The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis 9781350032637, 9781350032668, 9781350032644

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THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF CHARLES H. LONG

Also available from Bloomsbury RELIGION, POSTCOLONIALISM, AND GLOBALIZATION: A SOURCEBOOK, Jennifer Reid THE STUDY OF RELIGION: AN INTRODUCTION TO KEY IDEAS AND METHODS, George D. Chryssides and Ron Geaves

THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF CHARLES H. LONG ELLIPSIS Charles H. Long

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Charles H. Long, 2018 Charles H. Long has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3263-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3264-4 ePub: 978-1-3500-3265-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover image © Colourbox.com Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Foreword, Jennifer Reidvii Acknowledgmentsxi Permissionsxiii Introduction1 Part I  America and the Study of Religion

11

1

Religious Interpretations of America

13

2

New Orleans as an American City: Origins, Exchanges, Materialities, and Religion

25

Part II  Theory and Method in the Study of Religion

39

3

The Study of Religion in the United States of America: Its Past and Its Future

41

4

Mentalités, Myths, and Religion

55

5

Encountering Joachim Wach: Hermeneutics, Religious Experience, and America

61

6

Introduction to the Reprint of Morris Jastrow’s The Study of Religion

67

7

A Look at the Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions: Retrospect and Future

75

8

The Chicago School: An Academic Mode of Being

89

9

The University, the Liberal Arts, and the Teaching and Study of Religion

99

10 Mircea Eliade and the Imagination of Matter

117

11 Popular Religion

129

12 Transculturation and Religion: An Overview

145

13 The Religious Implications of the Situation of Cultural Contact

157

14 New Space, New Time: Disjunctions and Context for a New World Religion

171

15 Religion, Discourse, and Hermeneutics: New Approaches in the Study of Religion

183

Part III  African American Religion in the United States

197

16 African American Religion in the United States of America: An Interpretative Essay

199

17 Assessment and New Departures for a Study of Black Religion in the United States of America

213

18 Rapporteur’s Commentary

225

Contents

19 What Is Africa to Me? Reflection, Discernment, and Anticipation

247

20 Bodies in Time and the Healing of Spaces: Religion, Temporalities, and Health

261

21 Passage and Prayer: The Origin of Religion in the Atlantic World

279

Part IV  Kindling, Sparks, and Embers

285

22 Understanding Religion and Its Study: An Outline for Continuing Research

287

23 From Colonialism to Community: Religion and Culture in Charles H. Long’s Significations

293

24 Mircea Eliade, Joachim Wach, and Chicago: An Interview with Davíd Carrasco

307

25 The Humanities and “Other” Humans

321

26 History, Religion, and the Future

329

27 Enlightenment, Ancestors, and Primordiality: A Note on Modernity and Memory

337

28 Matter and Spirit: A Reorientation

345

29 The West African High God: History and Religious Experience

349

30 Primitive/Civilized: The Axial Age in a World Context

361

31 Theodicy and Modernity: Comments on Mark Scott’s “Theorizing Theodicy in the Study of Religion”

371

32 Religion and Mythology: A Critical Review of Some Recent Discussions

375

33 Other Times, Other Places: Myths and Cities in Mesoamerican Religion

383

34 The Dreams of Professor Campbell: Joseph Campbell’s The Mythic Image

387

35 The Gift of Speech and the Travail of Language

403

36 Introduction to the Wesleyan Edition of Henri Baudet’s Paradise on Earth

413

37 How I Changed My Mind or Not

417

Index425

vi

FOREWORD

I have to admit that when Charles Long asked me if I would write a foreword for this momentous volume of his collected essays, I was utterly terrified. These essays (many of them unpublished) span a period of fifty-five years and as a whole map out both a coherent and an eclectic vision of late modern society, the history of Western intellectual life, the ongoing dilemmas of global cultural exchange and conflict and oppression, and, finally, the study of religion. How can one do justice in just a few pages not only to this encyclopedic collection but to the man himself—his staggering intellectual prowess and curiosity and his unmatched dedication to the generations of students he has mentored? Actually, I am convinced that it is simply not possible. But I am honored to have the opportunity to say what I can. Dr. Long’s life from earliest childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, through his years of teaching at the Universities of Chicago, Chapel Hill, Duke, Syracuse, and Santa Barbara has been permeated by a central concern: how freedom and imagination cannot be contained within, or defined by, the social structures in which they are expressed. Dr. Long has told me many times about Mr. Wallace, a man in Little Rock who could repair virtually anything that was broken. Mr. Wallace fixed everything from busted watches to household appliances to large machinery. He was not formally educated in engineering or even mechanics. He just collected stuff of all sorts and intuitively knew how to use all that stuff to make things work again. When Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that societies engage in innovation through a process of bricolage—relying in new ways on old resources—it was not news to Charles Long. But he liked the sound of it very much and no student who has studied with him seriously has been permitted to avoid reading Lévi-Strauss. Now there is another aspect to this sense of bricolage in Dr. Long’s ongoing thought and work, and this is perhaps best described by Alfred North Whitehead’s expression “seek simplicity and distrust it.” In Dr. Long’s intellectual and cultural province, the goal of a scholar should be to fully understand the logic of conventional social constructions to be able to see where the ellipses are in their shadows. This is perhaps what most drew him to the study of religion under his mentor Joachim Wach at the University of Chicago. From Wach he learned the meaning and value of hermeneutics in reassessing the epistemic trajectory of Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment thought and social life. We might remind ourselves in this regard that Joachim Wach wrote our first history of hermeneutics. The subjects that Dr. Long has taken on over the past decades have been as broad-ranging as the stuff in Mr. Wallace’s workshop: African and African-derived religion, black theology, American religion, the meaning of the “other” in the study of religion, interdisciplinarity, the fetish, cargo cults, and reciprocity and exchange as basic to both hermeneutics, and the meaning of religion in modernity and late modernity, to name just a handful. In his work in all these subject areas there is a visionary consistency. His methodological orientation is one that was shared by his colleagues at the University of Chicago—in the first instance, Wach, but also Mircea Eliade, Joe Kitagawa, Kees Bolle, and

Foreword

others—all of whom were existentially among, as Dr. Long has put it, “the running and alienated people of modernity.” What they all shared was an interest, first and foremost, in religion. This does not mean that they did not see the great value in knowing history, anthropology, sociology, or psychology, for example. But for all of them these were hilfswissenschaft—complimentary sciences that are critical for, but distinct from, the study of religion. In the same way that a physicist recognizes the need for mathematics in her work but does not confuse her work with that of the mathematician, the historian of religions draws on these complimentary sciences while affirming that, at the very least, there is something called “religion” to study. In our current climate of reductionism in religious studies (sociological, psychological, cognitive, etc.), Dr. Long’s fundamental assumption that religion is sui generis remains crucial and sustaining for many of us. Dr. Long was also deeply influenced by the work of his dissertation adviser and colleague Mircea Eliade, whose sense of the imaginary structure and order of religion helped shape Dr. Long’s epistemological orientation. While he has drawn on this foundational work, he has also put a distinctive imprint on it. There is an empiricism that is basic to his work, an emphasis on “materiality” that goes beyond where Wach or Eliade wished to go. We who have been influenced by Dr. Long have generally found ourselves attracted to his particular blending of the commonplace concrete and the mysterious theoretical. At this juncture, I should speak a little of Dr. Long as both teacher and mentor. In some sense every student he has taught has experienced a different Charles Long based on the conditions and situations that brought each of us into his orbit. When I began my academic journey, I was convinced that I did not really know much about anything important at all. But what I and his other students learned through our association with Dr. Long is that memory, rather than knowledge, is the spark that ignites the intellectual life. There is a big difference between knowledge and memory. Knowledge without memory is a clanging symbol. Memory presupposes intimacies and flesh and actual spaces and times. It is the basis for significant knowledge because it is subversive, deviant, disjunctive to other forms of knowledge. Memory, according to Dr. Long, is like poetry. And he has told all his students that we each carry cultural and social memory that is the foundation of any authentic knowledge. Memory is that meaning of the human that is prior to concepts and language, and that should guide our intellectual passions. And these passions in turn should evoke a sense of shared memory in others. What we have also learned from Dr. Long is that the basic work we must do as scholars is to meld memory with experience before moving to expression. And the fundamental property of experience is that it is muddled and ambiguous. Thus there can be no facile certainty in intellectual formulations because there is no such certainty in experience. We are always and everywhere in a mixed-up state of in-betweenness—in-between times and places, in-between languages and ethnicities, in-between narratives. And these mixtures are not about quantity or proportion. They are our essence as modern people. They make us, as Dr. Long says, something akin to paintings or operas or symphonies. In all of this, poetic remembrance is key, in terms of both persons and societies. Memory binds us to one another through its invocation of shared spaces and intimacies and ambiguities. In the end, it has perhaps been this focus on ambiguity that has been the most radical aspect of Dr. Long’s work. It is through the notion of ambiguity that he has led us to a thoroughgoing critique of the Enlightenment legacy of inquiry that has shaped the meaning and study of viii

Foreword

religion broadly, and more specifically in the United States. Dr. Long reminds us that the study of religion is a child of the Enlightenment: it was constituent of the emergence of Western modernity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its particular scientific, political, and social conceptual frameworks. Many of these were based on a rather shaky concept of rationality: the idea that reason is a singular and preeminent mode of arriving at true knowledge. But even as this modern meaning of rationality was surfacing, the emerging West was also embroiled in the very unreasonable violence of colonial enterprises. The modern human sciences, including the study of religion, arose from this contradictory history. Dr. Long always reminds us that our field was founded by Friedrich Max Müller, from whom we inherited the desire to engage in historical and cross-cultural analysis. But the imaginative act of casting the persons who were subjected to European colonialism as the contrasted “other” (i.e., uncivilized, primitive, irrational) was also Müller’s legacy to us. The very people and cultures we sought to study, we also concomitantly sought to destroy. There is thus an unavoidable ideological tension concealed in the study of religion, as well as the other human sciences. A fundamental unreason rests at the foundation of our ambitions toward rationality and reason. The question of what constitutes “knowledge” has been mired in the conundrum of seeking to expose the truth while obscuring it. In this collection of essays, we are invited in countless ways to engage with this contradiction, and to seek out the penumbras contained in it. Of course, it is one thing to enter into the logic of contradiction, and quite another to permit that logic to influence cultural and academic discourses. For that problem, there are no facile solutions. Invoking W.E.B. Du Bois, Professor Long has emphasized the fact that contact and conquest are not neutral, and what they generate is not clear and distinct. They are multi-valenced, they are doubly conscious. And so he does not offer us an easy way out. It is not a matter of simply shining a liberal spotlight on diversity or multiculturalism, for example, concepts that commodify culture, recreating it as a product to be exhibited, purchased, or dismissed at will (something, by the way, that is increasingly shaping departments of religious studies across North America). The concept of diversity can erase the meaning of exchange and relationships and can cast further shadows on the “other”— reifying the power to signify the meaning of that “other.” It can easily become a whitewashing act of “concealment” (to invoke Dr. Long’s term). Dr. Long’s work is thus not so much about changing the content of what we call knowledge as it is about changing its structure and style. In his proem to its second edition, Davíd Carrasco described Dr. Long’s seminal book Significations as an “unsafe book” because, if taken seriously, it demands change. I hope Davíd will forgive me for poaching his term in this context, but Ellipsis is also a similarly dangerous text. It is not a comfortable read, if one is looking for validation of religious studies, consummate faith in the primacy of reason and the Enlightenment, or a clean and tidy methodological posture. If we take this book seriously we must reengage the history of the study of religion, as well as the meaning of religion itself. And that requires that we take the epistemological significance of European exploration and colonialism seriously. But it also means turning back to an older meaning of religion where it is not simply a conceptual category, or even a specific human activity, but a mode of locating and expressing the truest meanings of the most ordinary human gestures. In that sense, it is the most basic work of being human that hinges on who you live with and how you live with them. Dr. Long said a number of years ago that religion is about “the matters of the world and the things that matter in your world.” From a hermeneutical perspective, the hold his corpus of work and his ix

Foreword

life of teaching has on our imaginations is not the result of its articulation of a specific and systematic approach to the study of religion. Rather, it revolves around this basic meaning of religion, as well as Professor Long’s placement of usually discreet aspects of modern culture— contact, exchange, indigeneity, or geographies, for example—within the range of religious meaning. Finally, Ellipsis calls us to look squarely into the labyrinth of modernity where human beings have come to know themselves and the powers that make them in dramatically new ways. This is an act of “crawling back” like many others that Dr. Long has called for, but it is laden with the burden of requiring a radically different temporal and epistemological orientation from what we were bequeathed by the European Enlightenment. He reminds us that all religious meanings and expressions invoke time and history, but the way in which time is conceived is by no means the same across the gamut of religious worldviews. Karl Jaspers, I first learned from Dr. Long, had a rather revolutionary Western notion of history. Jaspers saw the appearance of figures like Mahavira, Confucius, Zarathustra, and Gautama Buddha as signaling an “axial age” not defined by the progress of cultures but by the radical intrusion of these figures themselves into emerging urban societies. I think of Dr. Long as an axial figure, one who has been able to discern a dramatic change in the nature of humans and their societies in the modern and late-modern periods. In this I see him as a Mr. Wallace too: seeing that shift, he has called for a different ordering of human relations and a different ordering of human knowledge. He has called us all to look deeply into the labyrinth and to use the stuff we find to make things work again. His compelling vision has guided generations of students including myself. Thanks in part to this wonderful collection of his writings, it will continue to do so for generations to come. Jennifer Reid Professor Emerita University of Maine at Farmington

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Collected Writings cover a rather flexible literary genre. Such a genre might refer to a body of similar texts or to an anthology of varied texts. In any case, the notion of a “collection” carries the sense of a “gathering,” a “bringing together.” Or even of a “tying” up, a binding—which later sense might hint one meaning of the Latin term religare from which our meaning of religion is derived. In most cases, Collected Writings are edited by persons or a person other than the author of the content of the text, and in several instances, there is a temporal separation between the author of the content and the editor or compiler of the Collected Writings. In this case, the editor of the text and the composer and compiler of the essays are the same person. This means that there is a simultaneity of the composition of each of the essays and the temporalspatial events of their composition; the essays taken together, extend well over a period of six decades. Allow me first to acknowledge and express my thanks and regard for those who were immediately and directly related to the production of this collection. In 2013 my colleagues in the state of Michigan organized two events for the presentation of the content of the volume. Professor Jualynne Dodson, Director of the African Atlantic Research Team at Michigan State University sponsored a two-day conference for a discussion of the work. Professor Freida Ekotto, Chair of the Afroamerican and African Studies Department, Professor Paul Johnson, a member of this department, and Professor Lester Monts, Vice-Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, devoted a colloquium to the content of the text. At both events, posters and flyers portraying a draft of what would become the cover of the volume were displayed. These design drafts were prepared by Margaret Reid, an artist and designer, and daughter of Jennifer Reid, who graciously provided a Foreword for Ellipsis. Jennifer Reid aided me immensely in gaining permissions to republish many of the essays. This volume will probably be referred to as the companion to my previous collection of essays, Significations, published in 1986. A second edition of Significations was published in 1999. This edition included a proem by Professor Davíd Carrasco. This is not the first time Professor Carrasco has aided my publications. In 1995 when he was a member of the Department of Religion faculty at Princeton University, Professor Carrasco directed a research project, “Charles H. Long Imagination of Matter Project.” This Project was sponsored by the Moses Mesoamerican Archive. Two of his graduate students Reiko Sono and Scott Sessions made a compilation and reproduction of everything I had published from the beginning of my publications in the mid-1950s to 1995. This compilation was reproduced as an in-house publication of the Archive. Professor Carrasco presented copies of this compilation to a group of scholars invited to a small conference sponsored by the Archive at Princeton for a discussion of my methodological approach to the study of religion. As I look back it is clear to me that a part of Professor Carrasco’s intent in the compilation of the Reader and the sponsorship of the Princeton Conference was to encourage me to publish

Acknowledgments

these materials. I obviously did not get the hint. The next year I retired from active teaching and embarked on a number of visiting professorships. Beginning in 2001, Professor Jennifer Reid organized several week-long summer conferences at the University of Maine-Farmington around my work. These conferences brought a number of scholars including Professors Jacob Olupona and Carrasco from Harvard, the late Professor Chirevo Kwenda and David Chidester from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, Professor Michio Araki, Tsukuba University, Japan, Professor Tracey Hucks, now of Colgate University, and the late Professor Kees Bolle of UCLA. These visiting professorships and conferences indicated that my work had significance to a wider range of scholars and disciplines and added pressure to Professor Carrasco’s urgency for the editing and publication of the compilation. Overlapping and continuing beyond the University of Maine-Farmington, colloquia and conferences were sponsored by the History of Religions Program in the Institute of Philosophy at Tsukuba University in Japan; these meetings were under the direction of Professor Michio Araki. Professor Araki had completed his doctorate in the History of Religion Program at the University of Chicago. To facilitate the institution of the academic study of religion in Japan I had been visiting with Professor Araki at Tsukuba University since 1984 for varying periods of time, from a week to two months, between 1984 and 2007. This tradition was carried on in Japan initially by Professor Richard Gardner and upon his retirement by Professor Tatsuo Murakami through the Niwano Project at Sophia University in Tokyo. Over this span of time several conferences took place in Japan; these conferences brought colleagues from the Farmington Group and the Moses Mesoamerican Archive together. In addition, on several occasions, Ashis Nandy, the Indian public intellectual, and William Pietz, who revived research on fetishism, were prominent participants in these discussions. I wish to express my profound gratitude for all those persons and events enumerated above. I have been blessed with recurring events and persons who were able to enhance my intellectual predilections. These writings form the context of my academic career. As I look back I am also impressed with the prominence of several intellectual structures of collaborative research. They extend from the 1950s to the present. I was a founding member of the American Association for the Study of Religion, the Society for the Study of Black Religion, and a member of the Administrative Board during the formative years of the American Academy of Religion. Finally, I would like to pay homage to my ancestral tradition of the intellectual life through acknowledging my indebtedness to the historian, sociologist, and preeminent public intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. His life and work has given my intellectual life a historical and existential dimension. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness led me to explore in depth Joachim Wach’s concern for hermeneutics as epistemology and Paul Ricoeur’s critical meaning of a hermeneutics of suspicion. While these essays purport to convey various and sundry intellectual meanings and notions, they are for me, a kind of “book of memory,” for they bring to mind pleasant memories of the several classmates, colleagues, students, and text, who engaged with me over a period of time in coming to terms with the human predilection for living a religious life.

xii

PERMISSIONS

The following chapters were reproduced with kind permission. The publishers have made every effort to trace copyright holders and to obtain permission to reproduce extracts. Any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions. 1. Religious Interpretations of America. © From Encyclopedia of Religion in America, edited by Charles H. Lippy and Peter Williams, pp. 62–69. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010. With permission from SAGE Publishing. 2. New Orleans as an American City: Origins, Exchanges, Materialities, and Religion. From New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase, edited by Richard J. Callahan, Jr., pp. 203–222. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. © The Curators of the University of Missouri, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, MO 65201. 3. The Study of Religion in the United States of America: Its Past and Its Future. © Journal of Religious Studies and Theology 3, no. 3 (September 1985): 30–44. University of Alberta. Equinox Publishing Ltd 1985. 4. Mentalités, Myths, and Religion. © The author’s own work. 5. Encountering Joachim Wach: Hermeneutics, Religious Experience, and America. © The author’s own work. 6. Introduction to the Reprint of Morris Jastrow’s The Study of Religion. “Introduction.” In Morris Jastrow, Jr., The Study of Religion, pp. 1–14. Classics in Religious Studies, 1. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, for the American Academy of Religion, 1981. © Charles H. Long and William A. Clebsch. 7. A Look at the Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions: Retrospect and Future. In The History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Joseph Kitagawa, pp. 87–104. New York: Macmillan, 1985. © Macmillan Publishing Company, a Division of Macmillan, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. 8. The Chicago School: An Academic Mode of Being. © The author’s own work. 9. The University, the Liberal Arts, and the Teaching and Study of Religion. From Beyond the Classics? Essays in Religious Studies and Liberal Education, edited by Frank E. Reynolds and Sheryl L. Burkhalter, pp. 19–40. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990. © Scholars Press (now dissolved). 10. Mircea Eliade and the Imagination of Matter. © Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 1, no. 2 (Spring 2000). 11. Popular Religion. From Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., editor in chief, Lindsay Jones, vol. 11, pp. 7324–7333. © Thomson Gale Press, Farmington Hills, MI. Cengage Learning. 12. Transculturation and Religion: An Overview. From Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., editor in chief, Lindsay Jones, vol. 14, pp. 9292–9299. © Thomson Gale Press, Farmington Hills, MI. Cengage Learning. 13. The Religious Implications of the Situation of Cultural Contact. © The author’s own work. 14. New Space, New Time: Disjunctions and Context for a New World Religion. © New Time in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera I. Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, pp. 241–254. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. 15. Religion, Discourse, and Hermeneutics: New Approaches in the Study of Religion. From The Next Step in Studying Religion: A Graduate’s Guide, edited by Mathieu E. Courville, pp. 183–197. New York: Continuum, 2007. © Continuum/Bloomsbury Publishing. 16. African American Religion in the United States of America: An Interpretative Essay. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 7, no. 1 (July 2003): 11–27. © University of California Press.

Permissions 17. Assessment and New Departures for A Study of Black Religion in The United States of America. From African American Religious Studies: An interdisciplinary Anthology, edited by Gayraud Wilmore, pp. 34–49. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. © Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the publisher. 18. Rapporteur’s Commentary. From © Re-Cognizing W.E.B. Du Bois In the Twenty-First Century, edited by Mary Keller and Chester Fontenot, pp. 213–243. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007. 19. What Is Africa to Me? Reflection, Discernment, and Anticipation. © Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 1 (2013): 91–108. Used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. 20. Bodies in Time and the Healing of Spaces: Religion, Temporalities, and Health. © From Faith, Health, and Healing in African American Life, edited by Stephanie Y. Mitchem and Emile M. Townes, pp. 35–54. Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2008. 21. Passage and Prayer: The Origin of Religion in the Atlantic World. © From The Origin of Religion in the Atlantic World, edited by Quinton Hosford Dixie and Cornell West, pp. 11–21. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. 22. Understanding Religion and Its Study: An Outline for Continuing Research. © The author’s own work. 23. From Colonialism to Community: Religion and Culture in Charles H. Long’s Significations. Callaloo 11, no. 3 (1988): 582–596. © Charles H. Rowell. Reprinted with permission from Johns Hopkins University Press. 24. Mircea Eliade, Joachim Wach, and Chicago: An Interview with Davíd Carrasco. © The author’s own work. 25. The Humanities and “Other” Humans. From Morphologies of Faith: Essays in Honor of Nathan A. Scott, Jr., edited by Mary Gerhart and Anthony Yu, pp. 203–214. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1980. © AAR Studies in Religion Series. 26. History, Religion, and the Future. © Ohio University Review 6 (1964): 38–47. 27. Enlightenment, Ancestors, and Primordiality: A Note on Modernity and Memory. © From Ancestors in Post-Contact Religion: Roots, Ruptures, and Modernity’s Memory, edited by Steven J. Friesen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, for the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2001. 28. Matter and Spirit: A Reorientation. © From Local Knowledge and Ancient Wisdom: Challenges in Contemporary Spirituality, edited by Steven Friesen, pp. 12–16. Honolulu, HI: Institute of Culture and Communication, East-West Center, 1991. 29. The West African High God: History and Religious Experience. History of Religions 3, no. 2 (December 1964): 328–342. © 1964 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 30. Primitive/Civilized: The Axial Age in a World Context. © The author’s own work. 31. Theodicy and Modernity: Comments on Mark Scott’s “Theorizing Theodicy in the Study of Religion.” 2009. The Religion and Culture Forum, Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. © Charles H. Long. 32. Religion and Mythology: A Critical Review of Some Recent Discussion. History of Religions 1, no. 2 (1962): 322–331. © 1962 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 33. Other Times, Other Places: Myths and Cities in Mesoamerican Religion. History of Religions 23, no. 4 (May 1984): 382–385. © 1984 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 34. The Dreams of Professor Campbell: Joseph Campbell’s The Mythic Image. Religious Studies Review 6, no. 4 (October 1980): 261–271. © 1980 Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, reprinted with permission from John Wiley and Sons. 35. The Gift of Speech and the Travail of Language. © The University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. 36. Introduction to the Wesleyan Edition of Henri Baudet’s Paradise on Earth. “Introduction” in Henri Baudet, Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, pp. v–x. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. 37. How I Changed My Mind or Not. © The author’s own work.

xiv

INTRODUCTION

Beginnings This collection of essays covers the span of my academic career. I have arranged them into four major topics: (1) America and the Interpretation of Religion; (2) Theory and Method in the Study of Religion; (3) African American Religion in the United States; and (4) a sort of catch-all topic that is reminiscent of Friedrich Max Müller’s Chips from a German’s Workshop. I have called this last section “Kindling, Sparks, and Embers.” Notions placed here should express residues of the past and the possibilities they might hold for future meanings and interpretations. As noted above, the essays cover the span of my academic career though they are ordered topically rather than chronologically. In spite of this, some historical and autobiographical elements are called forth by their publication. At the inauguration of a section devoted to Professor Joachim Wach’s tradition at the American Academy of Religion (Arts of Interpretation Group), I described my initial meeting with Wach. This statement, “Wach, Hermeneutics, Religious Experience, and America,” along with the two interviews in the last section of the text, extends my autobiographical comments. One more item of autobiography remains to be explored: “Just how did I come to not only study religion but also to study it in the manner in which I have pursued it?” I left my hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, for Chicago in September 1947. Prior to this time, I had spent almost two years in the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF). Before volunteering for the USAAF, I had completed one year of a Liberal Arts Program at Dunbar Junior College, a public junior college for African Americans in Little Rock. Upon release from the USAAF, I returned to Little Rock and completed the second year of this two-year program. When I left Little Rock for Chicago, it was not to attend the University of Chicago but the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is also located in Chicago. My choice of the Illinois Institute of Technology was prompted by two major concerns. There were several members of my mother’s extended family living in Chicago and thus I was afforded a network of support. Mathematics had always been one of my favorite academic subjects but I had no knowledge of the fact that mathematics could be studied in itself as a theoretical pursuit. For me, at this time, mathematics had only a functional value, as an aid to other practical vocations such as engineering. From this perspective, civil engineering appealed to me. The Illinois Institute of Technology was one of the better schools of engineering in the country, and it was located in Chicago where I had many relatives. I applied, was accepted, came to Chicago, and matriculated at Illinois Tech in the fall of 1947. To be sure, religion was an important personal and institutional expression of the community in which I grew up. In addition, our father was an ordained Baptist minister, though he was not the pastor of the local community church that his family attended. I regularly attended Sunday worship services and participated in the various activities for young persons in the church. As

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis

a matter of fact, I learned how to be in charge of a meeting and Robert’s Rules of Order within the church youth groups. I nevertheless had no special concern for religion. I was aware that there were religious differences, that there were different Christian groups and religious bodies other than Christian. I knew that some persons studied religion to become ministers or some type of administrators of religious institutions, but I was never interested in either religion or its study—and I might add, none of my friends or members of my family ever noticed any kind of concern for religion in me. My ending up at the University of Chicago studying religion came about in a most curious manner. My freshman year at the Illinois Institute of Technology did not go well. At the heart of this was my inability to understand and perform the tasks of mechanical drafting. About half of my classmates were graduates of the city of Chicago’s Technical High Schools and had been doing mechanical drawing since the ninth grade. Until I came to Chicago I didn’t know such a discipline or technique existed, and I simply couldn’t get the hang of it. Even when I stumbled upon the right move, I didn’t grasp the meaning of it and so could not replicate it. Though we received only one hour credit for this course, we spent three hours each week in the laboratory and had to submit two panels executed outside of the laboratory. For one who possessed the facility and knowledge of this technique this presented no difficulty. For me, it was frustrating and slowly became a serious morale issue. At the end of the first year I withdrew from the program for though Technical Mechanical Drawing was a small part of the total program, it was essential and necessary; it constituted the ABC’s of engineering and could not be a disturbance or problem. Upon withdrawing, I realized that I had no “Plan B.” When I first came to Chicago I lived on the Near North Side with my mother’s brother “Uncle Lucius” and his wife “Aunt Beth.” Also living in the household was Aunt Beth’s mother “Mother Blakely.” Mother Blakely was a gentle woman of prayer and piety as well as an accomplished seamstress. In my stressful period at Illinois Tech I confided in her and she enabled me to keep up my confidence. Mother Blakey reminded me that I had grown up in a church-attending community and that there was a religious resource that could and would sustain me at this time of my life. Living as we did, on the Near North Side of Chicago, we were within walking distance of the Moody Bible Institute, a school for the training of evangelical missionaries. Mother Blakely suggested that I attend their evening classes to put me back in touch with my religious background. At this time in my life, I had absolutely no sophisticated knowledge of religion or theology. I knew that there were differences between Jews and Christians and Catholics and Protestants, but I was not too clear about what these differences were and how they mattered. The lectures I heard at Moody sounded similar to what I had heard all my life in churches and I was a bit confused that anyone thought of this as special or distinctive. After attending Moody’s evening classes for two weeks I received a note to make an appointment to see the dean. I did so. When I arrived in his office he informed me that he had not received my weekly card that tallied how many persons I had spoken to that week about Jesus and salvation. In my response to the dean I made it clear that I had not forgotten to fill out my “missionary card,” I had never filled it out and would not participate in this practice. This position had nothing to do with the kind of theology taught at Moody. As noted above, I was totally unsophisticated about theological views. It was not that I did not agree with the kind of religious fundamentalism of Moody, I didn’t know the difference between a conservative and a liberal. My objection arose out of the values and concerns from my community of origin. I felt that to practice religion in this 2

Introduction

manner showed a lack of regard for the person and the religious message that one carried. Since this was their rule and because I did not plan to follow it, I left the evening school in the second week of my attendance. I, of course, reported all of this to Mother Blakey. In her typical understanding manner, she assured me that she understood and that the problem might have been the simple fact that I needed to apply to a religious school at a college or university. We knew a young man who attended the church we attended in Chicago who was a student at Garrett Theological Seminary at Northwestern. Once I arrived in the city I had come to know something, not very much, but something such as the fact that there was a University of Chicago. I called them to find if they had a “school of religion,” and, of course, the answer was “yes.” I proceeded to write letters to both Garrett at Northwestern and the University of Chicago. Within five days of mailing the letter, I received a call from the office of the Dean of Students of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. His secretary informed me that I should make an appointment to see him on the campus of the University. I’m not absolutely certain but I think that it was on September 15, 1949, when I met William Nelson Hawley, the Dean of Students of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. In our discussion I rehearsed the story of my life from Little Rock, through the USAAF, to Chicago and Illinois Tech and the Moody Bible Institute. I made it clear that I did not wish to become a minister but was following through on the suggestion of Mother Blakely that, at this juncture of my life, I should attempt to evoke the religious resources of my life as I moved forward. I even inquired about evening classes. In my mind, I wanted to take random courses of my own choosing. Dean Hawley asked me when I would like to enter school. In a complete but honest naïveté, I asked when the next school year began. Dean Hawley replied that school began the first week of October. I immediately responded that I would like to enter at that time. I will never forget the look on Dean Hawley’s face and the way his head jerked back when he heard this. Beyond this, he never let on that here was a man who had no idea of what higher education was all about. Instead he picked up his telephone and called Testing Services. At this time, the University of Chicago was at the height of its Robert Maynard Hutchins era. There were several critical and controversial elements in the Hutchins reform. One was that competence in several areas of the curriculum could be shown by taking comprehensive examinations covering the area; this separated the acquisition of knowledge from the amount of time spent in a class room. One must remember that in 1949 there was no ACT and students were admitted to college mainly on the basis of their high school transcripts and letters of recommendation. The University of Chicago created its own examinations that all entering students had to take. They covered the physical and natural sciences, the humanities, and social sciences. Luckily, the examinations were scheduled for the next week. Dean Hawley asked if I would be able to sit for these exams at that time and I responded in the affirmative. At the beginning of the last week of September, I received a call from Dean Hawley’s office requesting that I make an appointment to see him as soon as possible. This I did. When I saw him this time, I was filled with anxiety and dread for I had no idea how I had fared on the exams. Dean Hawley’s first statement to me was, “Mr. Long, I am pleased to report that you have successfully passed all of the examinations at a level that places you out of the obligation to take any courses in our college. You are therefore free to pursue programs and courses in all or any of our graduate schools.” I matriculated into the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in the Autumn Quarter of 1949. I took a full course which consisted of three graduate courses. In addition, I officially 3

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis

audited another course and unofficially another. My entrance into the graduate schools of the University of Chicago also marked my awareness of the historical, social, and intellectual issues of the modern world. Engagement with these issues have made for a good life and an exciting intellectual career.

Rationale and description of sections This is not a systematic text. It is a collection, a gathering together of various and sundry essays produced in a variety of times and situations. I have arranged them into the thematic topics I listed above. Now in addition to this rather obvious classification, I should like to point out another level of intelligibility. Throughout these essays, I make use of hermeneutics in place of the epistemological problem. In other words, I want to be very clear concerning my own stance. America and the study of religion The first section of the text goes directly to the issue of “America and the Study of Religion.” In one of the essays, America is presented as a historical-geographical space which became the basis for a primordial orientation for three kinds of peoples. This specification presents one of the major conundrums of American religion. The nation-state of the United States which occupies much of North America possesses no ab origine basis for its coming-into-being. It is a derivative entity, a former colony of the European state of England. Its founding comes about through a revolution and its reason for being is set forth in documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. That is, however, not the end of the matter. The sources of religious symbolism, expression, and practice do not arise from the prerevolutionary time of the aboriginal cultures, the time of the coexistence of the European settlers, and the period when enslaved Africans, aboriginal populations, and European settlers formed the mixture that occupied this space. Perry Miller makes it clear that he did not choose to begin his study of American religion from the first settlement of Europeans in North America. He chose to begin his story in a time and place that enabled him to tell the story that he wanted to tell. This time and place was seventeenth-century New England. By 1803, the United States was well into its formative beginnings. Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana in this year. With this purchase the territory of the United States was expanded two times its original geographical size. The purchase of Louisiana could be seen as a “new founding,” and a founding that could not ignore the existence of the three kinds of peoples who abided in this land. Reference to this possible meaning of America is presented in the article devoted to New Orleans as an American foundational space following upon the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Theory and method in the study of religion The next section, which is the largest of the four sections is devoted to Theory and Practice. I began this section with an article describing the history of the study of religion in the United States. Several more articles in this section define and specify sites from which the study of 4

Introduction

religion has taken place. Included in these articles is the introduction that Professor William Clebsch of Stanford University who was spending his sabbatical at Chapel Hill and I wrote for the reprint of Morris Jastrow, Jr.’s The Study of Religion. One of the articles in this section was occasioned by the honor bestowed upon Mircea Eliade at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in 1984. I trace back the origins of the AAR and find that its beginning was in the National Association of Biblical Instructors and not in the group of scholars associated with Professor Jastrow who were closely related to the European International Association of Historians of Religions. By and large, the European “establishment” of scholars in religion were able to maintain a sense of objectivity in their work through the use of a methodology based primarily in philology, history, and a hegemonic religious culture within their respective nation-states. In the United States, however, the phenomenon of religion was given no special or efficacious treatment by the state (ecclesiastical bodies were defined merely as voluntary associations); thus American scholars felt the need for an existential meaning in their study of religion. This is why their Journal of Bible and Religion held on to the meaning of “Bible” as the existential pole of their study. So, in this section a number of sites for the study of religion are described and recognized. In addition to the nation-state and professional academic associations, I devote attention to the teaching and study of religion within a liberal arts college curriculum. Two articles describe the University of Chicago as a site for the study of religion. The other aspect of method in this section is expressed in the general history of the study of religion. Several articles in this section describe new and different spaces of religion. Though broad geographical areas might be adequate as containers for some kinds of study, during a period of colonialism and mass movements of peoples other spaces might prove to be more authentic sites for understanding religion. The encyclopedia articles on “Transculturation” and “Popular Religion” delve into these possible loci. The article on the “West African High God” not only demonstrated how I worked at a specific problem in the history of religions, it is simultaneously an instance of scholarly communication. In an article published in the University of Chicago journal History of Religions, I respond to a discussion taking place in the British journal of anthropology, Man. When my article was published I sent an offprint to Robin Horton. This set off an academic conversation that culminated in an invitation to attend a conference devoted to the West African High God in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1965. I met several colleagues associated with the English anthropologist, E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Godfrey Lienhardt and John Middleton visited me in later years at the University of Chicago and we remained friends and colleagues throughout their lives. The essay on Eliade and the Imagination of Matter is one of the studies I have undertaken in showing the meaning of the “stuff of the world” (matter, creation) in the religious consciousness. Studies related to fetishism and cargo cults continue along these lines. The remaining articles in this section emphasize dimensions and meanings already mentioned. African American religion in the United States While the Civil Rights Movement was indeed an important political event, it could not have been accomplished apart from the context of African American churches and the worship and style of African American religion. This was, to be sure, an expression of the Christian faith through the cultural forms of African American culture and allowed a certain modality of the 5

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis

Christian Faith to reveal itself. I raise this issue because African American religion has often been seen as simply a camouflage for political activity of the black community. As a matter of fact, the study of African American religion was taken seriously in the academy only in relationship to the Civil Rights Movement. In the section devoted to African American Religion, I present two views of W.E.B. Du Bois. He is featured as opening the possibility for new forms of thought arising out of African American religious experience. I find the ways in which he gives expression to African American life and practice, adequate to a complexity that goes well beyond the binary separateness of an either/or of a naïve pie-in-the-sky/social science factual dualism. The “Rapporteur” article consists of responses to statements of Du Bois’s position on several matters dealing with the social sciences, history, religion, etc. My responses are extensive enough to be understood apart from the actual statements to which they are responding. I find Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, a much more authentic, critical, inclusive, and adequate statement of the situation of religion in modernity than Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The additional articles are written from the point of view of a kind of religious materialistic position. Building on notions set forth in “Eliade and the Imagination of Matter,” I have attempted to come to terms with the reality of black bodies in the Atlantic world not simply as data of the economic sciences but equally as modalities of symbolic clusters for a renewal and reform of discursive meaning of cultural languages through the matrix of the history of religions and its methodological resources. Kindling, sparks, and embers In spite of Friedrich Max Müller’s use of the term chips in his descriptive title of a series of volumes at the end of his long career, the diminutive “chips” were used to start a very bright flame of five volumes, summarizing his thoughts on philology, religion, philosophy, and culture. In contrast to Müller’s Chips, my last section of “Kindling, Sparks, and Embers” is meant to indicate resources for further understanding of the meaning and nature of religion in the life of our planet. Some of these resources might be seen as residues of the past, others as brilliant and significant insights that have not been followed through. I have also included in this section two interviews of me by former students of mine who are now well established in their own career. These interviews are not only additional autobiographical data, they are also part of the lore of the tradition of the study of religion from the position of the history of religions. This lore contains short pieces on other practitioners of the discipline. To show various dimensions of my thought and activity as a historian of religions I have included some public addresses, research plans, book reviews, and introductions to books by other authors. Ellipsis: Configurations, orientations, and modes of thought Philosophy is written in this great book, the universe which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language 6

Introduction

of mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth. —Galileo Galilei, The Assayer Though I had contemplated the title of this text for well over a decade it was only in the final process of writing and actually compiling the text that I ran across this epigraph from Galileo. After all this time, its appearance was serendipitous and in some ways justified and made my procrastination easier to accept; I decided to include it as part of the introduction. Galileo is the famed seventeenth-century astronomer and mathematician. Using the metaphor of reality as a “book of nature” that could be deciphered through geometry and mathematics, he was a part of that vanguard of investigators who would champion scientific inquiry as the proper key to reliable knowledge. While subsequent astronomers and mathematicians ceased to use the “book of nature” metaphor, their discoveries have remained creative and viable. There is, however, something overlooked in the story of this advance of the sciences since Galileo. In the first instance, there were several cultures within the Americas and in the AfroAsian regions that had deciphered accurate astronomical knowledge through understanding the heavens as modes of transcendent meaning. In addition, these forms, shapes, lines, and surfaces of geometry were experienced as various forms of life and not simply as a quasidetached “book of nature.” And finally, these geometrical and astronomical shapes may be seen in their own expressions as metaphors that can reveal and bear meanings beyond those of mathematical logic. I was introduced to the usage of geometric figures in humanistic study early in my graduate study. My initiation to hermeneutics was through my Doktorvater, Joachim Wach, who often spoke of the hermeneutical circle. Prior to the late modern period, the term and mode of interpretation designated by hermeneutics was restricted to the interpretation of the biblical text. It was Friedrich Schleiermacher who opened up the meaning of the term and redefined the range of the interpretative mode of hermeneutics as the understanding and interpretation of all human expression. Joachim Wach explored the modern tradition of hermeneutics stemming from Schleiermacher in his three-volume work, Das Verstehen: Gründzuge einer Geschicte der hermeneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert, between 1926 and 1933. It was this tradition that Wach introduced into the methodology for the study of religion. One of the basic tenets of Schleiermacher’s method was the constant interrelationship between the part and whole of a text or expression. One seeks an understanding of the part through a knowledge of the whole and a knowledge of the whole through knowledge of the parts. All understanding thus presents a kind of circularity. Another dimension of the hermeneutical task has to do with the reciprocity between the interpreter and the object/ subject of interpretation. At least since the time of Schleiermacher, hermeneutical theory has presented the problem of the “hermeneutical circle”—the relationship between part and whole within the contained order of a text or “the circle” of a disciplinary arena. The hermeneutical circle presupposes that all the interpreters are implicated in some way by the circle’s center. Over the period of time when the disciplines of the human sciences were established, there were a number of persons and cultures that were implicated by the “center” but were never allowed to be authentic interpreters. Since the Second World War, with the formal end of colonialism 7

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis

and imperialism and the easing of oppression of groups considered minorities in Western dominated regions, a new issue of interpretation has arisen. On the one hand, those who were formerly oppressed have often sought to create an alternate “circle of interpretation” that excludes the Western cultures and ideas that were part and parcel of their former oppression. On the other hand, many members of the formerly oppressed cultures have moved to join the “center,” claiming that the only thing false about the center was the fact that it was not inclusive. I have titled my text, ELLIPSIS. Ellipsis is a grammatical and literary term derived from the geometric figure of the ellipse. See the geometric and mathematical form of the ellipse below:

An ellipse is a smooth closed curve that is symmetric about its horizontal and vertical axes. The distances between antipodal points on the ellipse are pairs whose midpoint is at the center of the ellipse, it is maximum along the major axis or transverse diameter, and minimum along the perpendicular minor axis that conjugates diameter. The ellipse contains two foci that define the locus of a point that moves so that the ratio of the distance from a fixed point is always a constant less than one. Ellipsis is derivative from this geometric shape; other derivatives are ellipsoid and elliptical. I chose “Ellipsis” as the title for this collection to present another possibility for a rather large group of cultures and persons who must now engage in the interpretive enterprise. They have all been implicated in the interpretive processes, schemas, and resolutions of Western interpretation from the Western center. The ellipse, rather than the circle, evokes a certain style in relationship to methodological and epistemological concerns. This elliptical style is shown in the essays and indicates the spatial and temporal sources from which writings emerge, and finally, the elliptical mode demonstrates the creative capacities that are possible when one works authentically within the ranges of a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” In Significations I adumbrated my concern for geometric metaphors as aids to thought. I put it this way: The essays presented in this volume explore the possibilities of a form of thought that is rooted in the experience of black traditions. In one sense these essays are in Rudolf Otto’s language, “ideograms”—those forms of meaning which lie between experience and category. This is the exploratory range. In another sense, the essays may be seen as exercises in stylistics. I mean by this to indicate the shape of thought, or better the emerging shape of thought. The concern represented by this geometric metaphor has to do with the change in the structure of thought itself. (9) One of the reviewers of Significations had this to say: If I have nevertheless managed to decipher Long’s work, his main theme is most provocative: that there is an analogy and perhaps even a causal connection between the “other” in 8

Introduction

religious studies and the “other” in the modern West. The other of religious studies is the sacred, or the wholly other. The “other” of the modern West is the oppressed nonEuropeans: the Third World, American Indians, and American blacks. According to Long, the focus of religious studies on the metaphysical other makes it the best discipline for understanding the human other and even vice versa. (Robert Segal, review of Significations in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60, no. 3 [Fall 1987]: 613–615, at 614) I spoke above about how cultures of the Third World, or Du Bois’s “people of the colorline,” were implicated within the arena of knowledges of the modern period. While implicated they were not allowed a thought or voice in the formal and informal societal configurations of knowledge. They were a part by virtue of not being a part. This strange situation has led the Indian cultural critic Ashis Nandy to speak of the relationship as one of being an “intimate enemy.” This also lies behind Paul Ricoeur’s posing the hermeneutical issue of modernity as having to necessarily be understood under the rubric of a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” This is another way this same issue is posed. The grammatical and literary derivative from the ellipse, the ellipsis, are three dots with space on each side, that connote that something has been left out. This “something left out” is assumed to be known though in some cases this is problematic. It is that part of the formula of the ellipse that emphasizes, “the constant less than one.” Now what seems to be implied by the “left out” nature connoted by the ellipsis is the geometric figure of the circle. The circle is a sign of perfection: with its 360 degrees, its unitary focus, and its equal radii, the circle more often than not has been used to symbolize the perfect container, as well as a sign of authority and order. As a matter of fact the oblong shape of the ellipse has been referred to as a “squashed circle.” The geometric figure formed by the ellipse is an oval, the shape of an egg. In many cultures eggs of various animals are desirable food items. Eggs are not only good to eat; they are equally good for contemplation, imagination, and thought. I have chosen a facsimile of Constantin Brancusi’s Cosmic Egg from his sculpted ensemble, Sculptures for the Blind. This Brancusi Egg has also been referred to as the “Perfect Imperfect.” This reference reminds me of the prominence of eggs in the cosmogonic myths of the Dogon and Bambara peoples of West Africa. In one version of the cosmogonic myth the Creator Deity, Amma, undertakes the creation of a world. Amma brings forth an egg and within this egg twin beings begin their gestation. These beings within the egg are to be perfect beings; they will be amphibious capable of living in water or on land; they would be androgynous, able to procreate by themselves; and they would inhabit an atmosphere that would be neither dark nor light but a moist penumbra of color. One of the twins in the egg becomes impatient during the gestation, This twin, Pemba, cannot wait for the full gestation and prematurely breaks through the shell of the egg, using the yolk of the egg to create a place of habitation. This habitation is seriously flawed because it has short-circuited the full process of gestation. The habitation is arid and dark. Trees grow with their roots in the air, those who inhabit this space are restricted to existence on land and they are not androgynous. Amma, discovering the horror of Pemba, attempts to make things right. Amma sacrifices the remaining twin and from his blood attempts a rectification. Amma is able to do a kind of rectification but not able to bring the creation back to its desired ideal. We now are land creatures who are able to stay in water for short periods. Instead of having one mode 9

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis

of luminosity, our days are almost equally divided between light and dark and instead of being androgynous we must seek another to procreate. Though eggs are the sources of birth and reproduction of countless species, they are fragile and vulnerable containers of life. They have nevertheless remained the perennial containers of life giving rise to their symbolization of birth, rebirth, and sacrifice. In selecting Ellipsis as the title of my Collected Writings I have come full circle—no pun intended. I had suggested to the publisher of my first book, Alpha: The Myths of Creation, to make use of Brancusi’s World Egg as the major symbol on the dust jacket. My book was published as part of a three-volume trilogy of three texts dealing with myth and their cover designer had already made the design decisions. Alpha was written within five years after the completion of my doctoral dissertation. In my dissertation research I had immersed myself quite deeply in the religion and mythology of the Dogon of West Africa where the egg and ovoid symbolism in the creation myth, in the ovoidian movements that create the human form and its homology in the rice grains (Digitaris exilis) loom large. In addition, I found other modes of the egg in creation symbolism in Polynesia, China, and other parts of the world.

10

PART I AMERICA AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION

CHAPTER 1 RELIGIOUS INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICA

The United States of America is a continental nation-state, but this has not always been the case. Beginning with a revolution waged against its mother country, England, in the late eighteenth century, the nation, set between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, evolved over the next two centuries. Bordered on the north by Canada and on the south by Mexico, two noncontiguous territories, Alaska and Hawaii, eventually completed it as a nation containing fifty states. This nation-state, with the exception of Hawaii, is contained within North America, which is a part of the Western Hemisphere, the landmass west of Europe across the Atlantic, which also contains the territories and states of Central and South America. These simple facts form the bases for considering a meaning of religion within the temporal-geographical area referred to as America. While this essay is centered upon the political entity of the United States of America, contextual considerations warrant attention to the broader meanings evoked by the appearance of America and the Americas on the world scene. There are certain modes of “the given” and the “a priori” nature occasioned by the name and meaning of this space. These modes serve as background and evoke the deeper structures of the cultures of this space where human actions have taken place.

Introduction: Orientation and beginnings Fernand Braudel, in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972), introduced the notion of three temporal rhythms as history. There is an environmental geography of time that is slow-moving and repetitious replete with seasonal cycles, mountains, terrain, waters, rivers, and so forth. This is history as the longue durée. There is then history as the time of groups and groupings—a social history of collective life that moves in a rhythm faster than the longue durée but is still at a slow tempo; this is history as conjuncture. And finally, there is the fast-moving history of events. This is “a history of brief nervous fluctuations, by definition ultra sensitive; the least tremor set all antennae quivering.” Braudel calls this layer of history evenementielle (vol. 1, pp. 20–21). These layers of time are easy to locate in the Mediterranean, for it has been the locale of many and diverse human passages for more than three millennia. As I wrote in “Passage and Prayer: The Origin of Religion in the Atlantic World” (1999: 15), it is also “a womb for the gestation and birth of religions”—not only Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also earlier Egyptian and Mesopotamian traditions. In contrast, The Atlantic world introduces us to the globalization of the meaning of humanity. … The Atlantic is, however, not a revealer of deities, seers, and prophets; it is not under the sign of revelation but of freedom, civilization, and rational orders. This world manifests no regard for the layered thickness of time. It is a world justified by the epistemologies of

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis

Descartes and Kant, the English empiricists, and the ethical economies of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. (p. 15) In spite of these major dissimilarities, certain hints may be derived from Braudel that help to decipher a distinctive meaning of a religious orientation arising from the Atlantic world in North America. Though America does not appear in Mediterranean guise, its spatial geography fails to express a homogeneous meaning in relationship to the spatial and temporal orders of the peoples, cultures, or land. D. W. Meinig’s four-volume The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (1986–2004) takes up Braudellian hints in the understanding of American religious orientation. These volumes offer the most comprehensive historical cultural geography of the United States. The religious issue here is not so much one of transcendence but rather an awareness of those unchanging or ever so slowly changing realities of the created order out of which human societies emerge and upon which they are dependent. These given orders of creation not only undergird and sustain but are equally reflected and refracted in the symbolic and imaginative structures of human communities. In this essay, religion is defined as orientation. Orientation refers to the manner in which a culture, society, or person becomes aware of its place in the temporal spatial order of things. Implied in the term is a recognition of the powers that accrue to the specificities of the modes of being that are coincidental to this situation. Orientation expresses creativity and critique in the face of the given orders of creation. This is not a simple task; it is by its very nature a dialectical process, for it is precisely in the act of creating one’s world that the world is understood as having been already given. More specifically, orientation as religion is most appropriate to the situation of the Americas. To use the language of Gerardus van der Leeuw in his Religion in Essence and Manifestation (1938), Religion … in other terms, is concerned with a “Somewhat.” But this assertion often means no more than this “Somewhat” is merely a vague “something”; and in order that man may be able to make more significant statements about this “Some-what,” it must force itself upon him, must oppose itself to him as being “Something Other.” (p. 24) What better way to speak of the voyages of Columbus and most of the later “explorers” and “discoverers”? Though Columbus made land in a territory after months of travel on the western ocean and presumed he knew where he was, he had indeed confronted a type of “vague somewhat.” It was given to Amerigo Vespucci to make known that he had blundered into a landmass that was totally unknown to any of the heirs of European traditions. Europeans did not know the land and were thus alien to this land. European knowledge of the “lands across the Atlantic,” the Americas, combined the precision of a kind of empirical and scientific discourse of navigation and cartography with a vague speculative sense of the unknown and the mysterious. They were both fascinated and frightened by the land. In “The Earliest Accounts of the New World,” Antonelli Gerbi (1976: 37) remarks, “It must be remembered, however, that America (apart from the fact that it was long believed to be a peninsula of Asia), exercised its perplexing impact well before 12 October 1492.” Edmundo O’Gorman adds to this ambiguity about America in The Invention of America (1961) by questioning the logical and philosophical legitimacy of the “language of discovery” 14

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that becomes synonymous with the European meanings of America. Stated succinctly, O’Gorman makes the point that because Europeans did not know of the existence of America, it would be impossible to discover it since one cannot discover something that did not exist. Instead of “discovering America,” O’Gorman tells us that America was, rather, “invented” by the Europeans and that the ambiguity of this meaning has permeated all European discussions about the “lands across the Atlantic.” Henri Baudet extends this discussion in Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man (1988). On the one hand, Europeans have a knowledge of non-European peoples gained from concrete and direct relationships with them. On the other hand, Baudet describes a European “knowledge” of non-Europeans that is a product of their imagination of the otherness of non-Europeans. He goes on to explain that the knowledge gained from concrete empirical relationships hardly ever changes the myth-like imagination that constitutes the other pole of their knowledge and subsequent relationships. Such notions were not simply ideational and ideological; they find expression in practice and in the establishment of institutions, thus becoming basic ingredients in the cultures of contact in North America. With the coming of the Europeans, a massive reorientation on the part of all the participants took place among the three major cultures—the indigenous aborigines, the Europeans, and later the Africans who were brought into these lands as enslaved persons from various cultures. The meaning and orientation of religion now takes place within a “contact zone.” As opposed to those narratives that tacitly imply that the Europeans “knew who they were,” whereas the original inhabitants of the indigenous cultures were ignorant or debased, orientation within a contact zone provides the basis for creativity and critique on the part of all parties within it. Marcel Mauss’s notion of total prestations, outlined in his essay The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1990), provides a structure for the range of relationships and exchanges that take place within the contact zones of the Americas. Mauss’s understanding of the reciprocity of exchanges as a specification of the ongoing relationships between groups that were originally geographically and historically separated allows for a methodological orientation that is adequate to the historical cultural situation of America—a meaning of religion that takes into account the deeper order and structures of temporality as well as the materiality of the things exchanged and the attendant symbolic modalities of these exchanges. This meaning of religion is capable of dealing with the unique orientation of the religion of the “three races,” especially as each is related to the geographical space that they occupy together; but simultaneously, and equally important, it provides a way of understanding a meaning of religion that emerges from the relationship and exchanges among and between these three cultures that inhabit the territory of the United States. While several groups of people from various cultural backgrounds now occupy the space of the United States, the “three races” express the original constitutive founding groups of an American culture. From this perspective, America from its beginnings has been an Aboriginal-Euro-African culture. In addition, precisely because the nation is a political entity, some understanding of those peoples and cultures that lie within its boundaries but were not always considered citizens of the political community must be achieved. And finally, the issue of the very nature of the founding of the political nation-state of the United States within this geographical space must be considered. Given the variety of aboriginal cultures, the several and different origins of the European immigrants who came to inhabit the land, and the Africans who were brought as enslaved persons from Africa, one finds little unity among and between the three groups except 15

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that imposed by political or other forms of domination, including violence. To be sure, Europeans had in most cases come from cultures that practiced some form of Christianity, and even if they denied a religious sentiment, it was a denial based upon a Christian understanding of the nature and meaning of religion. From this perspective there has never been an American religion, per se—that is, a single explicit tradition with common rituals, deities, a cosmology, and so forth. While there has been no “American religion” in the strict sense, but only several religious traditions that are expressed in the country, there have been modes and meanings that identify essential elements of another religious orientation. From time to time, these modes come to the surface and are expressed in religious language, symbols, and styles. Chapter 10 of part 2 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is entitled, “Some Considerations Concerning the Present State and Probable Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States.” Tocqueville’s work, written in the middle of the nineteenth century, acknowledges the structural presence of the “three races”: the aboriginal cultures, the European immigrants (primarily English), and the enslaved Africans. If Tocqueville is taken seriously, one must acknowledge that American history and culture have been since the first European settlements a vast “contact zone.” The term contact zone has received academic parlance through the work of Mary Louise Pratt, who, in Imperial Eyes (1992), describes a contact zone as a “space of colonial encounters, the space which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish on-going relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (p. 6).

The three races that occupy the land The land as geographical space has been the constant ingredient shared by all the collectivities. Each group possessed a different perception of and use for the land. For the aboriginal populations, the land expressed not only their livelihood but also their identity. As a place for human habitation it had been given to them by a creator or other divine beings. The original inhabitants of the lands, known by another misconceived misnomer as “Indians,” had already been in this land for more than a thousand years when the first Europeans arrived. The land was held in common by the entire group in the culture of the specific aboriginal society. The land was not possessed as real estate and thus could not be bought or sold. The aboriginal cultures possessed both tacit and empirical knowledge of the land. Such knowledge was not only expressed in rituals and beliefs but was a pervasive aspect of their everyday existence. For the aboriginal populations the land performed a mutual orientation—it oriented them to their world, and they in turn served the land through the preservation of its orientation in space. Beginning as a series of English colonial settlements dating from the early seventeenth century, the colonies became independent through a revolution in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the United States has since become a nation of immigrants, primarily from Europe. In the Middle Colonies, primarily Virginia and the Carolinas, through the activities of Richard Hakluyt, whose writings about North America can be described as combining travel literature with real estate promotion urging investment in charter companies promoting ventures in Virginia and the Carolinas, the land is portrayed as paradisial. As Bernard Sheehan put it in Savagism and Civility (1980) in regard to Hakluyt’s rhetoric, “the effulgence of the rhetoric and the prediction that wealth would be obtained, 16

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‘with or without art or man’s help’ contained profound paradisiacal implications.” Sheehan continues with a comment about Hakluyt’s collaborator, Samuel Purchas: “He had traveled on three continents but held Virginia ‘by the naturall endowments, the fittest place for an earthly paradise’” (p. 12). In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash relates how William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower into what he called a “hideous and dangerous wilderness” (p. 23). From the time of Bradford to the present, the wilderness theme has been a feature of American culture, of its practices and rhetoric. The wilderness is an example of the New World as both threatening and sinister on the one hand and fascinating on the other. One of the most influential books on American culture and religion was Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness. Miller’s book initiated a renaissance in the study of the religious meaning of American culture. Since the aboriginal populations were not a part of the city traditions of the European immigrants, they were identified with the wilderness, threatening realities to be avoided or overcome. The European metaphorical expressions ranged from wilderness to virgin to paradise. In spite of the force of these metaphors, it is clear that the English settlers in New England and the Middle Colonies were able to work out a way of understanding and cooperating. Indeed, the colonists were dependent upon the native populations for long periods of time. Francis Jennings had already made use of the term invasion to describe the landing and settlements of the English in his 1975 work The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Jennings’s study is important because of its focus on the meaning and nature of the aboriginal populations at the time of the English arrival, and it discusses in detail the inner structure of their relationships over a period of time. It also erases the mild or neutral language of “pilgrimage” and the search for religious freedom that had defined the American rhetoric of the Massachusetts settlements. Jennings continued to debunk the other American shibboleths the land as “virgin” or “wilderness.” As Jennings put it, from a metaphoric point of view, the Europeans occupied a “widowed land”: European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land. Had it been pristine wilderness, it would possibly be so still today, for neither the technology nor social organization of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost colonies thousands of miles from home. … They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a resident population. (p. 15) The scholarship on the colonial period over the past few decades has gone far to emphasize two major factors that had not been put to the fore in previous works—the structure and periods of relationships of accommodation and the violence waged by the English populations against the original inhabitants of the land. The fact that accommodations were possible did not erase the European imaginings of these inhabitants of the land as savages. Given the several concrete relationships that the English experienced with the aboriginal populations, Bernard Sheehan mused over the profound inability of the reigning … European ideas to offer even a glimmer of truth about the meeting of white and Indian in America. Englishmen certainly behaved toward Indians in certain ways because they believed them to be savages, but more important was the irony that they continued to believe them savage even when circumstances inspired 17

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an utterly different relationship. Because the English were trapped by the disjunction between savagism and civility, they could never grasp the reality of their dealings with the native inhabitants of America. (pp. x–xi) In his novel The Confidence Man, Herman Melville coined the phrase “the metaphysics of Indian-hating.” It is clear that many observers equate the violence against those of nonEuropean racial groups to the experience of the English of the colonial period. One example is Richard Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (1980). Ralph Slotkin in a series of studies has taken up the theme of violence from the colonial period through the twentieth century as one of the basic ingredients in the formation of AngloAmerican culture. Violence is not discussed as simply physical acts of harm but the rhetoric and language of many American institutions and practices. In 1619 a Dutch ship arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, with twenty African persons aboard, including men, women, and children. They were sold as indentured servants, but this initial form of limited servitude of Africans opened the door to the full-fledged enslavement of millions of Africans imported into the colonies from Africa. The Africans in America constitute an “involuntary presence” in the land. Of the “three races of people,” they are the one group of people who did not wish to be here and who were brought to the country bound and in chains. From the small band of indentured servants, the African slave population grew to approximately three million by 1850, most enslaved on plantations in the Chesapeake region, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Some form of slavery existed in every part of the country, however, with the largest slave port north of Charleston, South Carolina, located in Providence, Rhode Island. No person of African descent was, or could become, a citizen of the United States until after the American Civil War. Europeans coveted the land inhabited by the indigenous peoples and their ability to trap furs and utilize other resources of the land for the international market. It was the bodies of Africans that were desired and coveted by Europeans. The Africans, themselves, became commodities in an international market participated in by all the European maritime nations. The enslaved African was the major source of agrarian labor throughout the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries. The enslaved Africans worked land that was neither their own nor the lands of those who had enslaved them. Their relationship to the land was highly ambiguous, being at once the reality that opposed them in the act of labor and at the same time allowing for a direct relationship with a form of the irreducible reality of this labor that defied the intervention of their owners. Through solitary and communal labor they were inspired with a notion of freedom that was not conveyed through the language and practice of their owners and other slaveholders. In addition, and as corollary to the economic value of the institution of slavery, were the symbolic and political effects of its existence in the colonies and later the United States. With the legitimation of slavery by the Constitution of the United States at the founding of the American republic, the values consistent with those of the slave system were destined to permeate the nation. Ira Berlin remarked in his book Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998) that there are “societies with slaves” and “slave societies.” What distinguishes them is that “in societies with slaves,” the enslaved are marginal to the central productive processes. In “societies with slaves,” no one presumed the masterslave relationship to be the social exemplar. In “slave societies,” slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social 18

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relations: husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student. From the most intimate to the most public relationship, the archetype of slavery reigned; no relationship lay outside this group. While the three constitutive races of American culture have been in constant relationship since coming to share the same geographical and human spaces, their relationships have seldom been peaceful. This is characteristic of the tensions involved in contact zones. The American historian Stephen Saunders Webb points to the year 1676 as crucial with respect to the possibility of the three races forming an expression of the American reality, embodying the cultural symbols and languages that gave authentic expression to their cultural beginnings. In his book 1676: The End of American Independence (1985), Webb interprets Bacon’s revolt in Virginia as a turning point in the colonial determination of cultural and economic destiny. This revolt involved Bacon and his followers against the English Crown’s representatives and the Iroquois League against the Susquehanna, who supported the Crown. Africans formed a significant cohort in Bacon’s ranks. The other event of this time was King Philip’s War in Massachusetts. The colonists were too weak after these conflicts to cohere as a possible united force to work out their own destinies and, according to Webb, fell into a purely Anglophone mode of understanding themselves as colonials. Though they would wage a revolution against the Crown a century later, this revolution was not fought in the terms of the new and creative forms of the three races sharing the land but in terms consistent with those of a purely Anglophone polity.

Civil religion: Founding and orientation Sidney E. Mead published his essay “The American People: Their Space, Time, and Religion” in 1954 in the Journal of Religion; it was later included in a group of his essays published as The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (1963). A long history of books and articles have been devoted to American identity or character, from Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), through Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, to Robert Bellah’s and Sidney Mead’s own studies of the 1960s and ’70s. Mead’s essay is one of the few that employs a geographical historical perspective; there are echoes of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” running through the essay. Turner’s thesis, initially delivered as a lecture at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (the Chicago World’s Fair) in 1893, was expanded into a book, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1920). Turner’s thesis presents the Americans as a people who moved across the land from one frontier to the next—from the Atlantic to the Pacific, occupying the continent. At each frontier the American pioneer, as bearer of civilization, touches primitive forces of wilderness and its inhabitants. In an agonistic conflict these primal energies provide the power to overcome the frontier and move on to the next. Mead’s essay, while paralleling Turner, adds the pathos of religious sentiment to this pilgrimage across the land. Mead mentions the Indian indigenous population only in passing and the Africans not at all. In the last analysis, the American is a person of European descent moving across and taking possession of a vast territory. The land and other inhabitants of the territory are not presented within any real space and time; they are real to the extent that they become aspects and dimensions of the inner consciousness of the Europeans. 19

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In 1975 Mead published another group of essays entitled The Nation with the Soul of a Church. In these lectures Mead was able to comment on the programmatic essay of Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” published in the journal Daedalus in 1967. Bellah’s essay begins as a commentary on the election of the first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. From this point of view it might be seen as a fulfillment of Will Herberg’s formula for American religious identity set forth in his Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955). Herberg was attempting to give substance to the notion that American civil or secular religion was an illdefined, “American way of life.” President Eisenhower had memorialized this notion in the statement, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” The context for most discussions of civil religion in America is strictly circumscribed as a negotiation about the proper accommodation of persons of European descent within the American republic. No mention is made of the Supreme Court decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in public education, nor is any reference given to the monumental study of race relations in America edited by Gunnar Myrdal and published as An American Dilemma in 1944. As a matter of fact, very little attention is given to the other “two races” that have inhabited the land since the beginnings. None of these studies deals with the debates of the abolitionists, nor do we hear anything of a specific nature regarding the “Trail of Tears” or the negotiation or adjudication of aboriginal native lands. Given the critical tone of these works, they are nevertheless suffused with a sense of optimism. In the words of Mead, what Americans had accomplished was done in a very short time. Maybe in time, Americans might achieve a tragic sense of life and express the maturity of the founding documents of the republic. If one takes seriously the existence of the three races, the tragedy might be situated at the founding, and if not there then at the end of the Civil War. All discussions of civil religion deal extensively with the founding documents and the founders, their beliefs, and their faiths. Very few raise the religious meaning of founding itself. Catherine Albanese’s Sons of the Fathers: Civil Religion in the Revolution (1976) details the importance of the Roman model and the rituals and pageants that accompanied the inauguration of George Washington as the first president. The nature and meaning of foundings and beginnings as basic modes of orientation for cultural life are discussed in the many writings of Mircea Eliade, especially in his Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958), and in Joseph Rykwert’s The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the Ancient World (1976). To date, only in the work of Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963), is there a thorough philosophical discussion of founding in general and the descriptive critical discussion of the specific founding of the United States. Arendt shows that the American and French revolutions differed from other radical and violent upheavals. While other upheavals had changed the ruling class, they had not changed the “nature of things”; the general hierarchy remained: some would always be rich, others poor; some always rulers, the others ruled. While the “actors” changed, the drama remained the same. The American Revolution intended to create a new drama; it was a revolution in the name of freedom. And this freedom was based on the idea that all persons could take part in their governance. Arendt notes that the possibility for a new drama of freedom was undergirded by the great economic wealth of the colonies. She points out that Europeans marveled at the wealth of the colonies, and Benjamin Franklin and other American colonists were amazed by the poverty that was pervasive in European societies. The wealth of the colonists 20

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was dependent upon the acquisition and exploitation of indigenous lands, the involvement of aboriginal populations in the international fur trade, and the labor of the enslaved Africans. In Slave Counterpoint (1998), Philip D. Morgan noted, From 1700 to 1780, about twice as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic to the Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Much of the wealth of early America derived from slave-produced commodities. Between 1768 and 1772, the Chesapeake and Lowcountry generated about two-thirds of the average annual value of the mainland’s commodity exports. Slavery defined the structure of these British American regions, underpinning not just their economies but their social, political, and ideological systems. (p. xv) Arendt discussed the philosophical meaning of the American founding. The men of the American Revolution knew that they were founders, and they perceived that their founding must have a model. They knew of two models of founding: that of the Hebrews’ escape from the Egyptians and the story of Aeneas from Virgil’s Eclogues. They chose the Roman model, for it hinted at the establishment of political instruments for governance. They chose as their motto for founding part of a line from the beginning of the Fourth Eclogue, magnus ab integro saeculum nascitur ordo. This can be translated, “The great order of the ages is born afresh.” The American version reads as follows: novus ordo saeculum, which in translation is “a new order begins.” The American motto implies that they created ex nihilo, that there is no past and that nothing occurred in the land before their Constitution. The Roman formula knew that every new creation must recognize a past, and thus their creation is a renewal and continuation of other past creations. A revolution breaks into and disrupts the old order so that a new order might begin. There is a moment in revolutionary temporality when the old order is no longer but the new order is not yet; this is a moment that allows for new forms of thought, new interpretations of the past, and heretofore unknown meanings and imaginations to enter into the new formulations of the new order. It is at this point that a meaning of the eternal as the absolute of all time presides over and permeates the meaning of this in-between time of the revolution. At this point of hiatus, the novel meanings, imaginations, and actions of “the three races that inhabit the territory” and their understanding of what freedom could be in this land should have been injected. Instead the American notion of “pursuit of happiness” fell back into the various older forms of mercantilism, and with the continuation and legitimating of the institution of slavery, the idolatry of race gained a hold on the American nation and the American republic continued its invasion of aboriginal lands. The eternal as a normal part of the ordinariness of common life became an abstract political symbol upholding in most cases the tyranny of the majority.

Bibliography Albanese, Catherine L. Sons of the Fathers: Civil Religion in the Revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976. Albanese, Catherine L. American Religious History: A Bibliographical Essay. Washington, DC: Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Office of Academic Programs, 2002. 21

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963. Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Baudet, Henri. Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Translated by Siân Reynolds. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Chidester, David, and Edward Linenthal. American Sacred Space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. New York: New American Library, 1980. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958. Gerbi, Antonelli. “The Earliest Accounts of the New World.” In The First Images of America, edited by Fredi Chappelli, vol. 1, pp. 37–43. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Gerbi, Antonelli. The Dispute about the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979. Herberg, Will. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955. Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Kupperman, Karen. Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Culture in America, 1580–1640. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1966. Leeuw, Gerardus van der. Religion in Essence and Manifestation. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938. Long, Charles H. “Civil Rights—Civil Religion: Visible People and Invisible Religion.” In American Civil Religion, edited by Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, pp. 211–221. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Long, Charles H. “Passage and Prayer: The Origin of Religion in the Atlantic World.” In The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, edited by Quinton Hosford Dixie and Cornel West, pp. 11–21. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Also published as Chapter 21 of this book. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Hall. New York: Norton, 1990. Mead, Sidney E. The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. Mead, Sidney E. The Nation with the Soul of a Church. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Meinig, D. W. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. 4 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986–2004. Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Nash, Roderick. Wilderness in the American Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967. O’Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Rykwert, Joseph. The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the Ancient World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. Sheehan, Bernard. Savagism and Civility: Indian and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Slotkin, Ralph. The Fatal Environment: Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization. New York: Henry Holt, 1991. 22

Religious Interpretations of America Slotkin, Ralph. Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Harper, 1993. Slotkin, Ralph. Regeneration through Violence 1600–1800. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 1993. St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector. Letters from an American Farmer (London: Thomas Davies, 1782). Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Edited by J. P. Mayer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

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CHAPTER 2 NEW ORLEANS AS AN AMERICAN CITY: ORIGINS, EXCHANGES, MATERIALITIES, AND RELIGION

Introduction New Orleans is rightly thought of as the most exotic city in the United States. In the midst of a dominating Protestantism as the style of the culture of the United States, New Orleans has continued its Spanish, French, Mediterranean, and African Caribbean traditions. Given this characterization, New Orleans has been looked upon as somewhat apart from the culture of the United States—an extra, surd, or surplus in the midst of a sea of “other Americans.” While affirming much of this characterization, I wish to show how essential New Orleans is for an understanding of the formation of this country and its culture. New Orleans forces us to ask other questions regarding our origins. By asking new and different questions, research into the meaning of New Orleans will reveal a novel perspective not only on this city but also on the culture of the United States. Everything looks different from the point of view of New Orleans. Research into the religious significance of this place will necessarily involve an interdisciplinary approach moving us beyond the touristic exotica into the fundamental meanings of this site and space of American cultural reality. Through such a study, a new and different emphasis might be given to what this country might and could mean when it speaks of diversity and pluralism. In other words, a shift from our New England and Virginia origins to a contemplation of our origins in New Orleans might prove to be quite salutary at this juncture of our cultural history.

The founding of the republic: Civil religion, settlement, and the land With the publication of Sidney Mead’s article “The Nation with the Soul of a Church” and continuing in Robert Bellah’s article “Civil Religion,” published in Daedalus the same year, a new locus for the understanding of American religion was set forth.1 The notion of “civil religion” or the “religion of the republic” moved beyond the study of American churches and denominations by combining an older perspective on religion with newer Enlightenment meanings, especially as these latter meanings found expression within what became the United States. The older notion of religion embodied in “civil religion” is derived from the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and their analogues with the mores and customs in ancient societies. This is expressed most profoundly in the founding rhetoric, ideology, and myth-story of the founding. Examples of this meaning in ancient societies may be seen in The Ancient City, by Fustel de Coulanges, and in The Idea of a Town, by Joseph Rykwert.2 From the point of view of the founding of

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ancient cities and states, the act of founding consisted of a new and fundamental orientation in time and space and thus the evocation of the gods of that place and relationship of the gods of that place to the techniques of orientation. Joseph Rykwert’s text is one of the exemplary discussions of the founding of Rome and the Romulus and Remus myth. Rykwert shows how the civil society of Rome was undergirded by the founding gods in the establishment of Rome as a fit place for human habitation. In light of these myths and techniques of ancient foundings, the novel meaning of civil religion creates a paradox as it is related to the American republic. The rational Enlightenment ideology in the founding rhetoric of the republic led to an explicit separation between any empirical church, denomination, or religious institution and the founding “God” of the republic. Thus, in Mead’s language, there is a “God of the republic” and this “God” lies at the heart of the “religion of the republic.” This “God” is not, however, identical to the Jewish or Christian God of Revelation.3 It is clear that the “men of the Revolution” took seriously their break from the order of being colonists. The Declaration of Independence was supposed to outline and give reasons to the world for such a radical break. In the Declaration there is the appeal to the abstract meanings of freedom and equality as ordained by “Nature and Nature’s God,” that is, the “god of reason.” Outside of the class of revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, there is little or no mention of the actual situation of this part of the North American continent, of the issues of the aboriginal populations and their rights and obligations to the land, of the existence of chattel slavery, or of those in their same class, who, while having grievances with England, saw a revolutionary break as a foolhardy exercise. Catherine Albanese has described the structure of this civil religion from the preRevolutionary days through to the twentieth century. In all the phases of this civil religion, attempts are being made to come to terms with the formation of a civil society created by colonists, who, after their independence, assume the role of colonialists, deriving their legitimate populations from a steady stream of new immigrants. I should like to refer to three modes of the more recent discussions of civil religion in the United States. Robert Bellah’s meaning of civil religion rehearses the basic documents and what he considers in those documents that express the rhetoric of the American republic. These would include the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and so on. For Bellah, these documents set forth the raison d’être of the American republic, its status quo, but equally a critical meaning for the notion of a continuing democracy in the future. Will Herberg’s rather descriptive understanding of the American republic as consisting of and being held together through the socioreligious symbolics of Protestant-Catholic-Jew points both to the religious and immigrant nature of American civil society. Whatever religious meanings that lie subliminally in the United States must express some mode of monotheism, and here we are reminded of some of the formulations of Roger Williams, but Herberg’s formulation makes clear that his formulation would encompass only those from a European immigrant background.4 Sidney Mead, in “The Nation with the Soul of a Church” and in his later formulations of the frontier experience, attempts to keep alive the pre-Revolutionary Puritan sentiments of the settlers within the context of their movement across frontiers. Mead’s is the only formulation of a meaning of civil religion that mentions the land or people other than those of European descent. 26

New Orleans as an American City

I would like to set forth another framework for American civil religion. In one sense it carries some of the style of Herberg in its demographic dimensions, and it extends meanings related to Mead’s notion of the land but from other perspectives. My formulation is that the culture of the United States of America is an Aboriginal-Euro-African culture. I set this forth as a structural, foundational, and primordial order of this culture. There are certain implications attendant to this formulation. In each case—of the Aborigines, the Europeans, and the Africans—we might ask what meaning of “land” is implied and how, at any particular time, this issue of land is adjudicated among and between them; we can also seek to understand their perception of this entity of the land. Again, the structure indicates that there have been relationships, contacts, among and between all these groups. This is a critical meaning, for as a normative order it specifies the country as having in all of its important aspects a multicultural orientation and thus the changing demographies should be seen within the context of this structure rather than understood as a new and additive dimension to the normativity of the American reality. For such a meaning to have validity, it must be located in a space/place where it is able to evoke new and different forms of cultural historical data. I have chosen New Orleans as that space where new meanings and data regarding a meaning of American civil religion might be forthcoming. In this proposal the temporal/spatial arena defined as New Orleans will be the locus in which several different peoples and orientations find themselves at various historical periods, thus allowing this historical, geographical space, time, and situation to become a place in which the issues of exchange, adjudications, reciprocities, tensions, powers, and realities work themselves out. Thus, the religious significance is not defined by any one of the specifications; rather, that significance is defined by the manner in which the relationships create and enable persons and communities to become aware of powers of being that orient all of them in their specific worlds. The so-called Southwest may be another important place for this rethinking and reevaluation. New Orleans became a part of the United States as a part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, expanding the country into a continental nation and doubling its original size.

Historical geography of the New Orleans area Fernand Braudel, in his magisterial The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, demonstrated how the destinies of peoples and nations are determined in multiple and complex ways by the almost cosmic and empirical/practical modalities of that large body of water that is the Mediterranean Sea. Braudel does not put forth a notion of geographical determinism, however; he is more precise and specific. He suggests various temporal rhythms that interact on the historical stage, thus enabling us to see how the nonhuman structures of reality enter into the creation of human community at the same moment that the human community is altering and changing these nonhuman orders.5 Neither New Orleans nor the Gulf of Mexico is analogous to the Mediterranean and Mediterranean cultures. The Mississippi River, the Mississippi Delta, and the city of New Orleans might well represent, however, a unique and other place for the meaning of an American orientation and memory. Just as studies stemming from New England and the American Revolution have always been prominent in any history of American Christianity, on the one hand, and American civil 27

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religion on the other, New Orleans offers very different possibilities for the significance of another form of religious orientation in the United States. The peculiar geography of New Orleans and the exchanges embedded in its history—involving the Aboriginal populations, the Spanish, French, Africans, and finally the Euro-Americans—force us to deal with its situation as a most important structure of memory. In New Orleans, these memories have not been erased; indeed—they continue to constitute the mundane practical rituals of the city. The cultural geographer Peirce F. Lewis has commented on New Orleans as a geographical site: The apparent paradox between excellent location and miserable location merely illuminates the distinction between two terms, “site” and “situation”—which urban geographers use to describe the location of cities. Site is the actual real estate which the city occupies, and New Orleans’ site is wretched. Situation is what we commonly mean when we speak of a place with respect to neighboring places. New Orleans’ situation is her location near the mouth of the Mississippi, and the fact that a million people work and make a living on this evil site only emphasizes the excellence of the situation. If a city’s situation is good enough, its site will be altered to make do.6 The historical geographical transformations that took place in New Orleans over an almost three-hundred-year period have not disappeared. The structure of empirical and popular languages, the specific and unique musical traditions, the forms of religious rituals, as well as the architecture and cuisine, combine to make New Orleans a distinctively different kind of American city. The broad usage of the term Creole is indicative of the amalgam of the various traditions that have taken place in this city. While many might agree with the distinctiveness of New Orleans, they might also suggest that the city is at the same time exotic and peripheral to the main currents of American life and thought. One could almost feel comfortable with this notion since New Orleans is seldom evoked in any of the founding stories. But the importance of New Orleans as a site of major geographical orientation is attested to by the double exchanges of the city between the Spanish and the French. As far as the United States is concerned, New Orleans has been strategically important since the end of the eighteenth century. The successful slave revolt of Toussaint-Louverture in Santo Domingo (Haiti) in the 1790s that influenced a number of slave insurrections in the Chesapeake area prompted many slave owners to sell slaves literally “down the river” to reduce the density of the slave populations in the Chesapeake. These Chesapeake slaves came into contact with African slaves who had been directly imported into New Orleans from Africa. Peirce F. Lewis has divided New Orleans into three major periods. He calls the period from 1718 to 1810 “New Orleans as a European City,” the period from 1810 to 1865 “America’s Western Capital,” and the period from 1865 to 1945 “A City Adapting to the Twentieth Century.” Lewis’s divisions are centered around the development of New Orleans as an urban form; another classification, that of Thomas N. Ingersoll, divides the city along cultural historical periods. His divisions are as follows: (1) “The French Regime, 1718–1769”; (2) “The Spanish Regime, 1769–1803”; and (3) “The Republican Period, 1803–1819.” Let me trace the history of New Orleans by overlapping the divisions of Lewis and Ingersoll.7 I begin in 1682, when Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, established a post and brought French colonists into the site. 28

New Orleans as an American City

Early period, 1699–1810 Though the Spanish made claims to this region based on the explorations of Hernando de Soto in the early 1540s, no sustaining post was established in this area by them. The choice of the site of New Orleans was a strategic decision based on two centuries of exploration in the region. The Spanish were the first Europeans to claim and explore the lower Mississippi Valley, but the only mark they left was a bitter memory among the local Native Americans. Partly because the Spanish found no treasure and partly because Spanish ships could not navigate the narrow waterways, European colonization did not occur until much later. The site of presentday New Orleans must be attributed to the French. New Orleans implodes as a city from the inland continent; it is an offshoot of French settlements in Canada. Prior to Iberville, La Salle had sailed down the Mississippi establishing outposts from Detroit to St. Louis, Petit Roche (Little Rock), Baton Rouge, Mobile, and New Orleans. He and his fellow explorers named the territory “Louisiana” after King Louis XIV. The French made peaceful alliances with the Native Americans, since they were dependent on them for their food supply. It was Iberville’s plan to expand the Louisiana outpost as the base for driving the English from North America. During this period, members of the French gentry as well as woodsmen and fur-trappers joined the French colony in Louisiana. The hopes for the establishment of a significant French base were dashed by the death of Iberville from fever in 1706. He was succeeded by his bother Jean-Baptiste Belville. The Louisiana outpost fell on arduous times, suffering from lack of provisions and neglect by the French government. The colonists became increasingly dependent on the Native Americans for their survival in this new landscape. No plan was developed in France for the exploitation of the French outpost in the Lower Mississippi. The king had appointed a commoner, one Antoine Crozat, to see to the administration of the colony. Crozat was primarily interested in the fur trade, and after exploiting the colony for all he thought was valuable in furs, he turned the colony back over to the crown. During this period the French were sending vagrants, convicts, and undesirables to the colonies. Hoping against hope to be able to establish viability through the cultivation of tobacco and indigo, the French had begun the importation of African slaves. Given the benign neglect of the crown, the colony was quickly becoming a métis colony, in fact and in reputation, the population rapidly becoming a racial mixture of French, Native Americans, and Africans. At this point, let us remember a geographical fact. When Peirce Lewis referred to the “wretched site” that is New Orleans, he was pointing out the significance of this particular site, one of the many turns in the sinuous river that flowed into the Gulf of Mexico one hundred miles below. Those treacherous miles of muddy water south of the river bend discouraged enemy intrusion. The site of New Orleans was a crescent in the shoreline of an old Indian portage to a series of huge lakes that provided an eastern backdoor route to the Gulf. The Indian trail was tremendously important, as it was the key controlling the entire Mississippi River delta on the underbelly of North America, a region that contained some of the richest soil in the world. Moreover, the whole region lying between the lakes and the river was protected by a natural, reinforceable levee bordering the river. With the death of Louis XIV in 1715, Louis XV became king but did not reach his majority until 1723; the affairs of state were taken over by a regent, Philippe II, duke of Orleans. It was the duke of Orleans, in league with the brilliant Scottish economist John Law, who schemed

29

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to bring new life into the colony of Louisiana. In 1719 they formed the new Compagnie des Indes. The crescent city would bear the name of the duke of Orleans, for it was to become a part of a grand design to link Canada, Louisiana, and the Antilles into a strong economic cordon. Emboldened by John Law’s new monetary theories of the economy and the desire of nobles to venture into the “world of money-making,”8 they set forth to convince colonists to immigrate to the colony and sell stock in the company. Their campaign was too successful, and in 1720 the shares in the stock of Louisiana’s future that promised only 5 percent annual interest lured the greedy gamblers of the upper class into a frenzy of speculation. Neither the government nor the national bank could cover the stock and thus the “Mississippi bubble” burst. There are two lasting effects of the Orleans-Law debacle: (1) the notion that the colony of Louisiana should have a wider impact on the fortunes of the French in the Atlantic world, and (2) during this period of speculation, seven thousand French citizens and over nineteen hundred African slaves were imported to the colony. The sudden population increase was too much for the crescent city, and many of the French and slaves were forced to live with the Biloxi and Pascagoula Indians. Native Americans From the earliest French period, Native Americans had an intimate relationship with the French fur traders and settlers. Given the geography of the area, the French were unable to exploit the richness of the soil, for they did not understanding the shifting structures of the levees. For the most part, they depended on the occasional provisional ship from France, but they were more basically dependent on the Native Americans for a sustaining food supply. During the nascent period of agricultural experimentation, the French had enslaved Native Americans as the labor force for their agricultural ventures. For the most part, the relationship of the French and the Native Americans was highly ambiguous. Sometimes the Indians were considered allies, other times they were enslaved, and other times they engaged in legal marriages and in various other forms of sexual unions with the French. Whereas the French claimed the land as a mode of sovereignty, it was clear that the Native Americans knew the land and had the greater capacity to live on and with the land. The French were attempting to remain sovereign over the Native Americans while they were dependent upon them for a sustaining food supply, and the relationships were never stable. During the period of the Compagnie des Indes, large numbers of Africans were brought into the colony in the hope of sustaining a much larger population of French immigrants as well as providing a stable and totally dependent labor force. These Africans in many cases recapitulated many of the relationships that the French had with the Native Americans. When in 1729 the Natchez revolted against the French, many Africans were to be found in the ranks of the Natchez. while other Africans were pressed into military service by the French. The Natchez revolt, along with the financial debacle of the “Mississippi Bubble,” signaled the end of the influence the Compagnie des Indes held on the colony. Africans in New Orleans The great influx of Africans in the colony of New Orleans occurred during the Compagnie des Indes period.9 The company, though propelled by the economic potential of the New 30

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Orleans colony, had much broader interests in Africa and the Caribbean. As a matter of fact, one might say that it was African slavery that brought the peculiar meaning of Creole into prominence. To understand this, one must understand some details of the African slave trade. The Portuguese were the first to establish themselves as slave traders on the west coast of Africa. The slave trade was not an episodic venture; it was an institution, a major business of the Atlantic world that was engaged in by every maritime nation of the Atlantic— the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Danes, and Swedes; it was also engaged in by Africans. For the trade to be viable, several enclaves, factories, or in the Portuguese, feitorias, were established along the coast of West Africa. These were places where enslaved Africans were stored and processed for the Atlantic trade. These factories produced a peculiar and distinct form of culture. The Africans who worked in them were no longer under the obligations of their kinship groups, and the Europeans were equally distant from their lands of birth. A new language of buying and selling of human beings as commodities and items of trade was beginning to develop in these entrepôts. Europeans and Africans were engaged in all forms of intercourse with human matter including sexual matters. A distinct Creole culture and language was thus being created in these spaces. This is the same arena identified by William Pietz in his famous articles on the creation of the fetish and how the meaning of the fetish as a religious discourse is directly related to the new economy of the Atlantic world in its usage of the term commodity.10 In passing, we should note that the similarity between the Portuguese terms feitorias and feitiço; both terms emerge simultaneously from the same context. The Compagnie des Indes had secured the rights necessary to carry on the slave trade on the West African coast of Senegambia. This meant that they had easy access to the Dogon and Bambara peoples. In fact, a large number of Bambara were enslaved into the factory system. The French became especially interested in enslaving Dogon and Bambara peoples when they discovered that these Africans knew the technique of rice cultivation. They were also adept at building dikes and controlling levees. By chance, the French had discovered barrels of rice in a shipload of Africans from the Bambara area. A great demand for Bambara, Mandingo, and Dogons ensued in the colony. And it is clear that large numbers of Bambara were sold into the New Orleans area. Since they were from the same tribe in Africa, they were able to maintain their language and many of their customs and memories. Enslaved Africans brought into the colony were regulated by the Code Noir enacted by Louis XIV in 1685. Most of the provisions of the code specified the kinds of legitimate punishment that owners could mete out to slaves, and they were severe. In comparison to other criminal codes of the time, for example, in early-nineteenth-century England, juveniles were hanged for stealing a handkerchief, and a Frenchman convicted of stealing animals or crops would be sent to the gallows, the Code Noir might be considered mild. There was one provision that made it distinct in comparison to Anglo-American slave treatment: While the code vested a slave owner with power that could be exercised directly on the body of a slave, it also established authority over the slaveholder by limiting the degree of violence that he could use. In other words, because the code’s final authority rested with the monarch and not with the slave owner, it made all humans in the realm subject to the authority of the monarchy. The influx of Africans into the colony during the later third of the first French period created New Orleans as a slave society. A slave society differs from a society with slaves. In a society with slaves, the slaves and slavery are peripheral to the overall maintenance and productions 31

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within the society. In a slave society, slaves and the institution of slavery constitute the central meaning of the maintenance and productions of the society; this was the case in New Orleans by 1762. The issue for the colony of New Orleans was how to obscure the importance of the meaning of slaves and the institution of slavery while still maintaining its necessity and viability. A similar issue was present in the Chesapeake area, but it cannot be so clearly noted given the rhetorics of the Middle Colonies. Africans in the New Orleans colony discerned their situation in various ways. First, there was the multicultural nature of the colony itself; second, the Code Noir allowed slaves to purchase their freedom; and, third, Africans occupied the spaces of the plantation and of the bayous and swamps. Given these modalities and the power through language and memory of Africa, slaves were quick to exploit any and all gaps in their situation of servitude and to create another form of culture. While originating with the Africans, this style would permeate the colony. The slave culture thus becomes the stylistics through which what began as an African creolization is translated and transformed into a specific form of North American culture. The Spanish period, 1769–1803 Thomas Ingersoll has written concisely of the motives behind the transfer of Louisiana from France to Spain: In the series of bargains that made up the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Louis XV finalized his gift of Louisiana to Charles III of Spain. After the fall of Montreal in 1760, the French crown saw Louisiana as an expensive liability and used it as a pawn to induce Spain to join in the war against England in 1762. While Charles III was not at all sure he really wanted the colony, it was clear that Louis would abandon it, and Charles knew he must take it to prevent it from falling into the hands of Britain; it was potentially the gateway to Mexico for the Anglo-American colonies.11 I will not take too much time in the discussion of the Spanish period. Suffice it to say, that no major structural changes took place. One might surmise that the residual possibilities of New Orleans that were present in the French period came to fruition during the Spanish period. The Spanish rule, especially after the takeover by the Spanish captain Alejandro O’Reilly, was without turbulence. During the Spanish period, sugarcane production was introduced into Louisiana, thus requiring the import of more African slaves. The Spanish version of the Code Noir was the Coartación. While the Spanish code followed closely many of the provisions of the Code Noir, the Coartación was supplemented with seventeen new provisions as it related to Africans and slaves. “Significantly, they removed many of the impediments to manumission that had been present in the Code Noir. The Spanish law of coartación allowed a slave who had accumulated money equivalent to his or her market value to purchase freedom—further it required owners to accept payment.”12 The cultivation of sugarcane and the change in the legal codes served to bring many free Africans into the colony from other parts of the Caribbean, thus increasing the number of persons of color in a slave society that was to be dominated by persons of European ancestry. 32

New Orleans as an American City

By 1800, France under Napoléon had revived the dreams of a North American empire. Napoléon schemed with Spain for the return of Louisiana to France. Control of Louisiana would halt the westward expansion of the United States and supply France’s other colonies in the Western Hemisphere with the supplies they needed. In 1800 Napoléon signed a secret treaty with Spain, the Treaty of Ildefonso, that stipulated that France would provide Spain with an Italian principality for the son-in-law of the Spanish king, Charles IV, if Spain would return Louisiana to France. Napoléon’s vision was for Santo Domingo to become the breadbasket for a flow of French immigrants into the Louisiana Territory. The successful revolt of the African slaves in Santo Domingo under Toussaint-Louverture in 1803–1804 ended the dream of a North American empire for France.13 The American diplomats in France heard rumors of the French/Spanish deal; knowing that with the loss of Santo Domingo, Napoléon lacked funds for his various European ventures, the Americans realized he was more than open to an offer to sell the Louisiana Territory.

Americans and the Louisiana Purchase D. W. Meinig offers a broad perspective on the tremendous growth and accompanying aspirations of the young nation: In 1800 the United States was one of the world’s largest states. Extending broadly inland from the Atlantic, spanning the Appalachians and fronting upon nearly the entire length of the Mississippi, its boundaries encompassed about 900,000 square miles. In simplest geographic terms, apparent to all at the time, it was a country divided into two parts: east and west, seaboard and interior, old and new. The American people were eagerly expanding into the newly opened and nearly empty lands of the western interior, and the prospects of national growth and enrichment seemed unlimited in a country blessed “with room enough,” as Thomas Jefferson said in an inaugural flourish, “for all descendants to the 1,000 & 1,000 generation.”14 The great expanse of this new country presented several geographic problems related to its coherence and security. First, how could the East and West be bound together, divided as they were by such a broad corrugation of mountains and so divergent in their alignments on the grand waterways of nature? Second, how could the young nation secure geographic positions deemed essential to the development of its territories; especially, how could it secure unrestricted use of the Mississippi River, upon which the traffic of the western half of the nation must move? And third, how could the union of states maintain the delicate geopolitical balances of federation, as the spreading population became formed into an array of new western states? None of these issues were lost in the vision of Thomas Jefferson. Even before his presidency, in 1790, as secretary of state, he had rehearsed the possibilities of American access to the Gulf of Mexico. While Americans had access to the Mississippi all the way through the Mississippi Delta, access to the Gulf of Mexico, which meant going through New Orleans, was not open to them. New Orleans was under the rule of Spain, and though Spain never denied Americans access through New Orleans, the fact that another nation controlled New Orleans meant that the United States lacked total power over this vital waterway, so essential 33

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to the coherence and security of the new nation, and was a situation that Jefferson felt could not be tolerated for too long. While the United States was relatively content with Spanish control of the mouth of the Mississippi, rumors began in 1795 that Spain was conducting diplomatic talks with France for a transfer of New Orleans back into French hands. From the American perspective, this was troubling news, for the French claimed a vast territory on the North American continent, and control of New Orleans was their access to this large piece of the continent. Jefferson’s role in the Louisiana Purchase allows us another perspective on the author of the Declaration of Independence and Notes on the State of Virginia. Read from this point of view, Jefferson must be seen as our first expansionist and geopolitical president. As would become clearer both in the career of Jefferson and with the expansionist policies of the country, America seemed destined to become a continental country peopled by persons from Northern Europe. When the United States heard of the impending transfer of New Orleans back to France, Jefferson sent Robert Livingston as a special envoy to France to inquire about the purchase of New Orleans. Napoléon initially refused, but he later consented to the sale in April 1803. At this point Napoléon offered to sell not only New Orleans but also the entire territory of Louisiana to the United States. The United States purchased Louisiana for $11,250,000 and assumed claims of its own citizens against France up to $3,750,000 for a total of $15,000,000. On November 30, 1803, Spain’s representatives transferred Louisiana to France’s representatives in New Orleans. On December 20, 1803, France officially transferred New Orleans and the territory of Louisiana to the United States. Several radical steps were taken in the purchase of Louisiana. With Louisiana, the United States acquired a foreign city and people without their consent and without the rule of conquest. Was this a legal act? But beyond the issue of legality were the practical issues incumbent upon making this foreign city into an American place. To be sure, New Orleans possessed a planter class, but its citizenry was from French, Spanish, Canadian, African, Italian, and Greek backgrounds—more Mediterranean than the Northern European immigrants in the other parts of the States. There was initial tension in the adjudication of legal codes and in the creation of a lingua franca, but these caused few major problems. The leveling catalyst proved to be the radical institutionalization of slavery and racism as the basis for the unity of the citizens in the city. There had been many free Africans in the city under both the French and Spanish administrators; many of these free Africans were themselves slave owners. The institutional form of chattel slavery under a republican white superiority meant that class, as far as persons of African descent were concerned, could not become the foundational basis for this unity. Many of the free African slave owners left with their slaves for a return either to Santo Domingo or to Vera Cruz in Mexico. This adaptive strategy of racism foretold one of the issues of the Louisiana Territory: the Americanization of the territory was synonymous with a commitment to the extension of African slavery as a fundamental institution of American society. While there was some concern about the adaptation of the foreign Europeans in New Orleans, no serious thought was given to the millions of Native Americans whose fortunes had changed over the last two hundred years through purchases and diplomatic treaties of Euro-American powers. The issue of whose land this was or, more fundamentally, “what is the land?” was solved through the assertion of ownership and conquest. 34

New Orleans as an American City

New Orleans, civil religion, and the founding It is not my intention to pose New Orleans and the Louisiana Purchase as an alternative in lieu of the reigning historical mythology of the Puritans and the American philosophes. In proposing New Orleans as a structure of civil religion, I am not setting forth a binary—“good New Orleans” as opposed to a “bad New England.” I mistrust most binaries and especially this one. What I am saying is that New Orleans is as necessary for an understanding of American civil religion as was the control of New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi for a coherent geographical, political, and economic order of the nascent American republic. Obviously, there is a great deal more to say about New Orleans. I have not even touched upon the spectacle of the Mardi Gras, the traditions of music, the cuisine, the layout of the city and the levees, or the specific and general characteristics of Creole and creolizations. I have been at pains to present a schematic historical geography of a very propitious time/space as an entrée to a discussion about foundings, civil religion, and religion in general. The backdrop to my portrayal of New Orleans is the presence of empirical and symbolic bodies of water—the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the waters of the Atlantic. All the persons and demographies in this history have been formed in relationship to these waters. In another place I have spoken of the symbolisms of water and religions: On the conventional level, it is clear that the Mediterranean seems to be the womb for the gestation and birth of religions. … [T]he Atlantic is, however, not a revealer of deities, seers, and prophets; it is not under the sign of revelation but of reason, civilization, and rational orders. This world manifests no regard for the layered thickness of time. It is a world justified by the epistemologies of Descartes and Kant, the English empiricists, and the ethical economies of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The world of the Atlantic lives under the rhetoric and mark of freedom—a freedom that was supposed to banish the specter of the ancient gods and reveal a deeper structure to the meaning of human existence.15 The revolutionary democracy of the United States boasts the honor of being not only the first modern nation but also the only one that did not found itself upon a religious tradition. Are such foundings so easily accomplished? Hannah Arendt has explored the political and symbolic meanings of the founding of a state, especially of a revolutionary state. Arendt gives us two sustained discussions of the American founding; the first is contained in her book On Revolution and is taken up in chapter 4, “Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis,” and in chapter 5, “Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum.” She returns to this theme in her posthumously published The Life of the Mind, volume 2, Willing. Arendt is at pains to make the case that the revolutionary founders were very much aware of the problematic of founding something anew. Arendt tells us that there is a temporal hiatus, an abyss, between the act of liberation and the actualization of freedom. This hiatus or abyss was a moment and time of discernment, a moment in which one might divine those heretofore “powers of being” that had always been there but had never been perceived until the act of liberation; these modes, actions, and materialities would be those resources that might give body and material meaning to the act of revolution. She implies that this is where the founders “blew it.” Anyone who has spent time with cosmogonic myths will recognize the problem being presented here by Arendt. What, if 35

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any, perfumes waft over the founding of the American republic? The founding fathers tended not to think sensuously nor redolently about their revolution. My interest in New Orleans as a meaning and locus for the renewal of the discussion about civil religion is related to another possibility of our common origins. While we like to characterize ourselves as now concerned about diversity and multiculturalism, there is no fundamental structure of our culture that has ever affirmed either diversity or the multicultural as constituting an empirical situation in the country. Untold Native Americans, Africans, Chinese, and others, have stories about diversity and the multicultural that few wish to hear. The Louisiana Purchase takes place in the same generation as the adoption of the Constitution. As the most significant singular acquisition of geographical space in our history, it offered a new possibility for the forming of a true revolutionary democracy. In presenting New Orleans as a datum, I am proposing that in that abyss and hiatus between the act of liberation and the actualization of freedom we inject the time/space and meaning of New Orleans as a fundamental structure of our origins. New Orleans becomes a part of this nation only thirteen years after the adoption of the Constitution; its acquisition is presided over by the author of the Declaration of Independence and a “founding father.” New Orleans, however, does not carry with it a master narrative, of either the triumph of Protestants or the excellence of reason. Its reason for being is not justified by high moral principles, and, as Peirce Lewis put it, the site was indeed “wretched,” but it is also a mundane situation in which over a million people carry on their lives. It is the second largest port after New York, and it is our opening to the rest of the Americas and the world. It is the place that is conscious of the fact that, for over three hundred years, Chickasaws, Choctaws, French, Spanish, Canadians, Bambaras, Dogons, Africans from the Chesapeake, and U.S. citizens from Tennessee and Philadelphia, have met and exchanged. It is a place that admits to no mastery of human agency—the levees have never been completely tamed, shifting in unfathomable ways according to their own rhythms. And this admixture of people is interlaced with the cultivation of rice, indigo, and sugarcane, and now shipping and the oil industry. It is again the place to ponder the economic theories of John Law, who originated the notion of credit as an asset and was the author of the Mississippi Bubble. New Orleans makes a triangle with the Chesapeake and with Santo Domingo; the revolt of Toussaint-Louverture in Santo Domingo and the dashing of the hopes of Napoléon for a French empire in North America thus led to the Louisiana Purchase. From the perspective of New Orleans, we would have to face the matter and materiality of our founding and realize that if America is a “discourse,” it is a discourse about something other than discourse. Mixed into every formulation about the American reality, whether it be about race, gender, religion, economics, or politics, there is the specificity of a meaning and modality of materiality that is avoided in most statements. This avoidance of the sensuous nature of reality as matter has forced most Americans to hide from themselves what has happened and is happening in this country. Attention to New Orleans as an important ingredient in the discussion of civil religion might allow us to mature as a nation and begin to deal with our issues as genuine human problems and not as “dilemmas” that will be overcome by a happiness that is coincidental with an infinite progressive future. In conclusion, allow me to return again to Peirce Lewis’s depiction of New Orleans as a “wretched site.” Lewis, speaking as a cultural geographer, was using this language to describe the physical geographical location of the city. We might extend the notion of “wretched” to encompass the historical temporality of the peopling of this place. There is a wretchedness 36

New Orleans as an American City

exposed in those decisions that tested the first amendments to the Constitution since its adoption. I refer here to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and to the decisions rendered in the Slaughterhouse case in 1872 and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The general history of wretchedness defined by the physical landscape and the evil wrought by human communities have come full circle in the catastrophe of Katrina. For Lewis the phenomenon of New Orleans as a city is the manner in which the inhabitants were in the continuous process of transforming this wretched site into an excellent situation—a viable city that supported a creative style of human community. Katrina forces the city and the nation as a whole to make sure that the transformative nature of this “wretched site” expresses itself in new and profound ways. Walter Johnson described in vivid detail another mode of human wretchedness in his book on the antebellum slave market of nineteenth-century New Orleans, which he concluded by reminding us of the freedom song, “Many Thousand Gone.”16 The song reminds one of the horrible reality of slavery and the slave market but it realistically defines freedom as the “no more” of slavery. In a similar manner I conclude with the refrain of another spiritual, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The wretchedness of site and possibility and hope for an excellent situation characteristic of New Orleans is expressed in the refrain of this song—Glory Hallelujah! The transformation of New Orleans as a city would again reflect and refract another meaning of our origins as a nation of many peoples and several sites. This nation must now come to terms with New Orleans in a new manner. Again we have the possibility of making New Orleans into more than an authentic American city. I hope that in the rebuilding of the city, we might be reminded again of its cultural significance for our national life.

Notes 1. Mead’s essay, “The Nation with the Soul of a Church,” was originally published in Church History 36, no. 3 (September 1967): 1–22, and republished in Sidney Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper, 1975); see also Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. 2. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). 3. One cannot say that this is a far-fetched notion. The founders were indeed familiar with the myths and ceremonies of the founding of Rome. See Catherine Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976). See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1971), especially chapters 4–6. Arendt continued this discussion in her Gifford Lectures published as The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). The issues of revolutionary time and beginnings are addressed in vol. 1, Thinking, in section 4, “The gap between past and future, the nunc stans,” and in vol. 2,Willing, in section 4, “The abyss of freedom and the novus ordo seclorum.” Her injection of the meaning of the hiatus between the revolution and the founding is especially important. 4. See part 2, chapter 13, in Catherine Albanese, America: Religion and Religions, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999); and Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 5. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 37

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis 6. Peirce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe, NM: Center for American Places, in association with the University of Virginia Press, 2003), 19. 7. Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), has much to say about the originality and brilliance of Law’s monetary theories (see below). 8. Joseph A. Schumpeter, “Ancestor of the Idea of a Managed Currency,” in History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 321–322; see also Jack Weatherford, The History of Money (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), 130–132. 9. For a history of the Africans in Louisiana, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). 10. For a discussion of these African Creole societies, see the prologue and introduction to Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For a sustained discussion of the meaning of the fetish emerging from the African trade, see William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17; William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987): 23–45; and William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (Autumn 1988): 105–123. 11. Ingersoll, Mammon, 247. 12. Lynn Stewart, “Louisiana Subjects: Power, Space, and the Slave Body,” Ecumene 2, no. 3 (July 1995): 227–246. 13. For the impact of the revolt in Santo Domingo on the French Revolution, see C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed., rev. (New York: Vintage, Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). 14. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective of 500 Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 4. 15. Charles H. Long, “Passage and Prayer,” in The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, ed. Quinton H. Dixie and Cornel West (Boston: Beacon, 1993), 13–14. 16. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 220.

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PART II THEORY AND METHOD IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION

CHAPTER 3 THE STUDY OF RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: ITS PAST AND ITS FUTURE

Introduction The title of this paper is prompted by a concern regarding the structure and nature of those forms of intellectual activities that fall under the umbrella of “religious studies,” “departments of religion,” or, if you will, as in the case of some Australian universities, “departments of studies of religion.”1 In one sense these kinds of studies have been legitimated; in most universities intellectual activities of this kind are accepted and our existence scarcely raises an eyebrow from our colleagues. The National Endowment for the Humanities lists “religion” as one of the bona fide disciplines within the humanities. From this perspective we are secure. We may, however, be in jeopardy regarding the meaning of our own coherence. Do those of us located in departments devoted to the study of religion have a clear understanding of what we are about? Is it possible for serious discussions, defined by a common set of intellectual issues, to take place within our respective departments? And, moreover, are there any implicit meanings that are common among and between the various and sundry departments in the several universities that house them? In posing these questions I am not anticipating nor presupposing a monolithic curriculum or method as the defining characteristic of departments of religion. At most I hope to suggest or adumbrate a context of shared critical assumptions as the basis for an orientation to disciplined research, inquiry, and teaching. I have in another lecture raised this issue in a more negative manner. In an address given on the occasion of the granting of departmental status to a program in religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I expressed regret that many of the several newly established departments of religion hardly—if ever—paid attention to a discipline that had for some time devoted attention in a precise manner to the study of religion as a total field. In that instance I had in mind the history of religion (Religionswissenschaft). Now in that remark I did not intend to recommend or impose this orientation as the basis or resolution of the issue (though one could do much worse). My critique and accusation had to do with intellectual seriousness in relationship to the constitution of a new academic endeavor. Such an omission is tantamount to organizing a department of anthropology without a critical awareness of E. B. Tylor or Émile Durkheim. I know of no department of anthropology organized simply around the theories of either of these gentlemen, but I have never met an anthropologist who did not know what these men stood for or who did not have a critical position in relationship to them. From another point of view one must acknowledge that most of the faculty presently teaching in departments of religious studies completed their graduate training in Protestantoriented divinity schools and seminaries. Does the teaching and research in departments of religion pose different issues and problems, or is the difference simply one of nomenclature and not one of substance and method? Too little attention has been paid to this problem in departments of religion.

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We are blessed with a well-attended annual meeting on the national level, a journal of the American Academy of Religion, and our regional meetings are a testimony to the liveliness of interest in the academic study of religion throughout the United States. I should hope that our successful legitimation with the world of the academy will not prevent us from the necessary task of asking searching questions about what might be our common endeavor. The last comprehensive attempt at an assessment of our field of study was the inquiry directed by Professor Claude Welch. This study, which was published in 1971, covered in its own fashion, theoretical, practical, and statistical materials and offered an analysis and interpretation of these data.2 It was long on statistics, modest in interpretation and analysis. I am not interested here in making a critique of this study; it is an important study and a product of its time. I do wish to call attention to some comments from this study. A statement reporting one finding of this study describes the significant increase in the study and teaching of religion in the public universities of the United States: In public institutions, for the brief span about which significant information is available, the relatively greater rate of growth in religion enrollments has been notable. Twentyfive public institutions that had organized religion programs in 1964 showed a rate of increase in religion course enrollments, from 1964 to 1969, that was nearly triple the increase in the total undergraduate population (150 percent compared to 55 percent). Consequently the proportion of students taking religion courses, while much smaller than in private nonsectarian and especially church-related schools, increased relatively more rapidly than in other types of institutions, that is, from 3.4 to 5.5 percent. Thus in 1969, approximately one out of twenty students in these public institutions was enrolled in one or more religion courses as compared with one out of nine students in the private and nonsectarian institutions with religion programs.3 In another context devoted to the change and redefinition of religious studies in the decades following World War II, the study has this to say: The purposes of the study of religion in college and university have been undergoing marked redefinition in the decades following World War II. Religion has come increasingly to be looked upon as a significant field of study within the liberal arts curriculum, rather than (a) a subject so bound up with evangelistic and confessional interests of the religious communities that it could not be dealt with responsibly in the academic world, or, (b) a means for caring for the souls of the students during their undergraduate careers. That is, religion has been established as an “academic discipline”—not in the sense of having a methodology distinct from all others, but as a major area of human experience that needs to be identified for special study. This change is particularly evident, of course, in the growth of programs of religious studies in the independent and public universities and colleges. These programs are pluralistic in faculty, they have no intent to prepare students for clerical careers and they eschew both evangelistic and pastoral goals.4 It is clear that something new has taken place in the study and teaching of religion in American institutions of higher learning; there has been an increase in the number of students enrolled in these types of courses and an increase in the number of departments devoted to the 42

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teaching of religion. The substance of the “teaching of religion” is defined in a negative manner. It does not aim “to prepare students for clerical careers”; such teachings “eschew … evangelistic … goals.” The most positive thing said about the content of such an area is that it (religion) has been identified as a major area of human experience that requires special attention within the academy. From an institutional point of view the novel element in the growth of departments of religion since the 1950s has been the phenomenal growth of departments of this kind in public universities. Along with the Catholic and Protestant schools and the prestigious private universities that had their origins in the cultural histories of American denominationalism, a new entity, the public university—an institution which by law must be religiously neutral— is the locus for novelty and difference in the meaning of the study of religion in American universities. Confronting this situation, it is a temptation—a great temptation—to oversimplify our problem. It would be easy simply to assert that the locus defined by the teaching of religion within the public institutions guarantees the objective and scholarly inquiry into the study of religion, freed from all theological biases. Constraint by law, and most probably from conviction by the members of its faculties, enables these institutions to present their teachings on religion in a nonproselytizing style; such institutions could then be declared the objective centers for the academic study of religion. This temptation must be resisted and denied because it does not portray an authentic appraisal of the meanings and nuances of the history of the study of religion prior to this innovation, nor does it pose in a correct manner the relationships and matrices of the meaning of American academic life as it is related to a serious concern for the understanding of religion. The presence of the public institution in this context does raise the possibility for a new discussion, involving all parties, regarding the academic study of religion. The very character of American public institutions of higher education and the fact that the study of religion thrives in them is consistent with a discourse that is crucial for all parties concerned with the academic study of religion in this country. In introducing this discussion I shall focus attention upon the study of American religion for several reasons. First, it is one of the areas least affected by religious studies. Secondly, it allows for the overlap of an academic subject matter with the cultural situation. And thirdly, it enables the issues of the consultation to receive a sharper focus.

The Enlightenment: Cultural history and orientation in method To raise this issue in what I consider to be the proper context, I must refer to an interpretation of the meaning of religion from an Enlightenment point of view: But in the 18th century the intellectual center of gravity changes its position. The various fields of knowledge—natural science, history, law, politics, art—gradually withdrew from the domination of traditional metaphysics and theology. They no longer look to the concept of God for their justification and legitimation; the various sciences themselves now determine the concept on the basis of their specific form. The relations between the concept of God and the concepts of truth, morality, law are by no means abandoned, but their direction changes. An exchange of index symbols takes place, as it were. That 43

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which formerly had established other concepts now moves into the position of that to be established and that which hitherto had justified other concepts, now finds itself in the position of a concept that requires justification.5 The Enlightenment heritage as expressed in the political and cultural formation of the American republic and people is at the same time the context out of which a new approach to the study of religion emerges. To be sure, the Enlightenment tradition is not the only American cultural reality. The Puritans made their mark before the Jeffersonians, and several other religious traditions had major roles to play on the American scene. But the Enlightenment tradition in its formative expression in the American republic and as a mode of inquiry and investigation into the nature of religion always expressed a critique of religion as it is conventionally understood. Religion in its institutional, empirical, and positive senses was not accorded a prestigious position in the founding documents—it was not understood as the “glue” that bound together the mores and sentiments that held or would hold together the values of the republic. Similarly, whether expressed in the idiom of the deists or by the later sophisticated theorists of an early Religionswissenschaft, all positive and empirical manifestations of religion, whether institutional or personal, were subjected to a critical analysis that sought to discover the unique and specifically religious elements contained in them. The situation is a bit more complicated than that. In the process of discerning the religious within the religions, the early historians of religion actually created taxonomies and classifications that brought into being the various religions as so many “isms,” that is, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and so on. The unique religious elements were then analyzed from these “religions.” One of the notae for the classification of religions as various “isms” was the compilation of sacred texts. In either case, whether it was the meaning of religion as a political form or the meaning of religion as a form of experience and expression coincidental with all humankind, another interpretation of religion was made possible through this new mode of inquiry. From the point of view of the Jeffersonians, the recognition of the actual and potential multiplicity of religions negated its meaning as the locus for the national community of the republic, while the early historians of religion were eager to find the proper taxonomies, categories, and structures for the pluralities of religion on a universal scale. These categories and concepts were designed to bring about a unity in the concept of religion. But this alteration of the meaning of religion which stems from the Enlightenment has a deeper meaning. The Enlightenment was not only a critique of religion; it was a critique also of the former modes of thought and theories of knowledge. This programmatic critique was the basis for the new human sciences of anthropology, political science, psychology, Religionswissenschaft, and so on. Michel Foucault has observed that the human sciences did not inherit a domain already outlined, one that had been allowed to lie fallow. The intellectual space created by the human sciences was not already circumscribed and simply awaited to be occupied with those data and materials later referred to as the “sciences of the human.” This was not a field that had been laid out in advance and already justified by some philosophical, political, or epistemological method. The object of the new sciences, the human, had not existed before as the object of a science. To be sure, one is able to see correlations between certain historical events and their influences upon the human sciences, but what is intrinsic to them as possibility is 44

The Study of Religion in America

the simple fact that man, whether in isolation or as a group, and for the first time since human beings have existed should have become the object of science—that cannot be considered or treated as a phenomenon of opinion.6 It is, according to Foucault, “an event in the order of knowledge.” This “new order of knowledge” had been matched since the sixteenth century by a new geographical space, the space of the Americas of the Western Hemisphere out of which the American republic was formed. As already noted, the two kinds of events, or what is implied by the two kinds of events, are not historically simultaneous: Columbus’ first voyage was in 1492; English settlements in the seventeenth century; and the Western Enlightenment is an eighteenth-century phenomenon. I have nevertheless attempted to bring all of these meanings into proximity because they have had a bearing upon each other as well as on the issues at hand. One long-term effect of the Enlightenment heritage determined the fact that religion was introduced into the curriculum of public universities as a nonproselytizing, self-consciously critical approach to its meaning and value in the life of humankind. On the historical level, and for several reasons, the heritage of the Enlightenment in the formation of the republic permitted the geographical space of North America to become the locus for the plantation of several European theological languages. These theologies and their adaptation to the American scene were elements in the religious and theological justification of “the modern world-system.” According to Immanuel Wallerstein, who coined the phrase, this “modern world-system” came into existence in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.7 While North America is not a part of it in its inception, it does become an important element of it in the eighteenth century. Puritanism in England, New England, and the Caribbean are its theological counterparts. Religious history and theology in America thus became synonymous with the history of European traditions (especially the Protestant traditions) that were transplanted to the American continent. Their histories, the tensions among them, their adaptation to the time and space of the new land and the ideational and institutional structures of this history became the normative story of American religion.

Religion, America, and the Protestant era If the establishment of radical religious freedom in America was a correlate of an Enlightenment understanding of religion, it was equally a novel manifestation of the place of religion in the nation-state. It thus marks a critical locus within the general arena of previous relationships of this sort, and it sets up specific tensions between positive religious traditions and ideas as well as the constituted meaning of the American religion. But once the European hegemony was established in America, theology and religious studies in general became the servant of a kind of Protestant meaning of America. Therefore, to speak of American theology or religion meant to speak in terms of the mainline, traditional, Protestant establishment in the American republic. Just prior to the publication of his magisterial A Religious History of the American People, Professor Sydney Ahlstrom commented on problems faced by the American religious historian in an article entitled “The Problem of the History of Religion in America.”8 In 45

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the most general sense, he identified two major problems: (1) the rapidity of change in American culture in general and religious culture in particular; and (2) the radical diversity of American religion. He offers us a quick survey of how several historians attempted to deal with these issues. One way of coming to terms with these issues was through the avoidance and limiting of the scope of history writing to the manageable—denominational and sectarian histories. In other cases the diversity might be encompassed in a kind of compendia of denominations and sects on the American scene. Comprehensive and synthetic narratives have tended to make use of the several “Great Awakenings” as the pivotal events that allow for an identifiable model of American religion through the triumph of Protestantism and its identification with the national destiny of the American people. The present situation, he notes, has changed. The model of the Protestant establishment no longer obtains; religious history must be seen as a part of world history and the religious historian must use the same methods and techniques as secular historians. With the deterioration of the Protestant establishment, pluralism has become the rule in American religion. Throughout the article, Ahlstrom uses the terms “religious” and “Christian” interchangeably. While making the claim that religious historians must use the same methods as other historians, he chides many secular historians, whose writings, he observes, often, “remind one of Orosius’s Seven Books of History Against the Pagans,” for taking what he calls a “civil religion for granted.”9 In point of fact, Professor Ahlstrom in this article and in A Religious History of the American People failed to raise critical questions regarding the general categories used in his study. What does one mean by “religion,” “history,” and “American people”? Now this uncritical sense is not innocent; it is simply a sensibility and method that has accepted the “natural attitude” as the basis for the narrative structure of the work. It may be for reasons stated as conclusions to his article and book, just because the historical theological formulation of the Protestant synthesis has fallen apart, his book represents the end of an era. It is not the case that pluralism became the rule in religion in America at the end of the 1960s. What he is referring to by the term pluralism may have always obtained. It is the model, the synchronic structure of his narrative that rendered other religious elements silent or signified them in passive, peripheral, and unimportant ways within the history that he crafted. In the same issue of Church History in which Ahlstrom’s article is found, there is an article by Professor Richard D. Birdsall, “The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order.”10 In this article, Birdsall makes the case that the Second Great Awakening formed the basis for a new personal and social identity in New England—an identity that was neither that expressed in the proprietary concerns in the tradition from Cotton Mather through Ezra Stiles to Timothy Dwight nor that formed around the deistic orientations of the Jeffersonians. On the one hand, the Second Great Awakening was a part of the continuity of the older New England traditions which permitted it from succumbing completely to Enlightenment deistic notions, and on the other hand, it enabled the individual and social order to integrate the new energies released in the revolution into the cultural religious context. It could be argued that the religion of the awakening with its heavy emphasis on humanity’s sinfulness and need for grace, penetrated to the center of national life and served to reduce both self-righteousness and excessive Utopianism. In spite of all the exuberance of young America, people had enough religious sense of living under judgment to develop very strong doubts about slavery and the Mexican War. 46

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Those who see only the optimism and innocence of Jacksonian America miss the tough realism, that sense of human fallibility that informed the post-Calvinist religious temper.11 Birdsall’s article brings into sharp focus the tension between the cultural meaning of American Protestantism and the founding ideology of the American republic. The tension between empirical, institutional forms of religion and the power and order of the instruments of government did not imply that the forms of governmental authority were simply prohibitive as far as religion was concerned, or that there was no positive concern for the meaning of religion. As Sidney Mead, Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert Bellah,12 and others pointed out, all authentic governments are concerned not only with the administrative and legal processes of their constitution and maintenance; they have paramount interest in the creation and maintenance of a morale, a sentiment which forms the context and expresses the possible unities that undergird the notion of a people. This sentiment, this morale is present in at least two forms, and if we combine the two, in possibly a third form. There is first of all the political mythology, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It evokes the “founding fathers,” the celebration of patriotic “holy days,” the extraordinary rhetoric of leaders who define the national purpose of the republic. Catherine Albanese has described the initial ritualization of this mythology in her Sons of the Fathers.13 This structure of meaning is the basis for the debate about the nature and destiny of the American republic. There is also a kind of cultural myth related to the land. It begins with the first European settlers and continues in symbols of the American land and landscape. From the symbols of America as various kinds of wildernesses, virgin lands, to the agrarian and pioneer meanings expressed by Jefferson14 and given masterful treatment in Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land,15 this myth of America continues in its various formulations to inspire the American. American theology and the study of religion in America in its descriptive, critical, and apologetic modes have taken place within this synchronic tradition of American cultural languages. The plantation and establishment of these cultural languages as the lingua franca of homo religiosus Americanus has provided a certain clarity and receptacle for a class of historical events, but in so doing other traditions have been obscured. Now as I stated above, the study of religion as a discipline (Religionswissenschaft) had its philosophical origins in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. These orientations to the study of religion allowed for a careful assessment of the data of religion from historical and philological sources. But, above all, this discipline was critical in the face of conventional and ready-made formulations of the religious reality. So while accepting, on the one hand, the data of history and philology as defining the locus of the embodiment of religion, the discipline, on the other hand, created methods for a deeper probing of these forms in quest of a more essential meaning of “the religious.” By such a procedure, new forms of data—folk-religion, primitives, mystics, heretics, and so on—were subjected to the same methodological precision as the established and orthodox forms of the religious. As a case in point, Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy affirms the historical expressions of religion in their rational and theological formulations as given by the tradition, but then goes on to assess the meaning of another level—religious experience itself and its qualitative structuration.16 In this movement Otto hoped to establish the global intentions of all religion 47

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at the level of experience before returning to the original expressions on the historical and philological levels. I am not recommending this as a specific model to follow; I have mentioned this work only to indicate the structure of a procedure in method. If we take, for example, the articles of Professors Ahlstrom and Birdsall, and for that matter the entire corpus of historiography of American religion, seldom is attention given to this kind of methodological procedure. In both the articles mentioned above, the opportunity to ask new kinds of questions about the nature of American religion is missed or avoided. Let us take for granted that the interpretations given to the data discussed in both articles are valid. The evidence for the support of the premises in both articles refers only to the existence of the traditions of settlement by speakers of English. In both cases the issues have to do with the fashioning of a cultural language for the self and for the community. The restricted context for interpretation blots out, except in a very peripheral manner in historical context and in the mind, the existence of the African slaves or the Indian aborigines. Birdsall mentions slavery in the last paragraph of his article, and Ahlstrom gets to the issue of other peoples towards the end of his article. The fact that aborigines and Africans are not mentioned in the materials with which they have to deal, does not mean that these peoples were not in existence in the selffashioning of the minds and communities that Birdsall and Ahlstrom discuss. If we look to other sources we are able to confirm this suspicion. The theme of capture, resistance, temptation, and release from the aborigines forms one of the early literary genres in the same tradition that is under discussion. If we are to believe Richard Slotkin,17 this theme derives from the actual capture of a white person by the Indians, usually a woman, and it was allegorized by many preachers during the Awakenings to portray the biblical theme of sin and salvation. The journey to the Indians for the purpose of converting them, as was the case with Jonathan Edwards, continued a myth of the pilgrimage tradition. In some cases this outer pilgrimage was correlated with an inner pilgrimage for the sake of the salvation of the missionary’s soul. Instead of accepting the accounts of these New England divines simply within the structures in which they are presented and thus implying a premature theology of history, the meaning of these documents could have been illuminated by seeing what religious meaning the reality and symbolism of those “others” in this context had to do with the self-fashioning of the EuroAmericans, and how this mode of self-fashioning of the synthetic American tradition formed images that were, in turn, purported to have been lived through. The first Great Awakening was followed by a second, a third, and a fourth. And, as a matter of fact, the religious fervor and revivalistic movement referred to by the term awakening became the religious container and structure of the subsequent images of the self-fashioning of Europeans in this new land, and the images and symbols of the “others” in the religious-historical landscape. Religious studies might be able, in its methodological awareness, to provide a basis for referring to this land in a different cultural sense, namely, as an Aboriginal-Euro-African culture. It will not do for the scholarly investigator of religion simply to wait upon the data until these persons and communities appear in the self-conscious significations of the paradigm traditions of scholarship. The investigator knows of the existence of these “others” in close proximity to the Europeans who form the paradigm traditions. If they are not mentioned explicitly in the documents of the signifiers, they are signified through this silence. A religious orientation must be able critically to raise issues related to the religious realities and presence of all the traditions that are part and parcel of the formation of the American culture. 48

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Disjunctions, new methods, and originary forms By introducing another definition of the American people I am stating that a new orientation in the study of religion must be correlated with a range of data that makes its appearance at this critical juncture. I am also implying that there is a relationship obtaining between method in the study of religion and the location of departments of religion in the public institutions of higher learning in the United States. The Enlightenment heritage that historically determined the new religious space in the United States opened the way for a wide range of human expressions and experiences. The rational scientificity of this tradition and the normative structure of the Puritan tradition and its interpreters thwarted the development of a full range of methods for the study of and ultimate meaning of these expressions. Religious studies as a “child of the Enlightenment” had reversed the older theological and metaphysical procedures in the investigation of religion. As Cassirer noted, there was a change of index symbols. The rationalistic method of the Enlightenment was, in turn, undercut by a type of romanticism that struggled against the normative meaning of reason as the ultimate arbiter of human expression and understanding. The notion of the “nonrational” in Rudolf Otto, or before him, Schleiermacher’s espousal of divination in the act of understanding, underscores the critique of the “new reason” in the study of religion. I am convinced that the notion of the “nonrational” and similar notions present a problem faced by all the post-Enlightenment human sciences. This issue arises precisely because of the change in the order of knowledge, when the “human” began to constitute the object of a science. In Giambattista Vico, this gap between two identities of the human constitutes the very possibility of understanding human creations, and knowledge is deployed in terms of a stratagem that turns philology into rhetoric and champions poetic wisdom over logical reconstruction. From such a procedure he is able to gain understanding without collapsing the two identities into one. In almost all hermeneutical procedures the nuances and modalities of the meaning of the nonrational will hover over the hermeneutical task. All modern historians of religion are confronted with this problem in their definition of the datum of their study. To the extent that the discipline admits of an ultimate signifier, whether God in the theological traditions, science in the human sciences, or a form of rationalism or common sense in the historical and political sciences, the nonrational will be located in the objects of investigation. In the early tradition of anthropology the nonrational was found in the religion of the primitives. A similar situation is present in the study of religion in America. The normative American religious tradition in its Puritan formulation accomplished the same effect through its silencing of all the other forms of the experience of ultimate reality among the peoples of this land. In proposing a new definition of the American religious reality I am not insisting that we start de novo. One cannot deny the fact that America in some of its most important aspects is indeed a European idea. America, or what comes to be called America, was an imaginative, cartographical, economic, and phantastical notion of the Europeans. It was this even before the Europeans arrived on these shores and, of course, it remained this after their settlement in the New World. In many respects the concreteness of the European settlement and colonization never obliterated this ideational discourse as a dominant meaning of the New World in all of its geographical areas and, at the same time, there continued a long and sustained debate within Europe. Antonello Gerbi has called the discourse about America “a particularly successful heresy,” and he finds its manifestations “in the most diverse authors.”18 49

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A great deal can be learned from this kind of discourse about America. It was not only a discourse that served the ideological and religious justification for the conquest; it also formed the cultural parameters of distinctively American cultural languages. This kind of discourse has more often than not provided the framework and context for the discussion of anything cultural or religious in these lands across the Atlantic. There is a factuality and reality in this meaning of America, but it is at the same time a discourse that served to obscure other realities of the situation of America. An entire body of literature about the discovery of America is expressed in the language of pilgrimage. In order to understand the rules of observation peculiar to this literature, one must rediscover which techniques constituted the art of travelling. Historically speaking, the usage, the collection of curios, and the field trip have each in their turn been predominant. The early Europeans were pilgrims: prudentia peregranandi. They were taught languages as linguae peregrinae, that is not languages specific to a given territory but languages necessary for the activity of travelling. … This vast universe, known to few people, absent from sacred texts and of which Antiquity knew nothing, could have provided a field for endless invention and exaggeration. But the writers’ obligation to truth was the product of a hierarchical network of competition and political confrontation. No doubt the voyage of discovery should be situated between the medieval crusades which it miniaturizes and the organization of the laboratory.19 There is a marked distinction between the Spanish conquistadors’ voyages and discoveries, and those of the English. The Spanish are self-consciously part of the old Mediterranean oecumene, whereas the English are outposts of the newly emerging entity of western Europe. These differences have been noted in the history of the discovery of the New World, but once noted, they have simply become cliches of classification, the western-European North and the Spanish South. A new literature describing and dramatizing the inner pilgrimage of the American in the United States has come into being. It is obvious in the traditions of the Puritans, but it is also present in the torturous structure of the Jeffersonian language or in the Journals of Francis Parkman. From the publication of R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam in 1955 to Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence in 1973, a mature genre has evolved.20 These works intensify the problem of the locus of the American religious reality. Is the religious tradition in America to be defined by what Sidney Mead has called “the inner, spiritual pilgrimage, with its more subtle dimensions and profound depths,”21 or by the outer pilgrimage of the exploration of geographical and social space, or both? If it is to be defined by both, we again discover the poverty of a cultural language that is capable of integrating the two modes. The outer pilgrimage is the story of the conquest and its justification; the inner, the psychic drama of a “cover-up.” But is it really a cover-up? It is a way of talking about the manner in which the contacts in the New World, violent and intimate, were hidden. The theological and ideological languages of conquest and pilgrimage formed the lens through which the reality of other traditions were refracted, and through a glass darkly; they were obscured. The other land and other peoples of the New World were not and are not to be confused with the inner psychic reality of the Europeans. They possess their own inner and outer realities. The language and discourse of savagism, Christianity, and civilization became the normative 50

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modes of denying the cultural, historical meaning of the contact, the mutual borrowings, the dependence of the Europeans upon the aborigines, and the African slaves—in short, the recognition of the contact situation itself as a normality of reality in the New World. African slaves were transported across the Atlantic in bondage; their voyages did not constitute pilgrimages. This voyage of bondage and their subsequent situation in the New World defines an involuntary movement and presence. The pilgrimage structure has little to do with their mentality. For the most part they have become a people within the various contexts of the New World and their acquisitions of European cultural and empirical languages have taken place in situations of duress. Europeans were the agents through which the aborigines and slaves were placed within a new history—history as terror. The possibility for a new history of humanity was present in the New World. Historical circumstances forced the issue; the New World and its history, culture, and religion became a pawn of European hegemony. It is impossible to understand the making of modern western Europe independent of the lands across the Atlantic. In other words, to use William McNeill’s phrase, “the rise of the West” is predicated upon the discovery of the New World. The rise of the West and the discovery of the New World are simultaneous and synchronic. There are several very long-term situations of cultural contact: Europeans and aborigines, Europeans and African slaves, aborigines and African slaves, and various admixtures of these cultures and traditions. The European discourse has all but silenced the true significance of these contacts. I am not attempting to raise the old “saw” about the contribution of all ethnic groups to America. I am rather attempting to define a new situation in the contemporary world—the religious and cultural significance of the New World itself. This could be the originary form of data that is consistent with the changed locus for the study and understanding of religious realities. The specificity of the contact of cultures in the New World as a religious meaning has already been deployed in several ways: first of all, through the hegemony of European cultural languages; secondly, in the historical, genealogical and biological discourses of miscegenation and the ensuing racial and class distinctions; and thirdly, in the separation of the religious traditions of the New World on the basis of their origins—as if after almost five hundred years, contact had not taken place. All of these modes prevent an authentic religious structure of expression for what has been the historical situation. The locus for a new area of religious meaning could be the reality of the contact of cultures in the New World. The New World is a macronotion and a historical longue durée; it is an entity that allows for close historical and comparative religious studies. Within this context, the study of the various responses of aborigines to the several European peoples and African slaves could be undertaken; a sharper focus for the already distinctive area of comparative plantation systems would emerge; and the similarities and differences between prophetic figures and movements among aborigines and African slaves could be encompassed. This wider context of New World Religions would require all of the disciplines of an Allegemeine Religionswissenschaft—the history, sociology, phenomenology, and philosophy of religion. It would require a hermeneutical reorientation to the entity of the New World as a religious space. What is being proposed is not so new in terms of its structure. The interpenetration of cultures and religion has a venerable tradition, especially in those studies that have concentrated on the Mediterranean world. What is new in my proposal is the consideration of the specific area under discussion and the fact that in many of its 51

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aspects it is a lived experience and not simply a historical datum. This might very well lend some excitement to the endeavor. It raises the possibility for new questions and for the participation, on a more or less equal footing, of all of the participants. Very new and different issues might be raised once the cultural discourse of any one of the participants ceases to assume a normative value. Since aborigines and African slaves lived under situations of oppression, we have a chance to understand the formation of a religious consciousness in the modern world that did not accept what Michael Taussig, making use of Marxist language, has called commodity fetishism.22 The range of the meaning of religious experience and expression, and economic structures in comparative situations within the New World could be clarified. But this context is equally fruitful for a new study of European traditions in the New World. Different questions about the nature of these traditions need to be asked so that they could be placed in a different perspective. Comparative questions involving prophetic and millenarian movements among non-Europeans and Europeans might throw light on the Great Awakenings as well as the Burned-Over district of New York and modern “cult” phenomena in the United States. The New World in general—and New World religion and religions in particular—represents a disjunction and a renewal of scholarship in religious studies. It could embody many areas of the studies that are already taking place, but by placing them within a new context, different methodological horizons would appear. Such a study would open up avenues for collaboration among a wider group of scholars whose cultures are different but whose identity as a people resulted from similar structural processes. The notion and meaning of America and its religious heritage could gain some explicitness if we undertook a hemispheric study. We would need to develop a different modality of time as history within the confines of this hemisphere. And finally, a hermeneutic of deciphering might reveal the true language of religious meaning within the entity of the New World. My proposal that the new context for study and teaching in departments of religion should focus upon a critical and creative orientation to the religious meanings of the New World echoes John Locke’s voice (but for quite different reasons), when he said, “In the beginning all was America,” or, as Fernand Braudel has most recently said, “For historians, for all other social scientists, and for all objective scientists, there will always be a new America to discover.”23

Notes 1. The fact that departments devoted to the study of religion have difficulty arriving at a satisfactory name for their departments or discipline is indicative of the problematical character of such studies. This is especially the case in the United States. Now this is due in part to the structure and usage of the English language. There is no authentic translation of the German, Religionswissenschaft, or the French, science des religions. The English, “religious science,” or “science of religion,” reminds one too much of the American denomination, Christian Science, and this in turn recalls the peculiar debate about science and religion in the American context. Religion, whatever else it might mean, tends to have reference to some form of earnest endeavor; thus, “religious studies,” could refer in English to the meaning of “studying anything with a disciplined intensity.” The “-ology” suffix that denotes the “study of ” a modality of the human, as in “sociology,” has been preempted by “theology” which has made a smooth adaptation into

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The Study of Religion in America the English language. Even if “theology” had not taken over that usage, “religiology” is not quite American English. A great deal of confusion lies in this problem of the nomenclature for what is done in such departments; in part this problem has to do with the history of religion in the United States. 2. Claude Welch, Graduate Education in Religion: A Critical Appraisal (Missoula: University of Montana Press, 1971). 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1950), 159 (emphasis added). 6. Michael Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), 345. 7. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), see the introductory chapter. 8. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “The Problem of the History of Religion in America,” Church History 39, no. 2 (June 1970): 224–235; see also his A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1972). 9. Ahlstrom, “Problem,” 233. 10. Richard D. Birdsall, “The Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order,” Church History 39, no. 3 (September 1970): 345–364. 11. Ibid., 354. 12. Sidney Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner, 1952); Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21. 13. Catherine Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976). 14. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), for a discussion of Jefferson, the Jeffersonians, and the agrarian ideal; for a certain kind of equivocation in Jefferson’s literary style, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt, 1948); and for this same meaning in his life, see Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: Norton, 1974). 15. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). 16. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923). 17. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), chapters 1 and 5. 18. Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), xi. 19. Daniel Defert, “The Collection of the World: Accounts of Voyages from Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” Dialectical Anthropology 7, no. 1 (September 1982): 11–20, at 12. 20. See, for example, Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Lewis O. Saum, The Fur Trader and the Indian (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973); Gary H. Gossen, Chamulas in the World of the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); and Eva Hunt, The Transformation of the Hummingbird: Cultural Roots of a Zinacantecan Mythical Poem (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

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The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis 21. Sidney Mead, The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 7–8. 22. Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 23. Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 117.

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CHAPTER 4

MENTALITÉS, MYTHS, AND RELIGION

We are all of us and Eliade in the fore, would have been believers; we are religious minds without religion. —Émile Cioran1 As for those subjects which might in principle become fields for disciplinary cultivation, but in which effective disciplinary development has as yet scarcely begun, we shall speak of these as “would-be disciplines.” —Stephen Toulmin2 The last time I had the pleasure of speaking before the assembled body of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) was just over a decade ago when I dutifully delivered my presidential address. At that time I spoke on the topic of cargo cults and the possible insights this phenomenon had for the amorphous nature of the AAR. Operating on the principle that one probably has only one good idea in a lifetime, I shall play upon the same theme this evening. I was initially asked to serve on a committee to plan the seventy-fifth anniversary of the AAR by the late Professor William A. Clebsch. I consented, but in my letter of acceptance I asked “What happened in 1909?” I knew something about the more recent history of our establishment but I could not immediately place an important event in regard to this Academy at that date. Given my background and the structure of my personal history, 1909 stood out as the date of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and I was sure that this Academy had nothing to do with that event! Bill Clebsch could not himself recall the meaning of this date for the Academy. I have subsequently done some research and will presently reveal this to you. (Incidentally, that committee was never formalized nor did it ever meet; the incoming president, Professor Ray Hart had other and better ideas.) For those of you who are still in a dilemma about 1909, let me fill you in on some of the history. The idea that led to the founding of our parent organization, the National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI), was the brainchild of Professor Ismar J. Peritz. He reported to his colleagues at the NABI’s twenty-fifth anniversary that the initial impulse came to him after conversations with a colleague in mathematics at Syracuse University. “Why might we not have an association of Bible teachers and a journal?” And he said that he came to the 1909 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literatures (SBL) with this thought in mind. He discussed this notion with some of his colleagues at the SBL meeting in 1909; those present were Irving J. Wood of Smith, Raymond Knox of Columbia, and Olive Dutcher, later Mrs. Lawrence Doggett of Mt. Holyoke College. All of his colleagues agree that the original impetus for the NABI’s founding came from Professor Peritz.

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A word or two about Professor Peritz is in order. He was born in Germany in 1863 and at the age of seventeen left his ancestral faith of Judaism to become a Christian. It is reported that this decision was a result of reading the letter to the Galatians with a Lutheran teacher. (Is this too formulaic to be true?) Upon emigrating to the United States, he completed graduate degrees at Drew and Harvard and came to Syracuse to teach Greek in 1895 and was soon appointed to head the new Department of Semitics and Archaeology. Peritz continued as an active enthusiastic member of the NABI until his death in 1950; he was influential in the establishment of the Journal of Bible and Religion and in promoting all phases of NABI activities. He was never president of the organization, and, as a matter of fact, only one of the founding members—Professor Irving Wood—ever held that office. In 1963, a committee of the NABI assessed the history of the society as a basis for change and renewal. They summarized the intentions of the creation of the organization in terms of its four goals: (1) to encourage members to share the results of their scholarly work; (2) to establish professional standards in teaching and study; (3) to increase the spirit of fellowship among themselves and a practical development of the religious life of their students; and (4) to promote publication of important papers and reviews of literature, relevant to their fields of study. The committee acknowledged that for the first twenty-five years these goals had matched the intention of the founders, but that over the last thirty years, with the growth of regional societies, the membership of the NABI had increased and now included several members expressing a variety of concerns that could no longer be construed under the original intent of the founders. This led them to reconsider the name, form, and function of the organization. The name National Association of Biblical Instructors gave the sense that the organization was limited to those whose special field was biblical studies. The designation Instructors gave the sense that the organization only included those who held junior positions in the academy, and National seemed to limit membership to those in the United States. This committee proposed the name American Academy of Religion—the organization moved from the clarity of American, to include scholars in Canada and Mexico, Academy, “to suggest a society of learned men united to advance art or science,” and Religion, because the committee agreed that it had a wider set of possible applications to our varying concerns than any other term. In the reconsideration of the form and function and the change of name to embody this reevaluation and renewal, the organization moved from the clarity of The Book—the BIBLE— to the seeming chaos of discourse about religion. The intentions of Professor Peritz were slowly but definitely receding. Professor Peritz had made it very clear that the meaning of the word and text BIBLE should form the locus and center for those scholars concerned with the meaning of religion in the academy. He stated quite forcefully in the discussions that led to the publication of a journal by the NABI that the word, “BIBLE,” should be prominent in the title of what would become the Journal of Bible and Religion. It was clear by 1963 that the scholarly study of religion could no longer be encompassed under this mode of centrality. Religion was either more or less than what the rubric of Bible or the Book signified. Allow me now to make a small excursus regarding another kind of history of the study of religion in the United States—a history that parallels and is almost simultaneous to the events of the NABI. I refer to the life, teaching, and scholarly career of Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr. 56

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In 1902, Professor Jastrow published an extremely delightful and scholarly manual simply titled The Study of Religion (see Chapter 6, in this volume). In this text, which is still relevant to many issues encountered in the study of religion, Jastrow set forth the meaning of the study of religion as Religionswissenschaft. Jastrow’s work sparkles with the names of the pioneers of this discipline, Friedrich Max Müller, Pierre Daniël Chantepie de la Saussaye, Eugène Burnouf, Austen Henry Layard, Cornelis P. Tiele, and the leading scholars of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and ancient Near Eastern religions—the later area being his own arena of competence and scholarly achievement. He was an original contributor to scholarship in this area and was recognized as an international scholar on the religions of the ancient Near East. The text The Study of Religion encompasses the total field of the study of religion; it is theoretical and practical, dealing as it does with the problematical status of the study of religion as well as devoting chapters to the study and teaching of religion in universities and colleges, and the use of museums as teaching aids. It set forth the interdisciplinary nature of the study of religion, with specific chapters on Religion and Ethics, Religion and Philosophy, Religion and History, Religion and Culture, and so on. But this work should not be seen as the incidental foray of a specialist into the wild field of the general study of religion. It is clear from his scholarly career that he thought of his precise scholarship within the wider context of the general study of religion. But more than this, he was actively engaged in organizing and giving institutional form to this ideal. Jastrow founded the American Lectures on the History of Religions in 1892. In 1891, he convened a meeting of scholars in Philadelphia to explore the establishment of a course of lectures on each of the major religious traditions. Buddhism was the topic in 1895; the lecturer was William Rhys Davids of University College, London; Primitive Religions in 1896 by Daniel Brinton, and the list goes on with Egyptian Religion, Judaism, and so on. I am recalling this different and even counter history as the basis for asking some peculiar and specific questions. First, why in our history as the NABI and the AAR do we not hear the faintest echo of this scholarly tradition of the study of religion in the United States? And second, why is our parentage in the NABI rather than in those activities surrounding the life and career of Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr.? I think that there are some answers to these questions and I should like to suggest some of them. Our heritage lies in the NABI, with Peritz rather than Jastrow, because of the peculiar relationship that the culture of the United States has with the BOOK—THE BIBLE. This is an empirical as well as a mythological structure, and I am using the term myth with its double-faced semantic—as true and fictive. We are, from this perspective, as Sidney Mead put it, a “nation with the soul of a church.” The prominence of the meaning of the BOOK— THE BIBLE as symbolic of the scholarly study of religion in the United States is, within the context of Peritz and Jastrow, even more ironic. Ironic because while both were scholars of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, Jastrow was by far the most eminent of the two, and yet it was he who wished to define the study of religion in broader and more general terms! The symbolic meaning of the Bible fed into the cultural myth of America and thus the lines of communication with a kind of grassroots meaning of religion were touched in its evocation. This country and its culture initially and as presently constituted has few of those traditions that confirm the meaning of religion as religare, to bind. Alexis de Tocqueville once mused that he failed to see in America any of those ancient meanings, customs, and relics, that bind a people together. 57

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Bible as mythological symbol of religion in American culture operated as a clarification of the ambiguity of the meaning of religion on the American scene—a structure that fulfilled the meaning of religion as a binding. Now, to be sure, the organizers of the NABI were no biblical literalists. They were sophisticated and critical interpreters, equipped with the most up-to-date scholarly methods in their understanding and interpretation of the biblical text. But they were operating out of a deeper cultural meaning of this text as a centering and binding structure in American cultural life. This center did not hold! And it did not hold because it was heuristic at best and fictive, at worse. The change made in the 1960s did not occur as a result of the discovery of a new meaning; the change came about because the scholarly community had to come to terms with what was the case. Let me rehearse the reasons given for this change again. No longer should we be called the National Association of Biblical Instructors—because: 1. The term National tends to define a limitation of scholarly communication based upon the political exclusivity of the nation-state and would exclude our colleagues in Canada and Mexico. (Why not in all the Americas?) 2. Bible or Biblical gives the sense that this text is symbolic of the meaning of religion. 3. Instructor, being a junior academic rank should not define the meaning of the scholar. These critiques of parentage are apt and to the point. The move from the NABI to the AAR seems to be a movement into the arena already defined by Jastrow. But then again the AAR has not really undertaken the program of Jastrow’s Religionswissenschaft, even though many in the Academy still speak of this kind of ideal in hushed and haunted tones. Though Jastrow’s program had the clarity of a Wissenschaft, it did not come to terms with the messiness that defined the situation of the meaning of religion within the context of American cultural dynamics. There is another kind of reason that explains why our heritage is in the NABI rather than with Jastrow. The NABI with all of its shortcomings touched the American mythology about religion through the symbolism of the Bible in American culture as the locus of ultimate and religious concern, centering the range of religious meanings and exfoliating itself to wider and wider peripheries, while in the same movement it obscured some fundamental realities of the American religious situation. It touched the roots in the same movement that it obscured. The NABI, from 1909 to the early 1960s, held together in a viable manner this strange tension. But we all know of other events of the 1960s—the Civil Rights Movement, the first Roman Catholic president of the United States. The change in name is occurring at the same time that the ultimate concern, the roots of possible bindings on the American scene are being exposed. It is worthy of note that no mention is made of this cultural context in the records that deal with the change of the NABI’s name, form, and function. These roots, the possible threads of our bindings are the mentalities of the American culture and have analogues in all cultural traditions. Allow me a word about this Frenchy term. It is even Frenchy in French! A few years ago, French historians began using the expression, histoire des mentalités (history of mentalities) to characterize their work in the field of intellectual history. While awkward in French and infelicitous in English translation, the phrase has survived; for it expressed a

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need to assign autonomy to a kind of historical inquiry which offers new perspectives on the civilizing process. The common ground for historians of mentalities is the boundary between the structured and the unstructured domains of human experience; tracing the contours of that boundary is the substance of their work. They make use of quantitative, psychological, economic, ideational, and geographical data; they refuse, however, to reduce the meaning of history to the political event or to any one of the methodological implications of their data. They are concerned to make room for, allow, find, the space for the human face to appear within the context of these various data and methods. The history of mentalities attempts to remedy the limitations of the idealist tradition of cultural history by studying the domain of culture which seems so remote from the idealist tradition: the culture of ordinary men and women. Decisive in this reformulation is a shift of focus from worldviews to the structures through which such conceptions are conveyed. These structures refer to all the forms that regularize mental activity, whether they are aesthetic images, linguistic codes, expressive gestures, religious rituals, or social custom. Since the 1960s, the Academy has become larger, and probably, more chaotic, and I hope more discursive. There are groups and sections devoted to theological assessments and reassessments, to textual criticism, to the philological and historical study of particular religions, to philosophical and methodological speculation—all are regular and normal scholarly endeavors. But there are also groups devoted to women, the feminine, blacks and their realities, ecology, a new kind of space, and a new kind of time. Over against the regular and ordinary disciplinary structures, these later groups may appear strange if not weird, for they trace the contours between the structures and the nonstructured; between male and female; between wilderness and domestication; between black and white; and between objectivity and subjectivity. They express the power and virtualities of that which is yet unformed and that which was obscured and unspoken and they define meanings in the identity of their empirical embodiment as positive structures of time, space, and power. The popularity and en vogue meaning of hermeneutics is their forte. They make use of every method and discipline and may even destroy and discredit some. They partake of every form of religion and of none. They often make discourse chaotic and agonizing. I feel this is necessary and quite appropriate. My regard for the notion of mentalité does not arise from an attraction to what the latest European or French intellectual fashion. I am personally attracted to this notion because in the Western World, a group of thinkers in France, have consistently and continuously explored the meaning of decolonization and post-imperialism, not simply as a political and economic meaning, but as a profound upheaval in the structure of thought itself, thus raising the issue of a fundamentally different possibility for human orientation in a world. We in the AAR might have something to contribute if we understand our seeming lack of intellectual order in a different manner—not as only chaos or in a pathetic manner, but a mode of attempting to express that which is novel, creative, and fresh. We must learn to live seriously, along the border, between the contours—liminally. The fact that we as an academy and perhaps as individual scholars represent would-have-been believers, or would-have-been-disciplines may be the best thing to say about us at this juncture of our history.

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Notes 1. Émile M. Cioran, “Beginnings of a Friendship,” in Myths and Symbol: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 407–414, at 414 (emphasis added). 2. Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 379.

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CHAPTER 5 ENCOUNTERING JOACHIM WACH: HERMENEUTICS, RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, AND AMERICA

Introduction Since Joachim Wach was such an important and intimate part of my intellectual life, my comments include a personal and intellectual portrayal of his intellectual biography. Another version of this story appears in the interview with David Carrasco in Chapter 34. I first met Professor Wach in the spring of 1950. At that time I was in the process of completing my first year in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. I had taken no courses with Wach and had not decided what I was to do with my studies. I, of course, had no idea that I would go on for a Ph.D., much less what area of study that might entail. I was leaving Swift Hall, proceeding down the corridor alongside Swift Commons. I saw Wach ahead of me. He was carrying a number of books in one hand and in the other he was managing what seemed to be a white box that deserts and cakes are normally carried in and an umbrella. It was clear to me that there was no way he was going to manage to open the heavy oaken door at the end of the corridor. I rushed ahead, opened the door for him. He gave the delightful Wachian “thank you.” Since I was going that way through the Haskell Arch to the Midway and Cottage Grove, I asked if I might assist him with his encumbrances. I took the books and the umbrella. And then with his characteristic curiosity, he asked if I were a student in the Divinity School. I answered in the affirmative. He then asked, how I liked it there. I told him I liked it very well … and that was true—that year and many subsequent years were very exciting times for me. So, I told him that though there was much I did not understand, I genuinely liked it. He inquired into the nature of my misunderstanding. As an example, I told him that I was enrolled in a yearlong course with Professor Wilhelm Pauck. Pauck throughout the year had used language such as Paul’s notion or idea of revelation, or Origen’s notion or idea of revelation, and so on. I told him that that was strange language for me, since where I came from, people did not have ideas or notions of revelations; they had revelations. Wach’s immediate enthusiastic response was, “Ah so, religious experience.” I did not realize it at the time but this encounter with Wach had a profound effect on me. Though I did not begin my studies in the history of religions as a graduate student until two years later, I did join the History of Religions Club (known as the Sangha) and attended the public lectures they sponsored. Allow me to draw upon this initial encounter with Wach to move into several aspects of his life and thought. First, the context of the intellectual life of the University of Chicago. Chicago was renowned for its excellence in social sciences; the first building in a university dedicated solely to the study of the social sciences was the Social Science Building at the University of

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Chicago. Almost all of the African American sociologists and anthropologists in the United States had been trained and had continued to be trained at the University of Chicago. In other words, Chicago was one of the better intellectual milieus for the enhancements of African Americans scholars. In the Divinity School, probably the area called Ethics and Society, was the area that would have encompassed the culture and religion of African Americans. There was a dearth, even an embarrassment, for African American sociologists to undertake a serious study of African American religion. Wach, in his “Ah so” statement to me, cut through the normal modes of conception of African American religion and culture. First of all, he did not understand my statement as quaint—a sign of the naïveté of my tradition, nor simply as a innocent, albeit ineffective understanding of the nature of the world. In his statement, “Ah so, religious experience,” he placed my community of origin within the universal structures of the human at a conceptual level as well and opened up the historical comparative meaning of my community within the entire history of humankind. As I understood Wach, my community in its religiousness was no longer simply a pawn of the vicissitudes of this country and its constitutional machinations. This did not mean that Wach did not attend to the empirical works of the social sciences at Chicago or in any other university; it did mean that he understood that the practical life of any community was part of the larger whole of the human world and that religion was one of the profound modes of expression of this life of practice.

The necessity for the human sciences All familiar with Wach’s characterization of Religionswissenschaft know that he understood it as a total study of religion. What we call the history of religion is a concession to the problem of the translation of Religionswissenschaft into American English. Theology, a normative discipline, is concerned with the analysis, interpretation, and exposition of one particular faith. The general science of religion, which reckons within its province phenomenology, history, psychology, and sociology of religion are essentially descriptive, aiming at understanding the nature of all religions. There is thus a quantitative and qualitative difference between the approaches, methods, and goals of the two disciplines: either one religion or a variety of them is the subject of study, the method being normative or descriptive. A philosophy of religion would be akin to theology in its normative interests, but it would share its subject matter with the science of religion.1 It is clear from this statement that the study of religion entailed all of the other human sciences and could not be carried forth apart from the engagement of these other “helping disciplines.” The above description might sound very much like what we refer to today as the interdisciplinary study of religion, and to some extent, this is true. For the student of the science of religion (which will be referred to hereafter as history of religions), one must at least in a logical order deal with the question, “what is religion?” In other words, sooner or later, better sooner, one must deal with the phenomenon of study—religion. 62

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It is not enough to simply string along a number of points of view from various disciplinary perspectives. One must understand that every discipline of the human sciences operates under a naïve and unconscious mode of totalization, that is what makes them a discipline. From Wach’s point of view, it is only the history of religions as a discipline which wishes to totalize, that is understand, religion as a total integral phenomenon. But to do this, one needs the help and communication with all the other disciplines of the human sciences. They are not only our necessary communication partners; they are also our critical allies. Such a relationship is not a contest; methodological as well as empirical exchanges of concepts and data can take place. In this regard Wach quotes with approval Vinogradoff ’s studies in law. When we treat of facts and doctrines in ideological order, we do not for a moment mean to deny or disregard the conditions—geographical, ethnological, political, and cultural—which have determined the actual course of events. “Wach goes on to say,” this applies definitely to our attempt at a systematic or phenomenological study of socio-religious phenomena.2 In point of fact, this led Wach’s Chicago students into two related but distinct modes of study. On the one hand, there were specific studies in particular religious traditions. On the other hand, there were critical studies of some aspect of the human sciences. The best critical dissertation at the University of Chicago was written by one of Wach’s students, Jay Fussel, who wrote his dissertation on Malinowski. Before Wach’s death, I had been working on a dissertation on the English anthropologist, R. R. Marett, and I had taken the equivalent of a master’s degree in the university’s anthropology department. Seymour Cain wrote on the philosopher Gabriel Marcel and Tom Altizer did a great deal of work on Carl Jung.

Joachim Wach and American culture Wach had both an amazing knowledge and curiosity about American culture. Unlike Mircea Eliade, who followed him, he did not confine himself to the major metropolitan centers of this country such as Chicago, New York, or San Francisco. Wach was particularly interested in the ordinariness of this culture. During the summers, he often took off on long bus trips throughout the country. He went to Amish Country, Hollywood, Salem Village, Savannah, Georgia, and many other places. He also regularly visited African American churches in Chicago, as well as Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Pentecostal churches. In this regard, Wach was more like Alexis de Tocqueville, on whom he had written a very perceptive essay. Instead of following the attitudes of many European intellectuals who came with doctrinaire notions of this country and its culture, Wach was anxious to see and experience the meaning of this country for himself. I don’t know whether his extension of Ernst Troeltsch’s church/sect paradigm came from these observations or not, but his essay, “Church, Sect, and Denomination,” derives its data from the American religious experience. As a matter of fact, his stay in America, especially at the University of Chicago had as one of its aims to establish the study of religion (Religionswissenschaft) as a pervasive academic discipline in American universities. This could not be done through an assertive forcing of the issue within the academic community; for historically, politically, and sociologically, this country and culture express unique and peculiar meaning of this term. Thus one would have 63

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to come to terms with the hermeneutical understanding of the meaning of religion in America before such a discipline could gain legitimation.

Phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the “Ah so” Joe Kitagawa divided Wach’s career into three periods. In the first period he was preoccupied with the hermeneutical basis for the historical descriptive task. In his second period, Wach attempted to develop the systematic dimension of the history of religions by following the model of sociology, and, in the third period, Wach expressed a concern for an integral understanding of various aspects of religious experience and its expression which led him to reassess not only the relationship of Religionswissenschaft to the social sciences but also its relationship to the normative disciplines of philosophy of religion and theology. Wach’s students at the University of Chicago benefitted from the mature Wach. Not only had he published his Das Verstehen and Sociology of Religion by that time, he was also beginning to make forays into another grand synthesis of his work through a series of articles and reviews. Though Wach had rather definite ideas about the meaning of a sociology of religion, he was not doctrinaire. Probably more than most practitioners of sociology, Wach attended with great care to the theoretical and empirical investigations of sociologists. One can see in this care his practice of the hermeneutical concern. In his article on the sociology of religion, he carefully lays out the entire area of this field, subtly delineating the four major international schools— the French, German, English, and American. He then raises the major controversial issues while raising the issues of norms, comparison, meaning, value, and validity. This is not the only example of his hermeneutical relationship to the human sciences. In the Winter Quarter, 1954, he conducted a seminar on hermeneutics that was cross-listed with the Committee on Social Thought; I was a member of this seminar. Students from history of religions, English, anthropology, sociology, history, and so on comprised the class. Presentations were given by faculty from departments such as music, law, literature, and anthropology. All dealt with the problem of hermeneutics in the interpretation of their varied disciplines. We must remember that in 1954, the term, “hermeneutics” was not the household academic word that is bandied about today. At that time the only other scholars who were using the term with any rigor were biblical scholars, the term having been brought back into parlance by Rudolf Bultmann’s New Testament studies. As late as 1964, a reviewer of my Alpha in the American Journal of Folklore, thought that I was using a Christian interpretation because the only place where hermeneutics made sense was in the interpretation of the Bible! I mention these practical and pedagogical dimensions of Wach’s career to touch on the way in which Wach made practical use of hermeneutics and phenomenology. This is not to say that this was the only way his students came to terms with these meanings. On the contrary, we read almost everything, from Friedrich Schleiermacher to August Boeckh, Wilhelm Dilthey, Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and heavens knows, much more. But finally, one internalizes these meanings as an attitude. It is an attitude of scholarly discernment as well as an attitude before and with the subject matter one engages. It is equally an attitude of critique, communication, and engagement with scholars within and without one’s own discipline. Ultimately, it is an attitude of one’s life. 64

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It took me many years to understand that when Wach made that wonderful “Ah so” he had imposed the epoche of phenomenology that opened and allowed me to study with confidence.

Epistemology, social science, and social action It could be argued that Wach was at heart an epistemologist. He inherited the epistemological problem through the South German school of Kantianism that was characteristic of Marburg. In this, he had been proceeded of course by his teacher, Rudolf Otto. It should be noted that Ernst Cassirer was also a distinguished bearer of this tradition. Though Wach never devoted himself to “pure philosophy,” the epistemological issue was always present in his work. His interests had to do with the internal constitution of the self but equally and also with the forms of the worlds of the self. Thus his concern with history and sociology—how are forms of the world constituted in the life-worlds of time/space and community? Some of the epistemological issues of the constitution of the self both as internal modality and in the life-world of community are addressed in chapter 7 of Sociology of Religion where he deals with Types of Religious Authority. In this regard, he expands Weber’s notion of charisma of person by adding charisma of office. Likewise, Wach’s numerous biographical writings— the most important being those devoted to Caspar Schwenfelder, Alexis de Tocqueville, Otto, and Wilhelm von Humboldt—are analogues of his subtle discussions of the virtuoso, and the unique in history and community. Conversely a work such as The Structure of Social Action by Talcott Parsons, though brilliant in its analysis, presents no concrete data upon which to base the issue of the nature of the social in all of its forms. The attention paid within sociology to the meaning of action in society, or more precisely, “How does an entire society change?” was not an issue with which Parsons dealt.

Notes 1. Joachim Wach, Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944). 2. Ibid., 10.

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CHAPTER 6 INTRODUCTION TO THE REPRINT OF MORRIS JASTROW’S THE STUDY OF RELIGION

At the dawn of the century this little book analyzed, described, and did much to refashion the scholarly discipline concerned with the general or comparative history of religions. Eight decades later, at least in North America, the liveliest and most provocative debates about that discipline still turned on the very points and issues that the book advanced, but by then both the book and its author had been virtually forgotten. Thus, this reprinting of The Study of Religion by Morris Jastrow, Jr. (1861–1921), appropriately inaugurates the “Classics in Religious Studies” series under the sponsorship of Scholars Press and the American Academy of Religion. There are two reasons why the choice is appropriate. First, the book cannot help but enliven discussion of the discipline’s nature and destiny, and it is a cardinal feature of any classic to have power to stir discussion down the generations. Indeed. this particular classic may be serviceable today in introducing the student to this discipline. (Of course, the bibliography is dated.) Second, the republication and this introduction may serve to restore to the discipline’s memory the author, who was America’s most prolific historian of religion down to, and of, his own time—and who since then has outdone him? It is a book that speaks for itself. Therefore, an introduction highlighting the two or three themes of greatest interest to the introducers would tend to thwart the discovery, of the many themes that will be of great interest to each reader. Therefore this introduction will sketch a profile of the author as a major contributor to the discipline and ponder, briefly at the end, why the book literally and the author figuratively went out of print. The author’s father was a scholar and a rabbi, Marcus (later Morris, Sr.) Jastrow (1829– 1903); his mother, Bertha Wolfsohn Jastrow. The author would grow up to be a more famous scholar than his father, but would not last as a rabbi. A brother (there were seven children) would become a scholar and a popularizer but would leave the Jewish religion. Joseph Jastrow (1863–1944), who earned at the Johns Hopkins University what was probably the first doctoral degree in psychology conferred in the United States, became professor of experimental and comparative psychology at the University of Wisconsin, established the nation’s third laboratory for psychological experimentation, and became famous as a popularizer of self-help psychology through books, articles, and radio talks.1 Storms began breaking over the father’s career even before Morris, Jr., was born. A native of Rogasen in what was then Polish Prussia, he earned his Ph.D. through studies at Berlin and Halle. Soon after marrying in 1856, he became rabbi of the German synagogue in Warsaw. Early in 1861 Russian troops, deployed to repress home-rule movements, killed five citizens. At their memorial service Rabbi Jastrow preached a fervently patriotic sermon, of which 10,000 copies were surreptitiously printed and distributed. After three months in prison, Jastrow was

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deported, then recalled and readmitted, then again banished to Germany. The family moved from Worms to America in 1866. where Marcus served the conservative Synagogue Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia. There he promoted the controversial movement, Zionism, opposed Reform Judaism, and labored over his extensive A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (1886–1903; 1926). In Philadelphia Morris, Jr., received his education, winning the A.B. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1881. Three years of study followed in Breslau, Paris, Strassburg, and Leipzig— perhaps also Leiden. He returned as a Ph.D. of the University of Leipzig, to serve for a year as lecturer to his father’s congregation. The next year (1885) he resigned, withdrew from the ministry, and joined his alma mater’s faculty. The university appointed Jastrow professor of Semitic languages in 1892 and, as an additional appointment, university librarian in 1898. He held both positions until his death. Perhaps stability of place throughout a long academic career had something to do with Jastrow’s flexibility and vitality as to scholarly topics and academic interests. Arabic grammar was his first love, but he turned to the new and far more volatile study of ancient Babylonian and Assyrian life, especially religion. Although the bibliographies do not identify which work was his doctoral dissertation, the maiden publication was a long article in German on the works of a tenth-century Arabic grammarian.2 After 1889 he published no more in this field, although his verve for comparing religions led to later lectures and essays on Muhammad and Islam. Also an accomplished Hebraist, he worked extensively on the Hebrew Bible and on Judaica. From the beginning of his academic career, and with increasing intensity, his lifelong loves were two: technical scholarship in Babylono-Assyrian religion and culture, and, more generally, the scope and method of the history of religions. Leading scholars in both areas were among the lecturers he heard abroad, both in France and Germany, perhaps also in Holland. Mesopotamian studies were then novel and exciting. Excavations as recent as those led by Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894) in mid-century allowed scholars to decipher cuneiform and learn the literature and life of a very ancient, very high civilization. In France Jastrow heard Jules Oppert (1825–1905), an authority on the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Sumerians. There also was Joseph Halévy (1827–1917), who advanced the theory that the Sumerian people had never existed, that the writings attributed to them had in fact been in a secret code invented by Babylonian priests. At Leipzig he heard the young Friedrich Delitzsch (1850–1922), who during his career taught most of the leading Assyriologists of his time; his theory of almost total dependence of the Old Testament upon Babylonian prototypes is one that Jastrow countered in his mature works. That studies and travels in Europe brought him in touch with scholars who would pique the more general interest in the history of religions may fairly be surmised. During Jastrow’s sojourn, Joseph Ernest Renan (1823–1890), if not a grandfather then surely a godfather of the history of religions, became director of the Collège de France. “I recall a remark that Renan was in the habit of making in his lectures” there, Jastrow said in his presidential address to the Semitic Religions Section of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions (Oxford, 1908).3 The remark itself is beside the point; namely that Jastrow remembered Renan’s lectures. He had just noted that since the Second Congress (Basel, 1904) the field had lost the two men who inaugurated these meetings. They were Jean Réville (1854–1908) and his father Albert Réville (1826–1906). The latter was lecturing on

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the history of religions at both the Collège and the École des Hautes Études in Paris during Jastrow’s studies. He did not say outright that he studied with these men, but the inference that he did seems persuasive. At the latter institution, noted for its special attention to sciences religieuses, Jastrow may have studied with James Darmesteter (1849–1894), a Jew, an authority on Zoroastrianism, and a promoter of comparative religion, who translated the Zend-Avesta and edited it for Sacred Books of the East; he translated into French the Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (1878) by Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900). In the year after Darmesteter died, Jastrow and his wife—she as translator, he as editor—published the Selected Essays of James Darmesteter. What could be more typical of academic-filial piety? The typical respect of student for professor also suffuses the dedication of The Study of Religion to Cornelis Petrus Tiele (1830–1902). This Dutch Egyptologist and theologian was from 1877 professor of the history of religions and of the philosophy of religion at the University of Leiden. Tiele’s schemes for classifying religions, set forth first in the influential article, “Religions,” occupying twenty-eight columns in the ninth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica and revised in his Gifford Lectures (Elements of the Science of Religion, 1897, 1899), received extensive treatment as well as intensive criticism in Jastrow’s book. Already in 1900 Jastrow commemorated Tiele’s seventieth birthday in a brief article for Open Court; its author was personally acquainted with its subject. Two years later he wrote an obituary of Tiele for the Independent. The point of reporting what is certain and surmising what is plausible about Jastrow’s early associations with great scholars is not to reflect their glory upon him. It is to note that by age forty, when he published The Study of Religion, he was an internationally acquainted scholar, both in his special field and in the general science of religion. His lifelong bibliography lists more than two hundred publications, not to speak of literally hundreds of entries in dictionaries and encyclopedias. By 1900, fifteen years into the profession, Jastrow had published three books, two monographs, one edited book, nearly fifty articles, and nearly fifty more scholarly notes, ranging over Arabic, Hebrew–Old Testament, Judaica, and other Orientalia, as well as in the central scholarly and academic fields. In addition, he wrote on current political topics, including Zionism, on academic affairs at the University of Pennsylvania, particularly its libraries, and on American Jewry. He lectured across the United States and in Europe. To the early phase of his career, through the initial publication of The Study of Religion, belongs the English version of his magnum opus on Babylonian and Assyrian religion. Through the Ginn Publishing Company in Boston he was editing a series called “Handbooks on the History of Religions.” The first, by Edward Washburn Hopkins (1857–1932) of Yale on the religions of India (1895), was followed by Jastrow’s book, then by Pierre Daniël Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848–1920) of Amsterdam and then Leiden on the religion of the Teutons (1902), then Crawford Howell Toy (1836–1919) of Harvard on the general history of religions (1913), and finally John Punnett Peters (1852–1921), a scholarly clergyman of New York City, on Hebraic religion (1914). Also planned and announced, but apparently derailed by World War I, were Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson (1862–1937) of Columbia on the Zoroastrians and Jastrow himself on Islam.

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His two-volume handbook on The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898) provided “the first scientific and adequate account of this religion,” according to George Aaron Barton (1859–1942) of Bryn Mawr College, who in 1922 succeeded Jastrow at Pennsylvania. Further, “The book placed Professor Jastrow at once in the front line of the world’s Assyriologists.”4 The book grew into a tome of nearly 1,800 pages and included an album of plates in its German version, Die Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens (3 vols., 1905–1912), and that tome in turn was recast as Jastrow’s American Lectures on the History of Religions. Each version or edition pondered the latest scholarship in a fast-moving specialty. Jastrow founded the American Lectures in 1892 and managed them until his death. Late in 1891 he convened a meeting of scholars in Philadelphia to explore establishing a course of lectures on each of the major religions. Each course was to consist of at least six lectures, to be available for presentation in each sponsoring university and in various cities, and to eventuate in a book. The preparatory committee reported at Union Theological Seminary in New York early in 1892 to a meeting composed of persons representing major universities in the United States. Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, and Yale were among the inaugural sponsors. Toy of Harvard was the president. The secretary and moving spirit was Jastrow, who used the series to present lectures by renowned experts from anywhere in the world dealing with the history of religions. Buddhism was the topic for 1895, and the lecturer Jastrow invited was the world’s authority, Thomas William Rhys Davids (1843–1922) of University College, London. The religions of primitive peoples followed, by Daniel Garrison Brinton (1837–1899), a pioneer anthropologist at Jastrow’s own University. The German-trained biblical scholar who held the Oriel Professorship of Scripture at Oxford, Thomas Kelly Cheyne (1841–1915), lectured in 1898 on Jewish religion after the exile. Next came lectures on the pre-exilic religion of Israel, which issued in the widely influential book, in English and German, by Karl Ferdinand Reinhard Budde (1850–1935) of Strassburg, later Marburg. In 1903 Georg Steindorff (1861–1951) of Leipzig lectured on early Egyptian religion. Jastrow’s own lectures, delivered in 1910, were published as Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (1911). The famous Berlin Sinologist, Jan Jacob Marie de Groot (1854–1921) lectured during the academic year 1910–1911, followed by Franz Valéry Marie Cumont (1868–1947), curator of the Brussels Royal Museum, on Greek and Roman astrology and religion. High standards prevailed throughout Jastrow’s management of the series—and have continued down to our own time under the American Council of Learned Societies. The management of the lectures, the editing of the handbooks, and the encouragement that Jastrow gave to younger scholars combined to represent one of his three major contributions to scholarship in comparative religion. His own scientific writings stand first, and the development and teaching of scholarly methods for the study of religions rank next. But they do not dim the importance of his “organizing enterprises which called forth the contributions of others,” wrote a colleague soon after Jastrow died. Moreover, “America has had but one other scholar (the late Professor C. H. Toy of Harvard), whose stimulating influence called forth from others a degree of labor at all approaching that which Professor Jastrow elicited. Such men stand far above their contemporaries in the scholarly influence which they wield. They evoke in others a devotion to the search for truth which multiplies many fold the mere labor of their own hands.”5 70

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That judgment rests squarely on the assumption that effectiveness in the scholar’s own specialty is a necessary condition for the wider influence. Jastrow amply met that condition. One example of his scrutiny of details must suffice. To the commemorative volume presented to Toy on his seventy-fifth birthday Jastrow contributed an essay on “The Liver as the Seat of the Soul.”6 Astrology and divination in Babylonia and Assyria fascinated him. Among one of his more noteworthy scholarly attainments stands his discovery of the importance of hepatoscopy, or divination of future events by examining the livers of sacrificed sheep, in Babylonian life. Jastrow always studied original sources, in this case not only the divination texts in cuneiform but also the livers of sheep. It was said that he wrote on this topic with a sheep’s liver on his desk. Writings in his major field are crammed with studies of omens and signs as well as with philological investigations and commentaries on the great texts (especially Gilgamesh, but also Job and Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs). The liver commanded a large place in the German magnum opus and in the volume publishing his American Lectures. There were articles on liver divination in scientific medical periodicals, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, in Proceedings of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia. He compared Babylonian, Etruscan, and Chinese divination in a lecture at the fourth ICHR at Leiden in 1912. Jastrow knew his subject matter inside-out—including the livers. But such trees of scholarly specialization never hid from Jastrow’s sight his field’s forest. On the religion of Babylonians and Assyrians he wrote the basic handbook in English, at a time when the field was undergoing sharp reinterpretation, to which he contributed. He embodied others’ new findings and announced his own in the German tome that was received as definitive. In the American Lectures he drew widespread attention to the latest findings in the field. In the Haskell Lectures at Oberlin College (1913) he compared the Babylonian with the Hebrew traditions, giving each its due and showing, against the currents of leading German scholarship, that the Hebrews were not wholly dependent upon Babylonian prototypes. Yet he never forgot that the scholarly forest consisted of individual trees demanding meticulous study. Albert Tobias Clay (1866–1925), professor of Assyriology at Yale, wrote in eulogy. “Especially in the subject of the religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians, Jastrow made himself without doubt the leading authority in the world.”7 The second claim to fame came from his devotion to clarifying the scope and method of the general discipline, and now The Study of Religion may again speak for itself. On that theme he addressed academics of several disciplines and the wider public in many diverse articles, but none rivals in importance this quite successful book. Its early printings carried the publisher’s partial catalogue at the end, a common usage of the time. “This work presents a careful survey of the subject, and forms an admirable introduction to any particular branch of it,” ran the succinct—and accurate—blurb.8 The Study of Religion was originally published in 1901 as number 41 in The Contemporary Science Series, edited by the English psychologist-sexologist Havelock Ellis, in London by Walter Scott and in New York by Charles Scribner. Reprintings in 1902, 1909, 1911, and 1914 bore the double colophon. “The book,” wrote Barton in 1921, “fulfilled a two-fold purpose: It was designed to serve as an introduction to the study of religion—an introduction in which a student could learn the limits and aims of the study—as well as to teach a scientific method of pursuing it. In accomplishing this aim Jastrow made an advance at many points over his predecessors and so contributed materially to the development of the science to which he 71

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aimed to introduce the student.” Further, “Now, after the lapse of twenty years, the book is without peer in its special sphere.”9 Given such praise and the lively success of no fewer than five printings over thirteen years, what could account for the book’s later near-oblivion? Certainly its conception of the scope and method of the study of religion had value and relevance after it went out of print. After World War II, for example, one of the most active world centers for graduate training in the history of religions was the University of Chicago, under the regime of Joachim Wach (1898– 1955). That training followed almost to the letter the structure of Jastrow’s text, as we have it from one of his students, yet Wach, himself a walking bibliography, never referred to this book. In fact, only by happenstance did each of the authors of this introduction “rediscover” Jastrow in the early 1980s and realize that the work can still be commended as a guide to the field so long after it was written. Why the lacuna of interest and currency? Despite the fact that desuetudes are the despair of historians, we can suggest three answers. They are by no means mutually exclusive. First, the world changed, beginning with the latter half of the year in which the book was last reprinted (1914). Many who lived after World War I tried to forget or repudiate what was accepted before it. In one such change of mind, the Christian exclusivism and the negativism toward all religion that had forestalled until the nineteenth century the comparative study of religions once again took hold, the former fostered by Karl Barth (1886–1968) and his disciples, the latter by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his. On Barth’s reading all religions but Christianity, and on Freud’s all religions without exception, were a snare and a delusion. Why study them at all? Second, the book developed, as Barton noted, a scientific or academic-scholarly method for studying religions. After World War I, a self-conscious and largely successful effort was made to bend efforts on behalf of religion in American academia toward providing a theological ideology of higher education. Graduate training in religion largely passed from the departments (like Jastrow’s), teaching the philologies and histories of the several religions impartially, to the theological seminaries, both Christian and Jewish, where existential and neo-orthodox theology dominated the scene. Since World War II, the scientific-scholarly approach has staged a gradual, by no means yet universal, comeback. On this reading, the principles of Jastrow’s book themselves, and thus the book also, went into eclipse. The desuetude was natural. Now that the eclipse is waning, the renewal that this reprinting proposes is also natural. The third suggestion has to do with the spirit of the times, both Jastrow’s and ours. While his book contains all the intellectual ingredients to speak to the cultural situation after World War I, it did not exhibit a fitness for the new intellectual and ideological ferment. In a word, the eclipse was hermeneutical. Surely, Jastrow was aware of methodological issues, as the book makes clear from page one on. He relied on the methods of history and philology, but the philosophies of which he was aware were those of Hegel, Kant, and Hartmann rather than those of Husserl, Sartre, or James. The book is not hermeneutically oriented to the modern sense of intellectual crises, of cultural discontinuities, of personal ambiguities. On the other hand, the book breaks with the nineteenth-century hermeneutical orientation toward evolutionary optimism. It explicitly points away from the spirit of the times preceding it, but it points only implicitly toward the spirit of the times succeeding it. With that point in mind, the book’s lessons can be absorbed into the spirit of our times—unknown to and therefore unaddressed by Morris Jastrow, Jr. 72

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WILLIAM A. CLEBSCH,10 George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Humanities, Stanford University. CHARLES H. LONG, William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of Religion University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Professor of Religion, Duke University.

Notes 1. Morris Jastrow, both senior and junior, were written up in the prestigious Dictionary of National Biography; Joseph Jastrow, in DAB Supplement III. 2. See Albert Tobias Clay and James Alan Montgomery, comps., Bibliography of Morris Jastrow, Jr., Ph.D., Professor of Semitic Languages in the University of Pennsylvania, 1885–1910 (Philadelphia, 1910), 5, and idem, “Bibliography of Morris Jastrow, Jr.,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 41 (1921): 337–344, at 337. This number of JOAS contained a section entitled, “In Memoriam Morris Jastrow, Jr.,” that included the later Clay-Montgomery bibliography plus Julian Morgenstern, “Morris Jastrow Jr. as a Biblical Critic,” 322–327; George Aaron Barton, “The Contributions of Morris Jastrow Jr. to the History of Religion,” 327–333; Albert Tobias Clay, “Professor Jastrow as an Assyriologist,” 333–336; and the “Bibliography,” 337–344. Jastrow had been president of the American Oriental Society (1915) and of the Society of Biblical Literature (1916). 3. Morris Jastrow, Jr., “President’s Address,” in Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions, ed. P. S. Allen et al., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 1: 240. 4. Barton, “Contributions,” 329. 5. Ibid., 332, 333. 6. In Studies in the History of Religions, ed. David Gordon Lyon and George Foot Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1912). 7. Clay and Montgomery, “Bibliography,” 336. 8. Morris Jastrow, Jr., The Study of Religion, Contemporary Science Series, ed. Havelock Ellis, no. 41 (London: Walter Scott; New York: Charles Scribner, 1902), 463. This reprint reproduces the pages of the latter (that is, New York) printing. 9. Barton, “Contributions,” 328. 10. The introduction was prepared while this author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and of the National Endowment for the Humanities (#FC-0006-79-1229); both sponsors are gratefully acknowledged.

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CHAPTER 7 A LOOK AT THE CHICAGO TRADITION IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS: RETROSPECT AND FUTURE

Discipline and dilemma It has been noted that the scholars at the University of Chicago have a penchant for developing schools of thought. Remarking on this tendency William James wrote the following to his friend F.S.C. Schiller: “The best of the lot was reading up on the output of the ‘Chicago School of Thought.’ … A real school and real thought. At Harvard we have plenty of thought, but not a school. At Yale and Cornell, the other way about.”1 This predisposition, which, indeed, is a part of the tradition of the University of Chicago, expresses a concern for method and methodologies within the several disciplines of academic life. Schools of thought and methodological discourse are not expressions of the desire for ideological purity but rather a concern for self-conscious reflection about what one is doing and why. It was therefore not strange that in 1983 we gathered in Chicago to discuss methodological issues in the history of religions. The last Chicago conference devoted to method in the history of religions was held in 1966. These conferences are, however, only symbolic and public expressions of a historical tradition: the concern for method is characteristic of this discipline at this university. George Stephen Goodspeed held the first chair of comparative religions in the university. Upon his retirement Albert Eustace Haydon taught comparative religion between 1919 and 1945. I begin this history with the career of Haydon. Haydon, Joachim Wach’s predecessor, published two articles devoted to methodological issues in 1922 and 1926, respectively. The first one was entitled, “From Comparative Religion to History of Religions,” and the second, “Twenty-Five Years of History of Religions.”2 We shall return to these later. Even before the time of Haydon, I have learned from the oral tradition through Bernard Meland that Gerald Birney Smith had expressed similar methodological concerns. From Goodspeed to Haydon to Joachim Wach to the arrival of Mircea Eliade on to the present, methodological discourse has continued unabated. One could put together a quite distinguished anthology composed of methodological articles from the Chicago school. I have chosen the Chicago school as a basis for my remarks for several reasons. It constitutes a long and consistent discussion of the meaning of the discipline on the American scene, and it is a tradition that has produced an overwhelming number of the historians of religions in this country; this tradition has been equally the locus and entrée for methodological concerns of this discipline in other parts of the world. In my remarks concerning the leading figures of this tradition I shall not attempt to give a complete analysis and description of their work; rather

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I shall highlight certain tendencies regarding method that I consider basic for discussion of future developments in this area. Given this tendency for the discussion of method it is appropriate to ask, what was or is at issue in this discussion? What is there to be talked about in the study of religion? Let us examine the record of this discussion. Haydon’s article of 1922, “From Comparative Religion to History of Religions,” undertakes a critique of the notion of comparative religion as a disciplinary orientation for the study of religion. It is clear that this discussion accepts as a critical norm the notion of “religious sciences,” or “science of religion” as the basis for analysis: “Critical, objective interpretation of the religions of the world is one of the new fruits of modern scholarship. Only students of this last generation use the terms ‘science of religion’ without a sense of strangeness.”3 Two tendencies come under attack in this article. First of all, the assumptive notions that there is a kind of fundamental law of religious development, and second, that this law leads to a demonstrable superiority of Christian faith. The case rested upon three further assumptions. First, that religion is a certain basic thing in all religions and that phenomena are therefore similar everywhere leaving the investigator only the task of discovering the order of their arrangement. Second, that human nature is a unit producing similar forms when brought into contact with external nature. Third, that religious ideas and forms are capable of being gathered under universal terms owing to their similarity.4 Haydon finds the orientation represented by comparative religion incapable of rendering plausible premises for these assumptions, for unless comparative religion already possesses some preconceived ideas about the standard of religious excellence or some philosophical presuppositions as to a single cosmic power at work, its leading assumptions are not provable from the internal structure of its method. For Haydon, the history of religions represents a way out of this impasse. It is a way out because it gives up or sets aside these kinds of issues. Now by history of religions, Haydon has reference to the specific study of empirical religious traditions. He does not intend history of religions as the English equivalent of Religionswissenschaft—the systematic inquiry into the nature of religion itself. He makes this clear in his statement that “Its [history of religions’] task is to deal not with religion but religions, each of them the product of a human group and claiming to be interpreted in all its richness and individuality.”5 For Haydon history of religions is an inquiry into specific religious traditions. Four years later, Haydon returned to the problematic nature of the history of religions in his article, “Twenty-Five Years of History of Religions.” In this article he reviewed and praised the advances in research devoted to a wide range of religious traditions—Chantepie de la Saussaye’s Lehrbuch, van Gennep’s study of totemism, Skeat’s Malay Magic, Webster’s Secret Societies, Breasted’s works on Egyptian religion, Noeldeke’s studies of Islam, etcetera. He is indeed pleased with the work over the last twenty-five years; it represents precisely the advance beyond the old notion of comparative religion he had criticized. But he also notes that these specific works reveal another kind of problem in the area of method. The historian of the last quarter-century has, in his words, “escaped the revelation dogmas of the theologian only to yield to more subtle influence of philosophies with the resultant warping of method and coloring of interpretation.”6 These philosophies are those of Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Comte, who represent different understandings of religion, and Kant, Ritschl, and Spencer, who express three ways of harmonizing religion with science. 76

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This is not the only problem revealed from these empirical studies. He further notes that the studies referred to in his survey represent five distinct schools, each with its own method: the philological school, the anthropological school, the sociological method, the method of Völkerpsychologie, and finally, the continuation of the tradition of the historical school of Albert and Jean Réville, Chantepie, and Tiele. He must therefore admit, he says, that the method of history of religions is no longer the simple historical method used by the founders of the science before the opening of the century; it is an aggregate of all the sciences whose domains cover data which the historian must use. The success of history therefore depends upon the adequacy of the methods and findings of the various sciences involved. During the last twenty-five years these allied sciences have been struggling for a satisfactory method. The materials of religion often held the primary place. The story of the various methodological drifts is also the story of method in the history of religions.7 As far as I can discern, this was the situation in regard to method when Joachim Wach came to Chicago as professor of history of religions. Haydon, while aware of the status of the various studies within the history of religions, was wary of systematic and philosophical approaches to the entire range of data and materials characterized as religious. The methodological issue was for him located within the various methods that were used to study religion and not oriented to systematic schemas. It is interesting to note that neither in his 1922 nor in his 1926 article does Haydon mention Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige, published in German in 1917 and translated into English in 1923. For that matter, Nathan Soderblom and Gerardus van der Leeuw are also missing. The review of Otto’s classic was published in the Journal of Religion in 1925, and the author of that review was Gerald Birney Smith, not Eustace Haydon. Smith’s review, which appears in a review article with three other works, is sympathetic in its understanding and appreciation. He says at the end of this review that Professor Otto in our day, as Schleiermacher in his, has brought us face to face with that infinite cosmic mystery which supernaturalism made so real, but which most modernist interpretations of religion have so rationalized as to eliminate all sense of holy fear. Perhaps, after all, religion exists not so to promote social programs, not to give pleasing explanations of creation and providence, but to bring men honestly face to face with the awe-inspiring and dreadful non-human universe in which we humans count for so little, and to initiate us into an experience of oneness with the mystery in which dread and awe shall merge into worshipful trust.8 Before arriving at this conclusion, G. B. Smith had chided Otto for failing to show the correlation of religion to other aspects of life. This kind of critique seems to be a standard one for the members of the Divinity School faculty of that time. It is found throughout Haydon’s evaluation of Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Ethics and Religion,9 and it is also found in a review of Wach’s Sociology of Religion (the first appearance of Wach’s name in the Journal) in 1945, the year before he came to Chicago. The reviewer, in this case Edwin E. Aubrey, calls the work “a comprehensive and erudite work in the German manner.” Its greatest weakness is that “it fails to give adequate treatment of the dynamic processes which make up every religion and that 77

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it will thus tend to reinforce the declaration of Ruth Benedict, which he means to refute, that because religion is no longer a living issue, it can now be studied objectively.”10 Wach’s appearance at Chicago marks the beginnings of systematic approaches to the study of religion. Wach recognized, as did Haydon, that a general science of religion covered various disciplines: phenomenology, history, psychology, and sociology. This general science of religion differed from theology, which was for him a normative discipline concerned with the analysis, interpretation, and exposition of a particular faith. The difference is quantitative and qualitative; the general science of religion covers a variety of empirical religions, whereas theology is limited to one. The philosophy of religion is similar to theology in its normative dimension but akin to the science of religion in its subject matter. But the matter is not quite as simple as Wach states it in the first paragraph of his Sociology of Religion. In carefully nuanced statements in the first three chapters of this work, he continuously points to the primacy of religious experience and expression as those marks to be recognized in all of the data, methods, and disciplines that constitute the science of religion.11 On the one hand, he follows Hegel’s intuition that religion is an aspect of absolute mind and, like economic systems, works of art, laws, and systems of thought, is an objective modality of culture to be distinguished from “organizations of society” such as marriage, friendships, kin groups, associations, and the state. This latter group he will later designate as “natural groups.” He did not go the whole way with this interpretation because he realized that religious expressions are ambiguous, less objectified than a law or a product of industry. The ambiguity of religion, its comparable lack of clarity to other cultural forms that are more objective, is finally interpreted in a positive sense. The “holy” is not so much another value to be added to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, but is the matrix from which they are derived; religion is not a branch but the trunk of the tree. Wach’s orientation might be characterized in the following manner: (1) A concern for a systematic method for the study of religion. In this regard he always felt that the proper translation of Religionswissenschaft into the English “history of religion” should be adopted. The student of the discipline was interested in understanding the nature of religion and not simply particular religious traditions. (2) An emphasis on the phenomenology of religion as expressed by Rudolf Otto. This meant that in the tradition of the South German school of Kantianism the epistemological issue was always to the fore. (3) The context of method was always hermeneutics and the understanding of religion was part and parcel of the more general problem of hermeneutics in the modern period. (4) Thus historical method, while based upon philology and a careful assessment of data, was completed only in hermeneutics. Ancillary to this understanding of history was his concern for typologies as defining the basis for selection and discrimination of historical evidence. (5) An interest in methodologies and data from philosophy and all the human sciences as the basic intellectual context for the discipline expressed its humanistic meaning. Related to the above but not forming a part of his formal schema was Wach’s interest in Christian history and theology. From one perspective this stemmed from personal faith and his intellectual traditions. In another sense it formed part of the data of religion itself; the spread of Christianity and its relationship to the modern period was an important dimension in the understanding of the modern world. But given this emphasis on systematic method and the autonomy of the discipline of history of religion, he did not think that the discipline had arrived at this kind of unity—what he often referred to as an integral understanding of religion. This is best stated in the epigraph before 78

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the first chapter of Wach’s The Comparative Study of Religion, where he quotes E. Burnouf ’s prediction in La Science des Religions: “This present century will not come to an end without having seen the establishment of a unified science whose elements are still dispersed, a science which the preceding centuries did not have, which is not even yet defined, and which, perhaps for the first time, will be named science of religion.”12 This is the second time we have heard this refrain echo from this tradition. It was first expressed in Haydon’s dissatisfaction with a spurious comparative religion and later in his quandary regarding an integrative structure for the various historical studies of specific religious traditions. Wach, for quite other reasons, raises the same refrain. In one sense Wach felt that some aspects, if not the core of the problem, had to do with an uncritical acceptance of the interpretation of the religious life that came from the ancillary disciplines—the other human sciences. His problem could be defined as a conflict of interpretation. He thus wanted his students to undertake critical analyses of the other disciplines and also the explication of the specifically religious element and structure in the exemplars of Religionswissenschaft. Thus, one of the best dissertations on Bronislaw Malinowski at the University of Chicago was written by one of Wach’s students; there were also dissertations on Gabriel Marcel and Nathan Soderblom, as well as studies of mysticism. The Wachian heritage made this tradition highly self-conscious about the problem of method, its dilemmas, and its creative possibilities. Those of us who were students of Wach in the early 1950s had read Mircea Eliade’s Traité d’histoire des religions, and his Le mythe de l’éternel retour, and the sangha (Wach’s name for the community formed by students and friends of the history of religion) had discussed the possibility of his visit as Haskell Lecturer and visiting professor in 1956. The arrangements were made but Wach’s death in August 1955 prevented us from witnessing the “conversation” that could have taken place. For those of us who had studied with Wach and who then listened to the lectures of Mircea Eliade, there were scholarly continuities and discontinuities. The intense concern for method was continuous but it was expressed in a very different manner; one might say that in Eliade’s lectures and writings, the methodological dimension was implicit in comparison to Wach’s explicit expression. Kees Bolle correctly points to a tendency in Wach when he reports “that Wach’s principal activity concerned formal, philosophical questions.”13 In the discussion of a religious phenomenon, Wach placed it within a typological scheme, discussed the supporting philosophical and sociological justifications for doing so along with objections, and once this methodological procedure was accomplished, he moved on. Eliade’s discussion stayed much closer to the phenomenon. After Wach, it was a rather strange style. In describing a ritual or symbol he hardly ever used the term, “and they believe that.” His statements were more like, “and at that moment the deity appeared.” We were thus introduced to another kind of rhetoric, a rhetoric that attempted to present the imaginary religious world to us. Methodological discussion apart from data tended to bore him. After some time, those transitional students were asking à la Wach, “What is his method?” There was a method, but it was presented in a very different manner. As one of his early expressions on this issue after coming to Chicago, Eliade published in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology an essay entitled “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism.”14 Here, as in most of his strictly methodological studies, he gives us a language derived from the religious phenomena to undertake the study of religion. In this case it is the religious symbol; in his other works we acquire hierophany, axis mundi, in illo tempore, the center, etcetera. Not since Rudolf Otto has the historian of religion had such a rich language for 79

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encompassing the religious life. This language was predicated upon religious expression, whereas Otto’s language was directed toward the phenomenology of experiencing as a subjective mode of human consciousness. In contrast to Wach, whose major works, Das Verstehen, Types of Religious Experience, Comparative Religion, Understanding and Believing, express a general philosophical orientation, Eliade’s major works, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Yoga, Shamanism, Initiation, and Australian Religion, among others, are indicative of a refocusing of attention on the data of religion. This is also true of his students, whose dissertations were focused in the same manner. This orientation does not mean a change in the fundamental goal. If anything, Eliade has been as intensely devoted to the hermeneutical task of understanding the nature of religion as Wach. In an article reminiscent of Haydon’s articles of 1922 and 1926, “The History of Religions in Retrospect: 1912–1962,” Eliade undertakes an assessment of the field.15 And, again in a manner that reminds us of Haydon, he signals the year 1912 as an important date in the history of religion with the publication of Durkheim’s Formes élémentaires, Schmidt’s Ursprung, Raffaele Pettazzoni’s La religione primitiva in Sardegna, Jung’s Wandlungen, and Freud’s Totem und Tabu. Four different approaches to the study of religion—none really new—were illustrated by these works: the sociological, the ethnological, the psychological, and the historical. The only new approach potentially, that of the phenomenology of religion, was not to be attempted for ten years. But Freud, Jung, Durkheim, and Wilhelm Schmidt did apply new methods and claimed to have obtained more enduring results than their predecessors.16 In the course of this article he discusses the major trends that have taken place within these four approaches and adds the approach of the phenomenology of religion. Toward the end of the article he raises the issue of tension between the historicists and the phenomenologists. The alternative of a religious phenomenology or history of religion needs, he remarks, to be transcended so that we might reach a broader perspective in which these two intellectual operations are equally valuable for a more adequate knowledge of homo religiosus. “For if the ‘phenomenologists’ are interested in the meanings of religious data, the ‘historians’ on their side attempt to show how these meanings have been experienced and lived in the various cultures and historical moments, how they have been enriched, or improvised in the course of history.”17 This discussion centers on the internal problems of method in the discipline. As a hermeneut Eliade has always been concerned with the cultural situation of the interpreter and the impact of the discipline within the broader milieu. On three occasions he addressed this issue, and these remarks echo Haydon’s complaint regarding “the relationship of religion to life.” In “Crisis and Renewal in the History of Religions,” he chided historians of religions, accusing them of a lack of courage. Let us recognize it frankly. History of religions, or comparative religion, plays a rather modest role in modern culture. … Certainly one could respond that in our day there is no Max Müller, Andrew Lang, or Frazer, which is perhaps true, not because today’s historians of religion are inferior to them, but simply because they are more modest, more withdrawn, indeed more timid.18 This timidity among historians of religion occurs precisely at a time and in an epoch in which knowledge concerning man increased considerably due to psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and revolutionary artistic experiments, and, above all, at the moment when the confrontation with Asia and the “primitive” began. This fact is paradoxical and tragic. 80

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According to Eliade, a creative hermeneutics does not always guide the work of historians of religions because, perhaps, of the inhibitions provoked by the triumph of “scientism” in certain humanist disciplines. … Neither the History of Religions nor any other humanist discipline ought to conform—as they have already done too long—to models borrowed from the natural sciences, still more as these models are out of date (especially those borrowed from physics).19 In his article, “Cultural Fashions and the History of Religions,” published in the collected essays of the last of these conferences in 1966, Mircea Eliade pointed out the vogue of certain popular cultural styles as indicative of the desire and thirst on the popular levels of our society for a deeper, less mundane, more primordial, ahistorical meaning in life. Allow me at this point to summarize this history by pointing out the cluster of problems revealed in this discussion. Most of these issues are endemic to the study of the history of religions wherever the discipline is practiced. There is first of all a recognition of the quantitative mass of religious data from the entire history of humankind that confronts the interpreter, and these data represent several methodological orientations. Second, there is a general agreement that no theology and, in the case of Haydon, no thetic principle could form the basis or be the principle for the organization of this mass of materials. But if not theology, neither should any one of the methodological approaches within the discipline serve as the principle of organization. This is the issue of reductionism. Religion was not to be interpreted simply from the point of view of historical method, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and so on. The science of religion was thus to be an autonomous discipline that integrated not only the data but also the various methodological approaches. This kind of integration represented the autonomy of the discipline. Now corollary to this kind of integration and autonomy of the discipline was the notion of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics was not only a procedure of interpretation, it was equally the vision and telos of autonomy and unity. It implied the notion of a “pre-understanding” that allowed for the initial perception of the form and modality of the phenomena of religion as “religious”; at this point it was related to phenomenology. Hermeneutics then described the connection that these phenomena had to life. In this sense it served a reintegrative function; understanding should change the cultural life and situation of the interpreter. The play and problematic of the discipline has centered on these issues in their positive exemplary expressions and in the critiques that have been made of this tradition. Critical attention by historians of religion has tended to question not only the solutions to these problems but the authenticity of this kind of portrayal of the discipline itself.20 I refer here to Hans Penner’s work, which has not only questioned the validity of the notion of functionalism but has also raised issues regarding the use of phenomenology as a valid method within the discipline. The critical essays of Jonathan Smith and Charles Long have raised questions regarding the meaning of the center as related to the data on the one hand and as epistemological structure on the other. Joseph Kitagawa’s critical appraisal of Wach’s legacy has illumined and thus clarified the structural elements of his hermeneutic of understanding and salvation.21 Within the tradition we are discussing, two tendencies have been expressed. Wach’s heritage, represented by his Sociology of Religion, was historical and sociological; Eliade’s, morphological and ahistorical. I have elsewhere suggested a manner in which these two approaches could be combined.22 I put forth a form of Charles Sanders Peirce’s logic as a model for this conjunction. 81

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I am still persuaded that such a joining of approaches is a good idea, but I do not think that this can be done without a critical evaluation of the intentions of the two positions. Let me suggest that the discipline has been concerned with two kinds of religious manifestations, religion as an extraordinary expression and religion as a modality of the ordinariness of life. The emphasis in the first understanding of religion employed phenomenological and morphological methods to express the extraordinariness of the religious appearance. It is the world of Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinosum and of Eliade’s hierophanies and kratophanies. Religion as ordinary made use of the disciplines of history, sociology, and anthropology. It emphasized the integrative nature of religion in the life of society, the generality, normality, and regularity of the expression of the religious life. These two modes are not antithetical. Rudolf Otto in his schematization shows how the extraordinary is the basis for the ordinary and how Durkheim’s cultural effervescence is as necessary to his theory as are the totems. These are not only two different aspects of the religious life but also two hermeneutical and premethodological meanings of the nature and meaning of religion in the modern Western world. However, as desirable as the combination of the ordinary and extraordinary or phenomenology and history or the relationship of religion to life might be, can we accomplish this from the perspectives of this history? Can the “story of the methodological drifts,” in the words of Haydon, provide unity or express the relationship of religion to life? Wach’s resolution of this problem of the relationship to life veered toward a theology, and Eliade’s discussion of this issue is never as precise as his interpretation of the religious data itself. But this problem should not be relegated to the final stage of interpretation. As the hermeneutical problem, it constitutes the vision as well as an internal principle of the discipline. Issues related to the future of the discipline might best be discussed in relationship to this issue.

Models and methods Problems of interpretation emerge in a context of distance and relationship. The distancing is the veil of difference, dissimilarity, and the mysterious quality of the datum. The relationship is in degrees of vague similarity and likeness, the necessity to create an intelligible order for the datum that has appeared as the locus for the interpretive act. Religious phenomena constitute such data for the science of religion, and the goal of a science of religion as a total hermeneutic is to give a systematic and total interpretation of these phenomena. Such a task is procedural and visionary; it takes on both logical and aesthetic dimensions. The two exemplars of this work have been Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade. Wach’s work in its philosophical and formal dimensions involved the stylistics of Kantianism and a hermeneutics derived from romanticism. In each case there was a rejection of classical formulations of the datum either from the point of view of a formal Christian theology and its tradition (false/true religion) or from the point of view of conventional Western culture. Romanticism was a rejection of reification; the religious phenomena of all cultures were included as living realities, even ultimate realities of human existence. The systematization of these realities into a science tended to create an architectonic structure as the aesthetic and visionary order of organization and thus an inner tension within the structure of the system. In the case of Mircea Eliade, the morphological order as the pattern for the range of religious 82

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phenomena replaced the evolutionary progressivistic and linear bourgeois history as the basis for placement and deployment of homo religiosus. When I read his works, I am reminded of a phrase from Marcel Griaule’s wonderful Dieu d’eau, “Et le corps de ballet … est l’image du monde entier”23 (And the corps of the ballet … is the image of the entire world). The logical order is morphological: the aesthetic, the theater, the drama. In both cases, a new world inhabited by homines religiosi appears on the scene. These works considered positively are a critique of those worlds created by modern materialists and rationalists. The language of experiencing in Rudolf Otto, the orders and structures of this religious world in the forms of centers, symbols, and time are explicated in Eliade’s work. The types of communities, the forms of therapies and the ranges of communication, exploration, and imagination are given precise treatment in Eliade’s oeuvre. It is this world of homo religiosus that has attracted students and researchers to this discipline; it has at least attracted me, for I had tired of the rather banal sociological and historical studies of the “unofficial groups” in Western society put forth by the conventional “classical” disciplines devoted to their interpretation. There was an other world, a heterocosm whose echoed resonances reminded me of a world I had known but which was now distant from me. However, in making the strange familiar, it had paradoxically become more intensely Other. In my opinion most critiques of this orientation, the good ones and the misinformed, touch upon this same issue; the timidity of the historian of religion might well be related to this same issue. The logical and aesthetic dimensions of system as scientificity prevent the critique implicit in the knowledge of the Others from flowing back into the normality of one’s cultural life. Jonathan Smith put it this way: Is the material Eliade describes best organized under the categories, “archaic” and “modern”? If one accepts the basic dualism just described between those cultures which affirm the structures of the cosmos and seek to repeat them; which affirm the necessity of dwelling within a limited world in which each being has a given place and role to fulfill, a centrifugal view of the world which emphasizes the importance of the “Centre” as opposed to those cultures which express a more “open” view in which categories of rebellion and freedom are to the fore; in which beings are called upon to challenge their limits, break them, or create new possibilities, a centripetal world which emphasizes the importance of periphery and transcendence; in which, in Eliade’s terms one has chosen not installation in the world but absolute freedom … the annihilation of every conditioned world—ought one to suggest the periodization implied by the terms “archaic” and “modern”?24 In my own discussion of 1966, I had questioned the locus of the archaic in relationship to the interpreter as an epistemological issue. The same kind of question might be posed in the works of Wach. In his Sociology of Religion, he makes a distinction between religion and natural groups and specifically religious organization of society. The identification of religion and natural groups takes place in less complex societies, whereas specifically religious groups occur in more complex societies. I do not wish to argue the proposition, though it is arguable, but I do wish to question what the statement obscures. Why does the specifically religious 83

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occur apart from the totalization of religion within a society? Why is the specifically religious present only as a case of differentiation? In his discussion of a specifically religious community, the master and the disciple, he points to a distinct form of relationship and the dynamics and dialectical meaning of this form of bonding. Given his genius and knowledge, we would have all profited by an extension of this discussion into the religious or quasi-religious implications of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. The study of the Other as a science is a modern preoccupation of the West. The origins of these disciplines are in the Western Enlightenment. This orientation correlates the notion of reason to the idea of the human. Although all human beings and societies do not express the same quality or modality of reason, reason is still the norm as capacity and potentiality. This orientation is the background for the human sciences—a science in which the human constitutes both the object and the interpreter of the science. It is obvious that the human as interpreter and the human as object of interpretation are not quite the same. The context for both is posited as some form of Enlightenment rationality on the one hand, or, as in the case of Giambattista Vico, the capacity of all humans to create and understand cultural forms. The status of the interpreter, the position created by the act of interpretation, sets forth other heuristic norms as models of the interpretative acts. In the history of religions, at least from its origins, two heuristic norms, one emphasizing the similarity and the other the dissimilarity, dominate. Philology and written languages, an expression common to interpreter and object of interpretation, constitute one side; the other from the side of that which is dissimilar is that of the primitives—they are not like us, being without written languages and noncivilized. The science of religion proposes to encompass both these modes within a common order of intelligibility through recourse to a deeper and more primordial order: the sacred, religious experience, and so forth. But however this deeper order is articulated, the objects of interpretation are still constituted as Others. But this constitution of the Others as objects of interpretation is more than simply a procedure of investigation, for it represents the constitution of the interpreter—the desire to make sense of the meaning of the Others in one’s personal and cultural life. From this point of view there is confusion or conflation of what is Other in the culture and history of the interpreter with the reality of the Others who are the object of interpretation. This is a central problem in the study of religion as a science of religion. The pretensions of the Enlightenment heritage explain the reason that this science has not been accomplished but is nevertheless always anticipated.

From science to discourse Advances in our field at the level of method will occur if we place the Enlightenment model of science and its derivates in an epoche for a while. Several reasons dictate this restraint. In the first instance, we confront a very different historical situation. Many of the cultures that provided the data for the orientalists and primitivists are no longer passive or dominated by the West. Self-identification on their part poses theoretical and practical problems regarding the meaning of knowledge different from the nuances of the Enlightenment, theoretically, or colonialism, practically. This does not mean that these cultures cannot or should not be studied, but it requires a different relationship to the problem of knowledge. Even if these 84

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cultures accept the project of the sciences of the human, what might be involved for them is a different meaning of both human constitution and the constitution of a human science. Second, historians of religion should undertake more studies of religion in their own cultural traditions. Such studies are needed to reveal in a precise manner the ambiguity and valences of the sacred in a culture that forms the tradition of the interpreter. Studies of this kind might also cause a shift in the meaning of otherness; the constitution of the other is not simply formed by geographies. Some studies of this kind are already appearing from the pens of social historians. Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean is an example of a form of this work. A work of this scope devoted to religious matters could very well change methodological parameters. I have in mind another work, that of Lionel Rothkrug. Rothkrug’s study, Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation is devoted to the cult of relics in the late medieval period. In this work he establishes the relationship between power and place as these relate to the veneration of relics. From this discussion, we draw inferences regarding the relationship of religion to society in Lutheran and imperial traditions. His study, which began as an analysis of relics, draws a direct relation between this primordium of the West and some of its major philosophical presuppositions. Consider, for example, Kant’s concept of the moral life. The Kantian actor recognizes no moral law outside his own judgment, for, in every moral decision he must act always as if he were a cosmic legislator about to promulgate a universal law. Conceiving moral life to originate in sources outside the sphere of social or cultural fact, Kant describes an autonomous moral will—it determines itself entirely within itself—that imposes upon the individual an absolute duty to transcend his own social environment in pursuit of the goals of the universality, completeness and totality. … But the point to emphasize is that German intellectuals in the eighteenth century were receptive to Kantian or to some other radically cognitive type of moral philosophy because neither they nor their predecessors in previous centuries had ever thought themselves to be members of a civil society.25 Rothkrug’s study has the merit of showing how certain philosophical principles that are part and parcel of the discussion of objectivity are rooted in specific religious orientations. Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam is one of the few studies of another religion that carefully lays out cultural presuppositions and thus undertakes a critical examination of the signifying nature of the context of the study, in his case Islam. These signifying tendencies have to do with the precommitment of the interpreter, the range of cultural biases, not simply about Islam, but about civilization, maps, history, etc. What would otherwise appear as sheer pedantry in his work is transformed into an essay on the role of signification in a disciplinary approach to another culture. This leads to another kind of study. I call this “the history of the study” type of study. Some studies of this genre have already appeared, such as Eric J. Sharpe’s Comparative Religion: A History. Sharpe’s work is a good and readable text covering the entire range of approaches to the study of religion. More precise studies come to mind: Steiner, Taboo; Lévi-Strauss, Totemism; Guy Welbon’s Nirvana; and Benjamin Keen’s Aztec Image in Western Thought. These studies enable us to see the history of the changing meanings and fluctuations of what on one level 85

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was supposed to be an objective datum. They show the interrelationship of interpreter and the object of interpretation. More studies of this kind dealing with various religions and various forms of data should be undertaken. The development of a “historical phenomenology” from studies of this kind is a possibility.26 Now that several disciplines of the human sciences find themselves in the same situation, if not impasse, as our discipline, discourse with them could be fruitful. In my own case, I am thinking of social historians, anthropologists, and philosophical psychoanalysts. Our understanding and methods, especially as related to a theory of praxis, might enable us to supplement our understanding of the theoretical and doctrinal meaning of religion. I should finally like to see us develop a body of studies devoted to the religious situation of contact. I am not here referring to what is called syncretism. I would include that kind of meaning in my definition, but I intend the situation of contact itself as a religious mode. First of all, a study of the contact situation of the West with other cultures should be undertaken. The beginnings of studies of this sort devoted to Euro-American and Euro-African contacts are already in the making. On the American scene, Frances Jennings’s The Invasion of America and Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism represent this type of study. For Africa, there is Sheila Walker’s study of the Harrist Church and Karen E. Fields’s Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa.27 Second, situations of contact between the several other religious traditions in various parts of the world would afford a range of meaning for these religious modes. These types of studies obviously provide us with more materials, but the poverty of materials has never been our basic problem. I have suggested studies of this kind so that we might begin a new kind of discourse in the study of religion. The anticipations for a science of religion, a Religionswissenschaft, have not been fulfilled; these expectations have been simply postponed from one generation to the next. One might ask whether such expectations are legitimate. I am beginning to have my doubts. We all stand in appreciation and awe of the work that has been accomplished through making use of what we have learned from this history of our discipline. But is a “science” in the Enlightenment sense the proper receptacle of these meanings? I am suggesting that the human science that would be the proper receptacle will develop when the shadows surrounding the interpreter and his culture as “otherness” are made a part of the total hermeneutical task. Our goal would then not be a science, but a serious human discourse.

Notes 1. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1935), 2:501. 2. A. Eustace Haydon, “From Comparative Religion to History of Religions,” Journal of Religion 2, no. 6 (November 1922): 577–587; and Haydon, “Twenty-Five Years of History of Religions,” Journal of Religion 6, no. 1 (January 1926): 17–40. 3. Haydon, “From Comparative Religion,” 578–579. 4. Ibid., 582–583. 5. Ibid., 587. 6. Haydon, “Twenty-Five Years,” 18. 86

The Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions 7. Ibid., 33, italics added. 8. Gerald Birney Smith, “Rediscovering Religion,” Journal of Religion 5, no. 4 (July 1925): 435–439, quoting from 439. 9. A. Eustace Haydon, “An Evaluation of the Encyclopedia,” in “A Valuation of Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,” Journal of Religion 3, no. 1 (January 1923): 89–95. 10. Edwin E. Aubrey, Review of Sociology of Religion by Joachim Wach, Journal of Religion 25, no. 2 (April 1945): 140, italics added. 11. See especially his Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944). One of the epigraphs to this volume is that of William James from his The Varieties of Religious Experience. The statement is as follows, “The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champion of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions.” This orientation might seem to be antithetical in Wach’s program for a “science of religion” and the sui generis nature of the religious experience. In my opinion Wach interpreted James’s statement more in terms of expression than of experience, and it was at the level of experience that he sought the unitary nature of religion. Cf. Ernst Troeltsch’s review of James’s Varieties in “Empiricism and Platonism in the Philosophy of Religion,” Harvard Theological Review 5 (1912): 401–422. In addition, see Wach’s Types of Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) and The Comparative Study of Religions, ed. J. M. Kitagawa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). Also Joseph M. Kitagawa’s commentaries on the work of Wach in “Joachim Wach et la sociologie de la religion,” Archives de Sociologie des Religions 1 (January–June 1956): 25–40; Joachim Wach—Vorlesungen (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1963). For an insightful critical review of Wach’s method and pedagogy, see Kees Bolle’s review article of Wach’s posthumous Understanding and Believing, “Wach’s Legacy: Reflexions on a New Book,” History of Religions 10, no. 1 (August 1970): 80–90. Bolle points to a fundamental ambiguity in Wach. On the one hand he is eager to defend the validity of non-Christian religions against real or supposed attacks and thus he speaks of general revelation; on the other hand, he as often speaks of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and special or final revelation. This ambiguity matches his admiration for works such as James’s Varieties while still espousing a systematic and sui generis understanding of the nature of religion. 12. Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 2. 13. Kees Bolle, “Wach’s Legacy: Reflexions on a New Book,” History of Religions 10, no. 1 (August 1970): 81. 14. The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, ed. Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 86–107. 15. Mircea Eliade, “The History of Religions in Retrospect: 1912–1962,” Journal of Bible and Religion 31, no. 2 (April 1963): 98–109, republished in Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 12–36. 16. Eliade, “History of Religions in Retrospect,” 98; Eliade, Quest, 12. 17. Eliade, “History of Religions in Retrospect,” 107; Eliade, Quest, 21. 18. Mircea Eliade, “Crisis and Renewal in the History of Religions,” History of Religions 5, no. 1 (Summer 1965): 1–17, at 7; reprinted in Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 55–71, at 60–61. 19. Eliade, “Crisis and Renewal,” 7; Eliade, Quest, 60–61. 20. See the issue of the Journal of Religion 52, no. 2 (April 1972), devoted to the history of religions with the following articles: “Is a Science of Religion Possible?” (107–133) by Hans H. Penner and Edward A. Yonan; Jonathan Z. Smith’s “The Wobbling Pivot” (134–149); Jay J. Kim, “Belief or Anamnesis: Is a Rapprochement between History of Religions and Theology Possible?” (150– 169); and Douglas Allen, “Mircea Eliade’s Phenomenological Analysis of Religious Experience” (170–186). See also Hans H. Penner’s “The Poverty of Functionalism,” History of Religions 11, no.

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The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis 1 (August 1971): 91–97; Jonathan Z. Smith’s collected essays in Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1978), and Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Charles H. Long, “Prolegomenon to a Religious Hermeneutic,” History of Religions 6, no. 3 (February 1967): 254–264; Long, “Human Centers,” Soundings 61, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 400–414; and Long, “The Study of Religion: Its Nature and Its Discourse,” Inaugural Lecture of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, October 7, 1980. All of these studies express a tension between the science of religion and hermeneutics as an interpretive mode within this science. These discussions range from the problem of logical and definitional meanings within religious studies to those of contingencies within the study of religion. The issue of contingencies stems from what one may call a premature consistency regarding the universality of the nature of religion as this is understood on the level of a science of religion and the empirical historical meaning of religion. 21. See note 11, above. 22. Long, “Prolegomenon.” 23. Marcel Griaule, Dieu d’eau (Paris: Fayard, 1966), 225. 24. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Wobbling Pivot,” 146. 25. Lionel Rothkrug, Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation, Historical Reflections, vol. 7, no. 1 (Waterloo, Ontario: Department of History, University of Waterloo, 1980), 187. 26. See Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1975); Franz Steiner, Taboo (London: Cohen and West, 1956); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1963); Guy Richard Welbon, The Buddhist Nirvāna and Its Western Interpreters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); and Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971). 27. See Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Sheila S. Walker, The Religious Revolution in the Ivory Coast: The Prophet Harris and the Harrist Church (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); and Karen E. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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CHAPTER 8 THE CHICAGO SCHOOL: AN ACADEMIC MODE OF BEING

“The Chicago School”: What’s in a name? Dating its founding as a theological school from the time that Dr. George Northrup began teaching in the newly founded Baptist Theological Union in Morgan Park in 1867, the Divinity School celebrated its centennial in 1967. The Baptist Union Theological Seminary was incorporated into the University of Chicago at its founding in 1892, becoming the first graduate school of the university. The year 1967 thus marked the seventy-fifth year of its existence as an integral part of the University of Chicago. To commemorate this occasion the Divinity School commenced publication of a series of commemorative volumes, each volume composed of essays in each of the eight fields of study of the graduate program in the Divinity School. The first of these volumes was The History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding, edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa, Mircea Eliade, and myself, the faculty of the history of religions field. These volumes of the 1960s have a long history at the University of Chicago. This history begins with the publication of the Decennial Volumes of the University of Chicago that began in 1902, ten years after the founding of the university. These volumes covered all the disciplines researched and taught at the university—the biological sciences, business, classics, political economy, Semitic languages, philosophy, theology, physics, etc. The phrase, “the Chicago school,” arises from the reception of these Decennial volumes on the American academic scene. More specifically. It was from William James’s review of the volumes of the Philosophy Department that we first hear the phrase, “Chicago School of Thought.” James says, The rest of the world has made merry over the Chicago man’s legendary saying that “Chicago hasn’t had time to get culture yet, but when she does strike her, she’ll make her hum.” Already the prophecy is fulfilling itself in a dazzling manner. Chicago has a School of Thought!—a school of thought which, it is safe to predict, will figure in literature as the School of Chicago for twenty-five years to come. Some schools have plenty of thought to show, but no school; others plenty of school, but no thought. The Decennial Publications show real thought and a real school.1 James, in this review, expresses his scholarly critical appreciation of what he feels is a distinctive breakthrough, not only in philosophical thought but in the manner in which this enterprise is being carried on in America. James’s elation and excitement was more than I have previously addressed this issue in an article, “A Look at the Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions: Retrospect and Future,” in The History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect; A Collection of Essays, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa (New York: Macmillan, 1985). I return to this issue in light of the volume mentioned below edited by Professors Wedemeyer and Doniger. I find it to be a very odd and strange text as far as any legacy of the Chicago tradition in the history of religions is concerned.

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academic, it was equally existential. A year before in a letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, he had this to say: I have the duty on Monday of reporting at a “Philosophical Conference” on the Chicago School of Thought. Chicago University has during the last six months given birth to the fruit of its ten years of gestation under John Dewey. The result is wonderful—a real school, and real Thought. Important thought too! Did you ever hear of such a city or such a University? Here we have thought, but no school. At Yale, a school but no thought. Chicago has both.2 So, it was William James in an expression of critical appreciation who coined the term that we take for granted today. The Decennial volumes became a model for the publication agenda of the university. This publication agenda can be documented in several publications represented in the University of Chicago journals and the prominence of the University of Chicago Press as the largest publishers of scholarly articles and books in the United States. Even though James implicated the entire University as well as the city of Chicago in his meaning of the “Chicago School,” he concentrated his attention on John Dewey and the Department of Philosophy and its espousal of pragmatism. There is, however, no room for doubt as to what the proper reference of meaning of the terms “Chicago school” applies in the article by Mortimer Adler simply titled, “The Chicago School,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1941.3 Early on in his article Adler states quite explicitly, But to think of the Chicago School entirely in terms of a doctrine called “pragmatism,” or to restrict it to the “thought” of its philosophy department, misses the forest for the trees … I do not mean to imply that various departments always collaborated in research— although more of that occurred at Chicago than anywhere else—but I do say that the large round tables of the faculty club could usually assemble a diversity of specialists who really understood what the other’s research was driving at because it was a common objective they all shared. If a university should be a community of scholars, if it should sustain a universe of discourse, then the pre-Hutchins Chicago almost (I say “almost”) rang the bell.4 It describes a specific style of the academic life. And, in a whimsical way, he brings the city of Chicago into the discussion. In attempting to account for the style of the university, he says, I shall make no effort to explain this extraordinary phenomenon: it maybe the Middle West, it maybe the lawless Windy City; it maybe the sulphurous vapor exuded by the Midway or the animal spirits blown from the stockyards. Whatever the cause, the facts remain that the University is incomparably alive and kicking.5 William James’ original reference to the Chicago school applied primarily to the graduate schools and departments of the university and to the research publication and programs of

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these units. Adler’s discussion concentrates on undergraduate liberal education as the goal of college education. As a matter of fact the article itself was prompted by the argument that was going on at the University regarding the Great Books Project of Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Hutchins had become Chancellor of the University in 1929 and had almost immediately raised questions concerning the goals and purposes of a general/liberal college education and the processes by which such a program might be accomplished. His plan and pronouncements led to controversy, not only within the Chicago faculty but in the nation at large.6 The problematical nature of the College of the University of Chicago is one of the enduring features of the college. I remember during my own student days, the college curriculum changed very often and students dramatized the college with caricatures such as, “When I matriculated I was in the new college, while here the college changed and the new college became the old college so now I’m in the old-new college.” I speak of the college with some affection since I sat for the University of Chicago College Entrance Examinations. These examinations took place over a period of five days, three to four hours each day. They covered the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. I was lucky enough to pass out of the college and was thus able to enter the graduate program of the Divinity School though I did not possess a college degree. The Chicago school of history of religions The Divinity School was represented in the Decennial publications by three volumes; the last volume by G. B. Foster, The Finality of Christianity,7 published in 1906. A volume published in 1927 entitled, Religious Thought in the Last Quarter-Century, edited by G. B. Smith, contains an essay by Eustace Haydon entitled “History of Religions.”8 With this title, Haydon shows that he had abandoned the older designation of “Comparative Religions” under which Professor Stephen Goodspeed had taught courses of this kind. So, at least, the field and area at Chicago was called “history of religions” long before Wach came in 1945. Haydon’s essay is an encyclopedic marvel. It covers in a critical manner all the latest scholarship in data and methods since the beginning of the twentieth century. In his own words Haydon states, “The sketch of the progress of twenty-five years falls easily into three divisions—a survey of notable achievements in the various departments of history of religions, an account of the change in methods, and a study of gradual clarifications of the definition of religion.”9 No volume devoted to the history of religions was included in these initial publications. Adler’s article of 1941 does mention Divinity School members Shirley Jackson Case and Shailer Matthews, and the fact there was “the emphasis from dogmatic theology to comparative religion, studying the varieties of religious experience as psychological phenomena, creeds as ethnic by-products, and religion itself as part of man’s struggle for existence.”10 The concerns of the “Chicago school” were continued in several publications after the volume edited by G. B. Smith. A volume edited by Joseph Kitagawa and Mircea Eliade, The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, was published in 1959. It contained essays by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Raffaele Pettazzoni, Jean Danielou, Louis Massignon, Ernst Benz, Freidrich Heiler, Joseph Kitagawa, and Mircea Eliade. The first issue of History of Religions, a University of Chicago journal, appeared in 1962. The founding editors were Mircea Eliade, Joseph Kitagawa, and myself. Now given this background allow me to return to the volume of 91

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1967 that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. We are on very solid ground from the very beginnings of the university when we speak of a “Chicago school” from 1892 at the founding of the university or at least from 1903, the publication date of the Decennial volumes. There has been in fact and indeed, a genuine “Chicago School of Thought,” as William James put it. This notion was not, as reported by Professor Christian Wedemeyer, presently a member of the history of religions faculty—I repeat, the notion was not simply an assertion put forward by Professor Kitagawa and myself.11 Another volume, History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect, was published in 1985. The next publication from the faculty of professors in the history of religions field (I hesitate to call it the “Chicago school” since the editors doubt its very existence) was published in 2010 edited by Professors Christian Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger. This is a rather strange volume—while claiming to honor the legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade they seem to have forgotten that both of these scholars gained their renown as scholars at the University of Chicago as members of the history of religions faculty. One might have thought that the main ingredients of a scholar-teacher’s legacy would have been the significance of their work, the students they have trained, and the effect of their work on subsequent scholarship. Hardly any of this is to be found in this volume. In the main, the essays in this volume represent a kind of “scholarly rendition” of these two scholars’ formations in Europe where they can be discussed and dissected at a distance—at a distance such that whatever they meant would not have to confront the context of being at the University of Chicago or even in the United States. To discuss them as being at the University of Chicago would have forced them to deal in a more fulsome way with the nature and meaning of the university, its traditions, students, influence, etcetera. It is ironic in a text that accuses one of its protagonists of being “unhistorical” (Eliade), the simple notion of placing Wach and Eliade in Chicago and in the United States of America where they achieved the apex of their academic lives is not mentioned in the text. So intent were the editors to undertake their “rendition” of their protagonists back to Europe that they paid no attention to the fact that they came into a tradition and influenced that tradition as well. For all of the University of Chicago’s international renown for scholarship and scholarly research, as a University it never forgot where it was located and from the time of William Rainey Harper to almost the present, there was always a kind of ingenious probing of the possibility of an indigenous American mode of the intellectual life. At the time of the conference which led to the publication of their book there were two persons who just might have had something to say; they had studied under Wach and written their dissertations with Eliade. I speak here of the late Kees Bolle and myself. Neither of us were consulted. In addition, there were several students of the Chicago school who received their doctorates in the 1960s and 1970s. They too are absent. As I said, this is a strange volume; at best we might characterize it as awkward, and at worse, misleading. The volume reminded me of an analogy to the present-day Republican Party. Until the passage of the Civil Rights Bill in the 1960s, the Republican Party was known as the “Party of Lincoln.” Since the Republican Party was taken over by the Dixiecrats, they act as if there had never been a Party of Lincoln. Let me end this section with something that took place when I was a student at the university. At one of the Divinity School Wednesday luncheons, Bruno Bettelheim, the famous psychiatrist, spoke. The topic had to do with the loss of meaning in modern life. A student asked Professor Bettelheim a question, “What happen to the meaning of life?” Bettelheim paused and then responded “So what happened to it? I’ll tell you, we took it out and killed it.” This may be 92

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the reason there is presently no Chicago school of history of religions at the University of Chicago, but I assure you that for quite a long time there was a Chicago school of the history of religions at the University of Chicago.

Wach, Eliade, and the Chicago school on the American scene At one period the history of religions field consisted of Joseph Kitagawa, Mircea Eliade, and myself. I only thought of the possible significance of this a few years ago. It never crossed my mind before and obviously it was not anything that any of us ever discussed. In one sense, we were so different and in another sense—and this is what I have only recently thought about—we all occupied rather strange places on the American scene. When Joseph Kitagawa came to America as a Japanese national, World War II broke out and along with thousands of Americans of Japanese descent he was interned in what we called in Germany “concentration camps,” but in this country, “Relocation Centers.” Eliade was an émigré whose country fought on the wrong side of the war and so he felt that he could never go home again. I was an African American—a person who could never feel at ease in his land of birth. There was something of the exilic, something of “life on the run” in each of us. The same had been true of Wach whose heritage was the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family. Wach escaped Germany to England and then to America. We were all some kind of “internal others” on the American scene. When I put this together with the early years of my graduate study in history of religions I am struck by the fact that so many of us had the mark of a certain eccentricity. Harman Bro wrote a dissertation on the American mystic and seer, Edgar Cayce. Charles Adams wrote his dissertation on Nathan Soderblom; he noted that Soderblom had studied Islam and in delving into this dimension of his thought, he became an Islamic scholar and for many years was director of the Islamic Institute in Montreal. Philip Ashby was acclaimed by us because he was the first of our group to get a “good job”; he was hired at Princeton in the 1950s. This was in an era when the names associated with religion were theologians; Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr dominated the national scene. There did not seem to be a concern for the kinds of knowledge we were acquiring in the study of religion. At the time I really didn’t realize how very strange we all were. Though we were all in the same field, we did not bond as did students in other fields. For my part I bonded more with the students in the field of theology and many of them never forgave me for becoming a historian of religions. As a group we were cordial but not close friends. What held us together was the Sangha, the History of Religions Club. There we heard exciting lectures on out-of-the-ordinary meanings: Jacques Duchesne-Guillaume on Zoroastranism, Hideo Kishimoto on mountain worship in Japan, Ernst Benz on Eastern Orthodoxy, Gershon Scholem on Jewish mysticism, Ichirō Hori on Japanese folklore, etc. and we read different and other kinds of texts, Erik Zurcher on the Buddhist conquest of China, James Sydney Slotkin on the peyote cult, Henri Maspero on Chinese rituals, all sorts of stuff that was so very much out of the world that I shared with my friends in the theology field. In addition, from very different motivations, Wach, Joseph Kitagawa, and I were very much interested in the meaning of this place called America. Wach had a kind of Tocquevillian curiosity about this place. Over several summers, he would take trips through the countryside by bus so that he could talk to people en route. He visited New Orleans, German Moravian 93

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communities in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and many other places, and he read voraciously about this country. Kitagawa was involved in all sorts of immigration movements and status of refugees. Taking a note from Sidney Mead’s, The Nation with the Soul of a Church and Wach’s Sociology of Religion, I became interested in the civil and religious formation of what became the United States. Now we never taught courses in these areas but they remained the questions behind the questions, the probing of an internal otherness that matched the external others of our fields of study. By contrast Eliade did not seem interested in America at all—not in any empirical sense. When he does mention it, it is in broad and abstract terms. In one sense, one might say, that Mircea never had a “critical arrival” in this country. Now in spite of all this, it was Mircea Eliade who probably had the greatest impact on the academic study of religion in the United States. By the time that Professors Ray Hart, Robert Funk, and Robert Michaelsen were seeking methods to justify the teaching of religion in public universities within the parameters of the Constitutional structure of the separation of church and state, much of Eliade’s work had been translated into English, The Sacred and the Profane, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, and others. This period represented a crisis and critical period in American culture. The Civil Rights Movement was at its peak, the protest of the war in Vietnam was gaining momentum and American youth were convinced that there were or should be alternatives to the style and character of American culture. It was a time of communes, flower children, Woodstock, multiple and monstrous political assassinations, the introduction of drugs and altered states of consciousness as alternative life styles. Let me make it clear—Eliade’s work did not grow out of this milieu. One might even say, that he was not even aware of it! Mircea always remained aloof to the historical and current existential meanings of American culture. As an example I repeat the familiar story told by Joseph Kitagawa. During the American-Cuban Missile Crisis Eliade approached Joe Kitagawa asking him what this was about. Joe explained the situation to him. Eliade’s response to Joe was to thank him, adding, “Call me if something happens.” I cite this to show just how aloof and far removed Eliade was from the political dimensions of American culture. Between 1965 and 1970, graduates of the Chicago school of history of religions reached a critical mass in American universities and colleges. The work of Eliade and the Chicago school were configured within the interpretive modes that enabled the governmental bodies to accept the teaching of religion in public universities. Whether students or professors understood in a critical manner the implications of his thought or not, his work offered a language—a vocabulary of religious meanings that were not derivative from the liberal Protestant theological dictionary. The phrases, hierophany, kratophany, axis mundi, oneric realities, and so on, indicated that the study of religion need not be identified with theology nor limit itself to the language of the social sciences. Eliade and his work provided a convincing possibility for an independent study of religion that did not find it necessary to face the issue of proselytizing or that conundrum of prepositions involved in “teaching about” as over against teaching of religion.12 The American Academy of Religion (AAR) acknowledged the contribution of Eliade in a ceremony which took place at the Annual Meeting in 1984. At this meeting an entire celebrative plenary session was given over to honoring Mircea Eliade. As I remember it, it was the first time Mircea had attended the AAR. I remember that Eliade was quite taken aback by this event. He had been in America since 1957 and this was the first time he had ever 94

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attended the American Academy of Religion though he had attended the conferences of the International Association for History of Religions which met primarily in Europe on several occasion during this period of time. On this occasion several speeches were given in honor of his work; Paul Ricoeur and I were among those who spoke. Eliade was presented with a sculpture made especially for him by a famous Japanese sculptor. In addition to this influence on the study of religion in the United States, members of the history of religions faculty played important roles in founding of the most important national organizations for the study of religion. The founding meeting of the American Society for the Study of Religion took place in Chicago in 1959. Eliade, Kitagawa, and myself participated in the founding deliberations and became founding members. I was on the Executive Committee during the founding years of the American Academy of Religion and was a founding member of the Society for the Study of Black Religion. The crowning public intellectual achievement and symbolic expression was the publication in 1987 of The Encyclopedia of Religion (16 vols.), edited by Mircea Eliade. This was the first encyclopedia of this kind conceived, planned, and carried out in the United States.13 Over the years the members of the history of religions faculty contributed significantly to the formal and informal internal discussions over a variety of issues within the university. In the middle 1960s the college of the university in one of its many iterations organized the college into four divisions, each division representing one area of the liberal arts curriculum, the humanities, the social sciences, the physical and natural sciences. And then there was the “Fifth College.” This Fifth College was typical of the Chicago way of doing things. It would be easy to speak of this college as an interdisciplinary college but that would miss the point of its meaning. This Fifth College, which later became known as Harper College, was jokingly referred to by us as the “Fifth Column.” This was in reference to the origin of this phrase in the Spanish Civil War when General Franco stated that he had four columns attacking Madrid and as the four columns marched on Madrid, a “fifth column” hidden among the defenders would arise to join the attackers. In other words, the Fifth College represented a subversive intellectual element of the academy. To be sure, knowledge could very well be organized in the divisions represented by the four sciences; the Fifth College was organized to make it very clear that, “It ain’t or might not be necessarily so!” James Redfield, a professor in the Department of Classics, headed the original Fifth College. I was a member of the original committee formed to introduce the study of religion in the College of the University of Chicago and served on the Governing Committee of the College. It is strange that given the controversial and innovative theoretical and practical discussions that went on regarding general/liberal educational curriculum in the American college introduced by Harper and brought to an intensity by Hutchins, no serious discussion about the teaching of religion was ever prominent. I found the situation markedly different from teaching religion at the graduate level. I expressed my view on this matter in an article written for a conference sponsored by Harvard and the University of Chicago dealing with this topic.14 I was the only member of the Divinity School faculty invited to join the College faculty. One of the first courses taught on religion in the college was a course that was team-taught by Marshall Hodgson, professor of Islamic studies, and myself. It was a year-long course called “World History of Religion.” Instead of the old rubric of “World Religions,” our course raised the issue of a universal history in a critical manner. We opened up problems concerning temporal sequences and the disjunctions within the times and spaces of cultures. 95

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The success of our effort in teaching religion in the college enabled us to invite Jonathan Z. Smith to the college to teach in this area in the later part of the 1960s. I had met Jonathan before and recognized that he was a person who understood the problematical nature of knowledge in general and the specific and precise issues raised in attempting to conceptualize areas of human experience and expression that had been designated as non-rational. Now in addition to this internal impact of history of religions on the college, I served on and was chair of the Committee on African Studies. While this may be seen as par for the course of any university professor, it was in this case an acknowledgment of the weight and seriousness of the particular orientation of the way Chicago did history of religions. The implicit limitation of the “Chicago school” as if it was only Eliade and Wach shows a serious misunderstanding of what a school of thought in the Chicago sense really means. Traditions are cumulative and not simply causal. They represent the manner in which creative intellectual imagination enables the past to become a resource for renewal. While some traditions do this authentically and successfully, traditions should never be the same as what is “trendy.” The tradition of history of religions at Chicago is embedded in the broader traditions of the university represented by William Rainey Harper, Robert M. Hutchins, and Edward J. Levi. William James understood this immediately; it is taking others a bit more time. One person missing from the volume on the “non-existence of a Chicago school” is the voice of Professor Bruce Lincoln, who is presently a member of the history of religions field at the University of Chicago. It would have been interesting to hear what he had to say about this “legacy” since he was trained during the heyday of the preeminence of the school. I don’t wish to go into other absences and obscurities. Suffice it to say that there was a Chicago school before Wach’s arrival; there was a Chicago school before Eliade’s arrival; and there was a Chicago school after his arrival. Indeed, he arrived to join this school but he did not create it. There is still a Chicago school except that it may not any longer be located at Chicago. It is present wherever in the study of religion the concrete situation and locus of the investigator is probed for that sense of internal “otherness” that might be an analogue to the so-called “external otherness” that scholars encounter in their investigations. Eustace Haydon’s concern for the issue of method in the study of religion, a concern expressed in all of his published work, was the way in which he knew of Joachim Wach. Wach’s career at Chicago was exemplary in its almost total concern for hermeneutical methodology. It was precisely out of this methodological orientation that we, as students of Wach, were attracted to Mircea Eliade’s work. In this case methodological issues were not simply an intellectual activity; it served simultaneously as a vision for the field of history of religions at Chicago. In his 1941 article, Mortimer Adler had this observation to make regarding an important event at Harvard: Just four years ago Harvard celebrated its tercentenary. At that time, when peace still encouraged us to think of the future’s promise, Professor Whitehead congratulated Harvard on having completed its process of growth. “About twenty-five years for a man.” He wrote, “and about three hundred years for a university are the periods required for the attainment of mature stature.” Once full-grown, the measure of a university is “in terms of its effectiveness.” After three hundred years of growing up, Oxford and

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Cambridge played their part effectively in what Whitehead regards as “the brilliant period of European civilization,” the 17th and 18th centuries.15 Adler goes on to observe that it did not take Chicago three hundred years—that the University of Chicago sprang full-grown from Harper’s head. In ten short years it had become a dominantly effective force in American civilization. When one ponders Professor Whitehead’s comment, there is the realization that Harvard University is older than the nation-state of the United States and this implies that, if one follows Professor Whitehead’s analogy, the nation itself is not yet full-grown. One could not say that the nation was not effective—that it expresses power, brashness, and arrogance is the case. Chicago, as a university might be seen as an attempt to hone a cultural intellect that would be equal to the dynamic of this new entity, the United States. Sidney Mead in his narrative of the speed of development in America used the phrase, “and in a short time.”16 And the title of Conrad Cherry’s book which features the University of Chicago in a prominent manner is Hurrying Toward Zion. The photograph on the book jacket and the frontispiece is one of Harper and John D. Rockefeller on their way to a convocation celebrating the Decennial Publications of the University in 1901. Cherry observes that though they are walking together, “Harper out strides Rockefeller by one good step.”17 This may serve as a metaphor for the task that Harper assigned himself—to walk along with the powerful business and economic powers but always at least one step ahead of these institutional cultural powers. The intellectual task is to maintain difference and distinction in a creative and imaginative way—and to continually redefine the space in between. For most of its existence the university has performed this task well. These modes are expressed in various ways in the several disciplines and schools. The Divinity School in general, and the history of religions tradition of this faculty, have assiduously contributed to methods and procedures that reconfigure intellectually the distance between Harper and Rockefeller by presenting alternate possibilities for defining the nature of the human mode of being in our time and space. This tradition should not come to an end. Let us hope.

Notes 1. William James, “The Chicago School,” Psychological Bulletin 1, no. 1 (January 15, 1904): 1–5, at 1, emphasis added. 2. William James, The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, 2 vols. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 2:201–202. 3. Mortimer Jerome Adler, “The Chicago School,” Harper’s Magazine (September 1941): 377–388. 4. Ibid., 380. 5. Ibid., 383. 6. I shall not attempt to list the many references to this discussion. I refer the reader to an article that shows the extent of the discussion and issues at stake. See Kevin Brooks, “Liberal Education on the Great Plains American Experiments, Canadian Flirtations, 1930–1950,” Great Plains Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1997): 103–117.

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The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis   7. George Burton Foster, The Finality of the Christian Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1906).   8. A. Eustace Haydon, “History of Religions,” in Religious Thought in the Last Century, ed. Gerald Birney Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), 140–166.   9. Ibid., 144. 10. Adler, “Chicago School,” 381. 11. Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, ed. Christian K. Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xix. 12. For a general discussion of the change that took place in the academic study and teaching of religion in the United States since 1950, see Conrad Cherry, Hurrying Toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). It is interesting to note that the book jacket carries a photo of William Rainey Harper and John D. Rockefeller walking together to attend the University’s Convocation in 1901. 13. A second edition of this Encyclopedia was published in 2005. Its editor in chief was Professor Lindsay Jones, who is a product of the history of religions faculty of Chicago. 14. Charles H. Long, “The University, the Liberal Arts, and the Teaching and Study of Religion,” in Beyond the Classics? Essays In Religious Studies and Liberal Education, ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Sheryl L. Burkhalter (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 19–40; also published as Chapter 9 of this book. 15. Adler, “Chicago School,” 378. 16. Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 7. 17. Cherry, Hurrying, 2.

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CHAPTER 9 THE UNIVERSITY, THE LIBERAL ARTS, AND THE TEACHING AND STUDY OF RELIGION

This essay places the issue of liberal education within the context of exchanges. I have approached the issue in this manner rather than the more abstract, and perhaps more familiar, discussion of “What constitutes an educated person?” because I believe the problem of education as cultural formation requires a broader and more concrete framework for its discussion. In one sense, I do address the issue posed by the above question, as education in any culture has to do with the empowering of individuals to enhance and contribute to their specific cultural milieu. But I move beyond the traditional parameters of the question in discussing the extent to which processes of formation involve knowing the order, structure, and dynamics of a variety of exchanges within a social situation, whether these exchanges be intellectual, social, material, or political in nature. My perspective in discussing this dimension of liberal education has been informed by meanings related to my grammar and high school education in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was in the 1930s that the parents of black students had to fight through the wide range of problems related to the communicative orders of our society in the establishment of a high school for African American youth. This debate was carried on between the African American citizens and the Little Rock Board of Education. The rhetoric of the debate was defined by the competing philosophies of education as espoused by W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Stated in most general terms, the issue of contention had to do with whether the proper education for African American youth should emphasize vocational/technical training, or whether high school education should be devoted to the liberal arts curriculum. Two differing notions of the functioning of reason and the nature and understanding of exchanges lay behind these opposing philosophies. Washington’s notion was a more strategic one: the training in vocational/technical crafts would enable the African American minority to realize a viable economic position. He recognized the relationship between economic and political social power; the goal of education was the enhancement of technical/vocational skills which would enable his community to find its legitimate place in American society. Du Bois’s position did not negate the necessity of vocational training; however, he thought that the primary goal of education, especially for a persecuted racial minority in the United States, should be the creation of an intellectual perspective on the cultural situation as a possibility for a truly democratic republic. This brought the issues of reason to the fore as a critique of the status quo on the one hand, and as the necessary creative structure in the constitution of a just society on the other. In my mind, the two conflicting philosophies of Washington and Du Bois are now mirrored with reminiscent intensity in the more general debate over the future of liberal education for the country as a whole. Washington’s emphasis on technical/vocational competence is

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currently played out on a much broader scale with the priority now given to pre-professional competency and skills as the basis for a college degree. Du Bois’s position currently finds expression by those who continue to hold to an Enlightenment vision, of reason as a basis for formation through education. Although this 1930s debate has fundamentally informed my perspective on current issues in liberal education, it is clear that one cannot turn to the vision of either leader for an answer to our current dilemma. All the same—and, perhaps, more importantly—it is equally clear that neither answer can be ignored. We must work through the kind of materiality represented by Washington’s position, as well as the more ideational and spiritual meaning of formation as represented by Du Bois. Only then, I believe, will we be in a position to recognize the relationship between reason as a primary orientation to our body politic and national community, and reason as the ordering power of the university. Addressing the interface of the debate in this manner requires that contextualization be given our notions of reason as the organizing principle of the university. I address this issue of context by focusing on the various exchanges operative within our society. First of all, the exchange between society and organized knowledge as expressed in the university; second, the exchange within the structure and order of reason itself; and third, the exchange between reason and the ground of reason. The sections dividing this paper reflect these three moments in this discussion of exchange. I begin by setting forth some of the formative notions present in the emergence of the American university in the latter quarter at the turn of the twentieth century. I attempt to address the emergence of higher education in this period as it relates to the technologization and industrialization of American society. I then turn to a discussion of how reason within the university organizes knowledge on the one hand, but in its critical capacity it undertakes a critique of reason itself. Finally, I relate the critique of reason both to the study of religion and to the materiality and historicity of our cultural modalities.

History and context of the American university The problem of a general education and the liberal arts, along with the more specific issue of the meaning of the teaching and study of religion within these contexts, is coterminous with the rise of the modern American university. Seldom do discussions of liberal or general education pay attention to the historical dimensions of this development. Consequently, discussions and proposals for reform in liberal education tend to be delimited by a rather abstract or philosophical discourse. Historical perspective does not afford a more definite answer to the current dilemma of where to go with liberal education; but it does open up the arena of possible solutions and strategies by providing them a quite different context for discussion. I therefore begin this discussion with an outline of the American university in its formation. Addressing the theoretical considerations that arise from the history and practice of the university will afford a quite different vantage point for discussing a theory of university education, and an argument for the organization of knowledge and a pedagogy appropriate for it, which I take up with the second section of this paper. One possible date for marking the beginning of a new and decisive role of the American university as a cultural force on the national scene is 1862. In this year, Congress passed the Morrill Act which granted federal aid to states for college instruction in agriculture and 100

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mechanics. Shortly after this, in 1868, Ezra Cornell’s aspiration to “found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study” was instituted as Cornell University; and in 1869, Charles W. Eliot was elected president of Harvard. It was Eliot who led Harvard from a college to a university, encouraging graduate study and abandoning the traditional, fixed classical curriculum in favor of a system of free student electives.1 Johns Hopkins opened its doors in 1876 as the first institution with a graduate program; and in 1881 Columbia began its first graduate program. Clark University, in 1889, was the first American university organized as only a graduate school. And the University of Chicago was inaugurated in 1892. The period that witnessed this activity among the most prominent of America’s educational institutions is synonymous with what has been characterized as the Gilded Age in American cultural history. The organization and institutionalization of higher education as represented by these universities mirrors a potpourri of meanings, intentions, and hopes—a potpourri that in large part continues to form the context of discussions devoted to the educational mission of American higher education. In the post-Civil War period, industrialization, and the accumulation of wealth by those who had amassed vast amounts of capital in the process, would have a profound effect on American higher education. Industrialization also led to training in those new knowledges and skills that would enhance and allow the population to cope with these changes. On the one hand, higher education in the land-grant colleges (thanks to Senator Morrill), and in the private universities such as Cornell, vied for support from the industrial sector by offering practical courses in agriculture, engineering, and mechanics—a curricula directly related to the demands inherent in the technologization of society. On the other hand, universities such as Johns Hopkins, Clark, and Chicago were seeking support for a form of higher education that championed rigorous academic study and methods of pure research, while eschewing more practical, technical, utilitarian ends. These two kinds of universities, or the two kinds of aims represented by those universities that had their origins in the Gilded Age, posed the issue of the liberal arts in a rather stark manner. There were, to be sure, problems of liberal education internal to the constitution of all the new university models; but a prior issue of liberal education had already been posed in the myriad of colleges and universities that had come into being before the Civil War. In this group must be included many private schools, state universities, and denominationally oriented institutions of higher learning throughout the country. For one reason or another, these schools were not confronted—or refused to confront—the issues of industrialization and culture as posed in the organization and structure of the new universities. To the extent that the problem arose, more often than not they expressed a reactive or counter meaning of the nature of the human and society. For most of them defined liberal education as the education of a gentleman or the forming of a “cultured” individual. Given this history, the discussion of liberal education was defined by three distinct arenas: (1) by the new research and graduate private universities where it took on the rhetoric and practice of specialization and/or professional education as over against a liberal education; (2) by the land-grant colleges where the issue was defined as liberal education as over against a technological training; and (3) by the liberal arts colleges which placed the liberal arts in tension with the vulgarization of culture by either technology or specialization. In many cases, the liberal arts colleges were attempting to form an educated person in contradistinction to the specialized scholar or the technically trained individual. 101

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These three contexts for the discussion and organization of higher education were not exerted with equal force on the American scene. The high ground was taken by the new research universities, and this for several reasons. First of all, they were all inspired by the novelty of creating a new kind of American university; second, they tapped into the coffers of the new financial resources of entrepreneurial capitalism; and third—and probably most important as it relates to the internal ordering of the university—the new universities were forced to create a new theoretical and practical meaning of reason that represented a continuity with the dynamics of society on one hand, and a discontinuity and distance from its presuppositions and goals on the other. For example, while Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago made much of the rigorous scientific and intellectual structure in their research, the leaders of these institutions from their inception carried on a high-powered public language of involvement in the social and cultural meanings of their respective local communities and the general problems of the nation. Furthermore, it is significant to note that though the University of Chicago has always possessed excellence in the physical and natural sciences as well as in those areas that have come to be known as the humanities, from the very beginnings of the university the public service languages and those departments and schools related in a direct manner to the sociological aspects of culture—sociology, social work, education, political science, and so on—remained to the fore. Significantly, the first university building ever dedicated to the study of society as a scientific endeavor was the Social Science Building at the University of Chicago. Daniel C. Gilman, the founding president of Johns Hopkins, toyed with the idea of limiting the university to graduate study and research; but he was dissuaded from this course by several of his advisors who warned him that such a notion smacked of elitism and would probably cause public alienation. Gilman was attentive to his advisors and created a college as well as a graduate school. But more than this, he and his colleagues actively engaged in a wide range of community activities, from public education and serving on state commissions, to engaging in matters dealing with safe water supply and wrestling with issues of social medicine. Clark University, which opened as a graduate school in 1880, foundered in the early 1890s. This was due in part to the idiosyncratic actions of its founder and benefactor, Jonas Clark. It was equally due to the fact that Clark University never established the wider arena for the expression of the ranges of reason, practical and theoretical, for the proper ordering of the university in this period. No provisions were made for a more general discussion of the meaning of the university within the structures of society, or for a discussion of the proper pedagogy incumbent upon the university in the training of youth. It could be argued that the Universities of Chicago and Johns Hopkins were simply following the equally idiosyncratic styles of their founding presidents. And, in part, this is true. William Rainy Harper was an activist academic. According to Joseph E. Gould, he was “a young man in a hurry.” Many of the educational activities of a public sort had grown out of his experience with the Chatauqua movement and the generalized notions of the necessity for education in a democratic country. There is, however, an additional and deeper level manifested in the peculiar circumstances of the new research universities and the opportunities for new intellectual approaches to the problem of knowledge itself and the expression of knowledge in teaching, research, and as a beneficent meaning in society at large. I have already alluded to the fact that though the University of Chicago has always shown excellence in the natural physical sciences and the humanities, its earliest and abiding rhetorics 102

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stemmed from and related to the scientific and practical meaning of the “sociological sciences.” Louis Wirth’s classic essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” is a symbolic expression of the basis and principle for the possibilities of a new form of knowledge and its organization in the new universities and in the university reforms of the Gilded Age. Michel Foucault addressed this development in the human sciences with the following: The first thing to be observed is that the human sciences did not inherit a certain domain, already outlined, perhaps surveyed as a whole, but allowed to lie fallow, which it was then their task to elaborate with positive methods and with concepts that had at last become scientific … for man did not exist (anymore than life, or language, or labor); and the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success); … [the human sciences] appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known. There can be no doubt, certainly, that the historical emergence of each one of the human sciences was occasioned by a problem, a requirement, an obstacle of a theoretical or practical order: the new norms imposed by industrial society … were certainly necessary before psychology, slowly, in the course nineteenth century, could constitute itself as a science.2 The new universities, as research institutions, implied a new structure in the order of knowledge on both theoretical and practical levels. The meaning of nature and human effort as work and culture form the contours of a new debate within the structures of knowledge itself. The urban setting is the context for the setting forth of this debate as theoretical and practical, as the city is a microcosm of the communicative systems of material and ideational exchanges which are national and international in scope. Research as a defining characteristic of the university implies a theoretical “world” capable of providing the clues and traces which would enable this new world to become habitable and beneficial to the human community. At a somewhat later period, similar developments took place along more or less the same lines in several state universities, such as the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin. I know more of this history at my former university, the University of North Carolina. It was through research in the sociological sciences that a break was made from the university being a place for the formation of the gentry into the university as a place for the exercise of a critical cultural consciousness. In this case, the options were clear-cut. The agrarians of the literary tradition had set forth a self-conscious ideology for the “fashioning of a gentleman” as a model for Southern education. It possessed even greater power because it fed into Southern values and the ideology of the South. The empirical research and the critical cultural languages stemming from the researches of Howard Odum and Guy B. Johnson made an end run around this ideology and placed the university within the structures, languages, and procedures of the new university as a research institution.3 The economy, ecology, and ecumenical meanings of the American research university are touched upon in these dimensions of its history. The economy, in its vulgar material sense, may be seen in the relationship of the university to its patrons, the new capitalists. Again, this economy leads to the deployment of university resources to enhance and criticize the structures of urban society. The university is thus continuous with the forms of its society in its public service 103

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aspect, and discontinuous with it in its theoretical structures. The physical location of many of these universities at the time of their founding was more often than not far removed from the heart of the activities of its patrons, the business community, and its clients, the indigent—the poor, women, blacks, laborers—all victims, in one way or another, of the new urban world. The physical separation between the university and the urban centers thus might be seen to reflect the gap we have discussed in the meaning of knowledge as a cultural production. In this section, I have attempted to do several things: first of all, to locate issues of higher education in America within a historical context; second, to show how the problems and tensions of curricula and the organization of knowledge arose in the American research university; and third, to draw out implications regarding the meaning of organized and institutionalized knowledge as a structure of society. This discussion brings us to acknowledge that although issues of liberal education are part of a curricular structure at the undergraduate level, the debate about it was, and continues to be, dominated by the more comprehensive theories and practices of the research university. To the extent that these universities express the wider meanings of the nature and function of reason, they afford a requisite perspective for addressing the notion of a liberal education in its relation to reason.

The economy of reason in the university I raise this more comprehensive meaning of the systematic ordering of knowledge within the university in the terms of the “economy of reason.” I have already alluded to the gross, material, financial, and conventional meaning of the economy and the rise of the research university in the United States in the section above. In this section, I shall be speaking of those levels of meaning in the term economy that refer to its more archaic derivation as the systematic dispensation of power over a field or area. This meaning implies another Greek term, oecumene, or ecumenical as relating to that field or area over which the power is dispensed. I will therefore be speaking of the power of reason as a production, as an activity and a product which can be used within and without the confines of the university. And then I must of necessity speak of reason as a mode or capacity in itself and for itself. Obviously, reason and its practice are not confined to the university community. The university is, however, that institution that recognizes, orders its life, and carries on its activities as an expression of the principle of reason. Reason is the active principle in its practical activities and goals, as in the rhetorical and theoretical justification for its being. This does not mean that the principle of reason is equally exemplified in all universities; all the same, it is difficult to find a university that has constituted itself against the notion of reason. Let me begin this discussion with a statement from the venerable Aristotle—from the Metaphysics. All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that, most of all senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things. By nature animals are born with the faculty of sensation, and from sensation, memory is produced in some of them but not in others. And therefore the former are 104

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more intelligent and apt at learning than those which cannot remember; those which are incapable of hearing sounds are intelligent though they cannot be taught, e.g., the bee, and other races of animals that may be like it; and those which besides memory have this sense of hearing can be taught. (Metaphysics, 980–980b) This is as good a place as any for beginning a discussion of the principle of reason and the various forms it takes in the organization of knowledge, for Aristotle’s Metaphysics not only delineates the forms of knowledge, their bases and processes; it also sets forth the meaning of reason as a universal attribute of the human and systematic reason as philosophy. More than this, Aristotle introduces the empirical and metaphorical meanings of knowledge as seeing and hearing as defining the possibility for learning. The principle of reason within the university thus yields at least two kinds of expressions: one pertains to practical knowledge, knowledge for the sake of doing; the other, to the desire to know for the sake of knowing, the desire for knowledge for no practical purpose. Both expressions of the exercise of reason, however, constitute modes of social power. The practical meaning of knowledge as power is self-evident. Knowledge for no purpose, however, also constitutes an expression of social and cultural power. Hannah Arendt’s point regarding the origin of the Royal Society is indicative of this meaning. Of this organization she writes, When it was founded, members had to agree to take no part in matters outside the terms of reference given it by the King, especially to take no part in political or religious strife. One is tempted to conclude that the modern scientific ideal of “objectivity” was born here, which would suggest that its origin is political and not scientific. Furthermore, it seems noteworthy that the scientists found it necessary from the beginning to organize themselves into a society, and the fact that the work inside the Royal Society turned out to be vastly more important than work done outside it demonstrated how right they were. An organization, whether of scientists who have abjured politics or of politicians, is always a political institution; where men organize they intend to act and to acquire power. No scientific teamwork is pure science, whether its aim is to act upon society and secure its members a certain position within it or—as was and still is to a large extent the case of organized research in the natural sciences—to act together in concert to conquer nature. It is indeed, as Whitehead once remarked, “no accident that an age of science has developed into an age of organisation.”4 The power of organized reason as research in the contemporary universities blurs the distinction between pure and practical reason. The power of knowledge on both the theoretical and practical levels is now deployed within a cultural context of informational or communicative systems. It is difficult to locate a clear distinction between practical or instrumental reason from “useless” or theoretical reason. As Jacques Derrida states the case, At the service of war, of national and international security, research programs have to encompass the entire field of information, the stockpiling of knowledge, the workings and thus also the essence of language of all semiotic systems, translations, coding and decoding, the play of presence and absence, hermeneutics, semantics, structural and generative linguistics, pragmatics, rhetoric. 105

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And he continues, I am accumulating all these disciplines in a haphazard way on purpose, but I shall end with literature, poetry, the arts, fiction in general: the theory that has these disciplines as its object may be just as useful in ideological warfare as it is in experimentation with variables in all-too-familiar perversions of the referential function.5 Derrida is not speaking here of the overt control or subversion of the research and practice of the university by the state. He is referring, rather, to the more comprehensive and pervasive decentralized orders of our culture as they relate to the funding of projects, the legitimacy of course offerings—the totality of evaluative structures operative in a given situation as they relate to the broader cultural context. These kinds of relations were certainly present in the rhetoric and strategies employed at the beginnings of the American research universities. In our time, they have simply become more intense. The rise of the new research university in the United States during the industrial age was the harbinger of an intense symbiotic relationship between the university and its culture, a relationship that directly involves issues of the kind of person the university can or may form through its processes and principles. Again, Derrida remains to the fore with his discussion of this meaning of informational structures. Information does not inform merely by delivering an information content, it gives form, in-formiert, formiert zugleich. It installs man in a form that permits him to ensure his mastery on earth and beyond. All this has to be pondered as the effect of the principle of reason, or, put more rigorously, has to be analyzed as the effect of the dominant interpretation of that principle, of a certain emphasis in the way we heed its summons.6 In specifying this range within the economy of reason, I am not suggesting a nostalgia for the pre-research university, nor for some pure and pristine understanding of reason, knowledge, or the university that would not have to come to terms with such contextuality. Rather, I present these considerations to give a quite different background for discussing liberal education as an element of the processes and structure of the university. Such contextualization of reason within its cultural milieu—as exemplified within the university’s various departments and schools, and expressed on the theoretical and practical levels of its life—cannot be avoided. There is something to be admired in this function of reason; indeed, there is something internal to the principle of reason itself evidenced in this deployment. It is a fact that reason can and ought to be rendered. The verb to rend in this context should be seen in terms of its two related meanings: with meaning given “to exchange, circulate, borrow, donate, debt, etc.”; but also, with its meaning “to tear or be torn.” The university is an arena for the exchange of ideas, and the public beyond the university participates in this exchange through the re-presentation of meanings and ideas that constitute the “universe of discourse” that is the university. But the university is more than the generator of rendered reason. It is incumbent upon the university to at least ponder the most basic issue of reason: On what does the principle of reason—as constitutive of the university, as rendered in its practical and theoretical modes, and as the basis for public debate—ground itself? Can one, as Charles Sanders Peirce asked, “demand a reason for reasonableness itself?”7 I raise his question at this juncture, as it relates to more recent calls for reform of liberal arts curricula at numerous universities. Many of these reforms are responding to the rendering of reason pervasive within the general culture, and 106

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more specifically to the extent to which these forms of rendered reason lay claim to objectivity, authority, and justification within the structures of the research university. Gerald Grant and David Reisman have researched this problematic with their work, The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College.8 In defining four different types of educational reform in our recent history, Grant and Reisman make a distinction between what they call “popular reforms” and “telic reforms.” Popular reforms are a partial response to meritocratic discontents that came to characterize student life in most selective colleges and universities in the 1960s. Students sought relief in a number of reforms that gave them a greater degree of autonomy by granting them considerable freedom in their choices of curricula and courses. The most popular of these reforms—student-designed majors, freechoice curricula, the abolition of fixed requirements—sought not to establish new institutional aims, but to slow the pace and expand the avenues of approach. That is, these popular reforms simply modified the means of education within the constraints of existing goals traditionally sought by the research-oriented universities. Telic reforms, on the other hand, attempted to reconfigure the goals themselves. As discussed by Grant and Reisman, To some degree, they represent an attack on the hegemony of the giant research-oriented multi-universities and their satellite university colleges. In one sense, these telic reforms could be thought of as counter-revolutionary, that is counter to the rise of the researchoriented universities.9 The authors discuss a number of college reforms, but their work focuses on the detailed analyses of four colleges: St. John’s, Kresge College of the University of Santa Cruz, The College of Human Services (CHS), and Black Mountain College. All of these colleges are characterized as “transdisciplinary.” That is, all attempt to realize some end or good to which they recognize academic disciplines and their processes to be subordinate. This is reflected in their respective forms of teaching. At St. John’s, disciplines are believed to serve as falsifying lenses through which students preconceive, or are likely to misconceive, the “natural articulations of the intellectual world.” They attempt to remedy this with their Great Books curriculum. At Black Mountain, mixed media events—where poets, musicians, dancers, actors, and so on. form the structure of production—attempt to draw theory and practice together on a more egalitarian level. At Kresge, the disciplines are viewed as subordinate to the task of building a community; and at CHS, they are subordinated to the aim of discovering the generic competencies of a humane professional. I will not continue an analysis of “telic” reforms at these institutions. Suffice it to say that all of them, with the exception of St. John’s, fail to come to terms with the centrality of the organizing principle of the university. In one way or another, they mount attacks or form themselves in reaction to one form or another of the rendering reason within the university (the disciplines), or within society (authorities and the professions). In this sense, they mount effective critiques and their goals are admirable; but if one fails to come to terms with more basic issues, reforms of this sort contribute little to the ongoing discussion, with the uniqueness of these reforms precluding generalizations that would be applicable to other situations. The curriculum at St. John’s might likewise be critiqued in that it assumes—rather uncritically—the notion of “classical texts” as the embodiment and substance of knowledge 107

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and virtue. There does not seem to be any one text or group of texts that would enable the student to undertake a critique of the notion of the “classical” or of the “book” and writing in relationship to reason and knowledge. In addition to this, the history, the size of the student body, and the general cultural milieu express an unearned notion of elitism on the class level that is perpetuated with an equally unearned curricular structure. What all of these reforms have in common is a reaction to the domination of the modes and styles of the research university: Kresge, CHS, and Black Mountain attempt to form individuals outside of what it considers to be the oppressive, objectifying, and authoritative structures operative within the university and beyond. St. John’s curriculum, on the other hand, reacts to the specializing and disciplinary archetypes of research universities and graduate schools. Yet in both cases, the notion of community is drawn to the fore. Black Mountain, CHS, and Kresge envision community in futuristic and utopian terms; St. John’s community presumes the class orientation of a cultural and historical ideal. Although we might object to the specific telic reforms discussed by Grant and Reisman, these reforms leave us with much to ponder if we recognize them as symptomatic of—rather than solutions to—real problems. I discern in these reforms four areas of concern: (1) the desire for knowledge that is historically and culturally substantive; (2) the desire for knowledge that allows the student to participate in a past, present, and future community; (3) the desire for a form of knowledge that affords a critical stance to other modes of the organization of knowledge in the university and the public arena; and (4) the desire for knowledge as personal growth. At the periphery of all of these desires is the integration of practical and theoretical modes of knowing. Are these legitimate concerns for a liberal education? And if so, how might they be accomplished? Since the 1960s, we have been confronted with a quite different situation in the discussion of liberal education. The fact that thousands of students graduate from high school without knowing how to read or write is an indication of the meaning that education now has in American culture. It is clear that several of the former gaps and distinctions are no longer present; and where such junctures are present, they are located in different places. For example, the gap defining the physical space of the university as separate from the urban space of its patrons and clients has changed: these physical spaces now merge and interpenetrate, destroying the symbolic space of knowledge as reflection and leisure on the one hand, and a haven for a certain class on the other. The present continuity of spaces presents us with the necessity of finding a concomitant meaning of knowledge within our society. Now, new kinds of students have appeared on our campuses in large numbers. The college degree has become a form of “citizen legitimation,” serving in the way a high school diploma did for previous generations. The generalized meaning of a college education has not been matched by equal attention given to the meaning of a general education. The cliché of a college education as preparation for the “job market” has blurred the distinction between professional and nonprofessional education at the college level. And looming alongside these factors is the specter of “big sports.” The actuality and symbols of these sports teams define the relationship of many students to the university; and for a significant alumni the meaning of the university is synonymous with “the teams.” The university as an institution in American society is caught up in the communicative, informational, and material randomness of our culture. This situation demands that the liberal arts address in a new way two aspects of reason as it defines subject matter and pedagogy: (1) how reason is rendered—to explain effect through 108

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its causes, and to rationally justify according to roots and principles; and (2) to investigate the grounding of reason itself. It is not enough that reason is rendered, for in the disciplines and forms of knowledge, the principle of reason must imply and express its own inner tension regarding its grounding. That upon which reason is grounded is not itself reason. Several implications follow from this observation. It provides a quite different perspective from which to address the ways liberal arts curricula seem to alienate many students. To be sure, disciplined modes of thought in the academy are different from those to which students are accustomed: there is a necessary distancing between the activity of thought in the university and other places. But all too often, the reason for this alienation is not in the modes of thought as such, but in the subject matter that is configured to be a representation of that which is superior—historically, culturally, structurally, and phenomenologically—from anything in a student’s own background. This presupposition of education as the transmission of knowledge which is alien, superior, and objective forces the student to respond to it as little more than packaged information; it, in turn, allows instructors continually to obscure the more fundamental problem of the grounding of reason itself. All of this is aided and abetted by sundry textbooks and the rhetorics they employ to emphasize this mode of passing on information. I do not think that the issue of the grounding of reason can be postponed to another level: it cannot be left to the more “theoretical” problematics taken up with a graduate education. The basic premise of a liberal education is learning how to know and knowing how to learn. In this arena, the quality and intention of faculty at the undergraduate level is of utmost importance. The kind of faculty I presuppose may well be found at a small liberal arts college, though I find it easier to imagine this kind of faculty at a large research university. I admit to a prejudice for the latter situation, as questioning the grounds of reason can take place most effectively where a community of scholars in their disciplined researches into theoretical and practical reason find ample scope for an honest, skeptical attitude regarding the self-sufficiency of the reason that undergirds their enterprise, and who are then open to the possibility of a mode of thought that is not identical with reason. The planning of a liberal education should be informed by listening, and a discernment of that which is obscured by reason. The subject matter, whatever it is or may be, should be presented as clearly as possible within the pedagogy of rendered reason (disciplinary orders); but in addition, the instruction should be aware of issues beyond those directly addressed. How does the problem arise as an issue and object of study? What is the context of the issue at stake? What are the broader ramifications of accepting a certain point of view regarding specific issues as the truth? Questions of this sort are related to listening and discernment at the level of subject matter. Another mode of listening and discernment has to do with the context of teaching—the university, the classroom, the student. Who are the students in your course? Why are they in this course? What contradictions are present in the curricular structure and in the lives these students represent as members of the university community? What might they expect from their education? And finally, what resources do they bring to the task at hand? Some of these issues were represented in the telic reforms at Kresge, CHS, and Black Mountain; but these reforms attempted to make sense of issues of this kind through a denial, or subversion, of reason as the organizing principles of the university. In asking these questions, I am attempting to suggest a notion of liberal education that goes beyond the forms of rendering reason on both the theoretical and practical levels. Knowing 109

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how to learn, and learning how to know, imply that there are modes of thought that are not limited to the exercise of reason; and it is these modes that place reason within the structures of life itself. In stating this, I am not speaking of the “irrational” or of obscurantism. I am pointing to the university not simply as a community of scholars, but also and more importantly as a community of thought. Such a community would interrogate the very basis of reason, the arche and radicality of the grounding of reason itself. It is only in this manner that we will be able to educate students who will undertake new analyses in order to evaluate the ends and means of community, and be able to make judicious choices about life. As this notion has come to me through Derrida, let me cite him again at this point. It [the community of thought] would be open to types of research that are not perceived as legitimate today, or that are insufficiently developed in French or foreign institutions, including some research that could be called “basic”; but it would not stop there. We would go one step further, providing a place to work on the value and meaning of the basic, the fundamental, on its opposition to goal-orientation, on the ruses of orientation in all its domains. As in the seminar I mentioned earlier, the report confronts the political, ethical, and juridical consequences of such an undertaking.10 Clearly Derrida is not referring here to the liberal arts curriculum itself. He is speaking of a community of scholars who would constitute a community of thought that might inform such a curriculum. This could take place in small colleges, but as I have noted above, the optimum place for such a community might be the research-oriented university. Yet seldom is such attention given to this dimension of the liberal arts curriculum in most institutions of higher learning.

The teaching and study of religion in a liberal arts curriculum The teaching and study of religion as a component of a liberal or general education curriculum presents some problems and some real opportunities. First of all, some of the problems. Religion is the only subject matter that is not in continuity with other forms of subject matter in previous secondary formal education. (A possible exception might be made of those students who attended parochial schools, although even this kind of education is not an adequate basis for what they confront at the college level.) It is true that certain disciplines such as sociology and psychology may not be taught in the formal sense on the secondary school level; but their relationship to other disciplines is apparent on the secondary school levels. This means that students do not really know what to expect when they come to a religion course on the college level. Most students’ understanding or knowledge of religion is held, whether positively or negatively, in a rather personal manner; and this is usually related to some experience and meaning given to religion by their families and communities. For the most part, their notions of religion have never been subjected to any form of critical thought or reflection. Second, the teaching and study of religion has a dubious career within the university community. It has been understood as necessary for the faith and morals of the students; it has been denied status as a topic that could or should be taught in the university; and, if such 110

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teaching did occur, the faculty and students in such programs were often thought to be “softheaded” and devoid of the rigor demanded by other forms of study in the university. Third, in an attempt to prove that their subject matter and methods were just as rigorous as those of other disciplines, scholars and teachers in religion often reduced the meaning of religion to methods, techniques, and modes of thought and analysis that were compatible with other disciplines in the university, thus losing anything unique that such study might have added to the meaning of the curriculum. All of these factors have to do with the even stranger meaning that religion carries within the cultural context of the American constitution and culture. Constitutionally, we are a non-religious nation; culturally, we are a “nation with the soul of a church.” The study and teaching of religion in the university present the opportunity for students to understand human modes of thought that are of ultimate importance but may be more or less than reason. Notice I insist that religion involves modes of thought. The modes of thought in religion are not simply extraordinary. There are dimensions of religion that are the same as, or analogous to, the forms of rendering reason; but the totality of the meaning of religion is not expressed in its attempt to set forth the proper modes of rendering reason. It is not incidental that theoretical studies in religion are replete with such terms as “the non-rational” or “mysterium tremendum fascinans et augustum” (Otto), or of “mana” (van der Leeuw), or “hierophany” or “symbol” (Eliade). All notions such as these are attempts to get at a meaning of this form of life that cannot be grasped immediately by rendering reason, but by other modes of thought. From the point of view of rendering reason, “religion is for no reason.” Now, to be sure, this is not something that can be easily taught at any level of the curriculum. It is possible, through the positivity of rendering reason, to set forth the meaning of religion in general and particular religions and religious forms within the context of rendered reason. And I believe this is precisely what should be done in the teaching of religion. Indeed, as noted above, there are aspects of all religion that are quite conducive to this mode of explication. The very study of religion since the latter part of the nineteenth century shows the tension between various forms of rendering reason and the specific modality of religion in methodological studies. This is seen as much in Friedrich Max Müller and the studies he fostered, as in Émile Durkheim. All of these kinds of studies of religion, especially as they relate to non-Western religions were aspects of a broader intellectual and cultural milieu as these religions were presented and represented to the world of Western scholarship and culture. They were objects presented and placed before a subject (the West). In such presentation and representation, the mastery and dominance over the object is assured: it is rendered in the form of reason by its presentation before the knowing subject. This is seen in the center/periphery structure of geographical and cartographical modes, as well as in the broader ramifications of colonialism as the context for the origin of scholarly questions. Issues of this sort are hidden in the rendering reason as marked by the history of the study of religion. I am not rejecting this kind of knowledge. I only wish to interrogate it. I seek to find the principle of reason that is obscured in it, to seek out that reason that is in tension with its clarity. The knowledge of other religions must be listened to and seen, and before this knowledge we must “blink.”11 Aristotle states, “All men by nature desire to know.” Desire is the relationship to otherness necessary for the articulation of identities and structures. Therein lies the double threat of desire. What is hardly, if ever, spoken about in our search for religious knowledge 111

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of the others is the issue of contact with them. In an ironic manner, those notions that could express the meaning of the actuality of the contact that led to our knowledge are usually taken to be conceptual forms that are used to give an objective analysis (scientific rendering of the structures of their religion): mana, taboo, gift exchange, symbol, myth, and so on. I am not saying that these notions are not adequate as interpretive concepts; I am saying that they need to be explored in terms of the meaning of the situation of knowledge itself. In this regard, I have been thinking of the notion of “cargo cults” as a paradigm for a kind of knowing that might be possible in religious studies. Cargo cults have been referred to by Weston LaBarre as constituting what he calls “crisis cults.” He understands these cults to be “responses to extreme cultural disruptions within a culture—these disruptions, in the case of crisis cults, are caused by the radical impingements of alien forms upon a culture.”12 The cargo cult symbolizes a crisis on all levels of the culture and most especially, a crisis of knowledge and of ontology. The leader or founder of a cargo cult responds to the crisis through a decipherment of the situation to the end of providing those rituals that will allow new human beings to grow out of this crisis. In so doing, the myths of the cult relate how the Western cargo was sent to them in a providential manner. Somewhere en route, the cargo that was originally sent to them was interrupted and the cargo stolen by the Western people who now make use of it to alienate them from the cargo and from themselves (the Westerners), and from their own traditions. In the cargo cult, new rituals are practiced to place the cargo back into the proper circle of beneficent exchange. The cargo cult is an attempt to establish reciprocity and to reinstate the meaning of exchange as gift. Marcel Mauss analyzed the ethnography of gift exchange in his classic work, The Gift.13 As opposed to the West’s subordination of gifts to the level of sentimentality while giving primacy to the value of the exchange of material goods as a source of wealth, the practices described in the literature included celebrations in which status was rewarded to those who expended or destroyed their most precious possessions, and to those societies whose prized possessions served only to be given away in a cycle of exchanges. Mauss discerned that every contact with difference—other families, tribes, orders of being—was caught up in the matrix of an ongoing system of exchange. He determined that any particular exchange is structured as a reciprocal, bilateral relationship governed by the obligation to give and to receive. The exchange is expressed in several modes: (1) it is a total social phenomenon, embracing the religious as well as the political; (2) it assumes the guise of a moral gesture as it is seen from a number of viewpoints as selfless and unmotivated by private interests; (3) it is an obligation; (4) the gift usually lacks practical value, in that it does not satisfy material needs; and (5) there is no immediate return. Because every contact occurs at, even as it presupposes, a boundary, gift exchange also attempts to regulate access to excess. As in situations of cultural contact, the boundary is ambiguous: two incompatible orders seem to exist. Cargo cults afford a perspective of their own to this incompatibility, a perspective I have found helpful in rethinking issues of exchange, oppression, materiality, and knowledge—issues that lie at the heart of the contemporary crisis in liberal education. The situation of education in general, and especially at the level of liberal education, constitutes a crisis; and in many respects, discussions of issues in education center around some of the same dynamics as those of the cargo cult. At one level, the cargo cultist accepts the reasons and rationales of the Westerners who have impinged on their culture. What is bewildering to them is that the Westerners, those in positions of dominance and power, cannot understand the notion of reciprocity and the 112

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exchange of gifts—gifts of goods and gifts of knowledge. Instead of exchange, there is only domination and suppression. In this situation, alienation and objectivity go hand in hand. The empirical actualities of contact with the other culture are deemed inadmissible as the basis for human and cultural knowledge; knowledge gained from the contact must be deployed as objective and scientific. Under the aegis of scientific scholarship, exchange comes to be viewed in terms of contagion within the native’s religious world. This posture obscures the actuality of contact. It also precludes the possibility of exploring new modalities of knowledge and new meanings of the human which those in the cargo cult believe possible through exchange. Throughout this paper, I have placed the issue of education within the wider context of the exchanges within our culture—exchanges in the gross and conventional sense of economy, exchanges between reason and the ground of reason, and exchanges of modes of communication. If we are now experiencing a crisis in education, this crisis is felt at every level of these exchanges. There is indeed a crisis within the economic order that affects the meaning of education; we are equally experiencing a crisis of reason—reason as the conventional wisdom of our culture, as well as reason as self-conscious intellectual reflection. This crisis relates to the older, Enlightenment view of reason that understood education as a universal process in the discovery of human value. Jay Geller has explored aspects of this crisis with a discussion of the dynamics of exchange as they affected Enlightenment societies. Mauss’ description of gift-exchange society recalls (nostalgically) the Enlightenment ideal of the public sphere or Oeffentlichkeit. The spirit of the gift, like universal reason, ensures the maintenance of the individual’s autonomy within a relationship. Although the relationships within exchange were agonistic, the mediation of the spirit of the gift deters the two threats, domination and war, inherent in both alternative determinants that govern the interaction: private interest and state.14 The claims of universal reason have not protected us from war, nor provided a safeguard from state domination. The universal meaning inherent in Enlightenment reason has been an important factor in the political processes that enable us to recognize the legitimacies of all persons, ethnic groups, and classes in our society. But does such a recognition, in a paradoxical sense, now contain these newly liberated ones within structures based upon the fear of war or state domination? Such reflection gives rise in a radical manner to a new problematic meaning of human knowledge in general and the specific meaning of the processes and content of knowledge as related to the institutional meaning of education. I am not limiting the implications of the notions of cargo cult and gift exchange simply to those areas of liberal education that have to do with courses in religion. To be sure, issues of exchange will bring us to rethink how we go about teaching such courses; but they also allow us the opportunity to think through the many implications this perspective might have for the entire curriculum as it concerns given boundaries—boundaries between practical/ theoretical reason, professional/non-professional, university/public arena, privileged/ oppressed, undergraduate/graduate, material/ideational, and so on. Such an approach also has the advantage of authentically grounding these realities and modes of thought within the institutional grasp of the university. Religious studies from this point of view may not simply be one of the elements in the structure of a liberal or general education curriculum. Its processes could become a defining 113

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structure for much of it. More and more, a literature is emerging that could aid us in this task.15 This perspective on the meaning of a liberal education has the advantage of preserving reason as the organizing principle of the university, while equally recognizing the impediments and restraints within the clear rendering of reason within the structures of the “objective” sciences and disciplines. It is often stated that religious studies is an interdisciplinary area. I should like for this to mean more than simply the addition of various approaches from various disciplines. I think that knowing how to learn and learning how to know requires that a community of scholars become a community of thought. Religious studies, through a realization of the problematics of the study of religion itself in our time, might thus provide a basis for the rethinking of reason in the university.

Notes 1. The history of the American research university came from a very good book, A City and Its Universities by Steven J. Diner (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). The city referred to is Chicago. I obviously had the University of Chicago in mind in the writing of this section. I do not know of another university that has carried on such a sustained and intense discussion of the issues involved in university education in general and the liberal/general education in particular. In this regard, I also consulted The Idea and Practice of General Education: An Account of the College of the University of Chicago, ed. F. Champion Ward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950); The Idea of the University of Chicago, ed. W. M. Murphy and D.J.R. Bruckner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); and Richard J. Storr, Harper’s University: The Beginnings; A History of the University of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, Random House, 1970), 344–345. 3. Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernism, 1919–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). This work is a kind of analogue to Diner’s work cited above. While Diner discusses the university and the urban situation, Singal’s work treats this same kind of problem in the context of agrarianism and its implications—economic, cultural, and literary. 4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 271 n26 (emphasis added). 5. Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” Diacritics 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1983): 2–20, at 13. It is clear that I have been influenced, if not convinced, of Derrida’s position in this essay. If it was not absolutely incumbent upon me to write an essay, I might have simply submitted his essay for our discussion. The essay is much less idiosyncratic than many of his other writings. Of course, the double entendre in the use of the word “pupils,” as referring both to students and the pupil of the eye that refers us back again to Aristotle’s discussion of hard-eyed and blinking eyes is a pure Derridian delight. 6. Ibid., 14. 7. Charles S. Peirce, Selected Writings: Values in a Universe of Chance, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Dover, 1958), 332. This quote is taken from the essay in the collection entitled, “Definition and Function of the University,” and it is the only other essay as perceptive as Derrida’s about this matter. 8. Gerald Grant and David Reisman, The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 9. Ibid., 17. 10. Derrida, “Principle,” 16. 11. See note 5 above. 114

The University and the Study of Religion 12. Weston LaBarre, “Materials for a History of Studies of Crisis Cults: A Bibliographical Essay,” Current Anthropology 12, no. 1 (February 1971): 3–44. There is an extensive literature devoted to this topic as LaBarre’s essay will show. My own interest is expressed in an article, “Cargo Cults as Cultural Historical Phenomena,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42, no. 3 (September 1976): 403–414. 13. Marcel Mauss’s classic, The Gift, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967), has been commented upon several times. The most interesting commentaries for my purpose are those of Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972); and Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). See also my essay, “The Religious Implications of Cultural Contact,” in Significations (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986). 14. Jay Geller, “Contact of Persistent Others: the Representation of ‘Woman’ in Friedrich Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, and Karl Gutzkow” (PhD diss., Duke University 1985), 12, 13. I am highly appreciative of the work of Jay Geller who wrote this dissertation under my advisorship. Not only am I indebted to the passage cited, but to the many stimulating conversations we had while he was a graduate student. 15. There is a growing body of literature dealing with issues of this kind. Just a few of the texts: Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

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CHAPTER 10 MIRCEA ELIADE AND THE IMAGINATION OF MATTER

Probably no work of Mircea Eliade frustrates, irritates, and leads anthropologists and other social scientists to fits of anger, more than his Patterns in Comparative Religion (Traité d’histoire des religions).1 It reminds them too much of James George Frazer’s Golden Bough or of lesser popular texts of exotic oddities that purport to describe the customs of primitive cultures. In a milder critical vein, it represents the kind of work that cannot, at least, should not be undertaken, for it appears to rest on a naïveté lacking in scholarly sophistication regarding the relationship of religion, behavior, and social structure. But given these kinds of criticisms and critics, I doubt if many of his most vociferous critics have ever read the work in its entirety or Georges Dumézil’s introduction to the original French edition. From either of these readings one would learn that Eliade is presenting a systematic text, attempting to address the issue of religion as a specific mode of being. Now it may be that several modern disciplines have already decided that the religious life does not exist and this decision has led them to fashion methodologies that reduce the forms of religion to those human dimensions more consonant with the ideologies and existential situations of a nonreligious modernity. Much has and can be learned from such approaches, but they need not express an imperialism of method for it is equally the situation of modernity that has called forth the need for, and hermeneutical procedures that seek, an interpretation of the historical range of human expressions in their specificity and integrity, whether in art, linguistics, geography, etc. Along with Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion is a most fruitful text for raising the issue of religious epistemology. In this text Eliade attempts to account for the inner structure of the consciousness of homo religiosus from an examination of the sacred symbols of archaic cultures. In this regard, the text begins from the other side of Otto, who attempted first to give us an account of consciousness and then to show how it expresses itself through religious forms. Eliade’s work shows how the forms of matter (nature) evoke modes of consciousness and experience (hierophanies). Let us begin with a cursory examination of the table of contents of Patterns. The text consists of thirteen chapters. The first chapter is entitled “Approximations: the Structure and Morphology of the Sacred.” In this chapter he sets forth the problematical nature of his undertaking and delineates the language for talking about religion; the language of the sacred and the profane are the most general linguistic categories, while the notion of hierophanies is the language of manifestation, of showing. Allusions are also made to those approaches to the religious which are predicated on the notion of homo socius as both a specific and general category and how his work differs from this position. The next three chapters are entitled, respectively, “The Sky and Sky Gods,” “The Sun and Sun-Worship,” and “The Moon and Its

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Mystique.” In these three chapters we are confronted with those religious experiences and expressions related to celestial phenomenon. Two chapters follow, one devoted to “The Water and Water Symbolism,” and the other entitled “Sacred Stones: Ephiphanies, Signs and Forms.” So now, after the celestial forms we are dealing with terrestrial forms. The next three chapters, “The Earth, Woman and Fertility,” “Vegetation Rites and Symbols of Regeneration,” “Agriculture and Fertility Rites,” are all related to human intervention upon the order of nature as a specific form of sacrality. The next two chapters, 10 and 11, bear the titles “Sacred Places: Temple, Palace, ‘Centre of the World’,” and “Sacred Time and the Myth of the Eternal Renewal.” The last two chapters are given over to “The Morphology and Function of Myths” and “The Structure of Symbols.” I have given this outline of the table of contents in order to call attention to the systematic order of the text. The author is attempting to show the correlation between the experience, transformation, and celebration of nature, and the linguistic and symbolic modes for expressing these actions and experiences. This procedure enables us to understand the archaic mode of consciousness, and in addition to this, we are presented with a “generative logic” of symbolic religious forms. Wherein do we find this logic? Let me proceed by calling your attention to a series of statements that occur rather early in the chapters on the Sky, Moon, Water, and Stone. First the sky: The sky shows itself as it really is: infinite, transcendent. The vault of heaven is, more than anything else, “something quite apart” from the tiny thing that is man and his span of life. The symbolism of its transcendence derives from the simple realization of its infinite height. … All this derives from simply contemplating the sky; but it would be a mistake to see it as a logical, rational process. The transcendental quality of height or the supraterrestial, the infinite, is revealed to man all at once, to his intellect as to his soul as a whole … Let me repeat: even before any religious values have been set upon the sky it reveals its transcendence, power and changelessness simply by being there. It exists because it is high, infinite, immovable, powerful.2 The analogous statement for the moon is as follows: The sun is always the same, always itself, never in any sense “becoming.” The moon, on the other hand, is a body which waxes, wanes and disappears, a body whose existence is subject to the universal law of becoming, of birth and death. The moon, like man, has a career, involving tragedy, for its failing, like man’s, ends in death.3 Now for water: To state the case in brief, water symbolizes the whole of potentiality: it is fons et origo, the source of all possible existence. … Principle of what is formless and potential, basis of every cosmic manifestation, container of all seeds, water symbolizes the primal substance from which all forms come and to which they will return either by their own regression or in a cataclysm.4 And finally for stones: 118

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The hardness, ruggedness, and permanence of matter was in itself a hierophany in the religious consciousness of the primitive. And nothing was more direct and autonomous in the completeness of its strength, nothing more noble or more awe-inspiring, than a majestic rock, or a boldly-standing block of granite. Above all, stone is. It always remains itself, and exists of itself; and, more important still, it strikes. … Rock shows him something that transcends the precariousness of his humanity; an absolute mode of being. Its strength, its motionlessness, its size and its strange outlines are none of them human; they indicate the presence of something that fascinates, terrifies, attracts and threatens, all at once. In its grandeur, its hardness, its shape and its colour, man is faced with a reality and a force that belong to some world other than the profane world of which he is himself a part.5 In all of these statements Eliade is speaking of a primary and primordial intuition of matter. In other words, he is approaching the issue of religious experiences in a twofold manner. The specific intuition of human consciousness is always correlated with an a priori form of the world. It is the universality of matter itself in all of its several forms, rather than simply the inner working of the human consciousness epistemologically or psychologically which is the source of the religious consciousness. Mind and phenomena go together. The Kantian epistemology which has ruled out knowledge of “things-in-themselves,” leaves us with the abstractions of consciousness proceeding from the vague intuitions and traces of the things-in-themselves, those things we can never know. For Eliade the very structure of the religious consciousness is predicated on a form of the world which is present as a concrete form of matter. While it is the case that the religious consciousness is always capable of recognizing the distinction between the sacred and the profane, this is merely the most general formulation of the religious dialectic. Every religious person and community recognizes this distinction in a precise and specific manner, and the archaic source of these specificities is the a priori concrete forms of matter. If we take note of it, we can see a logical or symbological relationship portrayed in the text. The chapter on the sky and sky-gods has a primary status for it is the correlation of the meaning of the sky with the very opening of consciousness. The sky itself as a religious intuition, before even gods are spoken of as inhabiting the sky, reveals transcendence. In this sense it is a symbol of orientation. Its height and its vault place the human within a proper realm—the situation of finitude in the face of the exaltation of the transcendent starry and shining vault of heaven. Consciousness itself is the most specific correlate of this grandeur of the sky; we are situated as humans in this manner. If you will note, I did not include any of Eliade’s statements regarding the imagination of matter from his chapter on the sun and sun-worship. There was a good reason for this. There is no such statement regarding the imaginary meaning of the sun. The sun is thus ambiguous within the structure of the text. Let me give some of the reasons for this ambiguity. First of all, it is Eliade’s belief that sun hierophanies in their most developed forms are always tied up with “historical destinies,” in cultures where history in on the march. Secondly, from the time of Aristotle onward the intellectual symbolism of the sun has, in Eliade’s words, “blunted our receptiveness toward the totality of sun hierophanies.”6 And then again in the chapter on the moon and its mystique, he states that, “The sun is always the same, always itself, never in any sense ‘becoming’.”7 Thus, though the sun is celestial in its form, it does not allow for that mode 119

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of becoming which Eliade wishes to correlate with the symbology of the human consciousness. The sun has no rhythms, it has no becoming; it refers to the clear and the distinct, the rational and intellectual. Now Eliade is willing to speculate that at one time or another there may have been another meaning to the sun and its symbolism, but from the data at hand the sun has been branded with those meanings which emphasize a break, critique, and tension with the other primordial symbols. The sun, as some malevolent symbol, is accused of being the cause of a “fall” of consciousness into the rational and practical. “This passage,” he says: from “creator” to “fecundator,” this slipping of the omnipotence, transcendence and impassiveness of the sky into the dynamism, intensity and drama of the atmospheric, fertilizing, vegetation figures, is not without significance. It makes quite clear that one of the main factors in the lowering of people’s conceptions of God, most obvious in agricultural societies, is the more and more all-embracing importance of vital values and of “Life” in the outlook of economic man.8 Throughout this chapter the ambivalent nature of the sun comes into play. The sun thus symbolizes in religious form the very ambivalence of life and possibility of homo religiosus; the basic dialectic between the religious being and that form of rationalism that is brought into the religious arena through the symbolism of the sun. It is appropriate at this point to mention another primary imaginative religious structure that is initially described in some of the same language he has used in relationship to the sun. I speak of the stone. Like the sun, the stone always remains itself; it is motionless and unchangeable. While the stone seems similar to the sun, it escapes the negative ambiguity of the sun because of its ability to enter into other symbolic relationships—relationships which keep alive a rhythmic dialectic that prevents a premature rationalization. Both in the chapter devoted to stones and in chapter 13 on the structure of symbols, a great deal of attention is given to the relational character of stone symbolism. Stones are symbols of fertility, burial sites, omphalos; they are able to hold together paradoxical meanings. The infantilization of stone symbolism through degeneration or rationalism is even quite interesting. It is strange that Eliade gives very little significance to stone tools. Here again we have a case in which the modification of the material form signifies the human presence. Again in the very act of making stone tools, the striking of one stone against another, an obdurate oppugnancy and internal dialectical rhythm and flexibility is established which allows the symbolism of stone to escape the tyranny of sheer practical activity on the one hand and simple rationalization on the other. From our initial symbols, we have yet to speak of moon and water symbols. It is clear from the enthusiasm which is present in these chapters that along with the sky, these imaginary modes of matter hold exemplary places in Eliade’s thought. The waxing and waning of the moon is the archetype of real human time. This time, he explains, should be distinguished from astronomical time (rationalized time) which comes later. Here we are dealing with time in the concrete sense. The rhythms of the moon measure and synthesize the various modes of concrete time. Thus, for instance, from the earliest times, certainly since the Neolithic Age, with the discovery of agriculture, the same symbolism has linked together the moon, the sea waters, 120

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rain, the fertility of women and of animals, plant life, man’s destiny after death, and the ceremonies of initiation. The mental syntheses made possible by the realization of the moon’s rhythms connect and unify very varied realities; their structural symmetries and the analogies in their workings could never have been seen had not “primitive” man intuitively perceived the moon’s law of periodic change, as he did very early on.9 When we look at the chapter on the moon carefully we perceive that in many respects it is a recapitulation of much that has gone on before and a forward to much that will follow. There are sections on “the moon and water,” “initiation,” “women,” “fertility,” “death,” and so on. It is clear for Eliade that as far as celestial symbolism is concerned, the moon is the symbol par excellence of the human condition. “Becoming” is the lunar order of things. Whether it is taken as the playing-out of a drama (the birth, fullness, and disappearance of the moon), or given the sense of a “division” or “enumeration,” or intuitively seen as the “hempen rope” of which the threads of fate are woven, depends, of course, on the myth-making and theorizing powers of individual tribes. … But the formulae used to express that “becoming” are heterogeneous on the surface only. The moon “divides,” “spins,” and “measures”; or feeds, makes fruitful, and blesses.10 The moon is equally the source of symbols of integration, the coincidentia oppositorum of the paradox of the lunar and solar modalities into a unity. Water, much as in the case of the moon, is a synthesizing symbol. It is the source of all things and the dissolution of all forms, but it has no form in itself, thus its adaptability to various modalities reveals its multivalent character. The next section of chapters reveals how these primary symbols find rhythmic or liturgical meanings in existential modes. They show how the religious consciousness revalorizes meanings so that action and practical activity do not serve to demythologize the primary intuitions of matter (the hierophanies). Allow me to summarize what I have tried to do in this analysis: 1. Reveal the systematic nature of Patterns in Comparative Religion. 2. Show how Eliade reveals the structure of archaic consciousness. 3. Emphasize the meaning of matter as a constitutive ingredient in the formulation of the archaic consciousness in Eliade’s thought. Since I have emphasized the imagination of matter in Eliade’s work I should like to proceed to a distinction between homo faber and homo religiosus. V. Gordon Childe coined the term “neolithic revolution” to refer to the radical change made possible for human cultures with the discovery of agriculture and the domestication of plants. This “revolution” formed the basis for citied traditions in various parts of the world, traditions with their notae of intensified demography, division of labor, surplus commodities, written language, historical destinies, and so on, became the norm for the human condition. Childe’s researches were consonant with the evolutionary, progressivistic historical notions prevalent since the beginnings of the human sciences in the late nineteenth century. Investigations tended to assume that early human cultures were characterized by rudimentary intellectual and creative capacities or 121

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were overwhelmed by irrational and illogical modes of thought. “How natives think” or the evolutionary trajectory from primitive to scientific thought obsessed many investigators. It is now, however, a commonplace to speak of the creativity of early human cultures. Marxists and neo-Marxist thinkers are increasingly concerned with the problem of origins, especially the origins of the human as homo faber. It is clear to the sophisticated Marxist that Marx inherited many of the current ideas of historical and economic processes en vogue during his time. The notion of the four stages of economic and political development in human history forms a common context for Adam Smith, the Scottish moralist, and Karl Marx. (See Ronald Meek’s Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.) In the works of Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete and Tran Duc Thao, “Due geste de l’index a l’image typique,”11 the issue of the originary and imaginary gesture of homo faber as the human is raised. Thao begins with a statement describing Marx’s analysis of work. Three elements are present: (1) the specific activity of the human being; (2) the object on which the activity acts; and (3) the means by which it acts. He asserts that the activity of large anthropoids in using a stick to reach an object is not a genuine act of work, for only motion is inserted between the natural organs and the material acted upon. The object of need and the activity of motion are identical. An authentic act of work occurs when, through some second instrument, the direct manipulation of matter is transformed into an act of work. The act of production implies that the worker is guided by an ideal image of a typical form and the presence of such a form on the object which enables the worker to realize that it is a product of the human hand. It is this ideal image that constitutes a common locus between homo faber and homo religiosus. The ideal image of nature for the Marxist is a concrete appearance of matter which can lead to a totalization of the authentic human community based upon the modes of production. This is the appearance of homo oeconomicus through the modality of homo faber. It is at the level of the ideal image that the imaginary intermediate, the tension between homo faber and homo religiosus appears. The proper understanding of the totalization of the originary gesture is the issue at stake. Karel Kosík delineates three modes of the totalization of the concrete: 1. An empty totality that lacks reflection and determination of individual movements and analysis. Empty totality excludes reflection, that is, the appropriation of reality as individual moments and the activity of analytical reason. 2. An abstract totality which formalizes the whole as opposed to its parts and ascribes a higher reality to hypostasized tendencies. Totality thus concerned is without genesis and development. Devoid of process it is a closed whole. 3. A bad totality, in which the real subject has been replaced by a mythologized subject. Surrounding all forms of totalization is care (Sorge). In Kosík’s words, “The primary and elementary mode in which economics exists for man is care. … Care is the practical involvement of the individual in a tangle of social relations conceived from the position of his personal, individual, subjective involvement.”12 Or again, “Care is 1) the entanglement of the social individual in a system of social relations on the basis of his involvement and utilitarian praxis; 2) the activity of this individual which in the elementary form appears as caring and procuring; 3) the subject of activity (of procuring and caring) which appears as lack of differentiation and anonymity.”13

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Care enables the person to develop a meaning of nature that transcends its role and significance as a workshop that provides raw materials for human productivity. Such a reduction of nature would from Kosík’s perspective constitute “the loss of nature as something created neither by man nor by anyone else, as something eternal and uncreated, and would be coupled with the loss of the awareness that man is a part of a greater whole: compared with it, man becomes aware both of its smallness and of his greatness.”14 Kosík’s use of care is similar to the meaning Victor Turner has described as the oretic meaning of the symbol or Martin Buber’s meaning of the I-Thou relationship.15 Though care is necessary to save the uniqueness of the human and the proper relationship to an authentic meaning of nature, care itself, because it favors the future and lives in anticipation, may become the basis for a repudiation of concrete existence in the future in favor of a fetishized future and a fetishized temporality.16 The way out of this temptation to fetishism is through the recognition of the full meaning of homo oeconomicus as the full materialistic context for the human mode of being. Such a context establishes the locus for the totalization of the human as a concrete socio-historical being and allows for the full release of personal and social valuations. The problematic of a history of matter as a totalization of religious and sacred meaning is undertaken by Mircea Eliade in a precise manner in his The Forge and the Crucible (originally published as Forgerons et alchimistes).17 General themes related to this issue are found in almost all of his works, especially in Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses.18 Mircea Eliade’s work is not conceived as a counter to or refutation of the Marxist tradition; while aware of the Marxist ideology as one of the elements of contemporary thought, Eliade’s studies are a work of creative scholarship possessing their own integrity. However, precisely because his work is a hermeneutical endeavor, he confronts the same latent and manifest problems of the Marxist and he is well aware of the Marxist resolutions. In Patterns in Comparative Religion, he alludes to the origins of homo oeconomicus, when he says, … the supreme divinities of the sky are constantly pushed to the periphery of the religious life where they are almost ignored; other sacred forces, nearer to man, more accessible to his daily experience, more useful to him, fill the leading role.19 … it is a popular expression of the idea of the transcendence and passivity of the Supreme Being, too far removed from man to satisfy his innumerable religious, economic vital needs.20 The stylistic mood of Patterns in Comparative Religion is one of passivity, for Eliade is attempting to show how human existence is dominated by the archetypes, the initial perceptions of sacred forms. These archetypes may form a symbological pattern within a particular culture or within the history of humankind itself. But even when the historical dimension is referred to in Patterns, it is a “history” of the archetypes or it is a history that is learned from the archetypal forms revealed in human activity with matter. If we locate the beginnings of human history where it is conventionally understood to have begun, in the Neolithic period with the domestication of plants and animals, this period of time, for Eliade, represents a change but not a clear and clean break with the archetypal

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patterning of human life. What is decidedly new here is the active intervention of human communities in the world of nature: … agriculture displays the mystery of the rebirth of plant life in a more dramatic manner. In the rites and skills of farming man is intervening actively; plant life and the sacred forces of the plant world are no longer something outside him; he takes part by using and fostering them.21 In this intervention, a new structure of the sacred appears; first there is the identification of the former with the powers revealed in the life of the plant—a new space and time and a more abundant form of life. A more optimistic view of life comes into being, for death is established as no more than a provisional change in the human mode of being. But this intervention is equally the temptation not only to abandon other archetypes, for example, the sky and sky deities and the entire range of the “archetypes of passivity.” The temptation for an autonomous existence beyond the world of archetypes comes into being at this moment. The new time and space revealed in the hierophanies of agriculture and the ability of the human community to make use of and control these processes establishes a new possibility for human relationships with matter and the meaning of totalization of a form of nature thus symbolizing a total form of human existence. Agriculture is the point at which homo religiosus, homo faber, and homo oeconomicus converge. For those who see this amalgam of human dimensions integrated either by homo faber or homo oeconomicus, the subsequent history of humanity with its citied traditions, intensification of agriculture and the development of technologies that allow for progressive intervention of the human community into nature, this historical “ascent of man” leaves the horizon of archetypes and hierophanies far behind. Now a history of the human mode of being as homo oeconomicus might be contemplated on this basis, but a history as homo religosus or homo faber cannot be understood from this point of view without extreme reductionism and selective distortion. Eliade insists that human work and the imagination of the reality of matter has never totally obliterated the fact that the human is also a “technician of the sacred.” As Tran Duc Thao pointed out in his definition of work, the worker is guided by the ideal image of a typical (archetypal) form and it is the presence of this form on the object that enables the worker to realize that his production is the work of the human hand. For Eliade, this ideal image or typical form is the imagination of the sacred in matter, and because it is the imagination of the sacred, the gods (sacrality) and the humans are co-creators. The basic human discoveries about matter were made by archaic societies. That is to say that the discovery of agriculture, the domestication of plants, the control of fire—all these techniques that form the basis of all citied traditions were accomplished by homo faber are in an archaic mode. The magical experience of the world, or in Eliade’s terms, the experience of the world as cosmos, implied the sacredness of the world, and this in turn meant that knowledge of these techniques was a mystery and their transmission constituted an initiation. In The Forge and the Crucible, Eliade undertakes an analysis of alchemy—a technique present in the traditional citied traditions, but forming a continuity with archaic metallurgy. Metallurgy is that technique that combines homo faber and homo religiosus. 124

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Mineral substances shared in the sacredness attaching to the Earth-Mother. Very early on we are confronted with the notion that ores “grow” in the belly of the earth after the manner of embryos. Metallurgy thus takes on the character of obstetrics. Miner and metalworker intervene in the unfolding of subterranean embryology: they accelerate the rhythm of the growth of ores, they collaborate in the work of Nature and assist it to give birth more rapidly. In a word, man, with his various techniques, gradually takes the place of Time: his labours replace the work of Time. To collaborate in the work of Nature, to help her to produce at an ever-increasing tempo, to change the modalities of matter—here, in our view, lies one of the key sources of alchemical ideology.22 Alchemy as a specific technique is a practice of “historical cultures.” The appearance of this technique within these cultures points to the perenniality of homo religiosus. Alchemy is not simply a repetition of older archaic modes of metallurgy, nor is it an embryonic or protochemistry. It is rather the rediscovery of the religious imagination of matter on the historical plane. Eliade places this discovery within the same context as husbandry. From a certain point of view, man, even the most primitive, has always been a “historic being” by reason of the fact that he was conditioned by the ideology, sociology, and economy peculiar to his tradition. But I do not wish to speak of this historicity of man as a man, or as a being conditioned by temporality and culture, but of a more recent and infinitely more complex phenomenon, namely, the enforced involvement of entire humanity in events taking place in a few restricted regions of the globe. This is what happened after the discovery of agriculture and especially after the crystallization of the earliest urban civilizations in the ancient Near East. From that moment all human culture, however strange and remote, was doomed to undergo the consequences of the historic events which were taking place at the “centre.” These consequences sometimes became manifest thousands of years later, but they could not in any way be avoided; they were part of the historic fatality. With the discovery of husbandry it is possible to say that man was destined to become an agricultural being or at any rate to suffer the influences of all subsequent discoveries and innovations which agriculture made possible: domestication of animals, urban civilization, military organization, empire, imperialism, mass wars, etc. In other words, all mankind became involved in the activities of some of its members. Thus, from this time on—parallel with the rise of the first urban civilizations in the Near East—it is possible to speak of history in the full sense of the term, that is, of universal modifications effected by the creative will of certain societies (more precisely, of privileged elements in those societies).23 The alchemists through magico-religious techniques attempted the transmutation of base metals into gold. One errs, in Eliade’s view, if alchemists are seen as mere gold-seekers or counterfeiters. They had probably discovered and/or retained an older conception of the Earth-Mother, bearer of embryos. Above all it was the experimental discovery of the living substance, such as it was felt by the artisans, which must have played the decisive role. Indeed it is the conception of a complex and dramatic Life of Matter which 125

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constitutes the originality of alchemy as opposed to classical Greek science. One is entitled to suppose that the experience of dramatic life was made possible by the knowledge of Graeco-oriental mysteries.24 In alchemy the life of matter is manifested not as “vital” hierophanies, as it was for archaic cultures, but it acquires a spiritual dimension; it takes on the initiatory significance of drama and suffering which can culminate in freedom, illumination, transmutation. While Eliade admits the significance of technological creativity and the meaning of the historicity of the human community as an arena of religious significance, homo religiosus implies a structure of perception of the world. This structure is the religious experience. It does not mean a reversion to a past for it is always in the context of a present situation, and the temporal context of the present provides the modes of expression and meaning. At least since the Neolithic period the relationship of the human community to the material world has undergone dramatic transformations. The inner structure of matter as the basis for cosmic order changes with every technological praxis. Through these changes life and integrity of matter became obscured, infantilized, trivialized, and disenchanted. There is nevertheless the possibility for the rediscovery of the life of matter as a religious phenomenon—an equal and sometimes alternate structure in the face of the dehumanizing and terroristic meaning of history.

Notes 1. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958); original French edition: Traité d’histoire des religions, intro. Georges Dumézil (Paris: Payot, 1949). 2. Eliade, Patterns, 38, 39. 3. Ibid., 154. 4. Ibid., 188. 5. Ibid., 216. 6. Ibid., 125. 7. Ibid., 154. 8. Ibid., 127. 9. Ibid., 155. 10. Ibid., 176. 11. Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete, trans. Karel Kovanda with James Schmidt, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 52 (Boston: D. Reidel, 1976); Tran Duc Thao, “Due geste de l’index a l’image typique,” La Pensée 10, no. 147 (October 1969): 3–46. 12. Kosík, Dialectics, 37. 13. Ibid., 38. 14. Ibid., 41. 15. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribner, 1958). 16. Kosík, Dialectics, 59. 17. Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible (New York: Harper, 1956); original French edition: Forgerons et alchimistes (Paris: Flammarion, 1956).

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CHAPTER 11 POPULAR RELIGION

Every society exhibits divisions and segmentations based upon the classification of its members and their activities, functions, and relationships (e.g., sex, work, knowledge, etc.). However, it was long a universally common assumption that the meaning of any institution within the society, or the meaning of the society as a whole, was the privileged province of the upper, or elite, levels of the society. Indeed, the idea that social meaning could be gained from any other level, especially the lower levels of the social structure, is a relatively new notion. The setting forth of the notion that a positive and necessary knowledge of society could be gained from its lower levels defined this strata as a locus of interpretation, meaning, and value. The idea that the positive meaning of a society is represented by the “common people,” “the folk,” or the peasants may be seen as an expression of “cultural primitivism,” the dissatisfaction of the civilized with the quality and style of civilization and the expression of a desire to return for orientation to the archaic roots of the culture. This “discovery of the people,” to use Peter Burke’s apt phrase, began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe. The philosophical justification for this orientation can be seen in the writings of Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Probably more than any others, these two thinkers represented new theoretical approaches to the nature of history, religion, and society. They distinguished the notions of the “populari” and “the volk” as the basis for an alternate and new meaning of humanism apart from the rationalizing and civilizing processes set in motion by the European Enlightenment. The discovery of two new and different forms of societal orders—one outside Europe (the so-called primitives), the other internal to European cultures (the peasants and the folk)—was prompted, in fact, by a search for origins. The search was in some senses antithetical, and in other senses supplementary, to the meaning of the origins of the West in the biblical and Greek cultures. The discovery that the archaic levels of human culture and society had an empirical locus in existing Western cultures became the philosophical, theological, and ideological basis for the legitimation of these new structures of order in modern and contemporary societies. The notion of popular religion has to do with the discovery of archaic forms, whether within or outside Western cultures. It is at this level that the meaning of popular religion forms a continuum with both primitive religions and peasant and folk cultures in all parts of the world. This continuum is based upon structural similarities defined by the organic nature of all of these types of societies rather than upon historical or genetic causation. Primitive and peasant-folk societies are, relatively speaking, demographically small. The relationships among people in these societies were thought to be personal in nature. Underlying all modes of communication is an intuitive or empathetic understanding of the ultimate nature and purpose of life. This is what Herder meant by “the organic mode of life,” an idea given methodological precision by the social philosopher Ferdinand Tönnies, who made a typological distinction

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between communities ordered in terms of Gemeinschaft and those expressing a Gesellschaft orientation to life and the world. Gemeinschaft represents community as organic form; Gesellschaft is society as a mechanical aggregate and artifact. A similar distinction is made by the anthropologist Robert Redfield when he describes pre-urban cultures as those in which the moral order predominates over the technical order. The moral order, in this interpretation, is the common understanding of the ultimate nature and purpose of life within the community. The notions of the organic nature of community (Gemeinschaft) and the primacy of the moral order lead to different meanings of the religious life in primitive and folk or peasant cultures as compared to societies in urban Gesellschaft orientations. Furthermore, the relationship or the distinction between the religious and the cognitive within the two kinds of societies differ. While it can be said that religion is present when a distinction is made between the sacred and the profane, the locus of this distinction in primitive and folk-peasant cultures is a commonly shared one. There is a unified sense of those objects, actions, and sentiments that are sacred, and those that are profane. The religious and the moral orders tend to be synonymous; thus, the expression of religious faith on the ordinary and extraordinary levels of these cultures form a continuum. The extraordinary expressions are those that commemorate important punctuations of the temporal and social cycles (e.g., a new year, the harvest and first fruits, birth, marriage, and death). The ordinary modes are expressed in the customs, traditions, and mundane activities that maintain and sustain the culture on a daily basis. One of the goals of the early studies of folk, peasant, and popular cultures was to come to an understanding of the qualitative meaning of religion in human cultures of this kind. Attention was focused on the meaning of custom and tradition, on the one hand, and upon the qualitative meaning and mode of transmission of the traditional values in cultures that were not predominantly literate. The two early innovators, Herder and, especially, Vico, had already emphasized the modes and genres of language of the nonliterate. Vico based his entire philosophical corpus on the origin and development of language, or, to be more exact, of rhetoric. By the term rhetoric Vico made reference to the manner in which language is produced as a mode of constituting bonds between human beings, the world, and other beings outside the community. Closely related to Herder’s philosophy of culture and history is the work of the Grimm brothers in their philological studies of the Germanic languages. Their collection of fairy tales, Märchen, and folktales represents the beginning of serious scholarly study of oral traditions. In the work of the Grimms, the first articulation of the relationship between genres of oral literature and modes of transmission are raised. This relationship is important, for, given the presupposed organic form of nonliterate societies, the genres of transmission of ultimate meaning, whether ordinary or extraordinary, defined a locus of the religious. The romantic notion (present in Herder and in the theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher and Paul Tillich), namely, that religion is the ultimate ground and substance of culture, underlies the importance given to transmission, manifestation, and expression of this form of culture as religion. Religion is thus understood to be pervasive in society and culture, finding its expression not only in religious institutions, but in all the dimensions of cultural life. The genres of the folktale, folk song, art, and myth became the expressive forms of popular religion. The investigation of poetic meaning and wisdom, and of metaphorical, symbolic expressions, emerged as sources of the religious sentiment in the traditions of popular religion. The initial “discovery of the people” as an approach to the interpretation of culture and society 130

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and as a new form of human value was made under the aegis of intuitive methods within literary studies and from the perspective of a speculative philosophy of history. Once serious scholarly attention was given to the data of the popular, certain ambiguities were noted. The original discovery of the people was based, by and large, on a contrast between the popular and the urban, or the artificiality of the urban mode as a form of civilization. In this sense, the popular represented the archaic and original forms of culture; it was its roots. However, the meaning of the popular could not be limited to the conservative, value-retaining, residual, selfcontained unit of a society or culture. One of the basic elements in the meaning of a popular cultural tradition was the mode of its transmission, and it was precisely this element that allowed the meaning of such a tradition to be extended beyond that of the nonliterate strata of society—the rural peasants and the folk.

Varieties and dimensions Critical investigations of the meaning of popular culture and religion from the disciplinary orientations of the anthropology and history of religion, and from the sociology of knowledge, revealed a wide variety of the forms of popular religion. From the anthropological and historical perspectives, one is able to delineate and describe the characteristic modes of experience and expression of religion at the various levels of the cultural strata, and to show the dynamics of the interrelationships of the popular forms with other cultural strata. The sociology of knowledge provides an understanding of the genesis, contents, and mode of thought and imagination present in popular religion, and demonstrates how various strata within a social order participate in the values, meanings, and structures of popular religion. Though scholarly, disciplinary approaches led to a more precise definition of the popular and to a critique of the original meaning of the popular and popular religion, such studies also brought about a proliferation of different meanings and interpretations of popular religion. Of these, the following seven are the most significant. 1. Popular religion is identical with the organic (usually rural and peasant) form of a society. The religious and moral orders are also identical; in this sense, popular religion is closely related to the meanings of primitive and folk religion. This is the original meaning of popular religion as the religion of folk and peasant culture. Though the distinction between the folk and peasant religion and the religion of the urban areas is clear-cut in the industrial periods of all cultures, such a distinction does not rest simply on this basis. In the feudal periods of various cultures, this distinction is more pronounced in relationship to certain practices and in the hierarchical structures of the society. Within feudal structures, the upper classes participated in and controlled a form of literacy that was confined within this group. In various cultures, this meant access to an orientation of religious meaning revolving around sacred texts. In China, for example, there appeared Confucian classics; in India, the Sanskritic literary tradition; in Christianity, the Bible, and so on. The limitation of the modes of literacy suggest that though there are authoritative sacred texts, they are situated in a context that is often dominated by illiteracy and oral traditions. The line of demarcation between the culture of literacy and that of the oral traditions is seldom clear-cut. In many cases, the traditions of literacy embody a great deal of the content, form, and style of the oral traditions of the peasants and the folk. Prior to the universalization of the 131

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modes of literacy in many cultures, the prestige of literacy was to be found in the belief in, and regard for, the sacred text, which itself was believed to have a magical, authoritative meaning in addition to the content of its the particular writings. The written words of the god or gods (the authoritative text) resided with, and was under the control of, elites within the culture. Another characteristic of folk-peasant societies is that they define the lives of their members within the context of a certain ecological niche (agricultural, pastoral, etc.), and the modes and genres of their existence are attached to this context by ties of tradition and sentiment. The group and the ecological structure thus define a continuity of relationships. The sentiment and the moral order of communities of this kind are synonymous with the meaning of their religion. In agricultural peasant and folk cultures, the rhythms of the agricultural seasons are woven into the patterns of human relationships and sociability. The symbols and archetypes of religion are expressions of the alternation and integration of the human community, the techniques of production, and the reality of the natural world. In most cultures this type of popular religion carries the connotation of religion as ab origine and archaic. Robert Redfield has suggested that the folk-peasant mode of life is an enduring structure of human community found in every part of the world. As such it is not only an empirical datum of a type of human community, but may also represent an enduring source of religious and moral values. 2. Popular religion as the religion of the laity in a religious community in contrast to that of the clergy. The clergy is the bearer of a learned tradition usually based upon the prestige of literacy. Another type of popular religion is notable in religious communities where literacy is by and large limited to the clergy. The clergy carries out the authority of the tradition through the use of religious texts. The laity may memorize and repeat certain of these texts in worship and rituals, but they are not in possession of the instruments and institutional authority of sacred literacy. Both clergy and laity may participate in and honor other traditions that arise from the life of the laity. Such traditions are those related to the sacralization of agricultural seasons and worship centered around the cults of relics and saints, holy persons, pilgrimages, and so on. Another meaning of this kind of popular religion stems from a society in which literacy is not confined to the clergy or elite. The laity may have access to certain authoritative or quasiauthoritative texts without being in possession of the power of normative interpretation and sanction of these texts. They therefore interpret these texts in their own manner, according to their own needs and sensibilities. A notable case of this kind of popular religion is the account given in The Cheese and the Worms (1980) by Carlo Ginzburg of the Italian miller Domenico Sandella (nicknamed Menochhio), a literate peasant who created and thought through an entire cosmology radically different from that of the church authorities. In other cases the clergy may create for the laity popular religious literature of a devotional or catechismal nature that takes on the forms of a more pervasive popular culture of the laity. This can be seen in the adaptation of archetypes from the authoritative tradition to a popular structure: for example, the popularization of Guanyin in Buddhist literatures, and the local and popular traditions concerning Krishna—among Hindus. In another example, Christmas (the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ), which developed from older, popular (pagan) traditions, has been adapted to the popular cultures and economies of modern societies. 3. Popular religion as the pervasive beliefs, rituals, and values of a society. Popular religion of this type is a kind of civil religion or religion of the public. It forms the general and wide context for the discussion of anything of a religious nature within the society. Two studies of Greek religion may be used to illustrate this point. Martin P. Nilsson, in his Greek Folk Religion, described the 132

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religion of the countryside, the folk-peasant religion of ancient Greece. Jon D. Mikalson, in his Athenian Popular Religion, treats Greek religion not in terms of class structures, nor through a distinction between the rural and the urban, but rather concentrates on the views and beliefs that were a part of the common cultural experience of the majority of Athenians during the late fourth and fifth centuries ce. Mikalson goes on to point out that one of the most important sources for this type of popular religion was the orations presented in law courts, where the orators addressed juries that numbered from five hundred to twenty-five hundred or more Athenian male citizens. Similar forms of popular religion are found in all cultures where the religious substratum of the culture radiates into, and finds explicit expression—or vague nuances and derivations— in the formation and processes of public institutions other than those dedicated to specific religious ceremonials. As such, this form of popular religion provides a generalized rhetoric and norm for the meaning and discussion of religion within the context of the culture in which it is found. In most cases the meaning of this kind of popular religion is expressed in terms of a dominant religious tradition that has had a profound and pervasive influence upon the culture. For example, in the Western world, one could speak of Christendom or biblical orientations; in India, of the Sanskritic language and cultural traditions; in China and other parts of the Far East, of the Confucian and Buddhist traditions; and, in Islamic countries, of the Islamic tradition. In each case a specific religious orientation has so informed the cultural life that it has become the “natural” and normative language of religion in general, and the secular forms of cultural life as well give expression to their origins in that religious tradition. Of particular interest in this regard is the discussion surrounding the issue of “civil religion” in the United States since the end of World War II. This discussion has come to the fore in many democratic societies due to the growing democratization and secularization of the processes and institutions within societies of this kind. The case of the American republic is an extreme example of this problem because, as a nation-state, it is not philosophically based upon an explicit or implicit meaning derived from either an archaic or aboriginal religion, nor upon any meaning of a named, empirical religion. Neither did the nation’s founders find it necessary to come to terms with the religion of the original inhabitants of the land as the Spanish did in Mesoamerica and South America. The notion of “God” or “Nature’s God” is used as an analogue for an archaic principle of founding, but its connotations remain vague; thus, specific religious groups interpret this principle in their own manner in accord with the principle of religious freedom in the United States. However, this same meaning is not limited to its interpretation by specific religious groups; it is also evoked and given extensive interpretation in the speeches of prominent political, judicial, and public figures, and in documents of the nation’s history. Sidney E. Mead (1963) and Robert N. Bellah (1967) have shown how the symbolic interpretations of the meaning of the “God of the republic” in the rhetoric of American presidents have attempted to define—and persuade the citizenry of the United States of—the public religious and moral meanings and implications of the American republic. 4. Popular religion as an amalgam of esoteric beliefs and practices differing from the common or civil religion, but usually located in the lower strata of a society. Popular religion in this form more often than not exists alongside other forms of religion in a society. Reference is made here to the religious valuation of esoteric forms of healing, predictions of events not based on logical reasoning, and therapeutic practices that have an esoteric origin and may imply a 133

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different cosmology than the one prevalent within the society as a whole. In most cases, the practitioners and clients have not eschewed the ordinary modes of healing and therapy; the esoteric beliefs and practices are supplementary, representing a mild critique of the normative forms of this kind of knowledge and practice in the society at large. This form of popular religion is present in industrial societies in practices such as phrenology, palm reading, astrology, and in the accompanying esoteric, “metaphysical” beliefs. The pervasive nature of this kind of popular religion may be noted by the fact that in almost all of the larger cities of industrialized countries, every major newspaper and magazine finds it necessary to carry astrological forecasts or some other symbolic mode that appeals to an alternate interpretation of the world. 5. Popular religion as the religion of a subclass or minority group in a culture. Particular classes defined by their ethnicity or by an ideology or mythology associated with their work (e.g., miners, blacksmiths, butchers, soldiers, etc.), form another mode of popular religion. In most cases, such groups do not represent foreign communities residing in another culture, but pose the problem of “otherness” or strangeness for people outside their communities due to their racial type or occupation. These groups are, nevertheless, integrated into the social structure as a necessary ingredient of a common cultural ideology and its functioning; they constitute “a part of the society by not being a part of it.” In most traditional cultures of the world, certain occupations, such as mining or blacksmithing, represent this meaning. They are restricted to certain places of residence within the villages and they in turn have their own rituals and alternate understandings of the nature of the cosmos. While the role and function of such occupations is understood by the rest of society, and is felt to have a place in its general cosmology, they nevertheless form the basis for an alternate understanding of the nature of society. Examples of the ethnic and racial meaning of this form of popular religion may be seen in the history of the Jews within Christendom or the religions of African Americans in the New World. 6. Popular religion as the religion of the masses in opposition to the religion of the sophisticated, discriminating, and learned within a society. This is a variation on the difference between the laity and the clergy in hierarchical and traditional societies. Reference is made in this form of popular religion to a meaning of the masses that is the product of democratic polities and industrialism. Whereas in the older, traditional, hierarchical societies, the clergy and the laity both possessed traditions, the modern definition of “the masses” implies the loss of tradition and canons of value and taste, which are now defined in terms of a privileged class order of the elite who have had the benefit of special education. Alexis de Tocqueville’s comments on the meaning of democracy in America imply that democracy and mass culture are synonymous. The form of popular religion will tend to express the existential and ephemeral concerns of the mass population at any moment of its history. 7. Popular religion as the creation of an ideology of religion by the elite levels of a society. From the very beginning of the study of popular culture and religion, the discovery, meaning, and valuation of “the popular” was undertaken by elites within the society. Especially with the coming of industrialization and the rise of the nation-state, the provincial traditions of the peasant and rural folk within a culture had to fall under the political and ideological meanings of larger generalizing and centralizing orders of the state and its bureaucracy. To the extent that the ideological meaning of the rural and peasant cultures served the aims of the state, it was promoted as the older, traditional meaning of the state deriving from its archaic forms. Popular 134

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culture and religion in this mode was invented and promoted by the state through folklore societies, museums, and by the promotion of historical research into the past of the society. On the basis of a genuine and authentic folk and peasant tradition of culture and religion, a new meaning of the popular forms is now embraced and supported by the state. Given this variety of forms and meanings of popular religion, it is appropriate to ask what is the common element in all of them. There are two common elements. First of all, “the popular” in any of its varieties is concerned with a mode of transmission of culture. Whether the group be large or small, or whether the content of the religion be sustaining or ephemeral, “the popular” designates the universalization of its mode of transmission. In peasant and folk situations, this mode of transmission is traditionally embodied in symbols and archetypes that tend to be long-lasting and integrative. In modern industrial societies, the modes of transmission are several, including literacy, electronic media, newspapers, chapbooks, and so on. Such modes of communication bring into being a popular culture that is different from, but may overlap with, other social strata within the culture. Due to the intensity of these forms of communication, the content of the forms of popular culture is able to change quickly. It is not, however, the content that is at the fore here, but the type of cognition afforded by the modes of transmission. Given the intensification of transmission and the ephemerality of content, this form of popular religion and culture is semiotic—it is embedded in a system of signs rather than in symbols and archetypes.

The nature of culture The meaning of popular religion presupposes an understanding of the nature of culture that is capable of making sense of differences and divisions within the totality of any culture. Furthermore, the notion of culture must allow room for the meaning of religion as one of the primary modes of transmission of the cultural tradition. Clifford Geertz’s description (1965) of religion as a cultural system is one of the most adequate understandings of culture as a mode of transmission. His definition is as follows: Religion is (1) a system of symbols that acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and longlasting moods and motivations in people by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with an aura of factuality so that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. This notion of religion as a cultural system enables one to understand how religion is the expression and transmission of a conception of the reality of the world, and it is clear that such a powerful and pervasive notion must of necessity imply a mode of transmission. If this notion of religion as a cultural system is seen in relationship to Robert Redfield’s analysis of the divisions and distinctions within a cultural system, a basis for the meaning of popular religion within a cultural milieu is established (Redfield, 1955). Redfield makes a broad distinction within a culture between what he calls the “great tradition” and the “little tradition.” The great tradition is that of the learned elite and often the ruling class, while the little tradition is that of the large classes and groups of the lower classes. His combination of these two theories provides an understanding of the meaning of popular religion from the point of view of culture as a whole. However, in all parts of the world, due to industrialization and modernization, it is becoming increasingly difficult to define the meaning of culture 135

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in these terms. Whereas political power may continue to reside in an elite ruling class that has hegemony over many forms of cultural expression, the modes of transmission, through literacy and electronic media, are so intense that the distinction between the elite and the lower class as well as between the urban and rural milieus fail to mark a line of demarcation that is true to social reality. From this point of view, the modes of communication and transmission have as much or more to do with the integration and wholeness of the culture as the content of symbolic clusters or ideological meaning. Considerations of this sort raise issues regarding the locus and meaning of religion in contemporary industrialized societies. Because of the intensity of transmission, the content of what is transmitted tends to be ephemeral; thus, the notion of religion as establishing powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations is shifted away from content and substance to modes of experience. Popular religion is thus no longer defined in terms of sustaining traditions, but in the qualitative meaning of the nature of experience. Thus, in attempting to describe popular religion in modern societies, the investigator may undertake research in a wide variety of media where members of the culture express their experiences, such as television, radio, and newspapers; and in occurrences such as sports and recreational events, political activities, and so on. Seen from this point of view, the popular approximates some aspects of the older and original notion of “popular” as the peasant-folk and organic meaning in a society. In the peasant-folk, organic society, the mode of transmission were relatively slow, and thus the content of the transmission predominated, allowing for the comprehension of the symbolic content to consciously and unconsciously inform the life of society. In modern industrial societies, transmission is almost universal throughout the society, but the content is no longer the bearer of organic and integrative form.

Social change The notion of an organic social order, whether defined as a primitive, peasant, or folk culture, often implies complete equilibrium, integration, and stasis in a society. This is hardly ever true: All societies exhibit divisions and segmentations of various kinds, and these are often expressed in religious terms. They may be seen in the religious meanings defined by gender as well as in the gradations of the types of religious knowledge wherein certain types of esoteric or secret knowledge is held by an elite, and a more public and general religious meaning is present in the society at large. A good example of this is given in Marcel Griaule’s account of the knowledge of Ogotemmêli, the old Dogon sage. The knowledge held by Ogotemmêli has a correspondence to the public meaning and symbols of Dogon religion, but his knowledge is more profound and possesses a metaphysical dimension. This type of knowledge and these types of human beings are found in many traditional societies. A similar situation is present in societies where shamans possess a different and superior knowledge to that of ordinary persons. Where differences of thought and social structure exist, there is always the possibility for a tension among and between social divisions and/or modes of thought; these tensions at any moment may lead to the expression of novelty, thus causing changes in the society as a whole. In addition to internally induced changes in organic societies based on differences of thought or social divisions, change may also arise from certain pervasive rituals. The rite of 136

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initiation is especially conducive to the influx of new religious orientations and changes in the social order. Initiation is that ritual concerned with the creation of new human beings. It introduces the initiand into the human community through the religious experience of the world of sacred beings in mythic times. Often in initiation rituals, the candidate is made to experience a regression to a time before creation and then to ritually imitate the archetypal stages of the first creation. The ability to imitate, re-create, or renew the cosmos is a possibility present in every initiation ritual, and this experience may become the basis for social change within the society. The notion that there can be a new mode of being is the basis for radical change in this religious ritual. There is hardly any knowledge available on the expression of initiation leading to broad societal change in non-European societies prior to the coming of the Europeans; however, initiation cults of this kind in pre-Christian European cultures attest to their implications for changes in the societal order. The Greco-Oriental mystery religions posed an extreme tension between the public religious cults of the Hellenistic period in their expression of a deeper and more personal experience of sacred realities. The preponderance of the data regarding the relationship between popular religion and social change has come primarily from religious traditions defined by their geographical extension in time and space, where the religious tradition has become synonymous with a cultural tradition (e.g., Hinduism, Islam, Christianity). These traditions cover a wide variety of forms of social divisions and thought. As such, the tensions among and between them are many, and are much more intense. It is in such traditions that the distinctions between the organic structure of society and the elite ruling class is most pronounced. Exchanges of thought and experience between these two major structures of society may occur in ritualized forms such as the festival, carnival, and pilgrimage. These ritual forms allow for a lessening of the social divisions, and for the communication and integration of modes and styles of life that are not governed by the everyday power defined by the political and social differences between the two groups. Not only do such rituals permit the relaxation of social differences, they allow for the interchange of vital knowledge between the two groups. M. Bahktin shows how these particular ritual forms have led to the creation of specific literary genres among the elite and literate members of the culture, especially as this is related to the carnival and the festival. Literary critics have long attested to the effect of the ritual pilgrimage on the literary imagination. E. Le Roy Ladurie, in his work Carnival in Romans (1979), has shown how the carnival provided the setting for revolutionary activities of the peasants and townspeople. Daniel L. Overmyer has described a similar situation in the White Lotus sect and the school of Luo Qing (1443–1527) in China in the sixteenth century (Overmyer, 1976). Movements and actions of this kind from the popular strata of the society have been called “pre-political” by Eric J. Hobsbawm (1959). By this he means that the people have not found a specific form of political ideology in which to express their aspirations about the world. While this may be true in most cases, such aspirations are expressed in religious terms, and it is on this level of expression that unique dimensions of the meaning of popular religion emerge. In a manner reminiscent of the initiation structure of primitive societies, peasant and folk societies express a new self-consciousness of their solidarity through archaic symbols drawn from the genres of their lives and from a reinterpretation of the traditional religion. In many cases, symbols and teachings of the traditional religion are understood in a more literal manner, especially as these symbols and teachings express renewal and change, the end of one order 137

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and the beginning of a new one. Banditry, outlawry, and other actions that violate the social order are permitted in the revolutionary milieu, for they are sanctioned by what Victor Turner has called the liminal state, which forms the context of the revolutionary activity. This state is a regression to chaos on the level of society. Two major types of religious personages appear in popular religious movements of this kind: the prophetic figure and the outlaw. The prophet as a religious personage is not unique to the situation of popular religion. In most cases, figures of this sort are a part of the traditional teaching of the culture. From the stratum of popular religion, the meaning and role of the prophet is enhanced as the critical and condemnatory voice of the people against the abuses and injustices of the ruling and elite class. It is the prophet who relates the existential situation of the people to primordial religious depths forged from the life of the people and a new interpretation of the religious tradition. The outlaw is the heroic religious figure in popular revolutionary religious movements. The archetypal outlaw is the one whose banditry establishes justice within the society; the outlaw takes from the rich to give to the poor. Myths and legends of the outlaw, such as Robin Hood in England, Janosik in Poland, Corrientes in Andalusia, or Finn in Irish and Scottish tales, abound. The religious meaning of renewal of the world is a prominent theme of popular revolutionary movements. Within Western religious traditions, this theme is derivative of the religious symbol of the Messiah, whose coming announces the destruction of the old world or the radical renewal of the world. The world will be reversed—turned upside down—thus there will be a redress of all wrongs. These millennial expectations are not only goals of a movement; they pervade all the activities of its followers, allowing for a reordering of psychic structures as well as opening up the possibility of a new social religious order on the level of popular religion.

Global structures With increasing rapidity and intensity since the late fifteenth century, the Western world— through exploration, conquest, and military and economic exploitation—brought the nonEuropean world under its modes of communication through the structures of the modern industrial system. The Western systems of economics and communications were the bearer of Western forms of religious mythology and ideology, often characterized by millennial hopes. From this point of view, the West became the center of the world; the other areas, the peripheries. In other words, the West took over the role and function of the ruling elite, with other parts of the world playing the role of the older peasant or folk societies. There has been a religious response to this hegemony of the West in almost all parts of the world. In many cases, a new elite comes into being in the colonized countries, imitating the structures and forms of the Western center. This, in turn, creates a new form of the popular— the traditional religion of the indigenous culture becomes a popular religion and must reorder itself in relationship to the power and authority of the new, indigenous elite. The situation does not simply create a tension of opposition. The religious and ideological meaning of the West will inform, in varying degrees, the whole of the society, and the reordering of the indigenous tradition will represent an amalgam of the older indigenous forms and a reinterpreted Western religious tradition. New meanings of popular religion will emerge in this context. Making use 138

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of the communication systems of the Western colonizers, many of these movements will move beyond the provincial confines of their local culture in one of their modes. A notable example is the universal influence and acceptance of African American music in almost all parts of the world. Walter J. Hollenweger has argued in his work The Pentecostals (1972) that this form and style of religion represents a global phenomenon, an alternate and critical response binding together religious communities in all parts of the world.

Bibliography While religious institutions exist on the popular, folk, and peasant levels of culture, the meaning of religion is not centered in the segmented religious institution. Because of the nature of these kinds of societies, religion is more often diffused throughout the forms of societal life. Given the various forms and modes of popular, folk, and peasant societies and communities, it is too much to say that religion is identical with the totality of the community. However, almost all aspects of the communal life are capable of expressing the religious life. This bibliography thus covers those works dealing specifically with popular religion as well as the wider range of the forms of popular, folk, and peasant communities. History of the study of popular religion For interpretations of the philosophical impact of Giambattista Vico and J. G. Herder, Isaiah Berlin’s Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth, 1976) is the best introduction. See also The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). Commentaries on the writings of Vico are found in Donald Phillip Verene’s Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981) and in Vico: Selected Writings, translated and edited by Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For Herder, see Frank E. Manuel’s abridged edition of his Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Interpretive studies of Herder are H. B. Nisbet’s Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1970), G. A. Wells’s Herder and After (The Hague: Mouton, 1959), and Frederick M. Barnard’s J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969). For a short and illuminating essay on the impact of the Grimm brothers on the study of modern literature, see William Paton Ker’s Jacob Grimm, Publications of the Philological Society, 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915). A highly critical study of the Grimm brothers’ method and scholarship is found in John M. Ellis’s One Fairy Story Too Many (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). The best history of the study of folklore in Europe is Giuseppe Cocchiara’s The History of Folklore in Europe, translated by John N. McDaniel (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981). Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1978) is historically oriented but is more systematic than historical. Older works such as Stith Thompson’s The Folktale (New York: Dryden, 1946; reprint, 1979) and Alexander H. Krappe’s The Science of Folklore (London: Methuen, 1930; New York: Norton, 1964) are still valuable. They should be supplemented by Alan Dundes’s The Study of Folklore (Englewood 139

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Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965) and Richard Dorson’s Folklore and Folklife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Some of Max Weber’s works bear on certain problems of popular religion; see especially The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930); The Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon, 1963); The City, translated and edited by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958); and From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). From an earlier sociological school there are the works of Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Association, translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis (London: Routledge and Paul, 1955), and William Graham Sumner’s Folkways (Boston: Ginn, 1907). Much can still be learned from Ernst Troeltsch’s The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols., translated by Olive Wyon (New York: Macmillan, 1931; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), as well as from Joachim Wach’s Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944). Wach’s work remains the only sociology of religion written by a historian of religions and is thus valuable for that reason. Clifford Geertz’s informative essay “Religion as a Cultural System” can be found in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Banton (New York: Praeger, 1966), and in Reader in Comparative Religion, edited by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). Regional studies of popular religion Numerous publications have been devoted to popular, folk, and peasant religions around the world. Without attempting to cover all areas of the globe, I offer here a sampling of works that are valuable for their contribution to theory as well as for their descriptive detail. Africa African Folklore, edited by Richard M. Dorson (New York: Anchor, 1972), covers most of the genres of folklore in Africa. Two sections, “Traditional Narrative” and “Traditional Ritual,” are especially relevant to the notion of popular religion. Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1970) is a highly controversial work. She makes a strong argument for the literary nature of oral literature and finds many interpretations by anthropologists and folklorists wanting because they fail to appreciate the literary character of this form of literature. She devotes a chapter to religious poetry, but she confines the meaning of religion to a very conventional usage. Jan Vansina’s Oral Tradition, translated by H. M. Wright (Chicago: Aldine, 1965), is a thorough working out of the problems and methods involved in using oral testimony as historical data. The data for his work are the traditions of the Kuba. This work has bearing on the relationship between the modes of transmission and the nature and meaning of the knowledge that is transmitted. Japan Cornelis Ouwehand’s Namazu-e and Their Themes (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1964) is important for the light it sheds on the reception and alternate interpretations of events on the folkloric levels of Japanese society. Especially in the case of catastrophic event, on the folkloric levels there is the appearance of a kind of savior figure as a motif of the understanding of these events. 140

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Ichirō Hori’s Folk Religion in Japan, edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa and Alan L. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), is the best general study of the forms and structures of folk religion in Japan. Studies in Japanese Folklore, edited by Richard M. Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), covers the folk traditions of various classes of workers and is one of the best studies of the traditions of workers. Michael Czaja’s Gods of Myth and Stone (New York: Weatherhill, 1974) is a thorough study of the mythic and religious significance of certain forms of fertility symbols and rituals in Japan; it is informed by sophisticated methodology. Ancient Greece Of the many works in Greek religion, I mention only three, the classic study of N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, new ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), Martin P. Nilsson’s Greek Folk Religion (New York: Harper, 1961), and Jon D. Mikalson’s Athenian Popular Religion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). Europe Most studies of popular religion in Europe are to be valued as much for their detailed content as for their theoretical approach and methodological contributions. Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society, 2 vols., translated by L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), is a pioneer work in focusing on the entire range of the cultural reality of the feudal period. Two representative works dealing with the amalgam of religious traditions in Europe are Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960) and Gail Kligman’s Calus: Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process (New York: Pantheon, 1978), Power and Civility (New York: Pantheon, 1982), and The Court Society (New York: Pantheon, 1983), all translated by Edmund Jephcott, demonstrate the social behavior patterns and psychological attitudes that define the processes that create the class and value orientation of the ideology of civilization. Similar processes, but directed from a centralized governmental center, are described in Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). A detailed account of popular culture in France is found in Robert Muchembled’s Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750, translated by Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). One of the most prolific and brilliant scholars of popular religion and culture in France is the Annales historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. His works include Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: George Braziller, 1978); Carnival in Romans, translated by Mary Feeney (New York: George Braziller, 1979); and The Peasants of Languedoc, translated by John Day (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974). Religion and the People, 800–1700, edited by James Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979) is a good survey of some important themes in the study of popular European religion. One of the essays in this volume, Lionel Rothkrug’s “Popular Religion and Holy Shrines,” has been followed up in Rothkrug’s Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation (Waterloo, Ont.: Department of History, University of Waterloo, 1980). The importance of this work lies not only in the detailed description of such phenomena as the cult of Mary on the popular level but equally in the way it raises the issue of the forms of perception and knowledge that stem from certain modes of religious apprehension. Concrete historical detail is given to issues of 141

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the sociology of religious knowledge that are discussed more abstractly by Georges Gurvitch in The Social Frameworks of Knowledge, translated by Margaret A. Thompson and Kenneth A. Thompson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971). Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), an account of the cosmology of a sixteenth-century Italian miller, is fast becoming a classic of popular religion. Miriam Usher Chrisman’s Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480–1599 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), shows the impact of printing and literacy on the various cultural layers of this period. William A. Christian’s Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), examines the spirituality of several towns in New Castile. A. N. Galpern’s The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), undertakes a similar investigation of this area. The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, edited by Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), contains essays covering almost all aspects of late medieval and Renaissance religion. Of particular interest is part 2, “Lay Piety and the Cult of Youth.” James Obelkevich’s Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), deals with the churching of agrarian laborers by the Methodist Church. It goes far in showing the interaction of the lower classes and the middle and upper classes as this is related to the form and structure of the religious institution. There is, finally, a beautifully written book by the folklorist Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). In this study of a rural community in Ireland, the author demonstrates in his research the moral meaning of this kind of community. While there is no one chapter or section devoted to religion, the entire work reflects the religious orientation of a small Irish village. The closest one comes to an explicit meaning of religion is in part 8, “A Place on the Holy Land.” Modern America There are few general and systematic studies of American popular religion. For orientation to the issues of the meaning of “the people,” “culture,” “religion,” and the national state in the American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America, 2 vols. in 1, translated by George Lawrence and edited by J. P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), is still a very good orientation. H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Holt, 1929; New York: Meridian, 1957) is one of the few works that raises the issue of the relationship of popular lower-class-strata religion to the founding of religious institutions in the United States. W. Lloyd Warner’s The Living and the Dead (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959) is an anthropological interpretation of the major sacred and secular symbols in American society. The methodological point of view lends itself to the meaning of American religion from the perspective of popular religion. Sidney E. Mead’s The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper and Row, 1963) is a group of essays that touch upon the broader religious symbolic values of American cultural reality as the context for religious understanding. Catherine L. Albanese’s America: Religions and Religion (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981) is the first systematic attempt to deal with all the religious traditions in the United States in an integrated manner. As such it eschews the normativity of the mainline traditions as the basis for American religion, thus allowing for the meaning of popular religion to become an empirical and methodological ingredient in the study of American religion. See also Albanese’s Sons of 142

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the Fathers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976) for a discussion of the manner in which popular religion instituted and responded to the apotheosis of George Washington as the founding father of the nation. Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955) shows how denominational designations were used to define cultural modes of popular American religiosity. For a discussion of civil religion in the United States, see Robert N. Bellah’s “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21. Peter W. Williams’s Popular Religion in America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980) is excellent for data but lacks methodological sophistication. The latter two works contain the best bibliographical sources for the many forms of popular religion in the United States. China Daniel L. Overmyer’s Folk Buddhist Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) is one of the few thoroughgoing discussions of folk Buddhism in China and is distinguished by its methodological astuteness. Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, edited by David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), brings together several essays on popular culture of this period. Of special note are “Religion and Popular Culture: The Management of Moral Capital in the Romance of the Three Teachings” by Judith Berling, “Values in Chinese Sectarian Literature: Ming and Qing Baozhuan” by Daniel L. Overmyer, and “Language and Ideology in the Written Popularizations of the Sacred Edict” by Victor H. Mair. Theoretical studies Almost all of the works cited above discuss theoretical issues, but there are, in addition, a number of valuable works written from a purely theoretical orientation. Among them are three books by anthropologist Robert Redfield that have had great influence on the study of popular culture and religion: The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953), The Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), and Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). Two works by Milton Singer are also recommended; although devoted to the Hindu tradition, they have much broader implications for many of the issues of popular religion and its relationship to urbanism and the great traditions: Traditional India: Structure and Change (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1959) and When a Great Tradition Modernizes (New York: Praeger, 1972). Approaches to Popular Culture, edited by C.W.E. Bigsby (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976), is an illuminating group of essays that demonstrate the ambiguity and difficulty of clear definition of the meaning of popular culture. Of particular interest are “Popular Culture: A Sociological Approach” by Zev Barbu, “Oblique Approaches to the History of Popular Culture” by Peter Burke, and “The Politics of Popular Culture” by C.W.E. Bigsby. The political and ideological meaning of popular culture is also explored in Herbert J. Gans’s Popular Culture and High Culture (New York: Basic, 1974). Finally, for a group of essays discussing the meaning of social history in various historical contexts, see Reliving the Past, edited by Olivier Zunz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 143

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New Sources Berlinerblau, Jacques. “Max Weber’s Useful Ambiguities and the Problem of Defining ‘Popular Religion.’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 3 (September 2001): 605–626. Feuchtwang, Stephan. Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor. Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 2001. Marsh, Christopher W. Popular Religion in 16th-Century England. New York: St. Martin, 1998. Mikalson, Jon D. Honor Thy Gods: Popular Religion in Greek Tragedy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Samuel, Geoffrey, Hamish Gregor, and Elisabeth Stutchbury, eds. Tantra and Popular Religion in Tibet. New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture and Aditya Prakashan, 1994. Scribner, Robert, and Trevor Johnson, eds. Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400– 1800. New York: St. Martin, 1996. Sharot, Stephen. A Comparative Sociology of World Religions: Virtuosos, Priests, and Popular Religion. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Stahl, William A. “The Village Enlightenment in America: Popular Religion and Science in the Nineteenth Century.” Sociology of Religion 62, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 407–408.

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CHAPTER 12 TRANSCULTURATION AND RELIGION: AN OVERVIEW

The term transculturation was first used by the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz to describe the formation of Cuban culture from the coming together of indigenous, Spanish, and African populations. (Ortiz gave prominence to the term in two chapters of his book Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, 1947: chapter 2 is entitled “The Social Phenomenon of Transculturation and Its Importance,” and chapter 7 has the title, “The Transculturation of Tobacco.”) In his studies, Ortiz shows how these groups interrelated, adopted, and adapted themselves in modes of language, music, art, and agricultural production. The contemporary usage of the term owes its academic parlance to the work of Mary Louise Pratt, who, in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), following Ortiz, tells us that processes of this kind occur within “contact zones,” “zones where cultures meet, clash, and grapple.” These zones, according to Pratt, express the improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters in the modern period. The contact zones show that the encounters between colonizers and colonized, while characterized by the domination of the colonizers, did not simply define separateness but many complex interlocking relations. Within this overall context of domination, Pratt foregrounds the copresence, interaction, and improvisational dimensions of the contact zones (p. 7). Pratt and others who make use of the term use it primarily to describe the contact of Western culture with other cultures over the last five hundred years. These contacts have taken on several overlapping forms—conquest, domination, reciprocity, adaptation, amalgamation, and so on. The phenomenon of the contact of cultures is not peculiar to the modern period, however. Given the human capacity for locomotion, different and diverse groups of people have been “in contact” since human beings have been on earth; cultural contacts have taken place throughout the history of humankind. Prior to the Neolithic period, when humans domesticated animals and began to practice agriculture, small transhumance bands of humans were in constant movement over designated parts of their regions. With the beginnings of early citied existence in China, Mesopotamia, and then in regions all over the world, the sedentary and centered human mode of being gained prestige. Though cities represented the human mode as sedentary and centered, movement, travel, and meetings and encounters with human groups outside the city centers increased rather than diminished. Mary Helms’s Ulysses’ Sail (1988) examines the meaning of geographical distance and foreign places in premodern periods in several cultures of the world. Just as the vertical distance between the heavens and the earth expressed the spaces and loci for cosmological and theological speculation, the horizontal traversal of space revealed structures of power and knowledge. Long-distance spaces were traversed by long-distance travelers who were either themselves elite or represented the elite orders of society. Helms does not deny that trade went

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on through this travel but her emphasis is upon the creation of the symbolic spaces made through geographical travel. Various kinds of knowledge, including literacy, navigation, the forging of metals, and astronomy, attended those who made these journeys, thus enhancing their power and prestige. The symbolic power also accrued from the knowledge of “outside phenomena.” Thus, in Helms’s study, boundaries are equal or even more important than zones. Long-distance travel involved going outside boundaries and thus the knowledge gained was understood to have the power of transformation. Helms’s study “rest[s] upon the assumption that the significance of interchanges of people and material goods across geographical distances can better be understood if we know something of the qualities attributed to space and distance in various situations” (p. 10).

Pilgrimages One aspect of the kind of long-distance travel discussed by Mary Helms has taken the form of pilgrimages in various cultures throughout the world. While Helms has pointed to longdistance travelers as people who went beyond, even transgressed, boundaries in their search for knowledge and power, the pilgrimage, though still emphasizing travel, specifies a definite destination and purpose for the traveler. It is this form of long-distance travel that is the precursor of the long-distance travels of Western peoples beginning in the fifteenth century of the Common Era. The contact of Western cultures from the fifteenth century with the cultures of the world should be seen against the practice, rhetoric, and literature of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage has a long tradition in European cultures. By the fourteenth century one can discern two major meanings arising out of the pilgrimage: pilgrimage as a soteriological act or pilgrimage as an act of grace. The archetypal pilgrimage was the Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Jerusalem for the Christian defined the symbolic and geographical center of the world; this space was saturated with the life and meaning of the Christian savior and thus was the most powerful and prestigious place in all Christendom. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem defined a penitential journey, where believers undertook a kind of ascesis en route that prepared them for the receptive beneficence of being in the Holy Land. Following Helms, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and in like manner all other Christian pilgrimages, was based upon the vertical meaning of space, with the heaven above, the human as sinner in the middle, and the earth below. In the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the penitent was congruent with the fundamental orders of divine power. At this center, the penitent could experience the most potent meanings of grace and redemption. The pilgrim nevertheless had to travel through space to arrive at Jerusalem, and in so doing, the old specter described by Helms in the horizontal traversal of the earth came back into play. The change of places and spaces through the journey of the pilgrimage piqued the curiosity of the traveler. Christian Zacher in Curiosity and Pilgrimage (1976) describes the tension between the soteriological and liturgical meaning of pilgrimage and the meaning of the pilgrimage as a journey of curiosity. The growing emphasis with curiosity as a major aspect of pilgrimage came to constitute another and often separate motivation for undertaking a pilgrimage. Obviously, theological formulations were given for the liturgical meaning of pilgrimage; equal theological attention was paid to curiosity. It was pointed out that curiosity—wanting 146

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to know on one’s own—was the original source of human sin. It was human curiosity in the Garden of Eden that led to the first disobedience to God. Curiosity represented the human will to know apart from God’s command, and thus in this independent mode of knowing, humans transgressed the meaning and roles of proper knowledge. These summary statements by Zacher show the marked difference between the two modes: “the temptation to curiositas referred to any morally excessive and suspect interest in observing the world, seeking novel experience, or acquiring knowledge for its own sake” (p. 4). Regarding the liturgical meaning of pilgrimage, Zacher states the contrast: “As a form of religious worship, pilgrimage allowed men to journey through this present world visiting sacral landscapes as long as they kept their gaze permanently fixed on the invisible world beyond” (p. 4). Pilgrimage as a movement through space expressed an inner and outer process of spiritual meanings. Two major changes took place that began to transform the pilgrimage from a liturgical ritual of travel into a more purposeful and pragmatic endeavor. The first occurred when Pope Urban II in 1095 called for a pilgrimage from the armed knights of Christendom to free the Holy Land from the Muslims and by so doing reconstitute the meaning of the sacred center of Christendom. This action allowed armed knights to undertake a ritual act while still part of a military order (Elsner and Rubiés, 1999, p. 24). The other change took place when monks and priests from the eleventh century on began to undertake missionary movements to other lands to convert nonbelievers to the true faith of Christianity. Missions took on a more rationalistic ideological bent that led to rationalistic narratives. Missions and crusades were allied during the late medieval period and this pattern was adopted by explorers of Africa and the Atlantic in the fifteenth century. Though liturgical ritual pilgrimages were undertaken for soteriological purposes, it is clear that a great deal of curiosity was always expressed through them. This curiosity had to do with the empirical observations of other lands and habits. Victor Turner in his anthropological analysis of pilgrimage suggests that a kind of tacit curiosity is part of the very structure of pilgrimage itself. The language and style of the pilgrimage structure pervaded the travel narratives and discourses of Europeans commencing with the voyages of Columbus in the fifteenth century. The pilgrimage model from this time on entered into the travel stylistics and rhetoric of all long-distance travels of Europeans. Thus, from the earliest pilgrimage traditions of the church to the pilgrimage voyages of the Reformation Puritans to the New World, the pilgrimage model served as both umbrella and reservoir for the meanings of travel, discovery, conquest, and even scientific curiosity. Henri Baudet has noted that the languages of travel and discovery embodied a duality that found expression in two relations of Europeans to the non-Europeans they “discovered.” One is in the realm of political life—in the concrete relations with concrete nonEuropean countries, peoples and worlds … The other relationship is an expression of the domain of the imagination, of all sorts of images of non-western people not derived from observation, experience or perceptible reality, but from a psychological urge—an urge that creates its own reality which may be different from the realities of the first category. (1988, p. 6) Long-distance travel, the salvation of souls, and military missions coalesced into an amalgam of ideology and practice that became the basic structure of Western explorations, 147

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discoveries, and conquests over the last five hundred years. This ideological orientation led Daniel Defert to make the following remark concerning Western expansion: [The early Europeans were pilgrims]: prudentia peregrandi. They were taught languages as languae peregrinae, that is, not languages of a given territory but language necessary for the activity of travelling … This vast universe, known only to a few people, absent from the sacred texts and of which Antiquity knew nothing could have provided a field of endless invention and exaggeration. But the writer’s obligation to the truth was the result of a hierarchal network of competition and confrontation. No doubt the voyage of discovery should be situated historically between medieval crusades which it miniaturizes and the organization of a laboratory. (1982, p. 12)

Normative modes of Western time From the time of Constantine through the medieval period the West was dominated by a Christian conception of the temporal process. Following the missionary commandment from the Gospels to preach and baptize all humanity, notions of time and space were made to conform to this injunction. Geographical space and the temporal process were believed to aid and abet this dictum. While other temporal modes among other peoples and cultures were acknowledged, they were understood as stages of preparation for the reception of the true time of Christian faith and practice. It was this conception and understanding of time based on a biblical paradigm that accompanied both the Roman Catholic missionary orders and Protestants in their explorations, discoveries, and conquests in various parts of the globe at least until the sixteenth century. Following certain developments stemming from the Protestant Reformation and various technologies in the West, new notions regarding the temporal process emerged from the Western Enlightenment. Both had to do with the secularization of time. One conception offered a critique and alternative to the biblical structure of time from creation, to the passion and resurrection of Christ, to the last days; the other, while accepting the basic Christian ordering of time as formative and necessary for the West, nevertheless exorcised all the mystical and theological meanings from this temporal process, thus equating and identifying the time of Western culture with the meaning, structure, and order for a normative understanding of all human time. It is a generally accepted notion in the Western social sciences that the history of humankind can be divided into four stages of development: the hunting-gathering, the pastoral, the agricultural, and the commercial. These stages did not arise from empirical observation but as a result of a kind of conjectural history. Ronald L. Meek in Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (1976) traces this conjectural history as it emerges from several thinkers during the eighteenth century. One prominent element in the development of the theory grew from various theories put forth to account for America, the lands across the Atlantic. America was seen as the first stage of some kind of development of human culture. Meek tells us that the decisive influence in the general adoption of the four-stage theory of cultural evolution and development was the Scottish moral philosophers, the most influential being Adam Smith. In his lectures on jurisprudence in 1762 and 1763, Smith used the four-stage theory as the underpinning for 148

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explaining the nature and meaning of property within several types of societies. With the growing acceptance of the theory, several scholars and literary authors undertook research and wrote texts that presupposed these stages as the “natural” evolution of human cultures. For the popular cultures of Europe, the four-stage theory could be turned into the binary of primitive/ civilized. This theory and its shorthand became a convenient taxonomy for the classification of the cultures that Europeans encountered in various parts of the world. While several events, technologies, and ideas contributed to the notion of a purely secular temporal process, the sustained treatment of this conception can be found in eighteenthand nineteenth-century German philosophy, most especially in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and those influenced by him. Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (1964) traces the way in which these thinkers undertook a critical analysis of the meaning of time within Western culture. Their philosophies were not a simple rejection of a religious or Christian notion of time. While Christian notions of time and history were subjected to critique, they also attempted to show that for a certain period of Western history, Christianity was the bearer of what was objectively real in human time. This objective reality of history has in the modern period moved from the framework of the Christian faith and is now embodied within the secular structures of Western culture. While Hegel was the progenitor of these notions, Löwith points to Johann Friedrich Overbeck as the seminal thinker in the Hegelian school who summarized the theory of the ultimate reality of modern historical temporality. When Europeans made contact with non-European cultures in various parts of the world, they were armed with ideological cultural notions not simply regarding what was normative for them but, in addition, their norms were understood to be normative for all humankind. While they were more often than not bearers of superior military, navigational, and other forms of technology, it was their normative understandings of time and space that they desired to enforce upon those whom they met. The encounter with others must perforce create a “contact zone,” a zone of time/space that must be adjudicated regardless of the dominating power. Conquerors had to learn from the conquered if they were to maintain their authority and the conquered had to adjust, adapt, and respond to those who came from afar. It is clear that since the fifteenth century, the entire globe has become the site of hundreds of contact zones. These zones were the loci of new forms of language and knowledge, new understandings of the nature of human relations, and the creation and production of new forms of human community. These meanings have for the most part been ignored due to the manner in which the West, in an uncritical manner, absolutized its meaning of itself as the norm for all humankind.

Exchanges: Languages, rationalities, and materialities The model of pilgrimage was always caught within a tension between curiosity, on the one hand, and the liturgical ritual meaning of a soteriology, on the other. It is equally the case that much travel was motivated by desire for the form of knowledge that came from visits to distant places. The narratives, discourses, and practices hardly revealed the kind of contingency and descriptions that would open these journeys to a full portrayal of the wide variety of exchange relations that were attendant to these travels. 149

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Kathleen Biddick in The Typological Imaginary (2003) traces the origins of the stylization of the kind of “absoluteness” that became the favored narrative structure. In her research she shows that this stylization of the absoluteness of time and space can be traced back to what she calls the “Christian typological imagination.” This form of historical thinking grows out of the way in which Christianity worked out its relationship to the history of Judaism and the Jews. The history of the Jews was subsumed into the Christian canon through their creation of the Christian Old Testament. From this perspective, the history of the Jews ended or should have ended with the coming of Jesus Christ. Though the history of Judaism continued and continues to this day, because of the canonization of the Christian Bible and the ensuing cultural power of Christianity, the Jews and Judaism were destined to always be seen as a people and tradition who were relegated to a temporal past, Christian time becoming the normative meaning of temporality as history. As Biddick put it, “They believed that the Christian new time—as ‘this is now’—superseded a ‘that was then’ of Israel” (p. 1). She makes it clear that Western secular time took over this meaning of supercession from the Christians. Now given the fact that Western historical time in either its mundane or philosophical modes carries this sense, modes of time in transcultural contact zones are often seen as “unhistorical.” Biddick refers to this kind of time as temporalities—ones not about divisions between then and now, but about passages, gaps, intervals, in-betweenness. “These unhistorical temporalities that do not use time as a utilitarian resource to ground identity are temporalities that can never be one” (p. 2). Temporalities within contact zones are very complex. The time of the pre-Western contact is no longer normative, though dimensions of it may inhere within the language; inhabitants are forced to accept the official historical time of their conquerors, and those oppressed within these spaces must express a temporality of their own “lived time,” which is neither the precontact time of their traditional cultures nor the official time of the conquest. From the fifteenth century to the present several different Western empires have dominated various cultural areas of the world. While dominance and conquest were common traits, all empires did not undertake these modes of control in the same manner. Neither did all the cultures within the dominated areas respond or adapt in the same manner. The processes and dynamics of these interactions define the varying meanings from within the contact zones. These contact zones had an effect upon the literary productions of Europeans, indicating how the Europeans were responding and the impact of these non-European cultures upon European sensibilities. Peter Hulme in his Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (1986) shows how Europeans styled the encounters in literary form. For example, the encounters of Columbus and other Europeans in the New World are expressed in the dramas of Prospero and Caliban, John Smith and Pocahontas, Robinson Crusoe and Friday, and Inkle and Yarico; these dramas are attempts to express these encounters in ways that would fit within the orders of European cultures (p. xiii). Hulme makes it clear that there is much more going on than simply literary production. These literary forms, he says, should be seen as colonial discourses. By this he means, an ensemble of linguistically based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationship, an ensemble that could combine the most formulaic and bureaucratic of official documents … underlying colonial discourse, in other words, is the presumption that large parts of the non-European world were produced for Europe 150

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through a discourse that imbricated sets of questions and assumptions, methods, of procedure and analysis, and kinds of writing and imagery. (1986, p. 2) These literary productions taken on face value enabled Europeans to create stereotypical images of the non-Europeans encountered in colonial and imperial projects. These images enhanced the images of the exotic, the oriental, and the noble savage as products of the distances from the center of European metropolises. They fed into the stadial theories of the historical development of humankind, congealing this difference into cultural categories of the West. The conjectural theory of history that formed the base upon which the stadial theory was erected was correlated with a cultural theory of human intelligence. Thus, various stages were expressions of forms of intelligence. This led to notions of “how natives think,” or “prelogical mentality,” and the like. Such theoretical postulations were based upon the normative structure and meanings of Western thought. Seldom were these issues of thought asked from within the contact zones, where oppressive administrative colonial structures, Europeans, and nonEuropeans carried on their lives. Thus, cultural, literary, philosophical, and scientific languages and discourses employing this supercessionary and absolute language of temporality normalized a Western understanding of the nature of the encounters with non-Western peoples. Interwoven and concealed within these linguistic productions were the actual and authentic relationships that were taking place in the contact zones. Two instances of the meaning of contact as it relates to the exchange of material products can be seen in the events and discourses surrounding the meaning of fetish and fetishism and the phenomena referred to as cargo cults. The fetish and fetishism became popular in European discourses of the eighteenth century as a definition of the earliest form of religion. This definition and its usage was part and parcel of a stadial evolutionary variation of supercessionary history. The etymological origin of the word fetish is the Portuguese feitiço, which means “manufactured” or “fabricated.” William Pietz, who has recently undertaken the most extensive research into the history of this term and its various usages in modern times, traces its beginning with the Portuguese to its usage by the Dutchmen Pieter de Marees and Willem Bosman through a succession of other European writers, finally appearing in the work of the first historian of religions, Friedrich Max Müller. It later becomes an important term in the writings on political economy of Karl Marx and in the theories of sexuality of Sigmund Freud. Given such a wide range of significations and connotations, Pietz notes that, fetish has never been a component in a discursive formation. Fetish rather describes not societies, institutions, or cultures but cross-cultural spaces. From this standpoint, the fetish must be viewed as proper to no historical field other than that of the history of the word itself, and to no discrete society or culture, but to a cross-cultural situation formed by the on-going encounter of value codes of radically different social orders. (1985, p. 11) At one level the fetish is about a new conception of matter and materiality as these notions undergo transformations within the Atlantic world of exchanges and discourses. While the religious world of Christianity was predicated upon the creation of all matter by God, a form of matter was necessary in the Atlantic that carried only an exchange and not an inherent 151

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value. The notion of the fetish, as originating in the Atlantic encounters with radically different cultural notions of the value of matter, developed into the language of the fetish, which performed the dual roles of hiding the true and authentic exchanges that took place in the Atlantic encounters, and creating a form of matter that would not bear the weight of any human meaning of tradition or origination. The fetish in Pietz’s description fits perfectly the kind of significations that arise from transcultural contact zones. Another phenomenon of such spaces is the cargo cult. The term cargo cult was coined in 1923 in The Vailala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf Division, a report by government anthropologist Francis Edgar Williams, to describe what he considered to be strange ritual phenomena among the population in Papua New Guinea. These rituals involved an interpretation of matter from within the contact zone. Although Westerners brought a wide variety of material products to Melanesia during the colonial period, their notion of matter was under the sign of inanimate products whose value lay only in their potential for exchange. The natives of Papua New Guinea understood matter and exchange in very different ways. In addition, Westerners were accompanied by Christian missionaries, who preached a gospel of the inherent value of each human soul as the basis for salvation. The natives of this area quickly perceived that though Christians preached a message of the salvation of human souls, they acted in terms of a soteriology based upon the accumulation and distribution of material goods. From this perspective they were able to understand the strange and almost magical characteristics between money as a mode of exchange, the inanimate nature of material products, and the hidden relationship obtaining between these items. Their response to this conundrum was in the form of rituals involving Western made products, the cargo, and millenarian hopes. All forms of human expression, including language, took on different forms within the contact zones. There were several languages: the language of the official colonizing culture, the original or indigenous languages, and languages that were mixtures of the official and indigenous languages. These mixed, creole, or pidgin languages were not simply derivatives from the mixture but equally a system of communication that was uniquely suited to render adequately the experiences of those who lived outside and underneath the official legitimated orders of officialdom. Exchanges were not limited to languages, products, and services; there were exchanges of sexualities as well. Exchanges of sexualities produced offspring of the mixtures in the contact zones. Every situation of contact included classes of persons resulting from the union of Westerners and non-Westerners. These “illegitimate” offspring became in turn complex aspects of the communication systems of the other exchanges between dimensions of work, products, and sexualities. For example, Magali Carrera (2003) has demonstrated how the complex mixtures of Spaniards, Indians, and Africans in Mexico led to taxonomies of cultural valuation that were expressed and normalized in a genre of casta paintings. Exchanges were not limited to human expressions; in the United States human beings as enslaved persons were legally defined as chattel and exchanged as property. This mode of exchange created almost imponderable issues regarding definitions and meanings of human freedom in a democratic society. One can see how various forms of fetishism enter into and serve to hide the true situation, often making it impossible for the official linguistic traditions to deal with the meanings and expressions that lie hidden within their legal and civil pronouncements. 152

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Karen Fields’s Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (1985) shows in a precise manner “how natives think.” The “natives” were very capable of not only “living in,” but also “thinking about” and reflecting upon their situation. As over against an anthropological wisdom that Africans had no objective knowledge of the forces determining their behavior, she shows that they not only possessed such knowledge but were capable of making creative, critical, and intelligent use of it. Her book also enables us to see that within the contact zone the cultural categories of the West are taken up and reinterpreted in ways that give them a freshness and novelty. In the search and desire for another source of power that is no longer derivative of traditional resources, nor simply acquiescent to colonial authorities, the native in question, Shadrack, saw the God of the Watch Tower Society as the foundation for a critical and revolutionary meaning within the contact zone. Another example of reason and intelligence from the contact zone can be seen in Margaret J. Wiener’s Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (1995), which demonstrates the persistence of the meaning of the “other” and the invisible world of value and orientation in the midst of contemporary life. She also makes clear that Klungkung, the Balinese kingdom, did not anticipate the entrance into Western civilization as a heralded event. John D. Kelly (1991) studied the meaning of virtue as a value within the structures of imported indentured workers from India on the island of Fiji in the early part of the twentieth century. His discussion raises issues regarding the nature of virtue when one wishes to be modern and at the same time appreciates the authentic limits placed upon one by tradition. These issues bear upon the nature of work, sexuality, kinship systems, and anti-colonialist organization and agitation. This study from within a contact zone adds much to the range of the meaning of virtue. Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), following a neo-Marxist methodology, is able to show a new valorization of the meaning of the devil from within the contexts of several contact zones in South America. Fernando Cervantes’s The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (1994) shows how this same figure of the devil brought by the Spanish missionaries developed in opposition, on the one hand, and in parallel, on the other hand, to the understandings of the Aztecs. Cervantes’s thorough study lays the grounds for a mature notion of evil emerging from the realities of the contact zone. One might identify transculturation and contact zones as corollaries of a creole or a creolization process. The term creole, from the Spanish criollo, was initially used to identify persons born in the Americas but who claimed white European ancestry. From this point of view, all of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States could be called creoles. The term took on other connotations from within the situations of transculturation and the many “contact zones” throughout the world. More often than not, it now refers to the processes and dynamics of the fluid improvisational meanings of cultures that express the survival, critique, and creativity of those who occupy these situations and sites. The Martinican intellectual Edouard Glissant has proposed the term creolization to describe a more general philosophical stance of transculturation and contact zones. Such a stance undertakes a critique of the official histories and the implicit notions of time and space embedded within them. Glissant calls for a “creolization process” of relationship and relativity. In the introduction to Glissant’s Caribbean Discourses, J. Michael Dash characterizes one of his positions: “But the world can no longer be shaped into a system. Too many Others and 153

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Elsewheres disturb the placid surface … Glissant is a natural deconstructionist who celebrates latency, opacity, infinite metamorphosis” (Glissant, 1989, p. xii). These works and several others of this genre are the result of serious questions asked from within contact zones rather than from the ideologically normative positions of Western categories. While the term globalization is used to refer to the various aspects of a worldwide capitalistic market-consumer system, the term might equally specify the myriad contact zones throughout the world where Western cultures and non-Western cultures have encountered each other. In these in-between spaces inhabited by both, exchanges, violent and reciprocal, have taken place. From places such as these a more authentic sense of humankind’s place in the world might be forged.

Bibliography In On the Social Phenomenon of “Transculturation” and its Importance in Cuba, Fernando Ortiz opened the door to the significance of cultural contact through his studies of the formation of the Afro-Cuban dimensions of Cuban culture. His publication, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, translated from the Spanish by Harriet de Onis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947) marks the first scholarly usage of the term “transculturation.” The contemporary study of cultural contact within an orientation of transculturation as both a description and critique of colonialism and imperialism was initiated by Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Pratt’s work served as a catalyst for other works published before and subsequent to her work, including Fredi Chiapelli, ed., First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Henri Baudet’s Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, translated by Elizabeth Wentholt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965; reprints, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976, and Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), shows how travel leads to images of non-European peoples, even though these images are not based upon observation or perceptions. See also Nicholas Thomas’s Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Charles H. Long devoted a section of his Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, 2d ed. (Aurora, CO: Davies, 1995), to an understanding of cultural contact and religion. Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), extends the meaning of transculturation to the nature and meaning of objects. The display and meaning that objects take in this process were enhanced by the “world fairs” that became international exhibits for exotic and esoteric objects. Two important works discuss this aspect, Paul Greenhalgh’s Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World Pairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988), and John Burris’s Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions, 1851–1893 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). The impact of studies of cultural contact on the discipline of anthropology can be seen in Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). 154

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The literature on travel as pilgrimage is extensive. Mary Helms’s study of travel in Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) adds a new dimension to the meaning of travel and the nature and quality of knowledge. Victor Turner’s analysis of Christian pilgrimage in Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978) specifies the ritual elements and processes within the structure of Christian pilgrimages. For discussion of medieval European pilgrimages, see Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Lionel Rothkrug’s several studies include “Popular Religion and Holy Shrines: Their Influence on the Origins of the German Reformation and Their Role in German Cultural Development,” in Religion and the People, 800–1700, edited by Jim Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); and Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation (Waterloo, Ont.: Department of History, University of Waterloo, 1980). Two edited works on pilgrimage contain excellent articles with extensive bibliographies: Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, edited by Stuart B. Schwartz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, edited by Jaś Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés (London: Reaktion, 1999)—see in particular Elsner and Rubiés’s introduction: “Travel and the Problem of Modernity.” Daniel Defert’s “The Collection of the World: Accounts of Voyages from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” Dialectical Anthropology 7, no. 1 (September 1982): 11–20, presages the world fairs mentioned above in the works of Greenhalgh and Burris. For a discussion of the tension in liturgical time that ensued in medieval societies under the impact of technology and trade, see Harald Kleinschmidt, Understanding the Middle Ages: The Transformations of Ideas and Attitudes in the Medieval World (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2000). Norbert Elias’s Time: An Essay, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), is a good discussion of social time; it should be read along with Fabian’s work, cited above. Kathleen Biddick’s The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) demonstrates how medieval Christian time, later inherited by secular time, was based upon the placement of Jews and Judaism in time and space; this work should be seen as a counter to the kind of conjectural history that produced a stadial theory of cultural development as discussed in Ronald L. Meek’s Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). The relationship of time, travel, and literary images is explored in Peter Hulme’s Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986; reprint, 1992). The philosophical justification and amalgam of Christian time with secular time is the task of Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, translated by David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964; reprint, 1991).One of the earliest reports of a contact site in a transcultural situation is F. E. William’s classic statement in The Vailala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf Division (Port Moresby: E. G. Baker, 1923). This report, which led to the notion of “cargo cults,” was followed by several works, the most notable being Peter Lawrence’s Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District, New Guinea (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1964) and the following works by Kenelm O. Burridge: Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium (London: Methuen, 1960; reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton 155

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University Press, 1995) and Tangu Traditions: A Study of the Way of Life, Mythology, and Developing Experience of a New Guinea People (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). A comprehensive study of this area is found in G. W. Trompf, Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Examples of historical empirical studies of contact zones include: for Africa, Karen E. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); for Fiji, John D. Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and for Bali, Margaret J. Wiener, Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), which shows in stark relief how religious powers and resources of an “invisible world” emerge and come to play decisive roles in the Dutch conquest of Bali. Magali Carrera’s Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003) demonstrates not only how the complex issue of race, class, and gender were managed but equally how they were normalized in domestic portraiture in the Mexican colonial family. John Cowley’s Carnival, Canboulay, and Calypso: Traditions in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) describes how the carnival tradition becomes the container, expression, and critique of an ongoing tradition in the Caribbean. Finally, Fernando Cervantes’s The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) and Michael Taussig’s, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980) present, on the one hand, theological ramifications of this Christian symbol in a contact zone, and, on the other, the popular manifestations of this meaning as related to work and the economic system. No discussion of transculturation or contacts zones can proceed very far without dealing with the issue of the fetish or what is implied in the modern discourse about fetishism. The most profound researches on the fetish are those of William Pietz, whose essays include: “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5–18; “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 23–41; and “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (1988): 105–124. The importance of Pietz’s research is shown by the fact that it is made use of by Biddick (cited above) and constitutes a significant part of the discussion of another important text dealing with issues related to contact zones, Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995). Almost all of the above works state explicitly or imply theoretical or methodological positions. However, a few texts directly set forth theoretical and methodological positions based upon transculturation and the contact zones. These include Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Another text containing an unique interpretation and extension of thought is Vinay Lal’s Dissenting Knowledges, Open Futures: The Multiple Selves and Strange Destinations of Ashis Nandy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, translated by J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), comes from a completely different experience of the contact zone, and expresses many of the same meanings and styles as does Nandy.

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CHAPTER 13 THE RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF THE SITUATION OF CULTURAL CONTACT

Introduction The theoretical and methodological bases for our discussion may be seen in two formulations of the meaning of religious experience. First of all, religious experience is a primordial experiencing of that which is considered ultimate in existence. Since the brilliant formulation of Rudolf Otto of religious experience as mysterium tremendum et fascinosum or Joachim Wach’s notion of religious experience as the experience of ultimate reality, students of religion have understood religion, or more precisely, the holy, the sacred, as the basic element in the constitution of human consciousness and human community.1 Second, implied in this notion of religious experience is that of human orientation—the meaning human communities give to the particular stances they have assumed in their several worlds. Orientation refers to the actual situation of the particular stance and the reflections and imaginations attendant to it.2 As a biological species human beings are equipped with the capacity for internally motivated movement. This self-evident observation looms large in any discussion of human cultures prior to the beginnings of the citied traditions. The cultures of the Paleolithic and Early Neolithic were cultures of transhumance. Human beings in these cultures came to a knowledge of themselves and their world by passing through and over the space of the earth. The erect stance characteristic of human equilibrium must be seen against the background of the ever present spaces of the earth, sky, topographies, and flora and fauna over which the human passes. But this externality was simultaneously an internality. Human consciousness emerges as the right configurations and approximations of the actual and potential meaning of this stance. The world as a cosmos, a home and receptacle for the human mode of being, is based upon this perception of space and the human transversal through it. The sacred as orientation and as those forms perceived from this orientation is defined in this movement. As a species we have maintained this mode of being for most of our existence on this planet, and though it is not given the status and prestige in citied traditions that it retains in hunting and gathering societies, it remains a residual value even within the citied traditions of modernity. The citied traditions, beginning during the Upper Neolithic in the Fertile Crescent represent a new human venture. While previous human cultures moved across the land and through space, these newer cultures introduced the meaning of the human as sedentary being—as situated in a specific space—a center defining the human condition. This centeredness as location and orientation was not absolutely new; it was known and practiced in the cultures of transhumance, but in these later cultures, the centers change quickly; they are flexible, changing with the movement of the community and thus they never retained the absoluteness of power as eternal and inflexible.

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Early prehistorians such as V. Gordon Childe, and some contemporary Marxists, contend that the beginning of these earliest citied traditions are the results of new economic and material conditions. More detailed analyses by Robert McCormick Adams, Thorkild Jacobsen, Paul Wheatley, Mircea Eliade, and Stanley J. Tambiah present an alternative and more plausible view of this beginning.3 Allow me to summarize. A particular space manifests itself in some extraordinary manner—this manifestation is sacred. The sacred is krataphonic; it is saturated with power. Instead of becoming a limited and specific flexible center, this center becomes the organizing principle for all habitable space. As such, this particular space is venerated by the community as a ceremonial center. As ceremonial center it is the model for all habitable space and the bases for the effective use of space as human habitation. All early cities are built on the site of a ceremonial center or are defined on the model of a ceremonial center. Power radiates out from the center in a centrifugal manner and returns to the center centripetally. The center is at the same time the locus for an axis between the earth and the sky. As a matter of fact, the center may be seen as a model of the astro-cosmic powers that establishes its legitimacy, authenticity, and coherence. This is the model for the citied traditions in the Ancient Near East, Asia, Africa, and Mesoamerica. It represents at once the sacred valorization and domestication of space as an effective human habitat. The economic, commercial, political, military, and technological expressions of the citied traditions are modes of domestication of this space rather than its cause. Patterns of citied traditions of this kind persisted in all traditions of the ancient world; the new modern city is either built upon the residual structures of this pattern or is the extrapolation of one of the functions of its domestication, whether economic, technological, or military. The kind of cultural contact I shall be discussing is an aspect of this kind of sacred ideology of the conquest and domestication of space and spaces. For the greater part of history, cultural contact has come about as a result of the centrifugal/centripetal forces of the center over ever wider spatial areas thereby bringing these spaces under the reign of the center and its ideology, assuring them a place in the legitimate and authentic structure of that reality designated and symbolized as this center. This is the broader contextual structure for my remarks. I shall in the main explore the religious situation defined, on the one hand, by those who reside in the center, and on the other, by those who form the peripheries of this center in that long series of cultural contacts in the world since the European discovery of the New World in 1492.

First impressions: Inner and outer pilgrimages The voyages of exploration commencing with Christopher Columbus are understood as continuing the older religious traditions of the religious pilgrimage.4 The pilgrimage is that peregrinative ritual which retains the older meaning of the human as a being who moves across space. But the pilgrimage is a product of the citied tradition. The ceremonial center, or a replica of it, is always presupposed in a pilgrimage ritual. After accomplishing the goal of the pilgrimage, the pilgrim must return to the original source of stability, the city of departure. The pilgrimage in one form or another is present in all periods of the Western Christian tradition. This tradition of pilgrimage expresses a tension between two religious attitudes contained 158

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within the structure of the pilgrimage—stability and curiosity. In the early centuries of the Christian church, many believers, following the imitation of Christ, as the homeless one, took up a life of peripatetic existence, residing in deserts, wandering with no predetermined itinerary or goal. They were condemned by the orthodox because of their instability. The normative pilgrimage for the orthodox was represented by the Jerusalem pilgrimage. Leaving home offered the pilgrim the chance to realize the spiritual value of forsaking the familiar world for an alien environment; but the act of pilgrimage also presumed a return home where each Christian must live and work—this return symbolized the restoration of stability and order. Curiosity, wandering in space or wandering in mind, was held to be a sin by the Christian community well into the Middle Ages. However, in spite of its sinful temptation, pilgrims were enticed and distracted by wondrous sights along the way, intensifying the tension between stability and curiosity in the act of pilgrimage. Columbus understood his voyages as pilgrimages, giving minute detail to the algae on the waves as indications of shallow water and the proximity of land, the constellations in the sky as signs of positions, scars on the Indians as signs of bellicose relations with neighboring tribes, gold rings as signs of gold mines. What he notices in the world he travels through are landmarks and these marks are placed within the context of an inner piety and faith recorded in his spiritual diaries combining the inner and outer pilgrimages in a manner reminiscent of stations of the cross. The tension exemplified in the diaries of the great admiral soon break down and the pilgrimage as a voyage of discovery—an exercise of curiosity became the rule.5 From the voyages of Columbus through the nineteenth century, European hegemony was established through economic, technological, military, and to a certain extent, religiously, throughout the world. This was, in the words of Immanuel Wallerstein, the beginnings of the modern worldsystem.6 This cultural contact had a tragic effect upon all non-European cultures but that is a history that need not be repeated at this juncture. These voyages of discovery, especially the discovery of the New World (referred to by Spaniards as the Other World), had an impact of equal intensity upon Europe especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There were the obviously economic, military, and political meanings of these discoveries but the intellectual impact was even more intense and far-ranging, and this impact is all too often not taken into account. Its discovery (the New World) had important intellectual consequences, in that it brought Europeans into contact with new lands and peoples and in so doing challenged a number of traditional European assumptions about geography, theology, history, and the nature of man.7 Let me place this intellectual impact within the structure of the pilgrimage—the inner pilgrimage of curiosity occasioned by the discovery of worlds that appeared new and strange to the European. I shall have in mind those processes that have gone into the “making of the European mind,” under the impact of these discoveries. It is the first impression of this New World that opens up a new inner space alongside those reorientations characterized by the terms “Reformation” and “Renaissance.” It is here that religion as orientation in time and space, externally and internally, forms a locus. The New World was intellectually and economically a 159

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matter of ultimate concern. This new locus of religiosity expresses a dynamic; like the pilgrim it expressed mobility and this movement forms the questions before the formal questions of a scientific and cultural inquiry regarding the New World and the new peoples confronted in the cultural contact. Stephen Greenblatt in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning has given us a brilliant study of the power of the New World on the literary imagination of six sixteenth-century English figures.8 They are Thomas More, William Tyndale, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. All of these men produced classics of English literature. But they were not simply writers, they were men of affairs, often holding high civil, military, and religious responsibilities. Their literary productions help to define the new space of religious and cultural consciousness in much the same manner as the works of Locke, Hobbes, or Montaigne did in the area of political and moral philosophy. In their personal lives and in their writings, they represent in dramatic form the ways in which the New World brought about a new orientation of European consciousness. In their “self-fashioning” we observe the impact of the Other World upon those “who stayed at home to travel.” Greenblatt offers the following general characteristics for all of them: All of these talented middle-class men moved out of a narrowly circumscribed social sphere into a realm that brought them in close contact with the powerful and the great. All were in a position as well … to know with some intimacy those with no power, status, or education at all … The six writers here then are all displaced in significant ways from a stable, inherited social world, and they all manifest in powerful and influential form aspects of Renaissance self-fashioning.9 Greenblatt in addition has noted ten meanings that are common to all of them. Five of these must suffice at this point: 1. None of the figures inherits a title, an ancient family tradition, or hierarchical status that might have rooted personal identity in the identity of a clan or class; 2. Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, and hostile. The threatening Other—heretic, savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist— must be discovered or invented in order to be attached and destroyed; 3. The alien is perceived by the authority either as that which is unformed or chaotic (the absence of order). Since accounts of the former tend inevitably to organize and thematize it, the chaotic constantly slides into the demonic and consequently the alien is always constructed as a distorted image of authority; 4. Self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in language; and 5. The power generated to attack the alien in the name of authority is produced in excess and threatens that which it sets out to defend. Hence self-fashioning always involves some experience of threat, some effacement or undermining, some loss of self. Selffashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien, that which is produced in this encounter partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, and hence any achieved identity always contains within itself the sign of its own subversion or loss. 160

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For the purposes of this essay, I will limit myself to examining two examples from the enormous corpus of these literary giants. I call your attention, first, to the destruction of the Bower of Bliss in book 2, canto 12 of Spenser’s Faerie Queen.10 The reader must recall that after a perilous voyage, Guyon the Knight of Temperance, arrives with his companion, the old man Palmer, at the realm of the beautiful and dangerous witch, Acrasia. After quelling the threats of her guards, they enter the witch’s exquisite bower, where aided by Palmer’s counsel, Guyon resists a series of sensual temptations. Guyon then systematically destroys the Bower and leads the tightly bound Acrasia away. Greenblatt suggests that the structure of the Faerie Queen is derivative from the descriptions, voyages, and pilgrimages of explorers of the New World. Even Spenser refers to the Bower of Bliss as Eden itself in a manner in which Columbus had already stated in 1498, “I am completely persuaded in my own mind that the Terrestrial Paradise is in the place that I described.” Similarly, Sir Walter Raleigh in his description of the Orinocco had suggested the same Edenic vision, “On both sides of the river, we passed the most beautiful country that mine eyes had ever beheld,” and Peter Martyr in his collection of exploration accounts had recorded, “Surely, I marvel not at the gold and precious stones, but wonder with astonishment with what industry and laborious art the curious workmanship.” But this seductive beauty of the New World like that of the Bower of Bliss is dangerous. The danger is not present in things that are described as repugnant to the perceiver; the danger lies precisely in the fulsome attractive and wonderful beauty of the New World and the Bower. The Edenic quality of the New World is the backdrop and screen onto which the Europeans projected their fantasies of evil in the New World. The Indians are often portrayed as beasts without intelligence; they are absolutely indiscriminate in their sexual relations, they are cannibalistic—eating their children and relatives. They lack discipline and often make wretched slaves and if left to their own devices they wander up and down and return to their old ways. It is indeed ironic that the Indians are accused of wandering by a class of people and a culture that has institutionalized, spiritualized, and commercialized the pilgrimage of curiosity. Even as acute an observer as Alexis de Tocqueville is under the sway of the Bower of Bliss notion as late as the early part of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville in Democracy in America repeats the story in this fashion: When the Europeans landed on the shores of the West Indies, and later of South America, they thought themselves transported to the fabled lands of the poets. The seas sparkled with the fires of the tropics; for the first time the extraordinary transparency of the water disclosed the ocean’s depths to the navigators. Here and there little scented islands float like baskets of flowers on the calm sea. Everything seen in these enchanted islands seems devised to meet man’s needs or serve his pleasure. Most of the trees were loaded with edible fruit while those which were least useful to man delighted him by the brilliance of their varied colors. In the groves of fragrant lemon trees, wild figs, round-leafed myrtles, acacias, and all interlaced with flowering lianas, a multitude of birds unknown to Europe displayed their azure and purple feathers and mingled the concert of their song with the harmony of a world teeming with vivid life. Death lay concealed beneath this brilliant cloak, but it was not noticed then, and, moreover, there prevailed in the air of these climates some enervating influence which made men think only of the present, careless of the future.11 161

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The Bower of Bliss in the Faerie Queen is destroyed not because it represented sensuality and sexuality for there is a legitimate place in the drama for these meanings in the Temple of Venus. The Bower of Bliss is destroyed because it is immoderate, excessive, extraordinary, and within the structure of the drama it does not enhance the fashioning and crafting of a gentleman. In contrast, the heroes and characters of Christopher Marlowe’s dramas are given to excess and immoderation.12 They are also homeless, but not in imitation of the homelessness of Christ; their homelessness is the sign not of humility and love, but of lostness. Indeed, Greenblatt points to the dramatic problem of representing this sense of the ever-moving, being nowhereness—this grim Utopia, on a stage. In Tamburlaine, Marlowe attempts to efface all differences and to insist upon the essential meaninglessness of theatrical space. Space has lost qualitative meaning. It is the space of the new cartography, the map that is simply the abstract grid upon which one locates where one is and where one wants to go. This mapping expresses conquest and it is the organ of wants never finished and of an infinite homelessness. Now precisely because Marlowe’s plays are deployed in this manner his characters do violence as a means of marking boundaries, effecting transformations, and signaling closures. The mark of one’s being is the ability to carry out a decisive and aggressive event upon this abstract grid of the world. His characters give one the sense that they are attempting to use up, to fully consume all experience—their appetite is insatiable. Marlowe wrote in the period in which Europeans embarked on the extraordinary career of consumption and conquest; one intellectual model after another of the conquest was seized, squeezed dry, and discarded along with the exhaustion of the world’s resources. The temporal processes created in this mode were understood in quantitative terms—time and space could be exhausted. We use and kill time, and this is the sense dramatically set forth in Marlowe. What I have attempted above through my summary of Professor Greenblatt is to portray the making of the modern “myth” of the European and European exploration of the new cultures and other worlds of the non-Europeans since 1492. I am using the term “myth” in that sense taught us by Mircea Eliade—it is a true story. Likewise, I include those elements of the myth which are anonymous and autonomous. It may be objected that the anonymity and autonomy of the myth have been lost or at least compromised since it is portrayed and fashioned by specific persons. My rejoinder is that the persons are doing exactly that—giving dramatic meaning to forces, desires, and impulses that are realities for their age and that in various ways the explorers and their explorations are at one and the same time the raw materials for the myths and then they are turned around and make use of the myth as the interpretative screen for their observations. The objective and empirical referent of the myth is the New World—first in the Americas, later in the South Seas. But the New World is at the same time an Other World. Greenblatt notes the element of Otherness in the myth of self-fashioning when he pointed out that all of the dramatists had to achieve an identity in relation to a threatening Other—an other that had to be invented or discovered in order to be attached and destroyed. Furthermore, this Other is perceived as unformed and chaotic or the parody of order. It is interesting to note in this connection that Edmundo O’Gorman, arguing on strictly historical and logical grounds, has put forth the notion that America was an invention and not a discovery of the Europeans. In like manner, the historian, John H. Parry commented that “Columbus did not discover a new world; he established contact between two worlds, both very old.”13 The myth of the New World obscured the reality of the contact. The “true story” of the contact has yet to be told. For some time, we have known the facts of this contact. We know, for example, that the Europeans in North America were absolutely dependent on Indian culture 162

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for several generations after their arrival. We know that North America was not a “virgin land.” What is more important the early European settlers knew it! In the Middle Colonies of North America, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the contact between the two cultures took on the normal ambiguities attendant to such human contacts. The English settlers of the early generations saw their role in America as tutelary. The Indians were not simply their brethren, they were their “younger brethren.” Karen Kupperman makes much of this distinction when she analyzed the meaning of this rhetoric among the English. … younger brethren, like women were dependent in English society of this period. After the death of the father, younger brothers in gentry families owed obedience to the inheriting older brother similar to the obedience they had shown their father. If younger brothers did not show proper respect and obedience to the oldest brother he could effectively cut them off from marriage and career opportunities … The superior brother knew what was best for the dependent.14 While such notions may have made sense to the English and may have had the ring of theological soundness about them, they obviously made no sense at all to the Indians and were violently resisted when they became the cornerstone of English colonial policy. In the day-to-day working out of the relationship with the inhabitants of these new lands, the Europeans came to a more realistic assessment of the relationship. Each colony learned in its own way that the Indian would not submit to vassalage. The Indians were not willing to forsake their cultures for “civilization.” Nor was English technology an attraction; in many instances Indian technology and know-how rivaled or was superior to that of the English. The Indians were willing, however, to share and in several instances, for longer or shorter periods, this sharing took place, but the cultural language for this notion of sharing with the Indian never came into being. The Indian was in all the reigning cultural languages ultimately taken as a race apart and different from the European. Once the differences between two groups came to be seen as important and continuing, it is a short step to seeing the different life of the Indian as less valuable than the European way of life and attributing the differences to qualities inherent in each group. When African slaves were imported to North America in the seventeenth century the idea of categorizing purely on the basis of race applied to both African and Indian alike. This was not simply a transfer of negative categorizations; the notions of race became the theater of the entire European myth of conquest while the color of the Indian assured his admission to the theater on the basis of race. The myth of the Indian and the African as inferior human beings—lazy, savage, heathen, wild, noble, and ignoble—the crass and vulgar side of the dramatic myths of the Elizabethans takes on popular expression only after the real issue of domination had been decided, at a time when the native peoples of the Americas could no longer hamper European exploration and exploitation. By this time, the language of pilgrimage had imperceptibly changed into the notion of progress; the meaning of novelty and otherness into the calculus of color. The economic and military conquest was accomplished but another conquest more subtle and having even longer lasting effects had taken place. This was the linguistic conquest. Now obviously there was an imposition of empirical European languages in areas conquered by them but on the deeper level I am referring to the creation of that form of language that is the myth and the metaphysical. In the encounter with the New and Other worlds, a new form of self-world 163

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structure is articulated and the new people and their worlds are located within it. This is a metaphysical world which imposes through archetypes its meanings upon the empirical and physical realities encountered. It has the power of the myth in that it becomes the normal manner in which realities are observed and understood. Samuel Daniel in his poem of 1599, the Musophile, renders this meaning poetically and directly … And who in time knowes wither we may vent The treasures of our tongue, to what strange shores This gaine of our best glorie shall be sent, T’inrich unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in th’ yet unformed Occident May come refin’d with th’ accents that are ours.15 The New World for Daniel is a vast rich field for the plantation of the English language. Language in the poem is both empirical and mythological. From an empirical point of view, the Indian languages were taken to be gibberish, guttural utterances. Since the Indian often went nude, it was presupposed that this nakedness corresponded to a blank mind and a cultural void. For the myth of the Wild Man and the savage to stick, it had to be buttressed with a linguistic interpretation. The nudity inferred a blankness of mind and culture, thus making the native transparent to every meaning, definition, and myth of the colonizer and conqueror. The colonizers in this sense were essentially dramatists who imposed the “shape” of their own culture embodied in speech on the New World, and made that world recognizable and habitable by them. The colonist and the dramatist in their mutual raids upon what they assumed to be the inarticulate penetrated new areas of their own experience; their language expanded the boundaries of their cultures and made the new territories over in their image. But the Indians and all other non-Europeans possess and possessed specific and definitive empirical and imaginative languages. Each of these languages reflected and substantiated the specific character of the culture out of which it sprang. Specific empirical languages are not transparent; they are opaque. Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had as much difficulty accepting this notion as we do today. When opacity (the specific meaning and value of another culture and/or language) is denied, the meaning of that culture as a human value is denied. By not dealing with this opacity, one is able to divorce oneself from the messy, confusing welter of detail that characterizes a particular society at a particular time and to move to the cool realm of abstract principles symbolized by the metaphorical transparency of knowledge.

Visions of the vanquished Originating in the neighborhood of Vailala, whence it spread rapidly through the coastal and certain inland villages, this movement involved, on the one hand, a set of preposterous beliefs among its victims—in particular the expectation of an early visit from their deceased relatives—and, on the other hand, collective nervous symptoms of a sometime grotesque and idiotic nature. Hence the name Vailala madness seems apt enough and at least conveys more meaning than any of the various alternatives.16 164

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This is the beginning of that classic study of Francis Edgar Williams which launched the anthropological interest in that phenomenon called “cargo cults.” This Report, published in 1923, is certainly not the beginning of the phenomenon referred by the name of the Vailala Madness. This kind of dramatic religious behavior is at least as old as the encounter between Hernán Cortés and Motecuhzoma in 1519.17 There is a history of the contact of those who were already at home when the conquerors came. There was, indeed, a new world and an other world for them also. The great disadvantage of those who came into contact with the Europeans after 1492 was the simple fact that these natives of extra-European lands knew who they were. They had an identity and were secure within it. It was beyond their imagination to encounter a mode of the human with such insecurities, with such enormous appetites, and whose identity had to be made in a combative and destructive posing of themselves against others and the OTHER. Their dramas, dreams, and visions tell another story—a story in dramatic form which is the only language we have of the true meaning of the cultural contact. In many respects, these dramas are analogous to those of the Renaissance Elizabetheans but they differ in one very important respect, and this difference makes all the difference. They are dramas in the opaque mode. This opacity of vision forces the vanquished to come to terms in a concrete manner with what has happened to them.18 They had to take account first of the conqueror and their initial wrong perceptions of them and their intentions. They had to make sense of the trauma of the decentering and destruction of their cultures. They had to come to terms with the fact that their cultures would never be the same. In addition to these factors they were forced to carefully sort out these specific meanings and qualities of the conquerors’ culture that had qualitative meaning for them. Attendant to these general elements of reorientation, there is the specificity of the meaning of writing as a mode of communication, the use of money as a token of exchange, and the professed understanding of the god and religion of the conquerors as definitions of the conqueror’s world. In their case the alien and the other are empirical concrete facts, accepted by the conqueror and the vanquished. The threatening Other does have to be invented or discovered so that it may be attacked and destroyed; for them, the threatening Other is not a structure of mind but a fact of history. The imaginary and visionary emerges in their dramas as the form which allows them to reconceive of the concreteness of their existence. Their myth and dreams outline a religious drama of the conquest, opaque. Myth-dreams are a series of themes, propositions, and problems which are to be found in myths, in dreams, in the half-lights of conversations, and in the emotional responses to a variety of actions. The appropriate term “myth-dream” was coined by Kenelm Burridge and he discusses it in this manner: All people participate in particular myth-dreams: they are not only to be found amongst pre-literate peoples. Myth-dreams are not intellectually articulate, for they exist in an area of emotionalized mental activity which is not private to any particular individual but which is shared by many. A community day-dream as it were. But among literate peoples a portion of it may be intellectualized and set down in writing.19 Among peoples without written languages the articulation of the myth-dream is through the charismatic leaders who bear the articulation in their bodies, in their speech and actions. 165

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A cult drama develops which enables a larger community to participate in its elaboration and to become a part of its meaning. In Meso- and South America, these dramas of the myth-dream, which began during the Conquest, are still carried on as follows: 1. Dreams foretell the advent of the Spanish. 2. Preliminary meetings between Spanish and Indians are always conducted on the lower administrative levels. 3. The dramatic highlight is the meeting of the Indian and Spanish leaders. 4. The death of the Indian leader is followed by lamentations and the king of Spain appears like some deus ex machina to punish Pizarro or Cortés. These myth-dreams and patterns of dramas form a structural logic articulated by a particular form of praxis and produces an imaginary restructuring of the native societies; it expresses at the same time the fierce determination of the Indians to revive traditions. But these meanings take place in a situation that is post-Conquest, made up of institutions, customs, practices, meanings, and patterns which both resist and sustain human activity. Freedom is not exercised arbitrarily. The natives both submit to the legacy of the past and the Conquest and adapts it to his aspirations for the future. In some instances, views of the colonial world through native eyes legitimizes the return to an earlier primordial state; but this return to the past at the same time foreshadows a new order, since in a quasi-messianic hope, there is the expectation of the justice of the Spanish king that will presage one final cataclysm which will set the topsy-turvy world to rights. In other parts of South America, the adaptation itself is the critique of the meaning of the world of the conquerors. These myth-dreams, these magical beliefs, are revelatory and fascinating not because they are ill-conceived instruments of utility but because they are poetic echoes of the cadences that guide the innermost course of the world. Magic takes language, symbols, and intelligibility to their outermost limits, to explore life and thereby to change its destination. Michael Taussig has explored the meaning of the symbolism of the devil in the acculturative process of Indian and African slaves in Bolivia and Columbia.20 The Indians, Africans, and their descendants view the new meaning of capitalistic production and the use of money as the basis of exchange as a sign of the devil; this devil is the religious symbol of evil taught to them by the Christians but they have applied its meaning in their own manner. To them this new socioeconomic system is neither natural nor good. Instead it is both unnatural and evil. The meaning that they give to the devil is very much like the definition given to this demonic form of sacrality by the early Christian Fathers—he who resists the cosmic process. The market economy interposes itself between persons, mediating direct awareness of social relations by the abstract laws of relationships between commodities. They are filled with incredulity when the Europeans speak of the procreative powers of money. They ask quite seriously, “how and when does money copulate such that it is able to bear offsprings?” They give value to gold because in their cosmology, gold is a form of the maturation of substances in the earth but it is to be used to bestow honor and prestige within the human community. The fact that it is used for exchange violates its essential meaning. In like manner, the growing of sugar cane makes sense, but they are unable to understand why the cane that is grown is 166

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bundled up and sent away to some place called the market, why is it not used, and used up, by those who grow it? Though they know that there is an authentic power in what appears to them as the magical power of the Europeans to transmute nature and natural relationships, for them it is the power of the devil. While they have been taught the power of a great and beneficent deity revealed in Jesus Christ, their own experience of the Europeans allows for this alternative theological formulation. The world of the Europeans is ruled by their god, the devil, and it is not beyond the natives to venerate this demonic devil-god when they are engaged in activities that bring them into contact with the world of the Europeans. These myth-dreams, behaviors, and orientations of the vanquished should not be seen in continuity with chiliastic movements in the Western world for they presuppose the specific nature of modernity—the modern world-system. Modernity itself is a form of critique. These movements, from this point of view, must be viewed as a critique of the critique. It is the modern Western world that created the categories of civilization, self-fashioning, the individual as an agent of production, the races, the primitives, and so on. These terms are part and parcel of the universalizing and critical structures of the modern Western consciousness. In many respects, those cultures that have given rise to visions of the vanquished, religions of the oppressed, were created for the second time by the critical categories and languages of the West. This is the source of what W.E.B. Du Bois has called the double consciousness as a characteristic of them. The oppressed long for or imagine the meaning of their existence as human beings before the definitions imputed to them in this second creation through the hegemony of Western languages. The first word about them in this second creation is abstract and categorizing. No intimacy of language is present in the definitions of the second creation. It is only in some such manner that we are able to understand the seemingly strange rituals, myths, and orientations of their religious experience and expression. Whether it be the American Indian Ghost Dances of the 1890s, the Vailala Madness, the Rastafarians, or even aspects of the black power movements in the United States, all of these movements have come face to face with radical contingency. Their myths, to paraphrase words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, “evoke a suppressed past and apply it, like a grid, upon the present in the hope of discovering a sense of those two aspects of that reality with which man is confronted—the historical and the structural—and to bring about coincidence of these two modes.”21 This critique takes place, behind the veil, in the language of Du Bois,22 or in the twilight zones of half-light and quasi-physical infection inhabited by the semi-realities of the modern Western world—this is the arena as described by Octavio Paz.23 Or again, in the languages of the Annales school, in a kind of intra-history.24 In each case the locus for this religious drama and language is opaque. I turn to Hegel’s master-slave paradigm as a way of articulating this structure of consciousness.25 When the slaves, ex-slaves, colonized, or ex-colonized persons become aware of their autonomy and independence, they find that, because of the economic, political, and linguistic hegemony of the master there is no space for the legitimate expression of this form of humanity. The desire for an authentic space for the expression of this form of human reality is a source for revolutionary tendencies in these religions. But on the level of human consciousness religions of oppressed peoples create in another way. The hegemony and authority of the oppressors is understood as a myth—myth in the two major senses of that term, as true and as fictive. It is true as a structure with which one must deal in a day-by-day manner if one is to persevere, but it is fictive as far as its ontological reality is assumed. But such a procedure 167

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does not define a simple dichotomy, for one’s day-to-day existence is in fact one’s life and labor—life and labor from which the meaning of one’s autonomy arises; therefore, one’s own autonomy takes on a fictive character. The truth of one’s existence must necessarily involve not only the change of consciousness but the realization of the true and fictive consciousness of the oppressor. The basic structure of such meanings approximates the myth, for only consciousness as myth can express the full range of this dialectical mode of being. The oppressed must deal with both the fictive truth of their status as expressed by the oppressor, that is, their second creation, and the discovery of their own autonomy and truth— their first creation. The locus for this structure is the mythic consciousness which dehistoricizes the relationship for the sake of creating a new form of humanity—a form of humanity which is no longer based on the master/slave dialectic. There is a primordial meaning in this consciousness for in seeking a new beginning in the future it must perforce imagine an original and authentic beginning in the past. Expressions of the meaning of the cultural contacts that have taken place since 1492 are still with us, not as residual structures of an older history but as expressions of new forms of the human face. They will increasingly move from the local levels and take their place as some of the most serious efforts made to define a new world and a new self. I close with the words of one of those who is a descendant of one of those cultures and I give you his vision of the vanquished. These are the words of Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, Pablo Neruda: As far as we in particular are concerned, we writers within the tremendously far-flung American region, we listen unceasingly to the call to fill this mighty void with being of flesh and blood. We are conscious of our duties as fulfiller—at the same time we are faced with the unavoidable task of critical communication within a world which is empty but which is no less full of injustices, punishments, and sufferings because it is empty—and we fed also the responsibility for reawakening the old dreams which sleep in statues of stone in the ruined ancient monuments, in the wide-stretching silence in planetary plains, in dense primeval forests, in rivers which roar like thunder. We must fill with words the most distant places in a dumb continent and we are intoxicated by this task of making fables and giving names. This is perhaps what is decisive in my own humble case, and, if so, my abundance or my rhetoric would not be anything other than the simplest of events in the daily work of an American.26

Notes 1. See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923); and Joachim Wach, Types of Religious Experience: Christian and Non-Christian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). 2. See Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1954); and Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958). 3. For V. Gordon Childe, see Man Makes Himself (New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1951). Subsequent analyses include Robert McCormick Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (Chicago: Aldine, 1967); Thorkild Jacobsen, 168

The Situation of Cultural Contact Towards the Image of Tammuz and Other Essays on Mesopotamian History and Culture, ed. William L. Moran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); Paul Wheatley, City as Symbol: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College, London, 20 November 1967 (London: H. K. Lewis, 1969); Wheatley, Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Chicago: Aldine, 1971); Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return; Stanley J. Tambiah, “The Galactic Polity: The Structure of Traditional Kingdoms in Southeast Asia,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 293 (July 1977): 69–97. 4. See Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Brown, Little, 1942). 5. For the literature on pilgrimage, consult Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Anthony C. Yu, “‘Two Literary Examples of Religious Pilgrimage: The Commedia and The Journey to the West,” History of Religions 22, no. 3 (February 1983): 202–230. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), is a brilliant discussion of the “pilgrimage of consciousness.” The relationships between voyages of discovery and languages of discovery and description are dealt with in Daniel Defert’s “The Collection of the World: Accounts of Voyages from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” Dialectical Anthropology 7, no. 1 (September 1982): 11–20. 6. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 4 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974–2011). 7. John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 6–7. 8. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). I shall be summarizing in passim the ideas set forth by Prof. Greenblatt. 9. Ibid., 7–9. 10. See Ibid., chapter 4. 11. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Jacob P. Mayer and Max Lerner, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 19–20 (emphasis added). 12. See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, chapter 5. 13. See Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961); and John H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (New York: Knopf, 1966), 65. 14. Karen O. Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 170. 15. I am again indebted to Stephen Greenblatt for these observations; see his “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in First Images of America, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 2:561–580. See also my working out of the meaning of opacity in “Archaism and Hermeneutics,” in The History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa, Mircea Eliade, and Charles H. Long (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 67–87; “The Oppressive Elements in Religion and the Religions of the Oppressed,” Harvard Theological Review 69, nos. 3–4 (July–October 1976): 397– 412; and “Freedom, Otherness, and Religion: Theologies Opaque,” Chicago Theological Seminary Register 73, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 13–24. 16. Francis Edgar Williams, The Vailala Madness and Other Essays, ed. Erik Schwimmer (London: Hurst, 1976), 331. 17. See Davíd Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of History: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), especially, chapter 4. 169

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis 18. This interpretation is based on Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570, trans. Ben Reynolds and Siân Reynolds (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977), passim. 19. Kenelm Burridge, Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium (London: Methuen, 1960), 148. 20. See Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), especially part 1, chapter 2; part 2, chapter 5; and part 3, chapters 11–14. 21. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Scope of Anthropology, trans. Sherry Ortner Paul and Robert A. Paul (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 7. 22. W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous statement describing the double consciousness is contained in his The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903). 23. Octavio Paz, The New Analogy: Poetry, Painting, and Technology; 3rd Annual Herbert Read Lecture (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1970), 25. 24. For discussions of the Annales school, see Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); and Patrick H. Hutton, “The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History,” History and Theory 20, no. 3 (October 1981): 237–259. 25. For a fuller discussion, see Long, “Oppressive Elements.” 26. Pablo Neruda, Toward the Splendid City: Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1974), 27, 29.

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CHAPTER 14 NEW SPACE, NEW TIME: DISJUNCTIONS AND CONTEXT FOR A NEW WORLD RELIGION

The year 1992 marked the quincentenary of what has come to be known as “Columbus’s discovery of the New World.” In 1892/1893 this event was celebrated by one of the most famous of World’s Fairs—the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. The Columbian Exposition stands in marked contrast to the “non-celebrations” that did not take place in 1992 to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the “Columbus event.” As a matter of fact, the event was shrouded in controversy and ambiguity. Columbus himself, the heroic discoverer, was vilified, and serious doubts were expressed regarding almost every phase of the voyages across the Atlantic. What brought about this strange turn of events? Since nothing on the scale of the Chicago World’s Fair was planned for the quincentenary, we might do well to revisit the fair of 1892–1893; it is possible that from a reflection on this fair we might discern the sources of reluctance regarding a celebration in the year 1992.

Fair or no fair The World’s Columbian Exposition was the second of eight international fairs held in the United States between 1876 and 1914. The Philadelphia Fair of 1876 celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, “the birth of freedom” and the beginning of the American nation. Occurring less than two decades after the end of the Civil War, the recollection of the European discovery of the New World was intended to bind up the wounds of the nation through a return to and recollection of the primordial European event of foundation. Such a return and recollection provided the basis for a new future—one in which the meaning of that original European venture promised the ultimate westernization of the entire globe. The Chicago Fair of 1892 marked the four hundredth anniversary of the Western venture in the lands across the Atlantic. The forty-year period beginning with the Philadelphia Fair of 1876 and ending with the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Fair of 1915 and the San Diego Panama-California Fair of 1915–1916 set forth in dramatic public display a summary statement of the accomplishments of the European venture in the New World as a foundation for the continuing domination of the Western Hemisphere and the world. Thus, twelve years after the American Civil War and continuing until the beginning of the First World War, the American nation—in a celebratory, yet specific and dramatic way—

A version of this paper was presented as a lecture at the University of Chicago in October 1984 in response to being chosen as the alumnus of the year by the Divinity School of the university.

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defined the meaning of the nature of the world from the perspective of the New World; it should be reemphasized that nine world fairs took place during this period. With the end of the Civil War and the assurance of the unity of the republic, Americans took up the task of traversing the frontiers across the Mississippi, “extending civilization” while destroying and pacifying the Native American cultures. General George Armstrong Custer’s debacle at Little Big Horn took place the same year as the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. And it would be three years after the Columbian Exposition that the Supreme Court of the United States upheld segregation in its “separate but equal” doctrine in its decision set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson. This was the historical context of the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Before examining two important events that took place during this exposition, it should be pointed out that the fair was divided into two main parts: the White City and the Midway Plaisance. The White City consisted of a group of buildings dedicated to science, technology, and progress. These buildings were located in Jackson Park and along Lake Michigan. The Midway Plaisance was a strip of land a mile long, connecting Jackson Park with Washington Park. (The University of Chicago, which came into being in 1892, would be built on land directly north and adjacent to the Midway Plaisance.) The Midway Plaisance was the location of the honky-tonk section of the fair, though it was officially classified under the exposition’s Department of Ethnology.1 The giant Ferris wheel, the largest such wheel of this kind, was located on the Midway, but an equally enduring symbol of the Midway was its displays and exhibitions of the nonwhite worlds of Africa, Asia, Native Americans, Mongols, and so on. And this display was not a hodgepodge affair. It was under the direction of some of the world’s most eminent anthropological scholars, from the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard, and the Musée d’Ethnographie of Paris. The exhibitions were arranged taxonomically, with the “lower races” beginning at the Washington Park side, proceeding in ascending order, to the “higher races,” the Teutonic and Celtic, closer to Jackson Park, the site of the White City. That Midway is just a representation of matter, and this great White City is an emblem of mind. In the Midway it’s some dirty and all barbaric. It deafens with noise; the worst folk in there are avaricious and bad; and the best are just children in their ignorance, and when you’re feelin’ bewildered with smells and sounds and sights, always changin’ like one o’ these kaleidoscopes, and when you come out o’ that mile-long babel where you’ve elbowed and cheated, you pass under a bridge—and all of a sudden you are in a great beautiful silence. The angels on the Woman’s Buildin’ smile down and bless you, and you know that in what seemed like one step you’ve passed from darkness and into light.2 The portrayal of blacks and other nonwhite groups was duly noted by the American black community. Protest over the various exhibitions were voiced in Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells wanted to publish a pamphlet in several foreign languages informing the world of the treatment of black Americans in the United States. Others suggested a separate exhibition. A compromise was reached such that blacks did not boycott the fair en masse.3 Two significant events occurred during the Chicago Fair. The first was that Frederick Jackson Turner, the American historian, set forth his famous “frontier thesis” as an interpretive framework for American history. His speech explained the meaning and evolution of North 172

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America from the point of view of the “settler” cultures and offered an apologia for the meaning of freedom from this perspective. Turner pointed to the complex interrelationship of geography (free land), the primal experiences of exploration, trapping, trading, and agriculture as the sources for the energy and buoyancy associated with freedom in the North American context. The frontier thus appeared as both a limit and a lure creating a new mode of being, Homo Americanus. An apocryphal story has it that Turner gave his speech at one of the buildings especially constructed for the exposition, the Museum of Science and Industry. The symbolism of this location was meant to undergird the thesis set forth—the challenge of the geographical frontier had been met and overcome; science and industry constituted the new frontiers awaiting the Americans of the United States. The other important event to note is the World Parliament of Religions. This conclave brought together scholars, theologians, and adherents of the major religions of the world to discuss the meaning and nature of religion in the world of the future. It was as such a “social drama,” an encounter among parties contending over the future of the religions of the world. Given the cultural, racial, and religious hierarchies explicit in the vision of the White City, the parliament could not avoid conflict and controversy. On the one hand, the parliament signified the possibility of world religious unity, and, in this regard, it expressed a state of theological liminality, an extended potent moment in time between the normative structures of the ten world religions represented at the parliament. It may have been the intention of the liberal Christians who organized the parliament to bring about at least a learned theological conversation related to the unity of world religions, but it is clear from the other manifestations of the Columbian Exposition that such a unity in diversity was never contemplated in fact. Overlooked in the parliament was the fact that the representatives from the great nonChristian religions of the world were already caught up in various reform movements in their own cultures—reforms and readjustments occasioned by Western intrusions in their respective cultures from at least the eighteenth century. That they had entered into the discussions of the parliament meant that they were “reformers” and not “traditionalists” in their respective cultures. It could be argued that the very idea of speaking about the diversity of religions already meant that one had accepted the generalized Western notion of religion as normative for all cultures of the world. Although the major world religions were represented, no significant representation from the Native Americans or the African American religious communities was even contemplated. Something more than the omission of Africans and Native Americans must be noted. For the most part, religion was seen in terms of “the great world religions”—Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, and so on. These were the religions created from the Western disciplines of Orientalism and were therefore the only religious traditions deemed adequate to converse with the dominant Western religions of Christianity and Judaism. More telling, however, is the fact that no one discerned that the structure of the fair itself was setting forth in dramatic form the outlines of a civil “religion of the republic.” The fair constituted a quasi-ideological and religious meaning of the New World as the creation of the Northern European white settlers, and it institutionalized this ideological religious orientation with emotions and sentiments based on the objectivity of the sciences of technology and objectivity of the disciplines of anthropology/ethnology.4 The Chicago Fair of 1892 set forth the archetypal structure for all the fairs that were to take place from that date until 1916. The norms and blueprint of the American century were made 173

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clear as summary of a past and prediction of a future. The world of the Europeans transplanted to the lands across the Atlantic had been a success; the future promised even greater triumphs for this model of the progress of humanity. From one perspective, the ambiguity and controversy of our time is the expression of another summary of the events of the last view. There is, however, a deep realization, even from the settler perspective, that the energies let loose some five hundred years ago have dissipated, that whatever was new and creative in that enterprise has come to an end. Paul Tillich, the German American theologian, announced as early as the 1940s, the end of the Protestant Era. Daniel Bell, the American sociologist, told us in the 1960s that we had come to the end of the age of ideologies. Contemporaneously, from every quarter we hear the rhetoric of the “post-” prefix of various intellectual orientations and points of view, whether it is the general notion of the “postmodern,” or its more specific expression in phrases such as, “post-Enlightenment,” “postcolonial,” or the like. These scholarly analyses have been prophetic in that they have portended the lackluster reluctance to mount a celebratory event commemorating the beginning of the long-event of the Columbian world at the moment when that world is coming to an end. The world signified by the Columbian event brought an end to several cultures of the Atlantic world, from the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands to the cultures of Meso-, North, and South America. The Columbian event, interpreted as a continuation and evolution of European history, has for the most part ignored the totality of the world signified by Columbus. This significance ranges from the destruction of several civilizations across the Atlantic to the oppression of countless millions of persons, the destruction of natural resources, enslavement of African peoples, and the establishment of the least desirable modes of mercantile capitalism as the ideological orientation of the nascent cultures of the Western Hemisphere. We are, to some extent, just beginning to realize the actuality of the destructive ambiguity that accompanied the European venture into the Atlantic world. This event did not, however, occur simply on the historical empirical level; at every stage it was accompanied by ideological and theoretical meanings and orientations that have become part and parcel of the scholarly sophisticated as well as the popular languages of the cultures of the West. In regard to the Spanish conquest in the New World, American historian William H. McNeill could write the following in his extremely well-received text on the history of Western culture: Neither in art, nor in technology—the only aspects of Amerindian civilization easily accessible to modern examination—was there any notable advance between 1000 and 1500 A.D. Most judges, in fact, detect a decline in artistic excellence as military rule replaced the earlier priestly dominance over the society. Certainly, none of the New World civilizations was in a politically sound condition when the Spanish appeared; and the potential strength of the Amerindians peoples was never really brought to bear against the handful of European invaders. Nor does it appear that the cultural life of the Indian civilizations was especially flourishing or had a deep hold on the loyalties of the common people. The remarkable rapid success of the Spanish missions in converting the Amerindians to at least the superficial aspects of Christianity could not have occurred had the mass of the population been really deeply attached to the priestly and imperial traditions of their erstwhile rulers. The loss to human culture involved in the Spanish extirpation of Amerindian civilizations does not therefore seem very great. Over the 174

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centuries and millennia, who can say what might have arisen? But in 1500 A.D., the actual achievements of the New World were trifling as compared to those of the Old. … In the larger context of world history, therefore, the Amerindian civilizations developed too late to stand a chance against European aggression. In this sense, Amerindian civilizations were abortive and enter passively and as victims into the story of the rise of the West.5 McNeill’s text, which was published in 1964, has undergone several editions and is still in print. It echoes the pervasive theoretical formulations of the Enlightenment human sciences as expressed by Michel Foucault. The Chicago Fair of 1892 dramatized this theoretical perspective. The human sciences wedded objectivity with power, the initial archetypal portrayal occurring at the Chicago Fair. Foucault’s reflection on the initial creation of these sciences as theoretical orientations is as follows: The first thing to be observed is that the human sciences did not inherit a certain domain already outlined, perhaps surveyed as a whole, but allowed to be fallow, which it was their task to elaborate with positive methods and with concepts that had at last become scientific; … for man did not exist (any more than life, or language, or labor); and the human sciences did not appear, when as the result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it decided to include (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success); … they appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived and that which is to be known.6 Foucault’s formulation fits almost exactly the North American ideology. Americans have portrayed themselves as inheriting a vast and void wilderness where all modes and forms of life, even the lives and cultures of the aborigines, had to be created by them. They identify themselves with the act of creating others; this is what was vividly portrayed at the fair. It is clear that the archetypal meaning of the world’s fair as expressed in the Chicago Columbian Exposition could not be replicated in 1992. The hegemonic meaning of the venture of the Europeans and their unquestioned destiny in the world has come to an end. “Fair is fair,” as the old folks used to say, and while the world is not yet fair enough, it is clear that any portrayal of the human in the present world and in the world to come cannot avoid the methodological and theoretical consideration of fairness.

Hermeneutical excursus: Disjunctions and diversions Although no celebrations rivaling the fair of 1892 took place in 1992, colloquia such as the one from which this volume has emerged are most appropriate. Forums such as these allow us to move our discourse into those liminal areas that lie beyond both the older hegemonic archetypes and simple protest. Although we must protest against the continuation of the old archetypes, protest is not enough. Protest is not enough because whether we like it or not, we all live in, have been formed by, or have been forced to undergo the structures and realities that have arisen out of the Columbian event. The schematization of the meaning of human lives and cultures from the point of view of those who claim the Columbian hegemony obscures the actuality of what that heritage 175

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has been. The archetypal conversation of the Columbian hegemony must be interrupted; a disjunction is called for. An epoche, a diversion, must be created so that new formulations of the rich and diverse meanings of human data that permeate the past five hundred years in this hemisphere may appear. These new data must eschew the notion and stylizations of purity symbolized by the Chicago Exposition’s White City; the new data must show there was a mingling of experiences as well as the forming of new modes of experiencing: “One of the terrible implications of the ethnographic approach is the insistence on fixing the object of scrutiny in static time, thereby removing the tangled nature of lived experience and promoting the idea of uncontaminated survival.”7 I take as a point of departure my community of origin, a people who form a peculiar situation in the New World. Africans in the New World are the only inhabitants of this land who did not voluntarily come to this hemisphere. Between 1492 and the abolition of the slave trade by the British government in 1807, more Africans crossed the Atlantic Ocean than did any other group of peoples. The New World was a negative lure, drawing them as commodities within its orbit. Given the presence of this vast number of peoples in the peculiar circumstances that surrounded their presence in the New World, there has been a remarkable silence concerning their meaning as a part of the New World. Scholarly disciplines have for the most part treated them as a shameful mistake. Within the United States, blacks constitute a minority group, an Intimate Other, whose presence in scholarship has been as objects of interpretation, primarily within the social sciences. By implication, the black minority has been defined at its best, as a sociological problem, and at worse, as a social pathology. Black scholars working within the disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences have sought to become aware of the regnant methods, data, and interpretations. This accounts for the high percentage of black scholars who hold terminal degrees in these disciplines. They have been preoccupied with an ameliorative and reformist scholarship—a desire to put knowledge to use for the sake of racial advancement and the alleviation of the oppressive situation of black communities in the United States. We have only to note the array of black scholars who contributed to Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and the equally formidable group of these scholars in the brief before the Supreme Court that led to the 1954 desegregation decision. Since the 1960s there has been a significant increase in the number of black scholars in the disciplines of the human sciences. A new body of scholarly material about blacks has appeared. Revisions of older historical, sociological, and psychological studies are increasing; in many cases, black scholars have played a leading role in the production of these data. Within the area of religion, three disciplines have dominated: the sociology of religion, historical studies, and what Professor Cone of Union Theological Seminary in New York has called “black theology.” These studies have brought new and different kinds of data before us. A problem of a hermeneutical kind remains, however. This problem remains because we have not yet developed a proper locus and context for these new data. Where and how may these data be situated? What, for example, are we to do with new data about the National Baptist Convention; black Roman Catholics; or, for that matter, the latest study of slave religion? These studies do not have a locus because they do not fit within the disciplinary parameters defining either America or religion. 176

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Sydney Ahlstrom’s work of the 1970s, A Religious History of the American People, the latest general study of American religion, does not find it necessary to define either “religion” or “the American people.” By implication, we must assume that he is referring to the traditions of Europeans who came to North America; and by religion, he implies the history of those traditions about gods, the sacred, and their religious communities. The new data concerning blacks, Native Americans, and other non-Europeans in the New World can have an authentic meaning only if a new context for the understanding of the Americas is defined. No one can deny the fact that the Americas are in some of their most important aspects a European idea. The Americas were an imaginative, cartographical, economic, and fantastic notion of Europeans. This was the case before Europeans came to these shores, and it remained so after they settled in what they came to call the “New World.” In many important respects the concreteness of the European settlement and colonization never totally obliterated this kind of ideational discourse as a dominant meaning of the New World in all its geographical areas, as well as on the European continent, where it sustained a long debate. Antonelli Gerbi has called the discourse about America, on both sides of the Atlantic, “a particularly successful heresy,” and he finds it manifest in the most diverse authors.8 A great deal can be learned from this kind of discourse about America. It not only served the ideological and religious conquest of the New World, it also formed the cultural parameters of distinctively American cultural languages. This discourse has, more often than not, provided the framework for anything cultural or religious in the lands across the Atlantic. There is a factuality and reality to this meaning of America, but such a discourse has simultaneously obscured other realities of the American situation. A significant body of literature about the discovery of America has been expressed in the language of pilgrimage. In order to understand the rules of observation peculiar to this literature, one must rediscover which techniques constituted the art of traveling. Historically speaking, the language of the pilgrimage moved between that of the collection of curios and the field trip of exploration. Daniel Defert has succinctly summarized the structure and intent of this kind of language as it related to the European explorations of the Americas: [The early Europeans were pilgrims]: prudentia peregranandi. They were taught languages as linguae peregrinae, that is, not languages specific to a given territory but languages necessary for the activity of travelling. … This vast universe, known to a few people, absent from sacred texts and of which Antiquity knew nothing, could have provided a field of endless invention and exaggeration. But the writer’s obligation to the truth was the product of a hierarchical network of competition and political confrontation. No doubt the voyage of discovery should be situated historically between the medieval crusades, which it miniaturizes, and the organization of the laboratory.9 There is a marked distinction between the Spanish conquistadors’ voyages and those of the English. The Spanish are self-consciously part of the old Mediterranean oecumene whereas the English are an outpost of the newly emerging entity of western Europe. These differences have been noted, but once noted they have become simplistic clichés made over into interpretive structures—the English North and the Spanish South. An important body of literature describing and dramatizing the inner pilgrimage is now in full bloom. Its seed may be seen in the peculiar structure of the Jeffersonian language or in the 177

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Journals of Francis Parkman, but from the publication of R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam in 1955 to Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence in 1973, a mature genre has evolved. Again the issue of locus is raised. Is religion defined by the outer or inner pilgrimage? If by both, we are confronted with a poverty in our cultural languages that is unable to integrate the two modes of the pilgrimage tradition. This is the language adumbrated by Frederick Jackson Turner and taken over by the historian Sidney Mead in his historical investigations of American religion. For Mead, the outer pilgrimage is the story of the conquest and its justification; the inner pilgrimage, with its deeper structures, is the psychic drama of the “coverup.” But it is not simply a “coverup,” for it is the portrayal in a precise manner of the hidden dynamics of historical contacts, violent and intimate, with the land and its inhabitants. The theological and ideological languages of conquest and pilgrimage formed the lens through which the reality of other non-European traditions were refracted, as through a glass darkly; they were obscured. The other land and other peoples of the New World were not and are not to be confused with the inner psychic realities of the Europeans. They possess their own inner and outer worlds. A great deal of the study of other traditions in the Americas has been placed within the European tradition of inner and outer realities. The language of savagism, Christianity, and civilization have become the normative modes of denying the cultural-historical meaning of cultural contact, the mutual borrowing, the dependence of Europeans on the aboriginal populations and African slaves—in short, the recognition of the contact situation itself as a normality of reality in the Americas since the time of Columbus. African slaves were transported across the Atlantic in slave ships; their voyages were not pilgrimages. The Middle Passage and their subsequent situation in the Americas define an involuntary movement and presence. The pilgrimage structure has little if anything to do with their mentalité. For the most part, they have become a people within the various contexts of the New World and their acquisitions of European cultural and empirical languages has taken place in situations of duress. The Europeans were the agents through which the aborigines and Africans were placed within the context of a new time—history as terror! The possibility of a new history of humankind was present in the Americas, possibly a history of freedom. But historical circumstances forced the issue; the New World and its histories, cultures, and religions became a pawn of European hegemony. It is impossible to understand the making of western Europe independent of the lands across the Atlantic. In other words, “the rise of the West,” to use William McNeill’s phrase, is predicated upon the “discovery of the New World”; the rise of the West and the “discovery of the New World” are simultaneous and synchronic events. The Native American fur trade was a decisive element in placing and maintaining Europeans within an international market, and Francis Jennings shows that Europeans were absolutely dependent, culturally and economically, on the cultures of the aborigines for several generations.10 This was not, he asserts, “a virgin land”; and if conjugal metaphors are to be used, it is more apt to refer to North America as a “widowed land.” His analysis seems to support that of Daniel Defert, who states that even in the midst of war and conquest there were still relationships of a cultural kind that persisted between aborigines and Europeans.11 In one sense, the admission of the conquest must be made; in the case of Americans of European descent living in the United States, such an admission might cause them to rethink their ideologies of “wilderness” and “virgin land” as the symbolic bases for the American 178

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character. The conquest need not, however, become the only factor of importance when one deals with the cultures and religions of the New World. There were many long-term situations of sustained contact in the Americas: those of Europeans and aborigines, Europeans and Africans, aborigines and Africans, and various admixtures of these cultures and traditions. I am not trying here to raise the old “saw” about the contribution of all ethnic groups to America. I am rather attempting to redefine a new situation in the modern world—the religious and cultural significance of the New World itself!

New World/new science The “New World” should constitute the arena for the renewal of the human sciences. I am speaking of the New World in two senses. First of all, I am referring to the empirical historical world that came into being with the Columbian event. In the second sense, I am referring to the contributions that the past five hundred years of human experience and expression in the Western Hemisphere can make to a total science of the human. The method and results from such a study would have ramifications for human societies in all parts of the world. Something approaching what I have in mind is referred to by the term “syncretism.” This term is acceptable as long as it is limited to the description of processes. Unfortunately, the term carries valences of a negative European discourse in much the same manner as the language of miscegenation. Few studies, and these have only recently appeared, divorce their analyses from the hegemony of a European discourse.12 Even the negative meanings of syncretism teach us something about the signified and the signifier in the symbolic contexts of the New World. By its very nature the notion of syncretism when used within the structures of most western Christian discourses carries the sense of stain, pollution, and guilt. In Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur has taught us how these meanings entered into the cultural consciousness in the Ancient Near East. They may equally serve as preconditions for the notion of evil in the New World. The specificity of the contact situation as a religious situation has been expressed negatively is several ways: first, it is often denied through the hegemony of European discourses; second, in historical genealogical and biological discourses of miscegenation and the ensuing race and class distinctions; and third, in the separation of the religious and cultural traditions of the New World according to their origins in Europe as if after five hundred years of contact with other traditions, these European traditions still represent pure and original forms of expression and experience. All of these modes prevent an authentic understanding of the meaning of what has been the normal historical reality in the New World. Now that we have entered the year 1992, I propose that attention to the traditions of the New World in their interrelatedness be placed on the agenda as a matter of primary importance. The New World is a macro-notion and a historical longue durée; it is an entity that allows for close historical and comparative studies. Within this context such topics as the study of differing responses of aboriginal populations to various European and Africans, a sharper focus for the distinctive field of comparative plantation systems, and the similarities and differences between prophetic movements among African slaves and aborigines could be encompassed. The wider context for New World religions would require all the disciplines of an Allegemeine Religionswissenschaft—the history, sociology, phenomenology, psychology, and 179

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philosophy of religion.13 It would require a hermeneutical reorientation to the New World as a religious and historical space. The dominant studies of the non-European traditions have tended to speak more of the space of the non-European others and not about their time. Marc Bloch once said that the dominance of space over rime represents a reactionary response in cultural studies. What I am proposing here is not so new in terms of method and structure. The interpenetration of cultures and religions marks a venerable tradition in those scholarly studies that have concentrated on the Mediterranean. What is new in my proposal is the consideration of the specific cultural area and the fact that it is a lived experience of contemporaries. This could make the study even more exciting! It raises the possibility of asking new questions and the participation, on a more or less equal footing of all the traditions of the New World and the scholars and investigators from these traditions. Very different issues might be raised once the language of one of the participants is no longer the normative structure of the discourse. New issues and problems that approximate a true history of a new world could emerge. A religious study of the Americas is capable of integrating the differing temporal and cultural rhythms within this hemisphere. The context of the New World is equally fruitful for a restudy of the European traditions; these traditions might appear in a different mode once they are integrated into the New World. The New World in general and New World religions in particular represent a disjunction and a diversion—a renewal of scholarship. As topics for discussion they open avenues for the collaboration among a wider group of scholars whose cultures, though different, achieved a meaning of peoplehood from the events beginning in 1492. This study would pave the way for a new kind of history and move us beyond a history of reaction among the “minorities,” and a history of hegemony among the “majorities.” The notion of America and its religions heritage could gain some explicitness if we undertook a hemispheric study; a study that explored the ranges of the meaning of time as lived experience within the Western Hemisphere. And finally, a hermeneutic of deciphering might reveal an authentic language and religious meaning within the cultural, historical, geographical, and religious space called the Americas. My proposal, one that I hope is at least as bold as Frederick Jackson Turner’s and as imaginative as that of the World Parliament of Religions, is that the New World or the “Other World” of the Western Hemisphere become the locus for a new time and a new space in the study of religion and in the study of humankind. In this regard, I echo John Locke (but for quite other reasons) when he said, “In the beginning all was America.” My sentiment is much closer to that of Fernand Braudel, the historian, who more recently said, “For all historians, for all other social scientists, for all objective scientists, there will always be a new America to discover.”14

Notes 1. See Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 40. I have been dependent on Rydell’s interpretations and analyses of the interrelationships of race, science, technology, and empire demonstrated in the American world’s fairs from 1876 to 1916. 2. Clara Louisa Burnham, Sweet Clover; quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 67. 3. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 52–54. 180

New Space, New Time 4. See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor, 1967); and Joachim Wach, Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), especially chapter 7. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 3, notes that Henry Adams had spoken of the “religion” of the World’s Fair and he had compared the dynamic energy symbolized in the Chicago Fair with the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages. The cathedrals were expressive of force and grace, while the fairs were permeated with impersonal power. 5. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 562, 252 (emphasis added). Here, as late as 1964, we find a distinguished historian still justifying the conquest. Justifications such as these are implicit in the every-day orientations of most of the settler populations in the New World. 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 344 (emphasis added). 7. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 14. 8. Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute about the New World: The History of a Polemic, rev. and enlarged ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 14. 9. Daniel Defert, “The Collection of the World: Accounts of Voyages from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” Dialectical Anthropology 7, no. 1 (September 1982): 11–20, at 11. 10. See Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). 11. See Daniel Defert, “Collection,” 12. 12. Edouard Glissant, in Caribbean Discourse, uses the term “creole,” to get at what I am referring to at this point. For him, “creole” and “creolization” describe a process as well as an imaginative conceptual probing into to the meaning of the human in the Americas. 13. It is clear that I am using the term, “religion” in two senses. On the one hand, I use “religion” in the conventional sense to specify certain traditional institutional forms of tradition. In the second, and more important sense, I speak about religion as a historian of religions; that is, I am speaking about the problematical nature of religion. The study of religion as Religionswissenschaft begins in the Western Enlightenment. It was at this point that the query regarding the nature of religion arose within the purview of a human science. One of the enduring characteristics of this orientation to the study of religion was the establishment of the relationship of the meaning of religion to some notion of alterity or otherness. In the case of the anthropologists and orientalists, the other was fixed through a distantiation in time and space—among the primitives and those in the East, respectively. For the phenomonologists, such as Rudolf Otto, otherness had to do with the constitution of consciousness itself. In both cases, the issue of origins was to the fore. For the anthropologists, this led to a stipulation of speculative origins in a pseudoempirical past that could be recapitulated in the so-called primitives; for the phenomenologists, the problem of the origins of consciousness was raised. The problem of religion for me is the problem of the modern consciousness and the arena in which I seek its resolution is in the origins of modernity, that is in the origins of the world that came into being with the Columbian event. 14. Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, trans. Patricia Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 117.

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CHAPTER 15 RELIGION, DISCOURSE, AND HERMENEUTICS: NEW APPROACHES IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION

Introduction: Background Sometime ago, at one of the periodic conferences that take place at the University of Chicago to discuss disciplines and methods, I delivered a paper that traced the methodological history of the study of religion at the University of Chicago. The paper was published as an article, “A Look at the Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions: Retrospect and Future.”1 In this presentation I gave an account of the methodological discussions centered on the study of religion at the university over a sixty-year period. I chose to discuss the history of methodological discussions at the University of Chicago because it was one of the important centers for research and training of historians of religion and was self-conscious regarding the issue of method and theory for the study of religion. I pointed out in my discussion that there had been a constant refrain over the years for the perfection of a systematic method for the study of religion and I concluded that such a method had not been forthcoming, and, in my opinion, was in fact, a false hope. I quote here my conclusion at length: The anticipation for a science of religion, a Religionswisssenschaft, has not been fulfilled; these expectations have been simply postponed from one generation to the next. One might wonder whether such expectations are legitimate. I am beginning to have my doubts. We all stand in appreciation and awe of the work that has been accomplished through making use of what we have learned from the history of our discipline. But is a “science” in the Enlightenment sense a proper receptacle of these meanings? I am suggesting that the adequate structure of knowledge that would be the proper receptacle will develop when the shadows surrounding the interpreter and the interpreter’s culture as “otherness” are made part of the total hermeneutical task. Our goal would then not be a science but a serious human discourse.2 In the “Afterword” chapter of the conference volume, two of the rapporteurs, Professors Joseph Kitagawa and Gregory Alles presented similar responses to my paper. They suggested that in one sense my presentation in its concluding suggestion of a “serious discourse” was reminiscent of “interreligious dialogue.” The other comment was expressed by Professor Benjamin Ray, my former student, who thought that my formulation of a “serious discourse” was “too sloppy.” I take as a point of departure that paper and the comments of my interlocutors.

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The construction of religion Scholars of religion were probably taken aback at Jonathan Z. Smith’s oft quoted statement that “there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytical purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.”3 The seeming radicality of this statement is matched by Michel Foucault’s observation concerning the origin of the human sciences in general: The first thing to be observed is that the human sciences did not inherit a certain domain already outlined, perhaps surveyed as a whole, but allowed to be fallow, which it was their task to elaborate with positive methods and with concepts that had at last become scientific; … for man did not exist (any more than life, or language, or labor); and the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success); … they appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived and that which is to be known.4 While the rhetorical style of these statements might well shock humanistic scholars out of their doldrums and cause them to think seriously about method, both statements say at once, too much and too little. Both statements help to disavow us of the notion that scholarly activity and research in the human sciences is merely the application of sophisticated methodologies to that which is “naturally given” as social and cultural reality. Both statements emphasize the constructed nature of the data of the social and human sciences and the manner in which the epistemological problem is involved in the creation of the data. Neither of the statements, however, places the origin of the construction or creation of these data within a proper temporal framework or situation. Foucault’s notion of the episteme moves us beyond the automatic progressive notion of an evolutionary history of ideas but he fails to make adequate sense of the correlation of the epistemic structures to other levels of human reality. There is something to be said for Smith’s notion that religion, insofar as it constitutes a datum for study, is created in the scholar’s study but one must go a bit further and ask, “which scholars and in whose studies and for what reasons?” In response to these issues I should like to understand the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment sciences against a background of the nascent mercantile theories and practices of the countries of the modern West. There is a relationship between the epistemological theories of mind and human constitution from Descartes to Kant and the English empiricists, and the new notions of matter, materiality, and its exchanges, though paradoxically their theories were not to be contaminated nor profaned by the numinous grossness or enticing fascination of the materiality and mercantilism that formed its context. This kind of methodological purity results in the “ivory tower” construction of religion within the scholar’s study and the necessity for Locke and Hobbes to posit beginning stories within their philosophical treatises. This also accounts for Foucault’s rendition of the rootless nature of these sciences.

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The Enlightenment arche for the study of religion The study of religion growing out of the Enlightenment sciences was derived from a classification of the world into two major categories—the “primitives,” those cultures and peoples without written languages and cities, and “Orientals,” cultures outside the West that possessed written languages and lived in cities.5 Much of the data for these categories grew out of the voyages of discovery beginning with the Columbian “discovery” of the New World and subsequently undertaken by most of the maritime nations of western Europe. As a result of these voyages new kinds of relationships among and between human beings were made possible; a new and different kind of trade took place in every part of the globe. Another novel and intense relationship among European powers ensued prompted by their desire, possession, and rivalry within the “New World.” It was the ordering of these new data within the critical and creative orientation of those “sciences” that presupposed the Enlightenment orientation that gave rise to a new understanding of the “human” and of religion. Given the general ideology of the universality of what the Enlightenment considered to be reason, the strange and distant cultures that were now becoming known to the West were more often than not placed within the context of an evolutionary meaning of history. The actions, behaviors, and customs of these other cultures were understood as embryonic growths of reason or reason hidden or obscured by shadows of ignorance. From this point of view, religion as a category became the depository of a new form of otherness in a double sense. It was other in terms of a correlation between the valences of geographical distance and also in terms of the qualities of the foreign as awesome and exotic. I have coined the term, empirical others, to distinguish this meaning of alterity from the kind of alterity expressed in theories of religious experience in Rudolf Otto’s classic.6 Too often there has been an easy identity of Otto’s wholly other of religious experience with the behaviors and practices of non-Western cultures. I have called this tendency to identify or correlate the meaning and nature of religion in the modern period a specific form of signification. The modern notion of religion as “created in the scholar’s study” or as emerging rootless from the inner epistemological consciousness of the modern West is directly related to the fact that religion as an authentic expression of the human mode of being has a direct relationship to those cultures that were “discovered” and dominated by the West during the modern period. One might immediately raise the issue of those ancient Western cultures of the Near East or the Greeks or the Romans. In all cases the issue of distance is to the fore—either a distance in geographical space or in chronological time. In both cases this distance is a sign of passivity.7 With the end of the open practice and ideology of colonialism and imperialism we are confronted with a theoretical and practical issue of a different kind. The former “sources of our data” have become interlocutors in the conversation about the human sciences, their origins, intent, and meaning. The empiricity of their presence necessitates a rethinking of the categories. This other kind of difference must, however, be seen within the context of a world that has been subjected in a variety of ways with the sameness of a former colonialism and imperialism. In other words, we cannot authentically deal with this new situation by creating a binary composed of the meanings of the West on the one hand, and meanings stemming from the cultures of the non-Western world on the other. All cultures have experienced some form of colonialism whether as colonizers or the colonized. The former colonized for

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all sorts of reasons are forced to admit of this situation; the cultures of the colonial powers, having formally relinquished their rule, have not yet come to the intellectual and theoretical implications of this changed situation, especially as it applies to method and methodologies. Dipesh Chakrabarty in several of his works has made this point in different ways. His clearest and most succinct statement of this point is, “European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in nonWestern nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought— which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects us all—may be renewed from and for the margins.”8 It is thus not the intention of this new departure to substitute the opposite of colonialism as an alternative meaning of thought for what was the reigning content and style of thought of the cultures of the European colonizers. We should now raise issues from the temporal in-betweenness of time that is located between the colonizers of the West and those who were dominated and colonized—from within the interstices of this contact situation. It is well known that in the Enlightenment context of the human sciences the problem of the “origins” of human institutions and modes of being provided an important take off for investigation and research. The concern for origins included a search for the origins of language, marriage, society, religion, and even the human mode of being itself. The quest for origins created speculative primordial and vague beginnings in some hoary past. Socalled contemporary “primitives” cultures were too often taken as an approximation of these origins in the past.9 This placing of cultures and peoples who are in fact contemporaneous with the West became a favorite modality within the human sciences. Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other is devoted to a discussion of this issue. He refers to this distancing within a contemporaneity as a denial of coevalness within the order of knowledge of the knower and the known. Fabian’s statement to this point is as follows: “The denial of coevalness … can be traced to a fundamental epistemological issue. Ultimately it rests on the negation of temporal materiality of communication through language. For the temporality of speaking … implies cotemporality of producer and product, speaker and listener, Self and Other.”10 In the remainder of this essay I will discuss situations that have taken place as a result of colonialism and contact between the West and other cultures in the world. I will show how these situations could lead to another meaning of religion and its study.

A new arche for the study of religion The origin of religion: The notion of the fetish At the present time the notion of the “fetish” or “fetishism” has been taken up in the sciences of psychopathology or is contextualized within a framework made famous by Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism.” In the eighteenth century, fetishism was acknowledged by leading Western scholars as the “origin of religion.” The term itself is derivative from the Portuguese feitiço, which is a form of the Latin facio, facere, factum, terms having to do with making, doing, or things made or accomplished. In Portuguese culture some form of these terms was used to designate witchcraft—extraordinary actions, usually evil or at least ambiguous, perpetrated by human beings. The word enters the scholarly lexicon not directly from the Portuguese but from their settlements and relationships with certain Africans on the west coast of Africa. Though fetishism as the origin of religion lost its prominence in the early part 186

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of the twentieth century, its position being taken over by evolutionary and stadial notions, the residue of meaning contained in it continued to make it a concern for the social sciences. William Pietz in probing into this residual meaning of the fetish and fetishism has revived the notion of the fetish in a new arena. In a series of brilliant historical and analytical studies published in the journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics between the years 1985 and 1988, Pietz brought about a new discourse about the meaning of the fetish for the methodologies of the social sciences.11 He discerned that the discourse about the fetish emerged out of the cultural, social, commercial, sexual, and linguistic contacts between the West and Africa and played a significant role in “establishing certain preconceptions about human consciousness and the material world which became fundamental to the disciplinary human sciences that arose in the nineteenth century.”12 Pietz shows how the made or fabricated meaning of the fetish came from two sources. On the one hand the Portuguese traders as good citizens of a Catholic monarch asked the Africans, “Who is your god?” The Africans replied by pointing to a talisman that they wore around their necks. Upon closer examination, the Portuguese discovered that many of these talismans were made of gold. They then inquired whether they would trade this “god” for glass baubles or textiles. The Africans were willing to engage is such a trade. There is a second meaning attached to the notion of fabrication in the constitution of the fetish. The Africans with whom the Portuguese were dealing were members of what one might call a “factory.” These factories were literally storehouses for captured slaves who were awaiting shipment across the Atlantic. The residents of these factories not only included detribalized Africans from several different tribes but also Europeans, former Muslims and Christians, that is, persons who no longer lived under African, European, or Muslims traditional orders of society. They were “self-made men” whose major job was to reduce enslaved Africans from ordered societies into non-descript enslaved beings. The factories for the creation of slaves were the first step in the process of the social death of the enslaved persons. Pietz offers this summarizing statement: The first characteristic to be identified as essential to the notion of the fetish is that of the fetish object’s irreducible materiality. The truth of the fetish resides in its status as a material embodiment; its truth is not that of the idol, for the idol’s truth lies in its relation of iconic resemblance to some immaterial model or entity. … [S]econd, and equally important, is the theme of singularity and repetition. The fetish has an ordering power derived from its status as the fixation or inscription of a unique originating event that has brought together previously heterogeneous elements into a novel identity. … [T]he final two … are the themes of social value and personal individuality. The problem of the nonuniversality and connectedness of social value emerged in an intense form from the beginnings of the European voyages to [sub-Saharan] black Africa.13 Pietz goes on to trace the history and literature related to the fetish from voyagers and discoverers of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Not only does he find that the notion of the fetish was being characterized as the general religion of the whole of Africa, it was taken up by Western scholars as the beginning and origin of religion itself. In addition, he finds that the notion of the fetish entered into Western scholarly and popular languages with no theological or philosophical discussion. The various descriptions in several formulations were simply taken into the Western discussion concerning African religion in particular and 187

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the nature of religion in general. The notion of the fetish lies behind Kant’s comment on Africa in his Observations on the Feeling of Beauty and the Sublime and Hegel’s characterization of Africa in his Philosophy of History. But something more sinister is going on in the meaning that is attached to the notion of the fetish. Obviously the Enlightenment had problems with the origin and beginnings of things and even more so with that meaning of transcendence that was related to a Creator of the world. In many traditions of the world, and especially in the Western religious traditions, the notion that a Creator God created the world gave assurance of an inherent value to the creatures of the world. The notion of the fetish, taking place within the interstices of the economic ordering of the Atlantic world, becomes an almost perfect foil for the creation of a modality of matter that had no inherent value; the only value accruing to this form of matter was its exchange value. Now to be sure, one cannot place the total burden of the creation of this form of matter at the door of the fetish discussion. There is, of course, Max Weber’s thesis concerning the role of the Protestant ethic and the creation of the capitalist mode of production.14 So while the meaning of the fetish is not the only cause, it is an important part of a constellation of meanings that have led to the disenchantment of the modern Western world. It is interesting that this disenchantment of the world takes place within the orders of religious languages. Through the notion of the fetish, the inherent meaning of matter is debunked as a relic of a past age of ignorance. Benjamin Nelson shows how the meaning of intimacy as an inherited modality of communal life is given up for the Calvinist emphasis on a High God whose relations to the world are inscrutable and unknown. Along with other movements in the modern world the new form of matter that possesses no inherent value becomes matter as the commodity, whose value is realized only in exchange, possessing the facility of portability. The cargo cult The phenomenon that is called the “cargo cult” was popularized through the work of an Australian government anthropologist whose professional responsibilities included keeping track of an area of New Guinea which was then governed by Australia. The anthropologist Francis Edgar Williams made a report on strange new ceremonies taking place in the neighborhood of Vailala, which was later published as The Vailala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf District. Here again is another scene of the encounter between the culture of the West and that of Papua New Guinea. In this case, the so-called “cargo-cult” centers around Western material commodities (cargo). In the original report, Williams gives us this description: “This movement involved, on the one hand, a set of preposterous beliefs among its victims—in particular the expectation of an early visit from deceased relatives— and, on the other hand, collective nervous symptoms of a sometimes grotesque and idiotic nature.”15 Kenelm Burridge tells us that these ceremonies revolve around mystical and messianic beliefs related to the veneration and expectation of Western commodity goods such as axes, knives, razor blades, colored beads, tinned food, bolts of cloth, and the like. This is why they are referred to as “cargo” cults. Typically members of such a cult say that the commodities that have been brought to New Guinea by the Westerners were really in fact sent by the cultist’s ancestors and were diverted en route by the Europeans.16 As a matter of fact, the cargo cultist 188

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makes it clear that from their perspective, it is the Westerners who sacralize and venerate matter and materiality though they attempt to hide this fact from those whom they dominate. The Westerners tell them that their success is related to their God and their belief in Jesus Christ, but the cargo cultist sees in the Westerners’ behavior that they really worship matter in the form of material goods—commodities which they have brought with them on great ocean ships. Now it is clear that the natives of Papua New Guinea have a very different notion and meaning of exchange. At bottom their exchange system still carries with it notions of the gift and reciprocity. Furthermore from their point of view all the elements in the exchange, the object exchanged, and the parties involved in the exchange are valorized, thus exchanges are always related in one way or another to some notion and meaning of community or the forms of intimacy related to communal life. It is clear that matter and materiality have not lost their inherent value for the cargo cultist; while dominated by Western power, they have not totally succumbed to the Western notion of abstract instrumental value as the reigning mode of exchange. In addition, cargo cults often represent the only modes through which the natives of New Guinea are able to retain their identities, but do not represent a simple binary with the natives on one side and the Westerners on the other; the relationship is more complex. As G. W. Trompf has noted, “they symbolize the power available to whites; thus, with their hopedfor transference into indigenous hands, they amount to redemption from white domination and from the injustices of evident inequality or inaccessibility.”17 History and temporalities In situations of colonialism, imperialism, and domination, we are accustomed to hearing some refrain on how the land was taken by the representatives of some Western power. Less often do we pay attention to the nature and meaning of time in a situation of this kind. The Enlightenment sciences present two interrelated views of temporality. From one point of view, time is understood as a variation of the Christian notion of time. In another version this Christian version is transformed into a secular abstract and neutral chronology based upon mathematical physical calculations symbolized by the Greenwich Observatory. The change is designated as a change from ad (Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord) to ce (Common Era). In either case, the normative meaning of time is based upon a variation of the Western understanding of the temporal process. One of these variations of time is at work in defining the past, present, or future or in universal terms; this time is also the basis for the periodizations of history, for example, ancient, medieval, and modern. Though the qualitative Christian Western time of “the year of our Lord” was changed to a neutral abstract notion of time, this same neutral and abstract time seemed to follow its own qualitative trajectory of progressivism. It is this qualitative trajectory that enabled the social sciences almost unconsciously to carry on what Johannes Fabian has called the “denial of coevalness.” A recent study of African American religion in Chicago is illustrative of this issue. Wallace D. Best’s Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Chicago, 1915–1952, is a study of black religion in Chicago.18 What is striking in this study of the migration of large numbers of African Americans from the rural South to the urban situation of Chicago is the fact that at the University of Chicago was a Department of Sociology that was literally “cutting 189

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its methodological teeth” on studies related to the nature of urbanity as a way of life. Best not only analyzes and interprets the religious life of black Pentecostal and mainline churches but also the meaning of the methodological impact of the Chicago school of sociology. In addition, a number of the members of the “Chicago school” were themselves, African Americans.19 For the most part, the sociologists defined the religious life of these migrant African Americans as an aspect of a bygone age and therefore would be ineffective as a meaningful structure in their adaptation to the urban situation. As Best’s work shows, these migrants did not abandon their religion or their gods in the new situation—and their gods did not abandon them. As Best states at one point, “The pervasiveness of a southern religious ethos over the entire religious scene and the cultural dominance of black southerners were intrinsic to that dynamic. The new urban religion … had taken hold in black Chicago during the migration era, even as important aspects of it eluded the view of some scholars.”20 The scholars of the Chicago school could not “see” nor make sense of the urban situation of Chicago because they had decided that religion was not fit for the modern urban situation and therefore any study of it as a creative form of cultural life would be ineffectual. This is as much an intellectual ideology as it is an ideology based upon the meaning and nature of temporality. There was the built-in sense that religion had no creative role in the temporality defined as the modern urban situation. Karen Fields has raised similar issues in her studies of a religious prophet in colonial Central Africa during the early part of the twentieth century.21 There appeared in various villages in this area a prophet, one Shadrach Sinkala. Shadrach preached a radical iconoclastic message telling his hearers to stop the work of cutting trees, to leave their wives if they were polygamists—that they should not lie, cheat, steal, or kill. The faithful must accept Christianity and be baptized. In addition, Shadrach preached that the faithful should not obey the colonial authorities, or the tribal chiefs, or the missionaries; they should obey God only. His message had a very clear millennial intent; the Kingdom of God was at hand! Fields attributes some of his doctrines to the missionary work of the Watch Tower Society in this part of Africa but it does not account for the intensity of his message or its affect upon all who heard him. Fields’s work operates on at least two levels. On the one hand, it is a descriptive anthropological history of colonial Central Africa during the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Interwoven in this narrative is a running debate with her anthropological colleagues and interlocutors regarding the “rationality” of Shadrach’s millenarian prophecies. I cannot rehearse the entire argument here. Allow me to state a summarizing conclusion where Fields makes her case for the “rationality” of the religious prophet: Thus, anthropological thought about the colonial order could not surpass a Shadrach’s. In a fundamental sense, it could not even compete with a Shadrach’s, for it did not organize the facts of the whole society that he confronted with mind and body. He had no scientific theory that abstracted away from the colonial reality. Anthropologists had. He lived within the colonial present, they within the ethnographic one. From his standpoint— of the whole, in the colonial present—the discoveries that organized anthropologists’ passion for detail and their humane aspiration about ruling were neither here nor there.22 The point of the argument was the insistence of her anthropological colleagues that because Shadrach expressed a religious and “non-scientific” view of his situation it could be 190

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disregarded. In the first instance any religious view was an inadequate mode of interpretation for any modern social reality and it is clear that religion had no efficacious power to render any meaningful knowledge about social reality. Here again, the nature and meaning of a religious orientation is almost ruled out beforehand because of an ideology of the temporal sequences. There can be no efficacious meaning attributed to religion in the modern period. In a book that is destined to become a classic, J. Stephen Lansing presents us with a study of the Balinese rice irrigation system.23 The study is placed within the context of a methodological tradition that includes Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism and Marxian theories of production, nature, and work. It, of course, draws upon contemporary anthropological studies of Bali. Lansing discovers that the best mode of understanding and controlling the irrigation system of Bali are contained in and associated with certain ancient rituals related to the temple structure of the old Bali kingdoms. After independence from the Dutch the Balinese did not return to these older structures but saw independence as a signal for the importation of modern techniques of agronomy represented by the Green Revolution. The techniques of the agronomists of the Green Revolution could not sustain a reliable and consistent yield of rice. The discovery of the older temple rituals and ceremonies proved to be the most stable and reliable mode of the management of the irrigation system. No modern technique could approximate the deft and subtle manner in which the system operated. Lansing tells us that, The images of society that the Balinese see in their terraced landscape do not reflect the progressive linear order that Marx and Hegel understood as “history.” Instead, for the Balinese nonlinear patterns of temporal order emerge from the regular progression of natural cycles, the seasons of growth and change. When Balinese society sees itself reflected in a humanized nature, a natural world transformed by the efforts of previous generations, it sees a pattern of interlocking cycles that mimic these cycles of nature. Whereas Marx looked at nature and saw evolutionary progress, a Balinese farmer may look at nature and see the intricate patterns of the tika calendar or hear the interlocking cyclical melodies of a gamelan orchestra.24 It is instructive to note that Lansing’s work is not a study of Balinese religion; it is rather a study of the nature and meaning of work as it is involved in the cultivation of rice. The methodologies employed are not those of the religious historian or investigator and it is more dependent on Marx and Habermas than any well-known scholars of religion. Indeed, the “Afterword” of the text is written by his colleague, Valerio Valeri who places Lansing’s work under a most critical “Marxist stare.” In his concluding statement, Valeri says that “[Lansing] has brilliantly renewed Marx’s theory of humanized nature and has forced us to see its strengths and limitations; and in the course of doing this he has shown, to paraphrase Kant, that production without ritual is blind and ritual without production is empty.”25 I have presented the examples above to show that the methodological presupposition of a “progressive” linear meaning of temporality must be questioned in light of the data that appear. This presupposition concerning methodological temporality seems to be a supposition of much of what goes under the name of human sciences. The kinds of studies referred to above indicate the need for serious attention to the presuppositions of the meaning of temporality within the methodological epistemologies of our studies. 191

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Kathleen Biddick has undertaken a radical critique of the presupposition of the Christian meaning of temporality as the normative meaning of historical time. I quote at length the manner in which she has raised this issue: This study grapples with an unsettling historiographical problem: how to study the history of Jewish-Christian relations without reiterating the temporal practices through which early Christians, a heterogeneous group, fabricated an identity (“Christianness”) both distinct from and superseding that of neighboring Jewish communities. These Christian temporal practices insisted on identitary time, by which I mean the assumption that time can be culturally identical with itself. … First, they posited a present (“this is now”) exclusively as a Christian present. They cut off a Jewish “that was then” from a Christian “this is now.” They also imagined a specific direction to Christian time. They believed that the Christian new time—a “this is now”—superseded a “that was then” of Israel. … The purported “secularization” of modernity, I contend here, has never overtaken this core Christian conception of supersession. Supersessionary thinking and notions of modernity are closely bound, and, I argue, shape even the very terms of current debate among medievalists over the existence of antisemitism in the Middle Ages.26 Biddick realizes that it is a false option to think that the alternative to this supercessionary history is a “Jewish history.” One must rather find a strategy whereby the reality that occurs within such history can be interpreted in another manner. It is at this point that she suggests another mode of temporality: “Indeed, this book is about the risk of thinking about ‘unhistorical’ temporalities—ones not about divisions between then and now, but about passages, thresholds, gaps, intervals, in-betweenness. These unhistorical temporalities that do not use time as a utilitarian resource to ground identity are temporalities that can never be one.”27 Dipesh Chakrabarty speaks to this issue of the meaning of temporality as a methodological concern.28 He takes off on the issue of historicism and raises this discussion through recourse to the scholarly texts of three non-Western writers, Jomo Kenyatta, Anthony Appiah, and D. D. Kosambi. He sets up the problem with Kenyatta’s usage and admission of magical practices in his classic text, Facing Mount Kenya. This book had been the basis for Kenyatta’s thesis with Malinowski and upon its publication he had asked Malinowski to write an Introduction. It is clear that Malinowski is worried about the inclusion of Kenyatta’s reference to his apprenticeship and practice of magic, especially now that he was a distinguished member of a social science discipline. Chakrabarty notes a “doubleness” of voice in Kenyatta’s text that is contrasted with a “single voice” in Malinowski expressing discomfort in a disappointed tone. Chakrabarty almost detects a double voice in Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, where in an autobiographical section Appiah speaks of his father’s communion with his ancestors by pouring a little gin on the ground. Appiah, the Ghanaian Cambridge-trained philosopher, glosses over this act of his father through some reference to anthropological literature by way of Edward B. Tylor. Kosambi is intrigued by the appearance of an ancient object, a saddle-quern, used to grind spices. It is clear that this is a very old Indian object but it is not mentioned or accounted for in any of the Hindu texts. The saddle-quern is the example of what Chakrabarty calls the “timeknot.” Though the saddle-quern exists and is used now—sitting in a modern Indian kitchen, it still remains in another time for him. He cannot ask the question about the 192

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relationship of the saddle-quern to the kitchen stove—though present together now, they are participating in two very different temporal modes. Chakrabarty refers to this mode of understanding history as historicist and anachronistic. It “involves the use of a sense of anachronism to convert objects, institutions, and practices with which we have lived relationships into relics of other times.” He goes on to say that, “this capacity to construct a single historical context for everything is the enabling condition of modern historical consciousness, the capacity to see the past gone and reified into an object of investigation; … the modern sense of ‘anachronism’ stops us from confronting the problem of the temporal heterogeneity of the ‘now’ in thinking about history.”29 Chakrabarty’s critique is directed mainly to situations, persons, and cultures that are contemporary, whereas Biddick’s focus falls primarily on the issue of Jews and Judaism especially within medieval and modern Western history. In making clear the notion of “unhistorical histories” she finds it necessary to bring to bear the meaning and nature of the fetish and fetishism in a fashion reminiscent of William Pietz’s discussions.

Conclusion I took as a point of departure for this essay the necessity to explain more fully what I might mean by a “serious discourse.” What I have done in the above comments is to give examples of the kind of work I have implied. I have introduced these examples as the basis for the kind of method that I think we might pursue in the study of religion. My commentators felt that my remarks evoked a method involving “interreligious dialogue.” There might have been echoes of this kind in my former remarks but that is not exactly what I have in mind. I would say that I think that any future method must include the kinds of issues and questions regarding the positing of data from scholars who are from other cultures. My concern here is about what questions are asked and who asks these questions. There is another issue having to do with matters related to “the interreligious.” I think that we must all admit that over the last five hundred years every culture in the world has been affected by the West; the West is everywhere. This “West that is everywhere” is no longer under control of the “original” Western culture; it no longer belongs to the West. This means also that some form of the Enlightenment sciences are a part of the contemporary scholarly world in every part of the globe. This universal spread of the Enlightenment sciences is part and parcel of the destructive and ambiguous symbolic constructions brought on by the West over the last five hundred years. Given the simultaneity of these sciences with colonialism and imperialism, their clarity carries with them silences and shadows and therefore one must practice them through a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” It is out of this suspicious mode that I seek methodological moments and rhetorical pauses in method. At one point I recommended that we needed to “crawl back through our disciplines” so that we might experience another modality of the temporality of these sciences.30 While this essay has been critical of the practices of Enlightenment sciences, it does not shy away from the creativity and necessity of these sciences in any discussion about human beings in any society or culture. Just as the “science of religion” first drew its data from cultures, times, and places distant from the West, in too many cases, the Enlightenment failed to exercise its critical and creative role in the times and places where the West was in control. All too often, other meanings from other sources were brought to bear to fulfill the promise of the 193

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Enlightenment sciences. I have attempted to bring a notion of “matter” and “materiality” back into methodological discussions. By and large, notions of this sort are discussed under the heading of “materialism” which is an idealization of the meaning of matter and often has no concrete referent since discourses flowing from such idealization presuppose the abstract neutral time of the “science” of economics. Let me be clear at this point. I do not favor the expulsion of the “science” of economics nor any other of the Enlightenment sciences. Rather, I recommend a critical discourse between these sciences and the specific and concrete description of matter, its exchanges, and meanings in specific situations of cultures and societies. If these exchanges are related in religious, ceremonial, and symbolic modes, this does not mean that these realities simply refer to the secular order of an Enlightenment science. In sum, my comments are expressed most aptly by Chakrabarty’s statement, “European thought is at once indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations.”31 I would expand this statement to include any situation on the globe.

Notes 1. Charles H. Long, “A Look at the Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions: Retrospect and Future,” in The History of Religions: Retrospect and Future, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 87–104. 2. Ibid., 101–102. 3. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi. 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 344. 5. This was, of course, a very rough categorization and represented the interest of the scholars involved and the availability of access to data. For example, no one knew where to place the Aztecs, Maya, and Incas of the New World in this structure. 6. I refer here to Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923). 7. See my discussion of “empirical others” in the introduction of Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, 2nd ed. (Aurora, CO: Davies, 1999). 8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 16. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 9. The search for origins was based upon a stadial notion of historical time. Ronald L. Meek’s study, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), is a lucid discussion of the beginnings of the four-stage theory of history and prehistory. 10. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 164. 11. See William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17; “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987): 23–46; and “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of the Fetishism,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (Autumn 1988): 105–124. 194

Religion, Discourse, and Hermeneutics 12. Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, IIIa,” 107. 13. Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, I,” 7, 9. 14. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner, 1958). Another take on the role of Protestantism can be seen in Benjamin Nelson, From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949), which emphasizes the desacramentalizing of the world through Calvinism and traces this process through a study of the practice of usury within the Calvinist tradition and its effect on the economic theories of modernity. 15. Francis Edgar Williams, The Vailala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf District, Territory of Papua Anthropology Reports, 4 (Port Moresby: E. G. Baker, 1923), 1. 16. See Kenelm Burridge, Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium (London: Methuen, 1970), xv–xxiii. 17. G. W. Trompf, Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 161. Trompf ’s work is the latest comprehensive study of Melanesian cargo cults. 18. Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 19. Some of the best known African American intellectuals of this era were members of the “Chicago school” of sociology. Among them were Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, E. Franklin Frazier, and Charles H. Johnson. 20. Best, Passionately Human, 34. Given the brilliance of the group of African American sociologists of this period and the creative vibrancy of African American religion during this same period, one is struck by the fact that none of them produced any major work on African American religion in Chicago. 21. Karen E. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 22. Ibid., 283. 23. J. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 24. Ibid., 133. 25. Ibid., 142. 26. Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1. 27. Ibid., 2 (emphasis added). 28. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 237–255 (“Epilogue: Reason and the Critique of Historicism”). 29. Ibid., 243. 30. Long, Significations, 9. 31. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16.

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PART III AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES

CHAPTER 16 AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: AN INTERPRETATIVE ESSAY

Abstract This essay addresses the problematical nature of the meaning of religion as it is related to the formation and destiny of peoples of African descent in the United States. Moving beyond a narrow understanding of the nature of religion as expressed in much of black theology, for example, this essay proposes a “thick” and complex depiction of religion in the African American context through a recognition of its relationship to the contact and conquest that marked the modern world. Characterizations Since the publication of Professor James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power in 1969, there has been a steady publication of books and articles by him and his students defining African American religion within the orders of a Christian theology. These texts have been important in adding a theological dimension to the meaning of black cultural historical life. Before the advent of black theology, it was the tradition of African American sociologists undertaking the task of critique of American society who, in so doing, provided a meaningful structure for an ameliorative form for African American communities in the United States. As sociologists they operated out of an empirical epistemology and had little use for religious meaning except as an institutional and often a residual form of African American life. While black theology hailed a new beginning for the study of the religion of African Americans in the United States, it was clear that from one point of view black theology was a black church Christian theology. This raised a number of issues as it related to the ranges of black historical experience and its cultural religious life. In the first instance, black churches did not appear in North America until the latter decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, and even then, in very selected regions of the United States. What of the religious life of African peoples in North America before this time? While black churches

This article should be seen in continuity with earlier studies I have devoted to this topic. In “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States,” I began an outline of some of the basic elements that had to be treated in any study of this religious orientation. In the William James Lecture at Harvard: “The Oppressive Element in Religion and the Religions of the Oppressed,” I delineated the difference between religious dependence and limit, and historical oppression and domination. I showed how any notion of civil religion in the United States must of necessity deal with the meaning of enslaved Africans and the institution of slavery in America to have any validity, in an article entitled “Civil Rights/Civil Religion: Visible People and Invisible Religion.” All of these articles are reprinted in Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, 2nd ed. (Aurora, CO: Davies, 1999). See also my bibliographical essay, “African American Religion in the United States: A Bibliographical Essay,” in The African American Experience: An Historical and Bibliographical Guide, ed. Arvarh E. Strickland and Robert E. Weems (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 368–394.

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were often the center of social life for the community, by virtue of their ordering in terms of various Christian forms, all modes of black religion were not brought into the black church. In addition, we know from historical data that before Emancipation, black churches in the North often emerged from a prior organization of freed black persons, commonly known as African Societies. Black theology had to come to terms with the rise of African American Muslim communities and forms of Afrocentric meanings and communities in the United States. Furthermore, black theologians themselves found that they were increasingly turning to wider ranges of data for interpretation, for example, slave narratives, black music traditions, rituals, literature, and so forth. Thus, the issue was whether the style and form of a black Christian theology were adequate for a profound understanding of the religious life of African peoples in North America. Now given these wide ranges of data and methods, it is not easy to characterize in a precise manner the nature of African American religion in the United States. C. Eric Lincoln echoes this situation in his description of black religion. In one of his studies he says, “black religion is not simply white religion in blackface, neither is black religion a formal denomination with a structured doctrine.” It is rather, says Lincoln, an attitude, a movement. … It represents the desire of Blacks to be self-conscious of black people about the meaning of their blackness and to search for spiritual fulfillment in terms of their understanding of themselves and their experience of their history. … Black religion, then, cuts across denominational, cult, and sect lines to do for black people what other religions have not done: to assume the black man’s humanity, his relevance, his responsibility, his participation, and his right to see himself as the image of God.1 In a later work, C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya present us with six dialectical models for an understanding of the black church—models which might be easily applied in the case of black religion. They are as follows: (1) the dialectic between the priestly and prophetic functions; (2) the dialectic between the other-worldly versus the this-worldly; (3) the dialectic between universalism and particularism; (4) the dialectic between the communal versus the privatistic; (5) the dialectic between the charismatic versus the bureaucratic; and (6) the dialectic between resistance versus accommodation.2 We should consider the above remarks in light of David Wills’s statement that, “The study of African American religious history still lacks an obvious entry point for persons seeking an obvious orientation to the field.”3 After stating the problematic of African American religious history, Wills goes on to suggest three models for the study of this religion. They are: (1) Pluralism and Toleration; (2) The Southern Encounter; and (3) The Encounter of Black and White from the Evangelical Wakening to the Present. It is obvious that much of the complex nature of African American religion is due not only to the peculiar situation of blacks within the culture of the United States, but equally to their formative meaning in the creation of the modern world itself. This accounts for Lincoln’s statement that African American religion is a “movement” that cuts across denominations, cults, and sects. There is thus a very essential existential element in the nature of this religion. This accounts for the appearance of James Cone’s initial work during the Civil Rights Movement and within a context defined by that movement and the activities of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. 200

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Legacies and sources It is obvious that the problematical nature of African American religion is due to the fact of the enslavement of African peoples in North America. Slavery is an old human institution practiced by most of the ancient civilizations in various parts of the world. The slavery introduced in North America at this juncture of history was an anomaly. Even before the creation of the American republic, the religious impulses of the Protestant Reformation expressed strong sentiments for the possibility that the human mode of being could define a meaning of selfdetermination that carried the meaning of freedom for ordinary persons. More than this was the advent of the American republic through a revolution that stated its fundamental meaning in terms of the “birth of freedom” as coincidental with the founding of the republic. There was, however, neither the eradication of the institution of slavery nor the emancipation of those enslaved. The American republic at its moment of founding created the impossible dilemma of embracing and sustaining the institution of chattel slavery within a revolutionary democracy. Chattel slavery is thus one of the general characteristics of the situation that defined and contained the meaning of Africans in the North American milieu. While being an institution legitimated in all parts of the United States at its inception, slavery was particularized in various regions of the country and differed in its relationship to the labor as dictated by the environmental and economic motivations. Into the more general characteristics of slavery, several complex meanings and relationships emerged. Enslaved Africans had to learn the empirical and cultural languages and styles of those who owned them; they had to find ways to make use of and enhance whatever forms, techniques, and memories of their land of origin, and over time, they had to find ways of teaching and accepting newly-enslaved Africans within their slave communities. Sterling Stuckey has described the way in which enslaved Africans introduced newly-enslaved Africans into the North American community of Africans through the African ritual forms of the “ring shout.” In this movement they created simultaneously a new form of African-ness while becoming Americans.4 Lawrence Jones coined the phrase, “they overheard the Gospel,” in describing the reception of Christianity among the enslaved Africans. This eavesdropping was not, however, limited to the Gospel; it included the secret transmission of the entire American ideology of freedom, government, economics, and so on. And in this secret hearing a new and different understanding of modernity was being transmitted. Thus there was forming not only a new American community among the slaves but another understanding and interpretation of America itself. On the specific level of religion, Albert Raboteau, Mechal Sobel, and Sylvia Frey have explored the actuality of this transmission and transformation of an American meaning among the enslaved.5 Because slaves, masters, and mistresses lived within the same spatial milieu and shared economic systems, they shared a rich communication. This communication was not on an egalitarian level, however, for the slave could hardly initiate and define the terrain of communicative exchanges. This fact has made for some confusion and given a sense of a common tradition stemming from the enslaved persons and their owners. Eugene Genovese, employing a Gramscian interpretation of hegemony, has portrayed this in terms of “the world the slaves made,” and Mechal Sobel as “the world they made together.”6 There was a kind of objective world created by the institution of slavery, but it was neither acknowledged nor 201

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known by the participants in the same manner. In the words of Ashis Nandy, within the slave system, regardless and in spite of the feelings of the participants, slaves and their owners had to remain, at best, “intimate enemies.”7 Overt and implicit violence was endemic to the institution of slavery, and though slave owners might have among themselves found it necessary to limit and regularize this violence, the very threat of violence was the terror that underlay the system of slavery itself. Violence within the institution of slavery was legitimated when perpetrated by the owners but never legitimized if practiced by the slaves unless under direct orders from the owner, and then, never against a person or persons who were not slaves. Slaves knew that they could also undertake the use of violence, and throughout the period of American enslavement there were instances of individual and collective violence against the slave systems by slaves. There are also several instances in which escaped slaves created their own maroon communities or took refuge with Native Americans.8 Enslaved Africans, forbidden to read or write, have not left an extensive written record. Access to their lives and experiences come by way of oral traditions that contain their testimony. I am using the term “testimony” as it has gained parlance in the works of Latina/o scholars. “Testimonio” means “to tell a personal story that contains a message from a subordinated group involved in a political struggle”; it is experience as knowledge that motivates the telling and retelling of testimony.9 For African Americans, these testimonies in the form of oral traditions bear witness to a meaning of time and space that has been hidden from the official ideological accounts of the story of the republic. One of the first and most extensive archives of these kinds of testimonials was that undertaken by the Works Progress Administration between 1936 and 1938. These consist of 194 interviews of former enslaved African Americans. John W. Blassingame has also compiled a volume of oral tradition of African Americans. In his introduction, Blassingame provides an excellent discussion concerning the critical and hermeneutical principles for understanding these testimonials.10 Oral tradition and its testimonies become “sites of memory.” The most general site of this memory for African Americans are those “places of terror”—spaces where through enslavement they came to know and experience this land. It is through stories and story-telling that these “memories” are re-membered and imagined as knowledge and resources for redemptive transformations. These memories play an important role in the work of many black novelists. We see this especially in Toni Morrison’s novels and in Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, as well as in his volumes of essays. Black music was the other expression of the oral tradition as “testimonio.” Whether from the “spirituals” or the “blues” traditions, this music and its musicians represent one of the most powerful and distinctive expressions of America as informed by the African American presence. The music not only speaks of the condition of Africans in the United States, it takes on social, psychological, and economic meanings within the wider culture of African Americans. John Lovell Jr.’s monumental study of the spirituals is an example of the impact of this music tradition. Miles Mark Fisher interpreted the spirituals as simultaneously expressing Christian meanings while sending subversive signals relating to escape from slavery. Douglas Daniel, working as a historian, has shown how the African American music tradition not only accompanied and in some cases preceded the migratory movements of blacks throughout the country but also served equally as a mode of communication between musicians and disparate communities.11 202

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Reorientation in the study of African American religion If we follow closely C. Eric Lincoln’s descriptive definition of black religion we are able to justify the ranges of data that contribute to its formulation. While the Christian denominational churches form a major and definitive meaning of black religion, black religion is not limited to this expression. This problem has been brought to light in a recent publication by Douglas R. Egerton. Egerton’s work is a study of Gabriel Prosser’s rebellion. While Egerton noted that several authors attributed Prosser’s slave rebellion to Christian motivation, he could find no basis for any form of Christian interpretation in the impetus of Prosser. The interpreters had noted that there was a religious element and seriousness in the motivations of Prosser and thus attributed this element in an unwarranted manner to the Christian faith.12 In recent interpretation, Africa and the African meanings retained by the slaves have been seen as sources of the religious sentiment among African Americans. If, therefore, Prosser’s motivations were religious, but not Christian, it seems that the African element is the only source remaining. Now, these two bases for the sources of the religious sentiment of the Africans enslaved in America have been seen as both dichotomous and simultaneous sources of the religion of African Americans. Instead of attempting to resolve this issue in the terms of the binary presented, it might prove salutary if we resituated the discussion. First of all let us extract the meanings which might be gained from an examination of the term “religion” itself. Our word “religion” is from two Latin words, religio and religare. The first meaning carries the sense of “seriousness,” things done with gravity; the second meaning is the infinitive “to bind”; binding as the simple act of tying together, but on the social level, the acts, rituals, and forms that bind together the exchanges of social life as in weddings, or those ritual acts and meanings that bind together a people or a nation. Whether we use either meaning, it is clear that these notions of religion conform to Lincoln’s understanding of black religion. In other words, a religious dimension seems to be coincidental to the presence, sustaining, and expressive power of African Americans. At this juncture it might be good for us to place the meaning of African American religion in the context of the modern study of religion. It is a well-known observation that the study of religion is a “child of the Enlightenment.” Two new sources of data fueled this new study and understanding of religion—the primitives and the “religions of the East” (the “Orientals”). The areas of the world peopled by those falling into these categories were under increasing Western influence and dominance through colonialism, imperialism, and trade. The category “religion” was used to classify the cultural forms and practices of these new territories. The classification of the new forms of data under these categories gave rise to a new meaning of both the nature of the human and also of religion. Given the norm of reason as the hallmark of the Enlightenment, religion in general and the newer forms of data were placed under the sign of “unreason” or the non-rational. While the practice of religion and religious institutions remained as important modes of Western culture, they had, for the most part, lost their efficacious and normative meanings as the basis for the ordering of these societies. Religion from an Enlightenment point of view was distanced from the West in terms of time and space. As the only nation coming into being out of the ideologies and norms of the Enlightenment, the United States of America presents us with a unique variation regarding the nature and meaning of religion. Whereas almost every other country in the world had some traditions that bound the people together as a unique entity, there was and has never been such a tradition 203

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in the United States, in other words, no ancien régime. This has meant that the American nation has had to have recourse to other modes of binding, and for most of its history, it has accepted the implicit notion that it is a nation bound together by the unity of the “white race.” To be sure, the notion of a “white race” is vague and highly ambiguous, but it is nonetheless a highly guarded and intensely practiced meaning in the American republic. This meaning of the religiosity of America is generally discussed under the rubric of “civil religion,” though none of the proponents of an American civil religion have dealt with the issue of race as a part of its meaning.13 Will Herberg’s discussion raises the ethnic issue but finesses it within a discourse of religion. It is clear, however, from Herberg’s work that neither African Americans, even though most of them would be classified as Protestant, nor Native Americans play any role in his formulations. We must add this understanding of the religiosity of America as civil religion to the Christian Protestant traditions that emerged from the Reformation in the traditions of the Calvinists and the Wesleyans. Though these traditions do not define the nature of civil society in the United States, they are appealed to as the sources of moral discourses in the public realm. African Americans have engaged in discourses on both traditions through their appeal to the American Constitution and have equally been a part of the American denominational orders organizing churches in the Protestant traditions of most of the mainline Reformation traditions. Vis-à-vis the non-African American majority in the country, neither the Christian churches nor the U.S. Constitution have effected the inclusiveness embodied in their respective understandings of human community. So while these institutions are part and parcel of the traditions of African Americans, they have been taken in a critical and prophetic manner rather than as descriptive of the ideals that they enunciate. African Americans in the United States thus fall into an anomalous position. They are a necessary part of the constituting and formative sense of the American culture and nation, and precisely because they are, they are seen as apart, in the sense of apartheid, from how the majority of Americans understand themselves. There has therefore emerged in African American culture a critical history of protest and agitation regarding their legitimacy and rights as American citizens. One might say that this history often expresses the merger of a kind of African American civil religion within the confines of Christianity. James Cone’s black theology is the latest example of the meaning of this amalgam of traditions. There are two fundamental questions concerning African Americans in the United States: the first has to do with whether the American status quo can or ever will acknowledge African Americans and their traditions as a primordial structure of the American reality. The second issue is this: to what extent should those who have endured a history of systematic and legitimized oppression wish to become a part of and continue such a system? This raises the possibility of an alternative. In addressing the issue of alternatives I wish to turn to the African American intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, for I perceive in his life and work a more comprehensive vision of African Americans in the United States from a world historical view, without losing the concreteness of their history and experience in the United States. He explored a range of meanings and situations, Africa and pan-Africanism, the nature of the U.S. Constitution and law, America and its relationship to Europe and the world, and so forth. As one of the first trained social scientists in the United States, he carried out social scientific researches on almost every form of the social life of African Americans. 204

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For this transitional move I wish to concentrate on his third book, The Souls of Black Folk. His first book, which appeared as the first volume of the Harvard American History Series in 1896, is entitled, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America from 1683–1870. His second published work was The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899. Souls appeared in 1903. Even for an accomplished intellectual and writer the text reveals, in the words of Paul Ricoeur, the mode of a “first naïveté.” It is a text about beginnings; it is not a text of the disciplines. It refers to those beginnings that define the archaism of the modern period through the tragic beauty of black bodies, the dilemma of the contact of peoples, the pathos and hypocrisy of evil, the aesthetics of tragedy, and the economies of reason and materialities. It is clear that this text centers on the situation of African Americans in the United States since Reconstruction. The references to Booker T. Washington, Alexander Crummel, Fisk University, and so on, make this clear. Yet, given all this specificity through explicit reference and contextual stylistics, Du Bois places this situation into a wider framework. In chapter 2 of Souls, he states, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, the relation of the darker races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and islands of the sea.”14 Again in the preface to the Jubilee Edition titled “Fifty Years After,” he writes, But today I see more clearly than yesterday that, back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it; and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war, until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.15 So, on the one hand, while Du Bois concentrates on the specific situation of the African American people and presence in the United States, he is able to discern that this people and their presence constitute a much deeper issue than defined by race or the political parameters represented by the U.S. Constitution and its compromising history of evasion in the face of the issue of human freedom. From another perspective, Du Bois’s text should be read alongside the other “mythological texts” of modernity such as those of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. For the most part these philosophical texts also posit some sort of primordial human past, but in abstract terms. Du Bois’s text speaks of a real beginning of modernity in the concrete temporal-spatial events of the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the present as expressed in the African slave trade and the ensuing conquest and destruction of peoples and cultures. The Atlantic world that begins with the commencement of the voyages of Christopher Columbus was initially seen in continuity with the worlds of the Mediterranean. While the religious style of this world was at that time expressed through the Latin meaning of the Catholic faith, even this style was being punctuated by the technological feat of the voyages themselves and the new geographical knowledge of lands and peoples. The full expression of the Atlantic world was under the aegis of a Protestant orientation stemming from the Protestant Reformation. The watchword of this reforming tendency was “human freedom.” While the Mediterranean world might be seen as an incubator for the creation of gods and religion—those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Jews, Christians, Manichees, and Zoroastrians—the 205

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Atlantic world, even in its religious modes of Protestantism, expresses strictures on the lively exuberance of the religious life. The Atlantic world introduces us to the globalization of the meaning of humanity. It creates and intensifies the relationships among and between all the peoples of the planet. The Atlantic is, however, not a revealer of deities, seers, and prophets; it is not under the sign of revelation but of freedom, civilization, and rational orders. This world manifests no regard for the layered thickness of time. It is a world justified by the epistemologies of Kant and Descartes, the English empiricists, and the ethical economies of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The world of the Atlantic lives under the rhetoric and mark of freedom—a freedom that was supposed to banish the specter of the ancient gods and reveal a new and deeper structure of the meaning of human existence. The Atlantic reveals no “soul-stuff,” no primordial ordering of time and space.16 Allow me to restate why I introduced Du Bois at this point. I am not attempting to create a “religion of Du Bois,” nor am I asserting that Du Bois’s formulations are the key or answer to the modern religious situation. I am saying that his text is one of the first to explore an alternative ordering of the world that does not yield either to the temptations of binaries and separations or to the false illusions of continuities. Du Bois recognizes that in the midst of those continuities that offered a more inclusive meaning of freedom in the modern world, there were fundamental and almost ontological discontinuities that moved towards another resolution. In other words, those who were oppressed in the modern period cannot hope that they will experience liberation in the terms of these continuities of freedom. In the case of the Africans enslaved in the Americas, they must go “back into the water” for a reorientation. They must realize that the slave and the enslavers sailed on the same boat, but they were making radically different journeys and defining radically different destinies. These fundamental differences arise because they are “on the same boat,” and one must come to terms with them in this locus. While the meaning of the continuity of freedom is expressed in America as the formation of an American “self ” from the time of the first English settlements to the present, Du Bois raises the issue of the “soul” as a critique, alternative, and new creative possibility for this new time and new space. And he discerns that this new ordering must perforce come to terms with the legacies of that voyage across the Atlantic—the meaning of Africa and the meaning of the Americas. Du Bois’s use of the veil in Souls is indicative of a subtle meaning that he is setting forth; in a fundamental sense, the veil is the caul which often covers a child at birth. In the legacy of African Americans, this is a portentous sign of something amazing or even wise. In other places the veil describes the falseness of separation between the two races, and at other times it highlights the permeable osmotic nature of this separateness. It is the travail of black folk that they must of necessity live through this situation and through the various meanings of the veil come to terms with the embryonic birth of the “soul.” Now while the American political and national culture is permeated with the rhetoric of freedom—which befits a country founded on a revolution—enslaved Africans did not experience this openness of American freedom. So while African Americans have often made common cause in these rhetorical expressions, it is clear that another meaning of freedom is being enunciated in the traditions of those who have been enslaved. David Brion Davis puts it this way in his discussion of Hegel’s understanding of freedom and bondage: It was Hegel’s genius to endow lordship and bondage with such a rich resonance of meanings that the model could be applied to every form of physical and psychological 206

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domination. And the argument precluded the simple and sentimental solution that all bondsmen should become masters, and all masters, the bondsmen. Above all, Hegel bequeathed a message that would have a profound impact on future thought, especially as Marx and Freud deepened the meaning of the message: that we can expect nothing from the mercy of God or from the mercy of those who exercise worldly lordship in His or other names; that man’s true emancipation, whether physical or spiritual, must always depend on those who have endured and overcome some form of slavery.17 Davis’s statement is congruent in content and tone with the way in which I see a profound religious dimension in the work of Du Bois—with one exception. Those who have in the modern period overcome some form of slavery were opened to another and deeper experience of modernity than those who through the illusions of continuities of freedom debased others. From the intensity of the experiences themselves, or through remembrances and recollections, they experienced other forms of power beyond those of human agency, and therefore they are convinced that neither the gods nor the godlessness of the world of the oppressors can be efficacious in the name of freedom. The gods and the godlessness of the oppressive traditions must be reinterpreted from other perspectives, and such reinterpretations should bring about a new hermeneutical and epistemological situation.

Religion, materialities, and cultures of contact Two basic paradigms lie behind the construction of the modern Western self. On the one hand is a conception of the self based upon Descartes’ famous, “cogito ergo sum.” On the other hand is Max Weber’s explanation of the relationship of Protestantism to capital accumulation. In the Cartesian formula there are two forms of the self as “I”—the “I” of the “cogito” that in a miraculous “sha-zam” manner becomes the “I” of the “sum.” One of the most recent interpretations of the Cartesian formula is that of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur sees the first ego of the cogito as an expression of the self in a moment of reflection; it is the “I think” which is the positing of the self as not dependent upon any other object in its modality of a thinking subject. This is a self that cannot express, show, embody, or admit the matter upon which it depends; it is empty and abstract. For the self to be shown, it must reappropriate other objects and substances so that it can become an existential being in a life-world.18 The second paradigm is that set forth by Max Weber regarding the beginnings of capitalism. Weber attributes the rise of capitalism to a form of Reformed theology prevalent in new communities in the Atlantic world. In Weber’s view, Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, allied with Luther’s doctrine of “calling,” led these Calvinist communities to practice a form of what he has called “inner worldly asceticism.” Luther’s notion of calling gave dignity to all vocations, thus bestowing prestige to all ordinary work. While acknowledging the dignity of ordinary work, Calvin’s doctrine of predestination made it clear that no works, whether ordinary or extraordinary, counted towards one’s salvation. Thus one is told to work with diligence, but at the same time one cannot expect one’s works, however noble, to play any part in one’s ultimate salvation. This led to the accumulation of surplus resources, the basis for capital investment.19 Both of these paradigms locate a meaning of the “self ” as a form of inwardness that must then negotiate with a world that is “out there.” This “world out there” is necessary for the 207

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manifestation and showing of the self, but it does not partake of its inner constitution. This is one of the primary meanings of selfhood that has been evoked within the interstices of the creation of the Atlantic world economy of mercantilism and capitalism. What is clear here is that, however the self may be constituted, it is dependent on things, forms, modes, matter— stuff—that it does not create. In the case of the Atlantic world, one of those forms upon which a European American self depended was the bodies of Africans transported as chattel slaves into the New World as the basis for the accumulation of wealth and resources for the mercantile and capitalistic form of production. One can imagine the meaning of “freedom” for this form of a self in light of any notion of god or limits to the autonomous inwardness, privacy, and purity that was the essence of its mode of being. I referred above to the fact that on the slave ships were Europeans and Africans, two human groups on the same ships but making different voyages. And these different voyages had to do with the very constitution of a meaning of the human within this time/space of the voyage as a passage into another form of human meaning. For the most part, the European enslavers define these voyages in the language of discoveries, new opportunities, ventures. In other words, while a difference is defined between the world of Europe and the Americas, such novelty is muted by the practical and ideological meanings of continuity. There are no fundamental experiences of discontinuity. Indeed, they have characterized this time period in continuity with their own past as “the modern age,” or modernity. I am raising the issue of religion again in light of a new beginning—a beginning that also defines the hiatus between the old and the new as experienced within the holds of the slave ships in passage. Those enslaved within the hold were literally “entangled subjects/objects.”20 Those many slave-ships and their cargoes in the Atlantic Ocean mark a profound site of memory for the modern world. It is from this site that another perspective on the worlds of the Americas, Europe, and Africa may be gained. The entangled subjects/objects—the slavers, the enslaved, the formations of personhoods, theories of exchange, and ideologies of freedom and religion—are all intertwined within this entanglement. The world of modernity has only interpreted this site from the point of view of the enslavers, those who were in charge of the slave ships; this is the case whether the discourses were pro- or anti-slavery. Du Bois’s double consciousness as portrayed in Souls carries with it the vestiges of this site as a space of terror within the heart of the modern world of democratic values and ideologies of freedom. Making use of a religious metaphor in referring to the slave trade, he says, “they descended into Hell.”21 What was being articulated as the nature and meaning of modernity was a world dominated by the West that overlooked, avoided, obscured, lied about, and denied the dependence of modernity on the entanglement, the fact that from those dreaded voyages out of which the world of modernity was a-borning, other and new realities were simultaneously taking place. African American religion must be placed within this wider context and while the specificity of the situation in the United States will always be the starting point for any interpretation, the larger reality is one inclusive of the religions and cultures of other enslaved and oppressed in the Americas but also as Du Bois put it in Souls, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” That color-line is global, for the paradigm of the Atlantic world was extended and adapted to all parts of the world. The conventional Western periodization of temporality as Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Modern, and here of late, as Postmodern, is the designation of the history of the world as a prelude to the “rise of the West.” The modern period is the only period in which most of the 208

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prominent participants had little or no say in the creation of the world that they had to inhabit and were known through the categories placed upon them by the various “sciences” of the West. While it makes rhetorical and practical sense to speak of this period as “modern,” it is in fact the global period of cultural contact throughout the world. Instead of speaking of the “postmodern” world as simply an internal critique of the “world that the West made” by and through the Western tradition and its categories, the contemporary period might better be called the “time of cultural contact.” This designation would allow for a full critical discussion regarding all parties to the cultures that came into being over the last five hundred years. In other words, voices of the experience of cultural formations, values, and meanings can no longer be dominated by the discourses of the Western sciences. This does not mean an outright rejection of the West or its discourses, but it does mean that all discourses out of those cultures formed in various parts of the world over the last half-century, including Western culture itself, must be placed within the same arena, thus rejecting the Western temporal ordering of the world. This would bring about a very different discussion of all those meanings, images, and symbols related to what we call religion. African American religion as well as the religious life in all parts of the world would then assume another status and quality. Those cultures on one side of what Du Bois defined as the “color-line” have, during the period of cultural contact, come to their own critical and creative meanings of religion and the religious life, and thus have come to very different assessments of their status and value. It is from this perspective that I read Du Bois’s Souls as a religious text stemming from the global cultures of contact. These religious meanings are not throwbacks to a former age, nor are they expressions of ignorance; they are often alternate perspectives on the nature of the human species and their world. The language of Souls employs what Ann Kibbey has called “material shapes of language.”22 Kibbey’s work shows how the rhetorical use of the material shapes of language were used polemically to incite the Puritans to violence against the Pequots as well as against Puritan dissenters such as Anne Hutchison. Material shapes in language refer to the rhetorical usage of the figurative and nonfigurative in discourse. Thus a discourse shows a correlation between the linguistic form, the material fact of speech, and the relationship between the positioning of words and the acoustical sounds as necessary for the production of a distinct meaning. In Du Bois’s usage, the material shapes of language create a position beyond the binariness of race and racial discourses in American cultural languages. Such a language does not, however, move to an abstract universalism; it remains very concrete and employs this very concreteness to probe and move beyond dualism. The language is critical but not polemical; it repositions the issues such that they move beyond both the polemical egotistical explanatory scientific modes to a fresh and novel beginning point. And it is precisely through the specific concreteness of his language that the material shapes appear. Now through the material shapes of language, Du Bois nuances and echoes the materialities of the Atlantic world—the world of slavery, slave ships and enslavers, as well as the world of democratic values and freedom. He will not, however, allow the bright promises of freedom to obliterate the horrendous terror that underlay the creation of the Atlantic world. It has been this world that has been denied and unspoken and unacknowledged. Any meaning of freedom or self or religion that does not take serious account of the events of formation of the Atlantic world will remain illusory. My continuing research in this area entails the exploration of an alternative epistemology that would resituate the meaning of modern “economy” and 209

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economic theory through a reflection upon the simultaneity of humans as chattel (matter) and bearers of souls. This aspect of the meaning of economic theory has been overlooked by all modern economic theorists. It is directly related to the religious meaning of fetish and fetishism (purported to have been derived from Africa as the earliest form of religion) and to the carry-over of this meaning into the form and meaning of matter as commodity.

Notes 1. The Black Experience in Religion, ed. C. Eric Lincoln (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974), 3. 2. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in African-American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), see chapter 1. 3. See Timothy E. Fulop, “Introduction,” in African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture, ed. Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–4, at 2, quoting from David W. Wills, “Bibliographical Essay: African-American Religious History,” Evangelical Studies Bulletin 11, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 6. See also David W. Wills, “The Central Themes of American Religious History: Pluralism, Puritanism, and the Encounter of Black and White,” in Fulop and Raboteau, African-American Religion, 7–20. 4. See Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundation of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 5. See the following: Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: “The Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 6. Eugene Genovese’s work, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974) is a bit disingenuous, since prior to this work he published another volume, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York: Vintage, 1971). Taken together these two works set up a binary that is not carried through in the later work. One can only support such a binary by giving legitimacy to the enforced silence of the oppressed. See also Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 7. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recover of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 8. See Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1973). The term “maroon” refers to fugitive slaves who existed in a self-contained communities, often in the mountains or other hard-to-reach locations. Maroon communities successfully fought off slavers and maintained their independence. 9. Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry, ed. Teresa Longo (New York: Routledge, 2002), xxiii, 124–125. 10. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1977). 11. See John Lovell Jr., Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Miles Mark Fisher, Negro Slave Songs in the United States (New York: Citadel, 1963); and Douglas Henry Daniels, Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester ‘Pres’ Young (Boston: Beacon, 2002). For an overall history of black music see Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1983). 12. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel Prosser’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1802 and 1803 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

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African American Religion in America 13. For discussions of civil religion, see Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967), 1–21; Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Anchor, 1960). See also Catherine Albanese’s discussion of civil religion in America, Religion, and Religions, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1999). 14. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Jubilee Edition (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1973), 13. 15. Du Bois, Souls, xi. 16. See Charles H. Long, “Passage and Prayer,” in The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, ed. Quinton Hosford Dixie and Cornel West (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 15–16. 17. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 564. 18. See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 19. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner, 1958). Debate and controversy have surrounded Weber’s bold thesis since its publication. The scope of this article does not allow for discussion of this aspect of his work. Two of the most trenchant critiques are found in Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen, 1978), and Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949). 20. The phrase is taken from the title of Nicholas Thomas’s book, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 21. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 727. 22. Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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CHAPTER 17 ASSESSMENT AND NEW DEPARTURES FOR A STUDY OF BLACK RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Assessment Though the present interest in the study of black religion in the United States within the theological community must be seen within the context of the programmatic theological statements of Professor James Cone, his work does not constitute the beginnings of the study of black religion in the United States by black scholars within the theological tradition. Prior to the work of Cone several works dealing with some aspect of black religion published by black scholars appeared. I refer to W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Negro Church (1903), Carter G. Woodson’s The History of the Negro Church (1921), Benjamin Mays and Joseph Nicholson’s The Negro’s Church (1933), Mays’s The Negro’s God (1938), and E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Church in America (1955). In addition, two dissertations from the University of Chicago were Carleton L. Lee’s Patterns of Leadership among Negroes (1950), and Miles Mark Fisher’s Negro Slave Songs in the United States (1953). Even closer in time are C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America (1961) and Joseph Washington’s Black Religion (1964). On the specifically theological level the works of Howard Thurman have for some time set forth a distinctively new interpretation of black religious experience. If Cone’s work does not constitute an absolutely new beginning, it does represent a shift which might form a watershed in the study of black religion. From the work of Cone one is able to set forth a basis from which we might assess the works prior to his time and to plot new and different trends in the study of black religion. Professor Cone’s book, Black Theology and Black Power (1969), is unique in several ways. He is not, however, the first one to make the point that Jesus or God might be black; a long line of blacks have asserted this slogan, from Bishop William McNeal Turner to Marcus Garvey. Cone is distinctive in that his understanding of the blackness of the Godhead is carried on within the context of a systematic apologetic theology that argues from within the theological tradition for its cogency. This work should be seen as part of the Civil Rights Movement, and of the change of context from civil rights integrationism to black power. I quote from the first section of this work, where Cone says, If, as I believe, Black Power is the most important development in American life in this century, there is need to begin to analyze it from a theological perspective. In this work an effort is made to investigate the concept of Black Power, placing primary emphasis on its relationship to Christianity, the Church and contemporary American theology. (p. 1)

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He continues, It is my thesis, however, that Black Power, even in its most radical expression, is not an antithesis to Christianity, nor is it a heretical idea to be tolerated with painful forbearance. It is, rather, Christ’s central message to twentieth-century America. And unless the empirical denominational church makes a determined effort to capture the man Jesus through a total identification with the suffering poor as expressed in Black Power, that church will become exactly what Christ is not. (p. 2) Even this emphasis is not new. The same kind of overtone is present in the works of Eric Lincoln and Joseph Washington, and, of course, these particular phrases remind us of the work of Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, first published in 1949. In this work Thurman stated, The significance of the religion of Jesus to people who stand with their backs against the wall has always seemed to me to be crucial. It is one emphasis which has been lacking— except where it has been part of a very unfortunate corruption of the missionary impulse, which is, in a sense, the very heartbeat of the Christian religion. The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish thinker and teacher appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. (p. 29) So the theme of blackness and the oppressed in Cone’s work is not novel. As I said before, the distinctiveness of his work is in the sustained systematic exposition, but there is yet another distinction: Cone, though acknowledging the oppression, mounted a theological critique of the oppressors from the stance of power! To be sure, the power, as far as the text is concerned, is present in its rhetorical style, its open accusation, its prophetic pronouncements. It issued a challenge—a challenge to black and white churchmen, and a challenge to American theology, and, for that matter, all Christian theology. It was a book published by the right person at the right time and in the right place. It caught up with some of the themes of previous black scholars of religion from the sociological and Christian ethics perspectives as well as the theological trends that were emerging within social ethics. It formed a continuity and a discontinuity with that milieu; it made clear a place on which to stand, and thus it became a pointer, and if not a culmination, a hiatus. Its culmination lies in the theological statements that summarize the protest for justice in the history of black scholarship in religion, its hiatus in the self-conscious theological assertiveness. If Black Theology and Black Power makes a clarion call and if its appearance on the scene was one of audacity, Cone’s work of 1970, A Black Theology of Liberation, is a different kind of theological work. Its style is different; it sets about to fill in the blank spaces created by his previous work. It moves more carefully through the theological method and defines itself as part and parcel of a theology of liberation. Its more sober tone reminds one that additional theological work remains to be done and Cone sets forth those elements that must be dealt with within the complete corpus of a black theology of liberation. In the meanwhile, the Fund for Theological Education had shifted resources to the support of doctoral studies in religion for black students; the Society for the Study of Black Religion was organized, and out of this ferment, critical analyses and discussion of Cone’s work and the 214

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rediscovery of other works published previous to Cone’s Black Theology were brought to bear on the discussion. So, coincidentally and causally related to these two works, we are able to see the formation of a new discourse that brings older works into a new milieu, and points to trends in other directions—directions stemming from this new discourse. Major critical and alternate statements on the definition of black theology were contributed by Major Jones and Deotis Roberts. The most trenchant critique of black theology is probably that of William Jones’s Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology (1973). This work by Jones raises the essential issue of theodicy. Put simply it is this question: Is suffering, black suffering, crucial for the black theologian? To regard liberation as the summum bonum and sine qua non necessitates the opposite, suffering as oppression, as an aspect of the summum malum. The pre-condition for black liberation as the objective for black theology is the prior affirmation of black suffering as oppressive. This is a crucial argument for it raises questions concerning not simply the enterprise of black theology, but of the Christian structure of existence itself; it forces one to ask whether the structure of Christian existence is capable of defining or expressing freedom for those who suffer. While theologians were discussing blackness within the context of theologizing, Gayraud Wilmore put out a kind of theological history of the black church. In his Black Religion and Black Radicalism (1972), Wilmore traced the history of the black church and its leaders as they responded to the various historical manifestations of racism in America. Though churches and church leaders took different stances during different periods, one is able to see a thread of continuity in the manner in which, in every case, the two structures of survival and protest constituted a kind of baseline around which these stances were taken. Again I see a skeletal structure in this work that should lead and has led in some quarters to more detailed historical studies of the black church. In part, the works of James Washington and Albert Raboteau are already filling in some of the flesh of this sturdy skeleton erected by Wilmore. A special word must be said about Eric Lincoln. The publication of his Black Muslims in America was a signal that something new was going to happen in the religious life of black Americans. Eric has always been ahead of everyone else. He has a peculiar intellectual intuition about matters of this kind. Not only has he written extensively on the sociology of black religion and the black church, giving us a reassessment of E. Franklin Frazier, and an excellent book of readings on The Black Experience in Religion (1974), he has encouraged and presided over the publication of several volumes which might not have seen the light of day apart from his confidence and faith in the authors. Not only for his own works but equally for this task and his hand in the works of others do we owe him a special thanks. This kind of genius is as much needed as the great intellectual ideas, and to find both of these in one person is much more than one would expect. With the mention of Lincoln, let me move on to another phase by way of a comment based upon his edited work, The Black Experience in Religion. If we examine this text, we see that it covers a very wide range of materials and interpretations: articles on the black church, preachers and preaching, black theology, black sects and cults, and on Caribbean and African religions. From this work it is clear that Eric Lincoln has not confined the black experience to the Christian churches in North America, nor is the attention to the black churches in North America limited to a theological interpretation of their histories. Black experiences seems to constitute a world system, or a potentially world system, of communication and soteriological 215

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meaning. This was already a leitmotif in his work on the black Muslims, for he saw the black Muslims at once as a protest against American racism and the expression of an alternate system of world communication. One may come at this point in another way if one looks at the activities and the work just put out by Gayraud Wilmore and James Cone. In their Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979 (1979), the authors document the history of this movement and provide critical comments regarding black theology over this period of time, but they also include in this volume those meanings of black theology as a theology of liberation, and thus the conversation and dialogue of black theology and theologians with Africans, Europeans, and Latin Americans extends the range of this soteriological communication. A crucial issue will, in my opinion, emerge at this point. Is theology in any of its manifestations capable of sustaining this conversation or will it be sustained at another level that grows out of a more difficult conversation—a conversation that is an attempt to communicate the religious elements of one’s cultural experience to another? To put it bluntly, how long will Jürgen Moltman and Paul Holmer be able to maintain themselves in this conversation, or, if they are able to do so, will they prevent other Africans or Latin Americans from speaking? How continuous is the discussion with variant structures of liberation theology and how much will the cultural-historical experience form a discontinuity? One of the themes running through a great deal of the interpretations of black theology and black religion is the assertion that the black community did not and does not make distinctions between the secular and the sacred and that it follows from this assertion that the black church is and has been the locus of the black community. If this is so, then it means that the church is the locus of the expression of black cultural life. Politics, art, business, and all other dimensions of the black community should thus find their expression as aspects of the religious experience of black folks. To test out this assertion, black scholars in religion should be conversant with works that deal with the wider ranges of black experience. To some extent, the Society has a few members who were not trained in theological schools, but only a few. Only one of two sociologists of religion, no anthropologist of religion, poet, novelist, political scientist, or economist is among us. We must do the best we can to become conversant with them through their writings. Harold Cruse in his wonderful tour de force book of 1967, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual had asserted that blacks in America could only make a cultural revolution and he called upon the black intellectuals to develop what he called a black cultural methodology. By this he meant a critical and creative hermeneutic that was capable of taking a stance within the American and Western tradition affirmatively and critically. It would involve not simply criticism of racial oppression but an identification within that culture while at the same time undercutting the very stance of one’s authenticity with that tradition in status quo. In another vein Cruse was stating in our times the issue that Du Bois raised in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as the double consciousness. But before I can give this discussion solidity, I must interject some other literature. First of all, there is a body of literature that deals with us explicitly and contingently, a body of scholarly works by blacks and others that bear on our situation. These exist in contrast to a body of general American texts—texts that tell the American story, the American ideology, George Washington, the founding fathers, Thanksgiving, the fourth of July, and so on and so forth. In one way or other we were all educated in this mode so I need not go any further. We should, however, be aware of the internal critiques of myth-history. As far as history is concerned, let me mention only a few works; first, 216

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The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975) by Francis Jennings, Savagism and Civility (1978) by Bernard Sheehan, and Sons of the Fathers (1976) by Catherine Albanese. Studies of this kind form a critique of the early American tradition and open the possibility for another mode of interpretation of American experience in terms of the new data and methods. These works should be read alongside the works of Vine Deloria. On Mexico, I would recommend Jacques Lafaye’s Quetzalcoatl and Guadulupe (1978). I mention these works because I think that they should be decisive for any critical cultural methodology that undertakes the analysis of the nature and reality of the world of the colonized during the colonial period. It is the case that millions of people were in fact colonized during the period of late Western expansion, but it is not the case that the progeny of these colonizers, at least at this time, have an imperialism over the methods and theories regarding the realities of persons and cultures during this period. As far as a philosophical critique is concerned, I would recommend the work of David Brion Davis, especially his The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975). Closer to home, there are a host of works by black novelists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and so on. John Hope Franklin’s editions of black biographies from University of California Press include James Weldon Johnson, William Wells Brown, Ida B. Wells, T. Thomas Fortune, Henry Ossawa Tanner. And even closer, there are the works of John Lovell, Jr., and Eileen Southern on black music or A. Leon Higginbotham’s study of blacks and the legal process. Works of this kind will help us make sense of the claim of a pattern of experience and expression within the black community. But there is another body of literature that is in one sense as close and in another sense quite distant from our work. It is close because it purports to deal with many of the same issues that face us, and distant because it does not arise out of the primordium of cultural passions that generates our work. Therefore, while these works are exceedingly competent in terms of the questions which they pose and resolve, the very questions are structures of the alienation. I am speaking here of works such as Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), and Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977). Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll is part of an oeuvre that includes The Political Economy of Slavery (1967), and the subtitle of Roll, Jordan, Roll is “the world the slaves made.” This is in a dialectical relationship with the former work. It is an extremely valuable text and continues a line of interpretation from Newbell Niles Puckett’s The Magic and Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1969) through Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956) to Time on the Cross by Robert Rogel and Stanley Engerman (1974). Genovese’s method carries strong overtones of the dialectic of Hegel and Marx, and in carrying through this method he makes a major revision of the religion of the slaves. The problem with this text is hermeneutical. What is his stance before our history? What is most lacking is any possibility for the discussion of the experience of slavery and of the slave in the terms of a transcendent meaning of freedom. The dialectic of master-slave allows only for the discussion of the meaning of freedom and obligation within the structure of paternalism. The meaning of the religion of the slaves is too closely tied to and reduced to the structures of the economy. Though admitting the formation of a new consciousness, it remains rooted in the structures of materiality and transcendent meanings are projections of this rootedness. The subtlety of Du Bois’s delineation of the double consciousness that tended to undercut its own formation is not an element of this analysis. 217

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Levine’s work, though bearing the title Black Culture and Black Consciousness, misses the point in the same manner—lack of participation as hermeneutical issue: the issue of living in and thinking about. Let me state what I have in mind at this point by reference to Du Bois’s notion of the double consciousness. In one sense it is the issue of objectivity and subjectivity. The true rendering of black experience and expression is not a privileged position for black scholars. At the same time there is room for and necessity for historical and humanistic studies that combine the “thinking about,” with the lived in participation. This methodological issue will become increasingly important in the work of black scholars. Let me give an example of what I have in mind by using Hegel’s master/slave dialectic from this point of view: Even when the slave, ex-slave, or colonized person becomes aware of the autonomy and independence of his consciousness, he finds that, because of the economic, political and linguistic hegemony of the master, there is not space for the legitimate expression for such a human form. The desire for an authentic place for the expression of this reality is the source of the revolutionary tendencies in these religions. But on the level of human consciousness religions of the oppressed create in another manner. The hegemony of the oppressors is understood as a myth—myth in two major senses, as true and as fictive. It is true as a structure with which one must deal in a day-by-day manner if one is to persevere, but it is fictive as far as any ontological significance is concerned. But such a procedure does not define a simple dichotomy, for the day-to-day existence is in fact his labor—labor from which his autonomy arises; therefore his own autonomy takes on a fictive character. The truth of his existence must necessarily involve not only the change of this consciousness but the realization of the true and fictive consciousness of the oppressor. This drama is carried out again and again in the religions of the oppressed. But the basic structure of such meanings approximates the myth, for only the consciousness as myth can express the full range of this dialectical mode of being. The oppressed must deal with both the fictive truth of their status as expressed by the oppressor, that is, their second creation, and the discovery of their own autonomy and truth— their first creation. The locus for this structure is the mythic consciousness which dehistorizes the relationship for the sake of creating a new form of humanity—a form of humanity which is no longer based on the master-slave dialectic. The utopian and eschatological dimensions of the religions of the oppressed stem from this modality. The oppressive element in the religions of the oppressed is the negation of the image of the oppressor and the discovery of the first creation. It is thus the negation that is found in community and seeks its expression in more authentic forms of community, those forms of community which are based upon the first creation, the original authenticity of all persons which precedes the master-slave dichotomy. There is thus a primordial structure to his consciousness, for in seeking a new beginning in the future it must perforce imagine an original beginning. (Long, 1976, pp. 411–412) Leonard Barret’s discussion of the Cumina-Pukkumina in C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Experience in Religion expresses the meaning of this dialectical mode of consciousness at 218

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the level of ritual action and his analysis might well carry over into some aspects of religious worship on the North American continent and allow us to rethink the impact of the great awakening on the slaves and other black persons. More congruent to, but offering a different methodological stance than either Genovese or Levine, is Roger Bastide’s The African Religions of Brazil (1978). In this work Bastide employs an intensive participant-observant verstehen method in accumulating his data. He was actually initiated into Candomblé and this initiation was more than and deeper than that cute kind of story often related by anthropologists at cocktail parties. It was an expression of what he called a crisis of consciousness on a personal level and on the level of his scholarly discipline, comparative sociology; it raised the issue of the very raison d’être for study. It may be the case that such intimacy allowed for better understanding, but, what is more important, it prepared him to understand the dialectical modality of consciousness that while present in Candomblé was at the same time an experience of modernity—that he and Candomblé were struggling with similar problems. This is a masterful work by one who stands outside a tradition to study it in context. What can one make of these various studies, presenting us with new data and new methods in light of the programmatic structures of black theology? First of all, though black theology is the most sustained protestant movement in black religious thought, it has not picked up or fully exploited the social ethical emphases of former black religious thinkers and therefore has not made full use of a particular tradition in black religious thought. In connection with this point black theology, though making one of its resources the black Christian institutional churches, had made hardly any inroads within these churches. The black churches have not seen fit to affirm or to critically evaluate the project of black theology. Neither black theology nor attendant works dealing with black religion and black culture have developed a general interpretative framework in which their interpretation makes for a distinctively new evaluation of religion and culture. (See Howard Dodson, “Needed: A New Perspective on Black History,” 1981.) Is it possible for new works about blacks to stay within the same framework that just a few years ago thrived on their exclusion? Responses to these questions lead to the next section of this essay.

Departures We should wish to know, for example, how it would be possible to tolerate, and to justify, the sufferings and annihilation of so many peoples who suffer and are annihilated for the simple reason that their geographical situation sets them in the pathway of history; that they are neighbors of empires in a state of permanent expansion. How to justify, for example, the fact that southwestern Europe had to suffer for centuries—and hence to renounce any impulse toward a higher historical existence, toward spiritual creation on a universal plane—invaders and later of the Ottoman empire? And in our day, when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how can man tolerate the catastrophies and horrors of history—if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no trans-historical meaning; if they are only blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of “liberties” that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history? (Eliade, p. 151) 219

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The Negro is sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels this two-ness,—as American, as Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge this double self into a better truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. (Du Bois, pp. 3–4) These two epigraphs form the context for this section. They are from the pens of two very dissimilar, from a conventional point of view, scholars. Eliade is the Rumanian-American émigré historian of religions, and the quotation comes at the end of his work Cosmos and History (1959), in the section entitled, “The Terror of History.” W.E.B. Du Bois is the black American scholar, leader, agitator, and historian; his quotation is taken from the very first section of the chapter entitled, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in his The Souls of Black Folk. There are, however, in the face of these dissimilarities several commonalities. Both of the statements are from a genre of literature that falls between scholarship and autobiography. They represent hermeneutical probings in which the stance and point of view espoused reveals a lived experience as the source of the probing. Both deal with human time as that temporal order that is the increment of imperialism and world systems that order through military, economic, and political power, such that they smother the time and histories of all who come into contact with them. Eliade raises the question of the philosophical justification of this kind of power in the terms of the apologia for it, and Du Bois’s statement represents an assessment of the possibility of freedom once this power has effected its purpose. Both are interpretations of religion. The bifurcation of the world that is coincidental to enslavement and conquest produces not only differing rhythms of the temporal sequences but also different meanings of the manifestation of world, the epistemologies for knowing it, and the practical activities for deciphering the meanings of cultural destinies. Invariably, a normative meaning of history is supported and justified by the ideologies of conquest. And these ideologies are not simply the crass and crude slogans of blood and soil or manifest destiny. In the period of late Western expansion these philosophical ideologies were, more often than not, part and parcel of the enunciation of a universal humanism, making claims as it did for the essential status of all human beings. This is as true for the French philosophes, Montesquieu, Montaigne, Rousseau, as it is for the German philosophers from Kant to Hegel and the English empiricists. These philosophical ideologies must be seen as sometimes forming the foundation for, and at other times serving as the correlate of, the modern university disciplines that undertook the task of studying, classifying, and understanding the lives and cultures of those who had to undergo the histories of the conquerors, or in Eliade’s term, the “terror” of their histories. What is remarkable on the epistemological level in these early new social sciences (and we might say 220

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almost to the present) is the fact that they hardly make mention of the contact situation itself, the fact of mutual discovery of the two cultures in the situation of colonialism—what Francis Jennings has called mutual discoveries. This is even more remarkable when we observe that one of the basic ingredients within the philosophical and cultural meaning of the conquerors is the evaluation of history. By history in this sense, I don’t mean that valuation of temporality that is a pervasive characteristic of human existence. I mean a particular and peculiar interpretation and point of view regarding time, justified in many instances through recourse to progress, civilizing missions, and Christian theologies; it finds its supporters among the technological positivists of the left and the right. Those who are forced to undergo this history are not subjected simply to economic and political exploitation; they are simultaneously forced to undergo an evacuation of their cultural meaning and the possibility for cultural creativity and stability. This evacuation of cultural meaning forced by the conqueror is matched by the presentation of the conquered people and culture as “problems of knowledge” in a special sense. They are “problems of knowledge” not so much in the conventional sense, but classified as special categories of this kind of problem. The taxonomies used to describe them allow them to become normal special problems, or normal exotic problems, and thus disciplinary structures need not fear their disappearance, for they were created by and for the disciplines and tend to exist as eternal intellectual problems. One of the most general and pervasive structures of this kind of problem revolves around the distinction primitive/civilized. (See my article “Primitive/Civilized: The Locus of a Problem,” 1980.) I show how meanings regarding a European discourse on wildmen, women, and the insane, became the normative language for the discussion of the new geographies and cultures discovered by the Europeans from the fifteenth century to the present. This language still pervades many of our common disciplinary fields and it is one of those forms of cultural language that has defined explicitly and adumbrated a range of meanings and interpretative schema concerning blacks in the United States. Critical and precise hermeneutical attention must be given to this level of our cultural and disciplinary languages as part of the creativity of black scholarship if this scholarship is ever to form a new framework of interpretation. In this connection I have found that some of the philosophical positions set forth by Jacques Derrida are quite congruent with Du Bois’s notion of a double consciousness. Especially in his program of deconstruction do I see a meaning of radical critique and creativity. I am pleased to find that younger scholars such as Cornel West at Union Seminary are of the same opinion. Another area pertinent to this topic has to do with the general interpretation of American culture itself. If this culture is continually understood simply as the culture of Europeans who came to a virgin land all subsequent interpretations will tend to be wrong-headed. I have experimented with the most general categorization of American culture as an aboriginalEuro-African culture. In making this assertion or operating with this presupposition, I am trying to mitigate the notion that Euro-Americans serve as the reality principle for American culture and that others are not real until contact has been made with the Euro-Americans. All are real, but in differing modes. To decipher this meaning methodologically, I have had recourse to models from structural linguistics, where I employ the meanings of synchrony, diachrony, and silence as basic elements for a total language. At another level attention should be directed towards a comparative history of the religions of the oppressed. Vittorio Lanternarria’s work of this title (Religions of the Oppressed, 1963) is 221

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suggestive but its heavy-handed Marxism suffocates any genuine religious interpretation. Given the general context of oppression, what mode of consciousness emerges, what epistemological resources are created, and what meanings of world are actual and possible? One of the problems of black theology is that none of its protagonists have attempted to delineate the meaning of power in our present situation. Power is assumed to be an eternal neutral category that can be had or grasped by the group or person lucky or militant enough to handle it. Power is a pervasive dimension of human existence but its constellation, locus, and influence is contextually situated. Paul Tillich’s essay on the “End of the Protestant Era,” in his The Protestant Era (1948), should complement W.E.B. Du Bois’s statement of the twentieth century and the “rising tide of color.” What is the meaning of power at the end of the Protestant era? Do the oppressed savor for the old capitalist Protestant power or has a new locus and formation of power appeared to them? These are crucial issues and since religion is also a concern about power, its origins and its forms, such questions cannot be avoided. My own work at this point has been at the level of what I call ideograms (to borrow a term from Rudolf Otto). I have been concerned to pay close attention to the concrete expressions from this level to conceptualization in either the theological or philosophical mode, I have developed the liminal ideogram, a meaning that emerges from concreteness but is not yet a concept. The ideogram allows for religious experience to adumbrate other dimensions of human existence in a preconceptual form raising the wider issues of reality, world, epistemology, and so on. Conceptual structures arising from these ideograms ought then to be constructive and critical. At the present time I am working with the passivity of power, the opaqueness of reality, the percussive nature of existence, and the rhythms of time. The study of black religion cannot be provincialized. Africans were brought to the New World as part and parcel of an international system of trade and communication; the meanings of the cultures of the former colonized in the modern world carry the same implications. Religious forms and expressions are the sources of new worlds of meaning; the study and understanding of black religion has much to contribute to our future.

Bibliography Albanese, Catherine. Sons of the Fathers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976. Bastide, Roger. African Religions of Brazil. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Cone, James. Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Seabury, 1969. Cone, James. A Black Theology of Liberation. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970. Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Morrow, 1967. Dodson, Howard. “Needed: A New Perspective on Black History.” National Endowment for the Humanities 2, no. 1 (February 1981): 1–2. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Negro Church. Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University Press, 1903. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903; reprinted, New York: Fawcett, 1961. Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History. New York: Harper and Row, 1959. Fisher, Miles Mark. Negro Slave Songs in the United States. New York: Citadel, 1963. Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken, 1963. Fogel, Robert, and Stanley Engerman. Time on the Cross. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery. New York: Random House, 1967. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Random House, 1974.

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Black Religion in America Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr. In the Matter of Color. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Jones, William. Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974. Lafaye, Jacques. Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Lantennarria, Vittoria. Religions of the Oppressed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Lee, Carleton L. “Patterns of Leadership Among Negroes.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1950. Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. Boston: Beacon, 1961. Lincoln, C. Eric. The World the Slaveholders Made. New York: Random House, 1969. Lincoln, C. Eric, ed. The Black Experience in Religion. Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1974. Long, Charles H. “Oppressive Elements in Religion and the Religions of the Oppressed.” Harvard Theological Review 69, no. 3–4 (July–October 1976): 397–412. Long, Charles H. “Primitive/Civilized: The Locus of a Problem.” History of Religions 20, nos. 1–2 (August–November 1980): 43–61. Lovell, John, Jr. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame; The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Mays, Benjamin. The Negro’s God. Boston: Chapman and Grimes, 1938. Mays, Benjamin, and Joseph Nicholson. The Negro’s Church. New York: Russell and Russell, 1933. Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966. Phillips, Ulrich B. The Slave Economy of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Puckett, Newbell Niles. The Magic and Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. New York: Dover, 1969. Stampp, Kenneth. The Peculiar Institution. New York: Vintage, Alfred A. Knopf, and Random House, 1956. Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Nashville: Abingdon, 1949. Tillich, Paul. The Protestant Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. Wilmore, Gayraud. Black Religion and Black Radicalism. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. Wilmore, Gayraud, and James Cone. Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979. Woodson, Carter G. The History of the Negro Church. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1921.

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CHAPTER 18 RAPPORTEUR’S COMMENTARY

The French term rapporteur carries the following connotations: talebearer, taleteller, reporter, recorder. It is clear that the term is closely related to the other French word rapporter, which carries a wider range of meanings; these include: to restore or restitute, to relate, to retrieve, to yield, to tell tales. In addition, there is the African American colloquialism, rapping. Rapping describes storytelling in an existential situation where the mode of telling carries the meaning of truth and authenticity. During the Civil Rights Movement, one famous activist was known as “Rap” Brown; Malcolm X was also called a great rapper. My commentary combines elements of all these meanings.

Introduction W.E.B. Du Bois was born 23 February 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts; he died 27 August 1963 in Accra, Ghana. He was born during the Reconstruction era in the South. His death was reported at the March on Washington, 28 August 1963, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. My life and that of Du Bois’s overlapped. When I graduated in 1947 from Dunbar Junior College in Little Rock, Arkansas, Du Bois served as the commencement speaker. As class president I had the honor of escorting him two blocks from the bed and breakfast where he resided during his stay in Little Rock to the junior college. I walked with him in admiring awe, both of us attempting to make small talk. His address to these African American working-class parents and their friends was entitled “The Principle of Extra-Territoriality in the Charter of the League of Nations.” For some reason, the title is all I remember of this address; I don’t remember a single other word. This incident needs a bit more deciphering. For example, why would a person of Du Bois’s preeminence address a small junior college in Little Rock, Arkansas? And why would he stay in a bed and breakfast instead of a downtown hotel? Finally, why would he speak to this audience in such a highly sophisticated way? In the first instance, it should be made clear that among African American communities and schools during this era, Du Bois was a household name. We, the members of the senior class, chose him unanimously as our speaker. We knew a great deal about his thought and we knew that our high school and junior college had a liberal arts curriculum because our parents were armed with Du Bois’s philosophy when the first high school for African Americans was founded in Little Rock. Obviously, Du Bois was staying in a black home because he was not permitted to stay in any hotel in the city. Why the particular lecture? This was typical of Du Bois; he did not abide fools easily and he never talked down to an audience. He felt that the content of his address was knowledge black folk needed to know. At this time he was engaged in petitioning the United Nations on behalf of human rights for African Americans. In a very short time, his colleague,

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Ralph Bunche, an African American official of the United Nations, would draw upon elements of this charter in negotiations that would lead to the creation of the state of Israel.

Du Bois as public intellectual: Context, polemics, and characterizations I mention this personal incident for two reasons. I should like for us to recall the important and tremendous public role Du Bois played in the life of African American communities from the end of World War I until his death; none of the papers touch upon this aspect of his career. The body of his written texts is considerable; he was the intellectual par excellence and probably the exemplar of all African American intellectuals. He was not, however, the kind of scholar who simply sat in his university study and wrote books. He served for varying periods of time on the faculties of Fisk and Wilberforce Universities, the University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University. Correlative with his academic responsibilities he was a major participant in all of the movements related to the situation of African Americans in the United States, extending from the Niagara Movement through the NAACP to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. He lived during a turbulent period of American history that was especially arduous for African Americans. This period covered, among other events, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the Elaine (Arkansas) Sharecroppers Riot of 1919, the Great Depression, the First and Second World Wars, the struggle over the League of Nations, and the creation of the United Nations. He lived for almost a century and there was hardly a significant event that had to do with peoples of color, the situation of workers, or the problematics of imperialism or colonialism that he did not reflect upon in writing and/or participate in personally. He was, indeed, an authentic public intellectual! One cannot deny the influence of Du Bois’s Harvard teachers or his German professors on the formation of his thought but neither should one forget that he also had brilliant interlocutors and adversaries in the African American community—not only Booker T. Washington but also Alexander Crummel, George Schulyer, Chandler Owen, A. Philip Randolph, and the editors of the Messenger. Du Bois was best known among the masses through his editorship of the Crisis, but even this highly influential role was marked by tension and strife with the board of the NAACP. In addition, the wide correspondence Du Bois carried on throughout his life shows that he was in touch with ordinary people, world leaders, poets, scholars, and a wide range of persons from every background and persuasion.1 Through his organization of the several Pan-African conferences as well as his many trips to Europe and other parts of the world, he met an array of scholars, heads of state, leaders, and intellectuals from almost every part of the globe. None of the papers in this volume address these dimensions of his life and thought. In my comments I shall bring the atmosphere and overtones of this context to bear on my remarks about the papers. In other words, Du Bois was not just another African American intellectual. While he presents to the academic community much food for thought, we should not forget that the major academic institutions of this country paid little or no attention to him during his very long career. Mary Keller, in her introduction, gives us a general survey of the papers contained in this volume. For my part, I shall, on the basis of these same papers, set forth another general interpretation of Du Bois’s work. 226

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The dual styles of Du Bois’s intellectual orientation It is clear to anyone who has minimal knowledge of Du Bois that all of his work—his scholarly monographs, articles, correspondence, speeches, novels, novellas, and pageants—all of his productions express a distinctive style. This style was equally a characteristic of his life as a totality. David W. Blight raises the issue of style as it relates to historical methodology in Du Bois’s work.2 Following Arnold Rampersad, Blight argues that Du Bois changed his historical methodology from one of scientific empiricism to that of poetic sensibility. Blight makes the case that this can be seen in his classic work The Souls of Black Folk, which was published in 1903 and expressed in a full-blown manner in 1935 in Black Reconstruction in America. In the final chapter of his later work, “The Propaganda of History,” Du Bois reveals in an explicit manner his historical methodology. I think that more is involved in Blight’s commentary than the issue of historical methodology. The notion of poetic sensibility is revelatory not only of much of his work but the very style of Du Bois’s career and vocation. While we may point to certain persons and ideas that influenced him—which I will discuss later on—the poetic sensibility was probably a given predilection. Blight notes this in Du Bois’s commencement address at Harvard in 1890. The address, “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization,” already expressed a poetic, discerning, critical, and ironic style that can be recognized in most of his work. It will be my contention that we might be able to understand the meaning of Du Bois’s life and work by seeing how he carried through a kind of hermeneutical methodology that he applied throughout his career to create another meaning of the modern world. This alternative meaning was not simply a polemic against reigning interpretations; it was equally and most profoundly the creation of a new foundation and context for the meaning of the modern. From this perspective, I should like to mention two sources that might have enhanced this orientation to his work; both of them emerged from his experience as a student in Germany. I am not dismissing nor ignoring Du Bois’s education at Fisk and Harvard nor the influence of his many friends and associates; I am rather suggesting that all these influences began to form a structure out of his experience in Germany.3 In the first instance I point to the influence of the German economist Gustav von Schmoller. At the time of Du Bois’s stay in Germany, Schmoller was Germany’s leading economist. He was Du Bois’s major professor, under whom he prepared a thesis, “Die Gross und Klein Betrieb des Ackerbach, in der Sudstaaten der Vereinigsten Staaten, 1840–90” (The Large and Small-Scale Management of Agriculture in the Southern United States, 1840–1890). Had he been allowed another year in Germany, he would have extended this thesis, with Professor Schmoller’s approval, into a doctoral dissertation under his directorship. In addition, Schmoller wrote letters on Du Bois’s behalf requesting that the directors of the Slater Fund extend his stay in Germany to complete the doctoral. Schmoller even went so far as to request from the administration of the University of Berlin that they waive the residency requirements so that Du Bois might receive the doctorate.4 Gustav von Schmoller was not only a leading economist and intellectual benefactor to Du Bois; he was at that time the most prominent anti-mercantilist economist in Europe. Known as the leader of the “Younger Historical School,” he believed in the production and cultural impact of local industries on the total economic system. It is clear that his influence had an effect upon Du Bois. This can be seen in the thesis and planned doctoral dissertation Du Bois 227

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wanted to complete with him.5 Insights from this orientation in economics can be seen in the Philadelphia Negro and the studies Du Bois undertook at Atlanta University. So, it was not so much an abandonment of a certain scientific empiricism but rather whether the studies dealt with specific concrete data of communities or the more abstract data of the market. Mercantile economics tended to understand certain empirical forms of data in terms of the “logic” of trade and the market rather than taking the local and empirical economics as a basis for economic theory. The impact of Wilhelm Dilthey is more difficult to assess since Du Bois’s correspondence makes no prominent mention of him. We are thus dealing with a great deal of conjecture and speculation but with a more than likely probability of Dilthey’s influence. We do know that Du Bois sat in Dilthey’s lectures during the second semester in 1893. Dilthey was a pivotal figure in the development of a general hermeneutics for understanding the distinctively human in life. Epistemology from this point of view made a fundamental distinction between the natural and the human sciences. In other words, Dilthey specified the “human” as a distinct and irreducible phenomenon. The human sciences should not be understood in terms of categories extrinsic to it but from intrinsic and inherent categories derived from human life itself.6 In addition, Dilthey was the philosopher of poetic sensibility par excellence.7 For Dilthey, poetry and the poetic imagination are essential epistemological tools for the decipherment of human experience as well as its primary forms of expression. Du Bois’s life and work thus expresses two fundamental orientations. It took an intellectual, aesthetic as well as practical feat to hold these two modes together in a single interpretive unity. I shall discuss the papers in this volume from this perspective. I see two major foci in these papers. In the first instance, there is an emphasis on the experience, expressions, and situation of African Americans in the United States. This concern is interrelated with the second concern: Africa, past and present. It is by means of Africa that Du Bois related to the international order of the world through people of color who have had to undergo oppression, colonialism, and imperialism—the terrors of modernity.

Du Bois and the African American situation For purposes of this commentary I shall define the two major orientations of African Americans and Africa by two essays: Carole Stewart’s “Challenging Liberal Justice: The Talented Tenth Revisited” to frame the former orientation and for the latter David Chidester’s “Religious Animals, Refuge of the Gods, and the Spirit of Revolt: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Representations of Indigenous African Religion.” These essays establish foci, specifying two broad kinds of data but not poles or extremes. Both sources of data demonstrate Du Bois’s employment of poetic sensibility on the one hand and historical social scientific methodology on the other. The remaining essays provide a deciphering mode, mediating between the two broad sources of data and methods. Carole Stewart’s essay, in undertaking a critical examination of Du Bois’s notion of the “talented tenth,” provides us at the same time with new and original understandings of his most well-known text, The Souls of Black Folk. It is not so much that she makes this notion understandable and plausible but the fact that her analysis of Souls enables a more complete view of Du Bois’s poetic and pragmatic senses of interpretation, especially as applied to the 228

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situation of African Americans. In the first instance, the notion of the “talented tenth” enables us to understand Du Bois’s own role in the struggle of the masses of African Americans recently emancipated from enslavement. I think that this is important, for too often intellectual leaders arise espousing various ideologies for the masses but never explain their own role or the legitimacy of their knowledge as it relates to the masses. In too many cases, these leaders’ authority was not gained from those they have chosen to lead but from outside authorities, whether malevolent or benign. Du Bois makes it clear that he is not of the masses; he is, in fact and indeed, an intellectual with poetic sensibilities but he has thrown his lot with the masses as a person and an intellectual! The sources of his thought and inspiration emerge from serious contemplation of their common situation in life. This view is directly related to the familiar sentence that begins chapter 2 of Souls: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” While in chapter 1 Du Bois gives us a poetic rendering of the situation of African Americans, in chapter 2 he shows how this issue entails international ramifications. Stewart’s essay makes clear that Du Bois did not wish for African Americans to diminish their meaning in the world by succumbing to either the temptation of the American version of the Protestant work ethic on the one hand, as represented by Booker T. Washington, or on the other hand to the civilizing mission of Christianity, as seen in Alexander Crummel. Stewart’s critical discussions of Washington and especially Crummel are central to her understanding of Du Bois’s meaning of the “talented tenth.” It is not the case that Du Bois is simply in opposition either to the Protestant work ethic or to Christianity and civilization per se. Du Bois himself makes use of Christian rhetoric and symbolism throughout his works and recognizes the importance of the work ethic as a discipline for those who have so recently been freed from slavery. In setting forth the notion of the talented tenth and defining a role for himself, Du Bois already anticipated the important study published some twenty years later by Florian Znaniecki, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge. Stewart shows how Du Bois’s Souls in its critical reflections is designed to engage and enhance the meaning of African Americans in the United States as a basis for action. Yet at the same time Du Bois redefines the field or arena of action. Stewart states, “Du Bois … redefines the ‘meaning of progress’ throughout his work; … for Du Bois, the slaves manifested the negative truth of the ‘meaning of progress,’ and, to be sure, invoked fear in the hearts of those who had so deeply imbibed theories of racial hierarchies that coincided with a white exceptionalist work ethic.” The situation of the African Americans in the United States is one of the consequences of slavery; as Stewart would have it, “The cross-cultural meetings that occurred during the slave trade and the ‘discovery’ of different worlds promise a form of religion, a form of Christianity ‘that would undergo characteristic change[s] when [it] entered the mouth of the slave.’” In making her argument against an elitism in Du Bois’s notion of the talented tenth, Stewart has recourse to the notion of “the public” as a necessary and essential meaning for any notion of a democratic participatory society. She speaks of “public forums,” “public worlds,” and “public spheres,” and lastly she refers to the spirituals as “a specific example of public space, the aesthetic and performative space he has in mind as the ‘truth’ of American Democracy.” This is an important argument, for it defines an operative and material modality for the meaning of a political polity. In other words, the meaning of power of any kind must also define a locus. 229

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As a matter of fact, the meaning and effect of any power is due to a great extent to its locus, its form of manifestation. The issues of power, faith, and messianism are brought to the fore in Marta Bruner’s essay “The Most Hopeless of Deaths … Is the Death of Faith: Messianic Faith in the Racial Politics of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Bruner begins with a query concerning human beings as divine agents. This query presupposes a binary with the human on one side and the divine as the not-human on the other. While the statement of the issue often appears in this form, even this binary rests upon the fact that any recognition of the divine must be in the human realm. From the Greek thinker Euhemerus (third century bce), who put forth the notion that the gods of Greek mythology were in fact deified humans; through the early Christian councils’ affirmation that Jesus of Nazereth was totally human yet equally and simultaneously totally divine; and the veneration of the prophet Muhammad, who is only human yet receives special status and veneration; to Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship, various traditions in the Western world have pondered the relationship of some kind of otherness of the powers manifested in the world. Of course, this seems to be an issue in all cultures but I have limited my attention to the Western tradition. In other words, the issue Bruner raises is not so new or so recent. I feel that this essay might have worked itself out in a different manner had a more precise distinction been made between belief on the one hand and faith on the other. In no religious tradition where the term “faith” looms large has it ever been simply identical with belief, though at times faith might be understood as belief while still maintaining its own unique meaning. There is a meaning of faith which, though it happens to be stated in one religious tradition, would cover its meaning in the religious traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. This meaning might equally be used in secular contexts. I refer to the definition of faith given in Hebrews 11:1 of the Christian Bible: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This is a succinct, precise, and elegant definition. It is comforting, critical, and anticipatory. Hope is not simply a futuristic desire for things to get better but a critical stance that allows one to live in an uncaring world without succumbing to its temptations, blandishments, or terrors. The full manifestation of profound change in the present world is carried in the notion of living in terms of “things not seen.” Now this meaning of faith is not a belief but a lived experience, the very manner in which one carries on his or her life. The notion of faith as belief can be one aspect of the meaning of faith as a “credo,” which as a part of worshiping community makes a statement that specifies the power or gods to which a community commits itself. The notion of faith as synonymous with belief became popular during the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment in championing its new critical reason subjected all religion to rational criticism and thus religious belief, from the point of view of the Enlightenment, was non-rational or irrational. What is interesting about Marta Bruner’s essay is that she is asking the question of faith from the side of one of history’s non-religious modes of thought. She imputes the implication of this kind of issue to Du Bois when she states, “For his part, Du Bois seems torn between calling for faith in a transcendent source (like a messiah figure or apocalyptic miracle) and faith in a non-transcendent source (like human action or economic strategies).” She then suggests that Cedric Robinson’s idea of men and women as divine agents might resolve this tension. First of all, this task is not as simple as one might think. If men and women are to be truly and efficaciously divine, we are opening up the same issue that arose in the early councils of the Christian Church where every permutation of that kind of equation was explored. More seriously, if one looks at the modern world, a world that 230

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defined Du Bois’s point of view, it revealed that most colored people on the globe had and were being exploited, dehumanized, and oppressed; it was a world that could be too neatly divided into the realm of the oppressed and that of the oppressors. Given this enormous fact, the real issue might have to do with the viability of the notion of the human mode of being itself as capable of any benevolent or ameliorative actions—a variation of the problem of theodicy. What must be understood is that since the creation of the Atlantic world countless millions of people have had to undergo new forms of oppression. To be sure, tragedy and evil did not originate with the commencement of the Atlantic world. It was, however, the Atlantic world that symbolized and emphasized the sufficiency of human agency, the triumph of reason, and the age of democracy, freedom, and human rights. This is the same world Du Bois addressed in his first book on the Atlantic slave trade, and he continued to address the evils that were perpetually obscured through the rhetorical styles of human agency. From the point of view of those who have undergone the terror brought about in history, the issue of human agency is at least as ambiguous as that of transcendent orientations. It is for this reason that I do not think the issue posed by Du Bois is as clear-cut as that stated by Bruner. One must take into account that the oppressed of the world do not experience their time and space in the same modes as those who dominate. They have other qualities and ingredients in their traditions that have enabled them to survive and withstand the onslaught upon their lives’ meaning. Du Bois does not dismiss these elements out of hand. Indeed, he attempts to retrieve, refocus, and reinterpret these traditions to keep the otherness of an-other world open for them. This is precisely the point Stewart makes in examining Du Bois’s admonition of succumbing to either the Protestant work ethic or a triumphant civilizing Christianity. Du Bois respected those elements that allowed the enslaved to endure and survive and he praises them as possible openings to a new meaning of a human world. The significance and understanding of patience should be seen in this context. As an aside, it should be noted that messianic and apocalyptic modes have not been limited to the dominated oppressed in the modern period. These forms may have been interpolated into the modernizing process itself. It is difficult to deny the kind of apocalyptic hope that feeds revolutionary action or that some essential meanings of the “American Dream” thrive on certain paradisal symbols and rhetoric. By and large the notions of messianism, apocalypticism, and eschatology have been translated into the secular language of utopia and utopianisms.8 “Utopia” can literally be translated as “no place” or a place that does not yet exist. Let me now turn to Rodney C. Roberts’s essay, “Rectificatory Justice and the Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Roberts places the issue of “reparations” within the philosophical/legal structure of rectificatory justice. There is some truth to the fact that scholars have not been engaged with the issue of reparations/rectification but this may be changing. In 2002 I attended a three-day conference, “Legacy of Slavery: Unequal Exchange,” sponsored by the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This was a very serious conference, attracting scholars of the caliber of Joseph Inikori, Howard Dodson, Gerald Horne, Leon Litwack, and Robert Hill among others. A quite stellar group of scholars dealt with the issue of reparations from a variety of theoretical and practical points of view. To partially confirm Roberts, however, no one among this distinguished array of scholars presented a philosophical/ legal analysis of the issue. Roberts clarifies the proverbial “40 acres and a mule” mantra that has become the refrain of many reparations discussions. Indeed, he makes it clear that the United States government 231

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has never made any promises to former slaves or their progeny in recognition of their former enslavement. Roberts admits that Du Bois did not in his long career make a specific emphasis on rectification or reparations. He then, nevertheless, involves Du Bois in the issue through other statements that relate to reparations. I think Roberts’s argument at this point is highly tendentious. Obviously, colonialism and imperialism imply an unjust order that should be rectified, but this does not mean that Roberts’s theory—or, for that matter, any particular theory of rectification—is the proper way to address the issues. There are many cases involving the need for justice as reparations; the oppressed parties have been voided of their labor and their land and subjected to forced migrations. While all may fall under a general theory of rectification, I would think that the emendations to any general philosophical/legal theory should be informed by the specific historical context of the injustice and the modes for its relief. This would speak in a direct manner about the location and tradition of oppression and would enable a general theory to take empirical specificities into account. What is most intriguing in Roberts’s theory is the emphasis he makes on the need for apology in any theory of rectification. He says, “rectification calls for an apology. Since restoration and compensation can only address unjust losses, an apology is necessary in order to effect rectification because it is the apology that addresses the matter of righting the wrong of an injustice. What makes an injustice wrong is the lack of respect shown when one’s rights are violated. Hence the righting of the wrong is accomplished by way of an apology, i.e., an acknowledgment of wrongdoing that includes the reaffirmation that those who suffered the injustice have moral standing” (emphasis added). I think that this is immensely important, for while not denying or rejecting compensation of a monetary or material kind, it moves the issue beyond that of a simple contractual compensation to an ethical and moral situation, to the recognition of rights and wrongs and ultimately to the definition and meaning of human persons. From my perspective, I feel that our present government, given the choice, would rather expend billions of dollars in compensation than make an apology. To make an apology would mean that this country would be forced to come to terms with its past—with slavery and all its ramifications. The primary fact of slavery is the enslavement of African persons in the United States; this enslavement was an institution made legal by a democratic constitution. The implications of this institution loom large even in areas not so directly related to slavery, for example, the electoral college that came to the fore in the last presidential election or the use of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution by the United States Supreme Court to decide the case of whether a state has the right to regulate slaughterhouses. The Slaughterhouse case then turned in a rather weird and eerie manner to deny the rights of the very freed slaves it was promulgated to enhance.9 I now turn to Stephen Andrews’s “Toward a Synaesthetics of Soul: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Teleology of Race.” This essay takes as its point of departure the musicals epigraphs that begin each chapter of Souls. Andrews sees this format as a peculiar way in which Du Bois interrupts and reclaims the typographical style of the written word through the interpolation of music into the text. He traces this manner of formatting back to William James’s notion of “transivity”; transivity, he says, appears in the text of Souls as the fluid nexus of felt relations evoked by the text. In Souls, Du Bois introduces a novel way of dealing with the protocols and codes of “reading race” that were dominant at the beginning of the twentieth century. Andrews states, “Du Bois claims for black music the privileged typographical space usually reserved for 232

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the teleological finesses of the written word.” Andrews spends a good deal of time showing the influence and revision of Jamesian principles in this work of Du Bois. He draws heavily on the work of Ross Posnock, Shamoon Zamir, and Eric Sundquist, the most prominent en vogue interpreters of Du Bois. No one can deny the feasibility and plausibility of his interpretations of Du Bois in these terms. I do think, however, that an overemphasis along these lines could lead to a serious case of misplaced concreteness. What is in danger of being lost in the kind of emphasis put forth by Andrews is the fact that the text of Souls exudes meanings of black culture that are hardly mentioned in Andrews’s essay. One must ask, “Who kept this text alive for almost a century?” Surely it was not read as an addendum to James’s or G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical works. Indeed, probably the name “Du Bois” itself was not known in respectable academic circles in the United States, apart from all black universities, before, let us say, 1975, and I am being a bit generous here. In other words, this was a text written for all Americans but understood, appreciated, and kept alive by black communities. I would furthermore insist that the form and style of the text, while peculiar in the manner Andrews describes, is not completely due to the influence of William James. This mode of stylization and formatting may have been suggested by the rhythms, styles, and manners of the black communities with which Du Bois was familiar. As a matter of fact, while William James may be credited with inventing the philosophical orientation termed Pragmatism, the experimental, improvisational style began among African people in this country almost from the very beginning of their enslavement. Would not it be closer to home, for example, to attribute the meaning and style of fluidity to the felt and lived memories in the black communities of the Atlantic slave trade and the deep and traumatic impression of “those waters” in the cultures of black people? “The watery passage of the Atlantic, that fearsome journey, that cataclysm of modernity, has served as amnemonic structure evoking a memory that forms the disjunctive and involuntary presence of these Africans in the Atlantic world … One hears the refrain in Negro spirituals such as ‘Wade in the Water,’ ‘Deep River,’ or ‘Roll, Jordan, Roll’ and in Langston Hughes poem, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’”10 Andrews finds the sources for Du Bois’s use of the “veil” in the Jamesian notion of “penumbra.” This may be the case, though the meaning of the caul and the veil are well documented in African American folklore and colloquial language. Yvonne Chireau, in discussing the topic of anomalous births, has this to say: “Many supernatural specialists were ‘born’ with the ‘gift’—marked, or chosen, at the start of their lives … Being born with a caul, the amniotic veil covering the face of the newly delivered infant, was interpreted as evidence that one was gifted with enhanced insight into the invisible realm. Another well-known belief held that the seventh child of a seventh son or daughter would enjoy an auspicious spiritual heritage. ‘If you are a double-sighted person and can see ghosts, if you happen to have been born on Christmas Day, or are a seventh son, you are born for magic,’ claimed one folklorist.”11 One should also look to the black tradition of preaching and sermons. We know that Du Bois heard more than his share of black sermons and preaching. This tradition portrays a great deal of what Andrews calls synaesthesia, often combining prose, poetry, song, movement, and dance in the performative art of preaching.12 I am not, of course, suggesting that the only valid interpretation of Du Bois is from within the African American cultural experience. Such an interpretation would not be authentic to Du Bois’s life nor work; I have already mentioned the influence of Gustav von Schmoller and Wilhelm Dilthey and I shall later continue the discussion regarding Dilthey. I am saying, 233

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however, that this same authenticity requires that we not neglect the importance of African Americans and the African American experience as powerful and determining influences in his life and work. While one can point to the fact that Du Bois might have enjoyed some privileges that the masses of other black persons in the country did not, he still shared and was subjected to those daily discriminations and humiliations that were the common lot of all African Americans in the United States. It is a mark of his genius that he not only lived through these experiences but critically appropriated his experience within the context of the American experience and its history into novel recombinations of meanings and orientations. With intellect and imagination he made use of all of his resources, those derived from being an African American in America as well as his academic experiences at Fisk, Wilberforce, Atlanta University, Harvard, and the University of Berlin; Du Bois was never ashamed of intellectual meaning and rigor but the resources of his life should not be limited to the influences of the history of ideas. It is clear that Du Bois did not trust those traditions and institutions that demeaned African persons in the creation of the Atlantic world. As long as those institutions and traditions reigned, there was slim hope that a world of democratic freedom would emerge where human beings would be treated with justice and fairness. Any notion of progress coming from these traditions would be synonymous with the deprivation of others. Having rejected the meaning of work under the sign of the Protestant work ethic and the civilizing mission under the aegis of a moralizing and triumphal Christianity, Du Bois turned to a reinterpretation of the modern world as the basis for a new orientation and alternative that might form the cultural structures of a viable future. Taking his stance within the tradition of enslaved Africans in the United States, Du Bois undertook a critical and creative reappraisal of the range of alternative human options. It is at this juncture that we see the confluence of his concern with the continent of Africa and Pan-Africanism.

Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism Three essays take up the subject of Africanism and Pan-Africanism. They are Robin Law’s “Du Bois as Pioneer of African History: A Reassessment of The Negro”; Jemima Pierre and Jesse Weaver Shipley’s “The Intellectual and Pragmatic Legacy of Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism in Contemporary Ghana”; and David Chidester’s “Religious Animals, Refuge of the Gods, and the Spirit of Revolt: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Representations of Indigenous African Religion.” Robin Law concentrates on Du Bois’s early study of 1915, The Negro; this text was revised and appeared under the title The World and Africa in 1947. The other two essays examine all of the major works on Africa by Du Bois, including The Negro (1915); Africa, Its Geography, People, and Products (1930); Africa—Its Place in Modern History (1930); Black Folk Then and Now, (1939); The World and Africa (1947); and finally the statement prepared for his Encyclopedia of Africa, “Africa: An Essay Toward a History of the Continent of Africa and Its Inhabitants” (1963). In looking back on Du Bois’s text of 1915, Robin Law is surprised that later scholars who created the discipline of African history, himself included, paid so little attention to the work of Du Bois. Du Bois was known by his activities devoted to Pan-Africanism and to the issue of the race problem in the United States. Given that the discipline of African history was not established until the 1950s, Law finds Du Bois’s ordering of history along the lines of a cultural 234

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geography to be remarkably cogent. Now, to be sure, Du Bois’s interest in African history had to do with his larger vision; it is clear that through the introduction of the internal history of Africa he is beginning a new kind of world history. This initial foray into African history is quite remarkable, for though there were not many general texts dealing with this subject matter and Du Bois did not carry on original research himself, he was able to pick out William Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man and Leo Frobenius’s Und Afrika Sprach, translated into English in 1913 as The Voice of Africa. A great deal of the meaning of Africa within a universal history has followed Hegel’s pronouncement in his Philosophy of History, where Hegel set forth his derogatory statements concerning Africa. Among other things Hegel said, “For it [Africa] is no historical part of World; it has no movement or development to exhibit … What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of World’s History.”13 While many in the United States would deny Hegel’s explicit statement, they were willing to accept the implications of his derogatory statements about Africa and its need for “civilization” either from the point of view of a missionizing Christianity or some notion of evolutionary progress. Hegel’s statement seems dictated by the normative value accorded “the West” in most formulations of world history. Du Bois sensed that a new kind of temporality might allow another structure of world history. Shipley and Pierre show in their essay how Du Bois’s interest in Africa took on practical forms; this was accomplished through the several Pan-African Conferences held in Europe between 1919 and 1945. I found two points very important in this paper: first of all, through a series of descriptions the authors enable us to understand the ranges of meaning connoted by the term “Pan-Africanism” and secondly, the authors discuss the significance of the political role Pan-Africanism played in the establishment and history of the state of Ghana. They demonstrate how the several meanings of Pan-Africanism are cumulative. Following J. L. Matory’s description of Pan-Africanism as a “live Afro-Atlantic dialogue … that has continued long beyond the end of slavery,” they add that “such Pan-African connections and practices ultimately have ramifications that extend beyond intellectual dialogue and explicit political movements; they have produced significant transformations of daily life, symbols, and practices on both sides of the Atlantic.” Second, the authors present their own understanding of Du Bois’s meaning of the term: “As Du Bois made clear, both in his scholarship and through his political and practical activities, Pan-Africanism is a broadly conceived set of intellectual, political, economic, cultural, and spiritual meanings and practices. It is a movement that is structured by the history of global racial inequality—beginning with the slave trade, the development of global commerce, colonialism, and capitalist expansion—but is certainly not reducible to it.” Pierre and Shipley demonstrate the plausibility of seeing the five Pan-African Conferences between 1919 and 1945, the various African cultural conferences, and Du Bois’s movement to Ghana and his collaboration with the Ghanaian government as all part of the same movement. Thus we are able to trace a kind of morphology from Pan-Africanism as an intellectual-cultural orientation to its institutionalization in a state formation symbolized by Du Bois’s residence in Ghana and the projected Encyclopedia of Africa that was to be published there under his aegis. Robin Law and other African historians had overlooked Du Bois’s early interest in African history because they had classified him and his work as concerned only with African Americans in the United States. Du Bois, almost from the very beginning, never separated the 235

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situation of African Americans in the United States from the issues and problems of Africa and never considered Africa marginal to world history. The authors address the fortunes of Pan-Africanism once it became part and parcel of a newly independent African state. In the early days of independence under the influence of president Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana pursued a Pan-African policy aiding and abetting independence from colonialism in other African territories as well as encouraging African Americans to settle and aid in the formation of the Ghanaian state. Nkrumah thus became the practical and symbolic embodiment of Pan-Africanism during this time. Nkrumah’s government was overthrown in a military coup in 1966. Since that time a series of military dictatorships have governed the country. Flight Lieutenant Rawlings came to power in a military coup in 1981, attempting to revive the older Pan-African policies. Given the economic situation of Ghana, any return to these policies had to come to terms with the policies and politics of the International Monetary Fund and other international agencies of global capitalism. Ghana thus raises the practical meaning of Pan-Africanism within the orders of a nation-state. The end of David Chidester’s article raises a similar note. Now, what is surprising here is that Chidester deals explicitly with Du Bois’s understanding of African religion and through this discussion implicitly suggests insights into the meaning of Du Bois’s own religious propensities. Let me say something about Du Bois’s assessment of African religion as reported by Chidester. While Shipley and Pierre bring up organizations such as the International Monetary Fund in relationship to Pan-Africanism, Chidester cites the same organization in relationship to the present expressions of African indigenous religions. Is there some kind of relationship here? Before discussing this possibility, let me turn to Chidester’s interesting appraisal of African indigenous religion by Du Bois. Chidester’s discussion revolves around three main topics: humanity, divinity, and transatlantic continuity. There is, of course, some ambiguity in this discussion; as Law makes clear in his essay, though Du Bois depended upon secondary sources, his 1915 text The Negro was a serious work, a kind of precursor for later works on African history. This does not deny the ideological intent of the work, however; Du Bois wanted to make it clear that Africans had a cultural integrity prior to the advent of colonialism. In other words, they were fully human before becoming enmeshed within the Western world. One documentation of this humanity is found in Africans’ religious expressions, which Du Bois, following the theories of his time, was willing to admit as being fetishism. Instead of seeing fetishism in derogatory terms, however, he viewed it as, to use Chidester’s words, a “coherent material philosophy of the spiritual dynamics of life.” Now, though he borrowed the notion of fetishism from the literature of his day, in 1915 no prominent interpreter of religion came close to a positive interpretation of fetishism. It is here that Du Bois showed radical independence from the meaning of fetishism by historians of religion and Marxists alike. Since the publication of Souls, Du Bois had emphasized the continuity of African religions in the Americas through the forms of obi, voodoo, and Christianity. From this perspective the Negro Church in America is in direct continuity with African religions. Both Law and Chidester mark Du Bois’s interpretation of African history and African religion, respectively, in The Negro as exemplary. Chidester shows how this portrayal of African religion as fetishism avoided the evolutionary model of the historians of this time as well as the Christian missiologists. Du Bois thus placed African religion within a different kind of history, “Neither a speculative evolutionary history nor a missionary faith history. ” 236

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In the revision of The Negro published in 1939 as Black Folk: Then and Now, Du Bois drops references to the explorer Kingsley and the missionary Nassau and introduces the Yoruba god, Shango. Shango is a High God, a Supreme Being, and is not the result of the influence of Christian missionaries but an indigenous god of the Yoruba people.14 Though this new theoretical interest might have been stimulated by the notion of High Gods, it is clear that Du Bois has not followed this up with an interest in new sources of African history in Western languages. By this time several sophisticated works on the precolonial history of Africa were being produced. The interest in Shango is more suited to Du Bois’s own project of providing a basis for a Pan-African source of religious and political power. He finds it necessary, therefore, to proclaim Shango not only as this Yoruba god of power but as a god “who soars above the legend of Thor and Jahweh, thereby transcending the power of the European and Semitic thunder-gods.” In his next rendition of African religion, The World and Africa (1947), Du Bois’s excision of references to fetishism continue; as a matter of fact, Chidester says that he gave limited scope to religion, expanding the role of Shango as the “supreme source of political power, authority, and sovereignty, father of royal rulers, whose ‘posterity still have the right to give the country its kings.’” Chidester does not wish to relate Du Bois’s changing conceptions of African religion to his biography; I will not follow him in this regard. By 1947, World War II was over and international and domestic maneuvers that would lead to the “Cold War” were being rehearsed. Du Bois, a member of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, was involved in various anti-Cold War movements and in groups petitioning the United Nations to make the situation of blacks in the United States an international rather than an internal nation-state policy. In a conference of this organization held in New York on 27 March 1949, Du Bois made an address that ended with these words: I tell you people of America, the dark world is on the move! It wants and will have Freedom, Autonomy, and Equality. It will not be diverted in these fundamental rights by dialectical hair-splitting of political hairs. … Whites may, if they will, arm themselves for suicide, but the vast majority will march over them to freedom! … Race war was not the answer. What we all want is a decent world, where a man does not have to have a white skin to be recognized as a man … where sickness and death are linked to our industrial system. … Peace is not an end. It is the gateway to full and abundant life.15 Among his colleagues in this organization were the distinguished Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, literary critic F. O. Matthiesen, and acclaimed novelist Norman Mailer. So, even in this post–World War II period, where his activity seems to be taken up with exploring the potential of the United Nations and making alliances with intellectuals who were neither African nor African Americans, echoes of the power of the oppressed come through; here I am able to hear echoes of the god Shango, whom Du Bois had evoked a decade earlier. Following Chidester’s outline I would say that Du Bois was, during this phase of his career, concentrating on the translatability of the meanings of Pan-Africanism through the structures of the peace movement and the United Nations. This was not simply a functional or instrumental use of these resources; for Du Bois, peace was not only a precondition for redress, but also called for a radical reassessment of the policies and raison d’être for a democratic society. 237

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Orientation and beginnings: Interpretations of religion and the “religion” of Du Bois The titles of David Levering Lewis’s magisterial two-volume biography are as follows: W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 and W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. The subtitles imply both an identity and a parallelism. To be sure, the meaning and practice of race has gone on for some time before Du Bois’s birth but the notion of race as a definition of free persons of African descent begins with the Reconstruction in the South following the Civil War. Du Bois was born in 1868. From his very early years until his death he was a part of every major discussion concerning the nature and destiny of black folk in the United States. One must, therefore, as Lewis’s biography suggests, ponder the meaning of his life in relationship to the fortunes of free persons of African descent in the American world. How and where does one begin? The Americans proclaimed their freedom and independence just a century before his birth and the Civil War has just ended. It is the case that neither the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, nor the Reconstruction seriously undertook a viable political or discursive meaning of freedom for persons of African descent in this land. American ideology is replete with phrases of freedom and rights but from the beginning, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, “slavery” has been hidden in the patterns of American rhetoric while all the time being practiced and defended. This is highlighted in Rodney Roberts’s essay when he speaks of an apology as a basic necessity for any consideration of reparations for the enslavement of African persons in the United States. When I attended the Conference on Reparations in Santa Barbara, California, a new meaning of American history was being enunciated. I thought that even if no material or monetary exchanges were ever made, the discussion of the nature and history of the American republic that would ensue from the demand for reparations would be invaluable. Strangely enough, very few white persons attended the conference. Reparations were seen as an issue of black people rather than an issue that lay at the very heart of the American republic. I was afraid that the only way white persons would become interested in the discussion would be to emphasize monetary and material exchanges. Yet I feel that Roberts touched something fundamental when he spoke about an apology. Apology establishes the basis for mutual respect and lays the groundwork for serious public exchange and debate. Even with all the civil rights bills and programs designed for the “uplift of black people,” there has been no inclination for the apology that would open the door for serious reassessment. There are, nevertheless, millions of African people in this land, united by the common past of the legal enslavement of their ancestors under the benign protection of the American Constitution. How does one begin the “biography of a race” out of the negation of freedom and justice and the humiliation of a people? Certain options were presented and the debates, arguments, and tensions associated with Booker T. Washington, Alexander Crummel, and the Niagara Movement pointed to certain possible points of departure. Rejecting, as Carole Stewart would have it, the “progressivism” of the Protestant work ethic on the one hand and a Christian civilizing mission on the other, Du Bois opted for a beginning in the very heart of slavery and even earlier in the continent of Africa itself. Let me turn now to the issue of influence and sources of style and method. In the first instance we must admit that Du Bois’s work confronts us with a superior intellect, possessing 238

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enormous creative and imaginative capacities. Du Bois’s first journey to the South had an impact that remained with him all of his life. I think that this was probably the greatest influence upon his life. It is clear that William James was his favorite professor at Harvard and it is possible to trace specific instances of this influence. One might even say that we can hear echoes of James’s “will to believe” in Souls, when Du Bois speaks of the double-consciousness of black folk as “two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength keeps it from being torn asunder.”16 There is probably something of the will here but it is not of the type of Jamesian individual will, for the very formulation of Du Bois’s double-consciousness expresses the way in which the public nature of slavery and freedom has been internalized within the souls of black folk. Again, we must remember that James defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude.”17 While Du Bois would share with James the propensity to speak about religion in terms of religious experience rather than the religious institution, they would part company regarding the meaning of the individual and the public as the loci of ultimacy. So while I can see the Jamesian influence in particular insights, I don’t think James was ever close to Du Bois’s poetic sensibilities. I feel that it was Du Bois’s German experience that enhanced his own personal style and predilections and enabled him to release his intellectual imagination and creativity. Let me return to the influence of Gustav von Schmoller. Schmoller and his school saw economics as historical. As Joseph Schumpeter put it, “He did not call it historical simply, but historicoethical. The label also carried a different meaning—it was to express protest against the whole imaginary advocacy of the hunt for private profit of which the English ‘classics’ were supposed to have been guilty.”18 It was from Schmoller that Du Bois probably got a sense that there was a theoretical position for economic analysis that did not lead one to profit-making mercantilist economics and that the specific situation of the modes of production were important in any economic analysis. Though Du Bois mentions that he sat in Wilhelm Dilthey’s seminar, I can find no other reference to their relationship. The reason I believe Dilthey had an influence is because the two men exhibit too many parallels between certain styles. To make this case plausible I shall take the liberty of quoting liberally from Dilthey and sources concerning him. For Dilthey, history like philosophy, had to serve the cause of practical reform and regeneration, not merely contemplation. … Dilthey’s training and reflection led him to the conviction that neither philosophy nor history, as generally practiced, offered the resources or knowledge which leads to action in the present and the formation of personal social life-values. This negative judgment of prevalent philosophy and history was determinant in his positive conception of a critique of historical reason. … His conviction that “man is not on earth simply to be but to ‘act’” disposed him toward a practical activism at odds with the contemplative spirit which dominated the fields of history and philosophy.19 In addition to his duties and research as a university professor, Dilthey carried on a crusading journalism contributing to several of the liberal journals, writing reviews and essays on philosophy, literature, historical studies, etc. “His efforts in other areas are so numerous that it must suffice to say simply that Dilthey was anything but a cloistered academic tied down to a narrow specialty.”20 Does this in any way remind you of Du Bois? Allow me to point out 239

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another dimension of Dilthey that I think was attractive to Du Bois—Dilthey’s notions of the poet and poetic sensibility as an epistemological probe and orientation: A poetics based upon psychology makes possible, above all, the recognition of the social function of literature; the feeling of the dignity of the poetic vocation rests upon this recognition. … None of man’s historical attitudes can be completely expressed in concepts. The urge to communicate the inexpressible is the source of symbols. Myths grasp the most important relationships of reality from a religious point of view. … In such symbols, the external, distant, and transcendent is always made visible on the level of the lived experience of one’s own inner life. … As if by an elemental power, lived experiences are elevated to poetic significance through speech, religion, and mythical thought.21 In speaking of the relationship between history, community, and poetry, Dilthey says, “In reality, a historical situation contains a multiplicity of particular facts. … Their coordination within a given period first constitutes the historical situation. … But the unity of a period and a people that we characterize as the historical spirit of an age can only arise from these elements through the creative power and self-assurance of a genius.”22 Allow me to add another link to this chain of plausibility. James and Dilthey read each other’s works and James met Dilthey on one of his trips to Germany. Dilthey had on several occasions made use of James’s work in psychology though he was at times critical of some of James’s formulations. Thus, Du Bois would have been prepared for the kind of psychological epistemology Dilthey employed. What was new was the stylization of the poetic sensibility and its relationship to literature, music, and historical forms, elements missing in James’s work.23 While I am making the case that there were definite influences from this German sojourn, I am not here speaking of particular ideas or concepts but of a stylization of sensibilities and intellect. David Levering Lewis tells us that during the time of Du Bois’s visit, Germany was a “culture in search of a nation.”24 This was a very formative period in the young Du Bois and it is my contention that he was able during this “age of miracles” to conceive of an intellectual orientation that combined an empirical historical bent with a poetic and deciphering sensibility. Moreover, this was taking place in the relative freedom far from his land of birth and citizenship; it was here that the vision and vocation of the scholar-intellectual-activist was born in him. It is well for us to note that for a young African American intellectual, freedom of person and intellect was found away from American shores. Lewis ends chapter 6 (“Lehrjahre”) of volume 1 of his biography with this quote: “As the Wanderjahre of his Age of Miracles ended with the Chester’s hawsers being yoked to the pier, Du Bois wrote: ‘I dropped suddenly back into “nigger”-hating America.’”25 This orientation allowed Du Bois to bring together seemingly contradictory positions into a unity; his poetic sensibility enabled him to deal equally with the empirical and the visionary. This same sensibility operated in a deciphering manner; he turned his attention to heretofore unexamined areas for new forms of knowledge. While he may have been impressed with certain aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of history, it is clear that throughout his life he was attempting to give a new structure to the historical record. This entailed bringing Africa into the meaning of a global history, hence his interest in African history. It was not African history simply as 240

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a record of the past but as the active meaning of Africans and their descendants throughout the world. In the modern world, Africans in the New World were enslaved and those on the continent were subjected to imperialism and colonialism. The day of Du Bois’s death in Ghana completes this symbolism—Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Civil Rights March for African Americans in the United States, on the one hand, and Du Bois’s death in Ghana preparing an Encyclopedia of Africa. It remains for us finally to make an assessment of the understanding of religion and the nature and meaning of religion in the life and work of Du Bois himself. It should be made clear in the first instance that in the main, religion for Du Bois should be seen from the point of view of religious experience rather than religion as the religious institution. This would conform to a tradition of interpretation represented by both James and Dilthey. It should be made clear furthermore that religious experience is not synonymous with “belief in God.” As the phenomenologist of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw put it, “Religious experience, in other terms, is concerned with a ‘Somewhat.’ But this assertion often means no more than that this ‘Somewhat’ is a vague ‘something’; and in order that man may be able to make more significant statements about this ‘Somewhat,’ it must force itself upon him, must oppose itself to him as being Something Other. Thus, the first affirmation we can make about the Object of Religion is that it is a highly exceptional and extremely impressive ‘Other.’” He continues, “As yet, it must further be observed, we are in no way concerned with the supernatural or the transcendent … but there arises and persists an experience which connects or unites itself to the ‘Other’ that thus obtrudes.”26 I contend that this is the kind of experience described by Du Bois in Souls when he witnesses a black Southern church revival. “I was a country school-teacher then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a Negro revival. … And so most striking to me as I approached the village and the little plain church perched aloft, was the air of intense excitement that possessed that mass of black folk. A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us,—a pythian madness, a demonic possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence.”27 For Du Bois this was the experience of the extraordinary, the vague “Somewhat” of van der Leeuw or the “firstness” or “phaneron” of Charles Saunders Peirce.28 Du Bois’s poetic sensibility perceived this experience as a symbolic orientation of ultimate concern. The strange, nonrational reality of the very existence of people of color in a land other than their own, caused to labor and to suffer under the rhetoric and discourses of freedom and self-determination, were in fact inexpressible except in the style of a poesis of history. A line from Countee Cullen’s poem captures this ironic mood: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing | to make a poet black and bid him sing.” We are able to see the ultimacy of the vision stemming from this when he says also in Souls, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”29 This experience symbolized a primordium of modernity that presented the possibility of an alternative interpretation of the modern. The meaning of African peoples in America would extend to the continent of Africa and its inhabitants and from there to all colored peoples in the world who had become dominated and subjugated through imperialism and colonialism. The primordial meaning of African peoples should be distinguished from any essentialist notion of Africa or African peoples; this fact marks the great divide between Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. As primordium, this structure should be seen epistemologically, allowing 241

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Du Bois to make fundamental critiques of the reigning ideologies of those in the modern world who dominated in the name of human freedom. By employing a hermeneutical epistemology, all of Du Bois’s investigations reflected his own formation and the changing standpoints of his situation. This was probably a difficult task for Du Bois; as an intelligent, somewhat arrogant polymath, finding the proper creative role for his ego might have been difficult. Instead of making this simply a problem of the will, I think he made it an issue of method. Limits were built into the structure of his method. While he knew the familiar binaries that characterized most ideologies and methods—for example, black/white, poetic/scientific, conjunction/disjunction—most of his work could be located on the slash (/) that became the space for new creativity in the modern period. Thus all of his varying interpretations of Africa as specified by Chidester’s essay can be related to meanings and movements with which he was engaged in the United States and on the international scene. In the midst of all his work and relationships he returned again and again to the primordial symbolism of the anomaly of African peoples in America. In Black Reconstruction, published in 1935, Du Bois characterized the African slave trade as “the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years,” the Africans “descended into Hell,” and in the Reconstruction they attempted to “achieve democracy for the working millions.” He went on to tell us that this country and the modern period itself act as if none of this ever took place.30 It is this story, this drama, that carries the flavor of transcendence through its sense of importance for the whole world. In his notion of fetishism, a notion he abandoned in his later interpretations of African religion, he came very close to anticipating the latest and most brilliant researches on this topic by William Pietz.31 Had Du Bois combined his earlier research on the African slave trade with his discussion of fetishism, he would have much earlier produced a theory of modern “secular” religion that involved the exchanges of matter and, in the case of the African slave trade, that most exemplary form of matter and materiality—human beings themselves. David Levering Lewis reports a telling incidence that took place in Ghana as an enfeebled Du Bois approached death; his source for the incident was Vice Chancellor O’Brien of the University of Ghana. At one of O’Brien’s meetings with students, one student had criticized Moise Tshombe, who in the midst of the independence of the Belgian Congo had led the province of Katanga out of the Congo and formed an independent entity. The student likened Tshombe to Du Bois’s old nemesis, Booker T. Washington. O’Brien said, “The old man stirred like a tortoise putting his head out of its shell. ‘Don’t say that. I used to talk like that.’ Du Bois then recalled the chastening words of an aunt to such sentiments. ‘Don’t you forget that that man, unlike you bear the mark of the lash on his back. He has come out of slavery. … You are fighting for rights here in the North. It’s tough, but it’s nothing like as tough as what he had to face in his time and in his place.’”32 This may be the case of a dying man making peace and reconciling himself with his enemies, but I think it showed that even at this point of his long life, now having immigrated to Ghana and become a citizen of an African state, Du Bois still remembered the primordium of Africa and African slavery as that magnificent, terrifying, and tragic resource that could become the basis for a new humane world order. Similar musings were expressed by David Brion Davis when he said “that we can expect nothing from the mercy of God or from the mercy of those who exercise lordship in His or other names; that man’s true emancipation, whether physical or spiritual, must always depend on those who have endured and overcome some form of slavery.”33 242

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Notes 1. See The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois. 1877–1963, ed. Herbert Aptheker, 3 vols. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), and the archival guide to his papers, at the University of Massachusetts, The Papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Robert W. McDonnell (Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1981). 2. David W. Blight, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory,” in History and Memory in African American Culture, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Malley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 45–71. 3. See Francis L. Broderick, “The Academic Training of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Journal of Negro Education 27, no. 1 (Winter 1958): 10–16; and, by the same author, “German Influence on the Scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois,” Phylon 19, no. 4 (1958): 367–371. 4. See Aptheker, Correspondence, 1:23–28. 5. It is interesting to note that Fernand Braudel also derived interesting insights from Gustav von Schmoller’s method; see especially his discussions of demographies, regional industries, and everyday life in Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols. (London: Collins, 1981). 6. Princeton University Press has undertaken the translation of the Selected Works of Wilhelm Dilthey. The following have been published: Introduction to the Human Sciences, Understanding the Human World, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, Poetry and Experience, and Philosophy and Life. 7. Note that vol. 5 of the translated collected works published by Princeton University Press is entitled Poetry and Experience. 8. For a discussion of the range of utopias and utopian thought, see Utopia and Utopian Thought: A Timely Appraisal, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston: Beacon, 1966). 9. For a discussion of slavery in the forming of the Constitution, see Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, enl. ed. (New York: Collier, 1965), 106–109, gives a précis of the Slaughterhouse cases. 10. See Charles H. Long, “Passage and Prayer: The Origin of Religion in the Atlantic World,” in The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, ed. Quinton H. Dixon and Cornel West (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 11–21; also published as Chapter 21 of this book. For a comprehensive historical and analytical study of the spirituals, see John Lovell, Jr., Black Song: The Forge and the Flame; The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out (New York: Macmillan, 1972). 11. Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 23. 12. For African American preaching and sermons, see Dolan Hubbard, The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994); and Bruce Rosenburg, The Art of the American Folk Preacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). Hubbard’s text carries a comprehensive bibliography. 13. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 93, 99. 14. From the perspective of the history of religions, this discussion of Shango is part of the theory of “primitive High Gods.” This phenomenon undercut the evolutionary model in religion that saw a movement from the many to the one, from polytheism to monotheism. In the English-speaking world this notion first attracted attention in Andrew Lang’s The Making of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1898). A comprehensive study of this phenomenon is found in Wilhelm Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (The Origin of the Idea of God) (Munster: W. Aschendorf, 1926). For a full discussion of High Gods, see chapter 2 of Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958). 243

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis 15. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, vol. 2, The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 543. 16. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), chapter 1 (emphasis added). 17. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Modern Library, 1902). 18. Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 812. Schumpeter carries on quite an extensive discussion of Schmoller and his theories. A more one-sided and derogatory estimate of Schmoller can be found in Lionel Robbins, A History of Economic Thought, ed. Steven G. Medema and Warren J. Samuels (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 19. Michael Ermarth, The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 26–27. 20. Ibid., 28. 21. Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, vol. 5 of Selected Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 168–169 (emphasis added). 22. Ibid., 162 (emphasis added). 23. See Ermarth, Critique, 176, 213–214. Ermarth says that in some circles Dilthey was called the “German William James” (3). 24. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, vol. 1, Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 136. 25. Ibid., 149 (emphasis added). 26. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938), 23 (emphasis added). 27. Du Bois, Souls, 17 (emphasis added). See also my discussion of the religious experiences of James and Du Bois in Charles H. Long, “Oppressive Elements in Religion and the Religions of the Oppressed,” in Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, 2nd ed. (Aurora, CO: Davies, 1995), chapter 10. 28. For a discussion of Peirce’s logic, see Perspectives on Peirce: Critical Essays on Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), especially 42–65 (chapter 3: Norwood Russell Hanson, “Notes Toward a Logic of Discovery”). 29. Du Bois, Souls, 13. 30. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Russell and Russell, 1935), 727. 31. Chidester made reference to the work of William Pietz. See Pietz’s “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17; “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987): 23–45; “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (Autumn 1988): 105–123. 32. Lewis, The Fight for Equality, 569. 33. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 564.

Bibliography Aptheker, Herbert, ed. The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1877–1963. 3 volumes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973.

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Rapporteur’s Commentary Bernstein, Richard J., ed. Perspectives on Peirce: Critical Essays on Charles Sanders Peirce. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965. Blight, David W. “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory.” In History and Memory in African American Culture, edited by Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Malley, pp. 45–71. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Braudel, Ferdinand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Translated by Siân Reynolds. 3 vols. London: Collins, 1981. Broderick, Francis L. “The Academic Training of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Journal of Negro Education 27, no. 1 (Winter 1958): 10–16. Broderick, Francis L. “German Influence on the Scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Phylon 19, no. 4 (1958): 367–371. Chireau, Yvonne. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Poetry and Experience. Volume 5 of Selected Works. Edited and translated by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Dixon, Quinten H., and Cornel West, eds. The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903. Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Russell and Russell, 1935. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958. Ermarth, Michael. The Critique of Historical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Fabre, Genevieve, and Robert O’Malley, eds. History and Memory in African American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Finkelman, Paul. An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Hanson, Norwood Russell. “Notes Toward a Logic of Discovery.” In Perspectives on Peirce: Critical Essays on Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Richard J. Bernstein, pp. 42–65. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965. Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956. Hubbard, Dolan. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Modern Library, 1902. Lang, Andrew. The Making of Religion. London: Longmans, Green, 1898. Leeuw, Gerardus van der. Religion in Essence and Manifestation. Translated by J. E. Turner. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938. Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois. Vol. 1, Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois. Vol. 2, The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Logan, Rayford W. The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. New York: Collier, 1965. Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. 2nd ed. Aurora, CO: Davies, 1995. Long, Charles H. “Passage and Prayer: The Origin of Religion in the Atlantic World.” In The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, edited by Quinton H. Dixon and Cornel West, pp. 11–21. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Also published as Chapter 21 of this book. Lovell, John, Jr. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame; The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

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The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis Manuel, Frank E., ed. Utopia and Utopian Thought: A Timely Appraisal. Boston: Beacon, 1966. McDonnell, Robert W., ed. The Papers of W.E.B. Du Bois. Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1981. Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, I.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17. Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987): 23–45. Pietz, William. “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (Autumn 1988): 105–123. Robbins, Lionel. A History of Economic Thought. Edited by Steven G. Medema and Warren J. Samuels. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Rosenburg, Bruce. The Art of the American Folk Preacher. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Schmidt, Wilhelm. Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (The Origin of the Idea of God). Munster: W. Aschendorf, 1926. Schumpeter, Joseph A. History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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CHAPTER 19 WHAT IS AFRICA TO ME? REFLECTION, DISCERNMENT, AND ANTICIPATION

Abstract This essay explores the construction of Africa as a critical aspect of modernity. Tracing the consequences of Africa’s modern mapping, it reveals how the emergence and rise of Europe affected the temporal and spatial orientation of Africa, Africans, and religion in modern, objective knowledge. The essay goes on to propose an agenda for the study of Africa that pays attention to both cultural unity and diversity. Such an agenda includes the study of the African diaspora and its religious dimensions. While mysterious in meaning, the term Africana symbolizes the ways in which this academic enterprise can challenge the elitism and exclusivity that previous claims of objective scholarship sometimes fostered. What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea; Strong bronzed men, or regal black, Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang? One three centuries removed From the scenes his father’s loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me? —Countee Cullen

Introduction In the research and writing of this article I was reminded that I had begun my graduate studies in the history of religions as a specialist in African religions. My dissertation of 1962 at the University of Chicago was titled “Myth, Culture, and History in West Africa.” Some forty years later while doing research on New Orleans, I met again some of these same West African cultures in the formation of the culture and city of New Orleans. The Dogon and Bambara, natives of West Africa, had been brought into New Orleans because of their traditional ability to grow rice and thus create a food supply for the French colony. However, for this initial issue of this important journal I have chosen not to write on a specific form of Africana religion such as Vodou, Santeria, or any of the many forms of Yoruba religion. Rather, I have chosen to raise issues and problems that arise and the connections that may obtain between the meaning

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of Africa, on the one hand, and the many derivations, images, and symbols of Africa that are potent and alive in the world. The title of our journal, Journal of Africana Religions, evoked the mood expressed in Countee Cullen’s poem. The use of the term, “Africana,” instead of Africa, is a sign of an ambiguity of meaning. Employing “Africana” instead of Africa gives the sense of something a bit indefinite or vague as well as derivative, varied, and even mysterious. In other words, “Africana” covers a wide range of meanings, ideas, and symbols regarding things pertaining to Africa—a kind of potpourri, an olio or constellation of places, modes, and qualities. As Elliot Skinner, the late African American anthropologist of Africa, put it, “Africa is like a mirror, and African scholarship often reveals more about the scholar than the continent whose cultures he seeks to describe. Indeed, the very shape of Africa, is a question mark, it is sphinx-like in its challenge to all scholars to find the proper key to an understanding of its diversity and complexity.”1 The function and meaning of “Africa” in creating modern knowledge was also raised twenty years later when Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr, the editors of Africa and the Disciplines: Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities, argued that “debates regarding how Africa should be treated within the disciplines miss a profoundly significant point: that while the curriculum may be controlled by the disciplines, the study of Africa has helped to define the very disciplines, … the study of Africa is already lodged in the core of the modern university.”2 In a similar way, the modern academy its structures, and its disciplines have been shaped by the ways that religion has been studied, classified, and circumscribed. The term religion, as redefined within the conceptual schema of the Enlightenment sciences, created as many or more issues than it resolved. The formulations of religion in this mode were inadequate, especially for those cultures without written languages. They have not shown any great efficacy in making sense of those religions that possess written traditions—the so-called “Great World Religions.” It would be relatively easy to make a survey and description of the various forms of religion within the landmass of Africa and those outside the continent that derive from them. While obvious, such a procedure would not do justice to the manner in which this continental landmass has appeared within the junctures of the time and space of its reality. In order to understand Africana religions, then, it is necessary to establish first a genealogy of Africa in the making of the idea of the modern world.

Africa: Continental configurations The landmass referred to as “Africa” is and has been a major factor and value in several different and often overlapping worlds. Here, I make use of the term world in the concrete and epistemological senses. “World” refers to the perspective any culture may have of the widest extension of human ordered meaning. “World,” in this sense, is thus inclusive of the human mode of ordering or any human order that presupposes a nonhuman progenitor of the order. Furthermore, world may refer to a geographical and/or cosmological time and space. From this perspective the original “stuff ” that is the basis for any and all “worlds” may be perceived to have been given prior to the human order in the same moment that such is discovered and/or fashioned by human communities. Thus world conveys both passive and active meanings. 248

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The term Africa as the name for the landmass that is the continent of Africa, is the name given to this area by those outside of the continent. Various origins are given for this name: Greek, Latin, Phoenician, and others. In any case, Africa as a continent has been a part of the global historical landscape for a very long time. As a place and meaning in various cultural temporalities, Africa has been an important ingredient in all the “ages of their several worlds.” Several generation of scholars have literally found Africa a mine for hominid fossils from Homo habilis through Australopithecus africanus to Homo sapiens sapiens.3 As a landmass it is the second-largest continent, exceeded in size only by Asia. The entire landmasses of the United States, Europe, China, and India could be comfortably contained in Africa without making use of all the space. Africa loomed large in the ancient Mediterranean worlds of Egypt, Greece, and Rome and later in the histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It also mattered in Asia; in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Chinese Admiral Zheng sailed an armada of ships from China to the east coast of Africa.4 It is not surprising that the name given to the continent is not derivative from any indigenous language of the peoples of Africa. Given the fact that it was known by cultures outside of the continent, knowledge of Africa was for some time based upon those areas available primarily through the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. After the advent of Islam, more knowledge of the vast interior of Africa began to be made known to outsiders. It should be emphasized that the several cultures within this landscape did not identify themselves as Africans. Their identity was based upon local knowledge of their origins and the lands of their birth, as well as the modes and forms of exchanges they made with their neighbors. In other words, it is difficult to give specification and a generalized meaning to the peoples and cultures of this continent through recourse to the name “Africa.” The kind of sophisticated geographical historical methodology employed by Fernand Braudel comes to mind here. Braudel in his classic The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II introduces us to three strata of time. The first is the longue durée, “a history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in relationship to his environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.” The second is a social history of societies, civilizations, and states. The third is what one of his colleagues has called l’histoire evenementielle, “that is, the history of events, surface disturbances, … a history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations, by definition ultra-sensitive.”5 Braudel’s methodology works well for the work he accomplished; the Mediterranean Sea is a longue durée and the life and times of Philip II is the structure of the history of events with the various Mediterranean states and societies forming the second structure of social histories. There are hints here for understanding Africa though the various oceans and waters that surround Africa, but the vastness of African space overwhelms the possibility of a continuous longue durée. Furthermore, what of the Sahara and the great interior of Africa? Still, I think that the introduction of the longue durée as a historical structure might yet be useful for coming to an alternate understanding and meaning of Africa. Perhaps this angle of vision will allow scholars to understand better the internal rhythms and meaning of time in Africa and in other cultures outside of Europe. Such matters were not considered to be important dimensions of a world history. As a matter of fact, the very notion of a “world history” was coincidental with European hegemony. Several factors were involved in the formation of European hegemony, not the least being the navigation of the Atlantic Ocean commencing with the voyages of Christopher Columbus 249

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at the end of the fifteenth century. This event forms the origin and context that enabled Europe to take on the prestige of a special and peculiar identity. Europe became a continent!6 Now it is clear that the landmass known as Europe is part and parcel of the larger landmass of Asia; geographically, Europe is a cape of Asia. The continental status of Europe was at the same time an announcement of its destiny. Fernand Braudel has pointed out, “To draw a boundary around anything is to define, analyze, and reconstruct it, in this case, indeed, adopt, a philosophy of history.”7 Europe’s self-definition as a continent represented an explicit separation of itself from Asia as “the East” as well as a diminution of Africa as possessing any prestige as a continental landmass. The European apotheosis reminds one of Theodor Gaster’s descriptions of the Rites of Filling (Plerosis) and Rites of Emptying (Kenosis) in the ancient Near East. Europe’s continental status accorded vigor, vitality, and power upon its spatiality while simultaneously divesting Asia and Africa of any similar virtues. Gaster’s description of what he calls a topocosm emerging from the rites of filling is analogous to various aspects of the European ideology. Gaster describes the topocosm thus: Basic to the entire procedure is the conception that what is in turn eclipsed and neutralized is not merely the human community of a given area and locality but the total corporate unit of all elements animate and inanimate alike, which together constitute its distinctive character and “atmosphere.” To this wider entity we may assign the name topocosm, formed (on the analogy microcosm and macrocosm) from the Greek, topos, “place” and cosmos, “world order.” The seasonal ceremonies are the economic regimen of this topocosm. … The essence of the topocosm is that it possesses a two-fold character, at once real and punctual, and ideal and durative, the former aspect being necessarily immerged in the latter, as a moment is immerged in time. It is bodied forth as a real and concrete organism in the present, it exists also as an ideal, timeless entity, embracing but transcending the here and now.8 The societal religious drama characterized in the topocosm could serve as the model for G.W.F. Hegel’s historical-geographical speculation in his Philosophy of History, in which he creates a speculative temporality that includes all the cultures of the world ending with the modern time of European Germany, where the ideal eternity of Freedom, Rationality, and the State are integrated and transcended by the Objective Spirit within History.9 It should be remembered that the year 1492, the advent of the Columbian venture, was the same year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain. The Muslims in Spain had already been defeated. These events are part of the ingredients that eventuated in the ideology that would undergird the notion of Europe as the normative center of value and history.

Cultural unity of the African continent The issue of the cultural unity of Africa arises out of a concern to give specificity to the cultures and people of the continent and to express the initiative, experience, integration, and creativity of its inhabitants. The dialectical relationship of the “continent of Europe” to the African continent prompted the separation of the African continent into two major zones, 250

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Mediterranean or North Africa and sub-Saharan or black Africa. It is clear that what lies behind this separation is the old primitive/civilized binary or the later racial categorization of black/white, European/African. The separation into major zones places the Sahara desert in an analogous position of the Ural Mountains in the creation of Europe as a continent separate from Asia. To be sure, one might cite major differences between Mediterranean Africa and Africa south of the Sahara. The Mediterranean has been a crossroads of human commerce and exchange for millennia, the waterway allowing easy access between adjacent landmasses. Such was not the case south of the Sahara. In spite of the barrier created by the Sahara, however, the “ocean of sand” was navigated quite successfully and over a very long period of time. One of the most cogent cases against this Saharan separation was made by George Peter Murdock. Murdock states his view as follows: Having chosen to emphasize the ethnographic literature, the author made the further decision to embrace the entire continent in his survey. To exclude Egypt, Ethiopia, and North Africa, as has commonly been done, could only have the effect of obscuring the influences which have impinged on Negro Africa from the north and northeast and of injecting an element of unnecessary guesswork into their interpretation. To exclude Madagascar, moreover, would eliminate a prime source of information concerning the cultural impact on Africa of contacts with India and Malaysia by way of the ancient monsoon trade across the Indian Ocean.10 James L. Newman also ignores the Sahara as some kind of dividing line within Africa. His work is encompassed within two broader limits, the continental limit of Africa itself and his more theoretical notion of “peopling.” For him, “peopling implies the existence of distinctive peoples and hence highlights the issue of identity.” Since all human beings share a common African genetic heritage, scholars need both to explain how, through evolution, human beings in Africa and beyond developed similar, yet also different genetic make-ups.11 Newman divides Africa into six regions: Northern Africa, Ethiopia and the Horn, Western Africa, Central Africa, Eastern Africa, and Southern Africa. Nowhere in his text does he introduce the continental polemic of a European North Africa as opposed to sub-Saharan Africa. In the theoretical chapters at the beginning of his text, he lays out the possible structures of the overlapping of regions in various terms of subsistence (for example, hunting and gathering, agriculture, short- and long-distance trade, and linguistic structures). He is also careful to note the influx of non-continental Africans into the peopling of Africa as in the case of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the fifteenth century. The continual influx of European peoples and practices radically changed the course of peopling of African cultures. This influx had a deleterious effect upon the demography through the slave trade as well as a radical change and diminution of modes of life and subsistence through the introduction of mercantile and capitalistic modes of production. By contrast, Jacques Maquet observes the separate status of North or European Africa but gives no reason for its omission from the cultural areas of the African continent. Maquet, however, makes a strong but speculative case for the cultural unity of sub-Saharan Africa. He begins by first stressing the great diversity that is present throughout the continent. But he also insists that there is cultural unity: “From Conakry to Mogadishu, from Khartoum to Durban, one may perceive a certain felt quality.” Maquet argues that while certain material 251

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cultural products such as sculpture are diverse, perhaps encompassing hundreds of different styles, “it is easy to perceive a certain relationship between African works of different origin, since one can pick them out from collections of traditional pieces from Oceania, America, and Asia.”12 Maquet does present empirical data as the basis for what may appear to be an assertive intuitive and speculative thesis. He divides the continent of Africa, excluding North Africa, into six civilizations: the civilizations of the bow, of the clearings, the granary, the spear, of cities, and of industry. Maquet is at pains to make sure that he does not account for this unity in terms of any sort of racial or biological essentialism. The unity seems to be a trait acquired through the adaptation to the ecology of the continent and through the various modes the inhabitants have created to maintain their existence. African cultural unity has also been traced through a study of African languages, especially in oral literatures. Joseph Greenberg’s classification of African languages not only purged African linguistics from its racialized overtones but established clearly the status of East and West African languages as well as documented the extent and integrity of Bantu language migrations.13 Scholars prompted by the initiative of Jan Vansina have demonstrated the value of oral traditions as important tools for historical research in Africa.14 The Uppsala school of ethnology has devoted several studies to oral traditions and myths in Africa.15 Ruth Finnegan’s study of oral literature moves beyond the use of oral traditions as historical tools to these traditions as literature. In her work on oral literature in Africa, she makes it clear that oral literature is directly related to performance. Thus, while possessing many of the qualities of written literature, it requires an audience in the moment of its actualization.16 David Scheub’s study of the Xhosa Ntsomi-performance is an almost perfect example of her meaning of oral literature as performance.17

Africa: Religion, diasporas, and modernity In the previous section of this paper I have attempted to raise some of the theoretical issues involved in any important discussion when Africa is introduced to the academy. V. Y. Mudimbe raised issues of this kind and extended their range and depth in his book The Invention of Africa.18 If, indeed, the study of Africa has aided in the critique and redefinition of the disciplines as the editors of the volume Africa and the Disciplines suggest, Mudimbe gives us an insight into what the discipline of philosophy or better, “the order of knowledge,” might look like if one paid serious attention to Africa. Mudimbe, in his preparatory and diagnostic text on African philosophy, speaks of an African gnosis. He acknowledges his debt to Johannes Fabian’s usage of this term in Fabian’s description of a charismatic movement in Africa. Scholars of religion will recognize the term as belonging to esoteric texts and movements in early Christianity. In any case, this term seemed to Mudimbe an apt way of introducing his text: Gnosis means seeking to know, inquiry, methods of knowing, investigation and even acquaintance with someone. Often the word is used in a more specialized sense, that of higher and esoteric knowledge, and thus it refers to a structured, common, and conventional knowledge but one strictly under the control of specific procedures for the rise as well as its transmission. Gnosis is, consequently, different from dona or opinion, 252

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and, on the other hand, cannot be confused with epistemic, understood as both science and general intellectual considerations .19 I find hints in this usage of gnosis to the way I have framed the issue of religion for our time. I have in various places defined religion as orientation. That is, “orientation in the ultimate sense . . . how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s life.”20 This is a rather cryptic statement that bears a number of implications. First of all it implies a kind of geographical sense of things, and like all geographies it has to do with the location of various forms of materiality in space. Part of knowing who one is means coming to know where one is located. This is true for peoples as well as individuals. Orientation required a consideration of the continents known as Europe and Africa. How are they located in global space and in relationship to each other, and what are and have been the meanings coming from these loci? I have characterized the invention of “the continent of Europe” in ritual terms borrowed from Theodor Gaster to hint at this dimension. In like manner, the determination of any geographical space has implications for all other spaces within that field. These implications occur with greater or lesser speed and intensity in relationships to specific temporal rhythms. In other words, any valid form of orientation in the modern world must presuppose the transcultural nature of the globe since the fifteenth century. This orientation must of necessity take into account the interaction and exchanges of matter of land and lands, water and watery passages, and the bodies and commodities, as well as ideas. Henri Baudet affirms that the basic elements of what came to be defined as Europe had a Greek, or better yet, a Mediterranean origin. It was not until the voyages of the Portuguese southward around the continent of Africa and into the Indian Ocean and the ventures of Columbus into the Atlantic that these distinctive elements became one of the ingredients in the making of Europe as a continent. These voyages and the physical geographical boundary of the Ural Mountains were not enough to demarcate the meaning of Europe as a continent. It needed a philosophical and ideological meaning to justify its continental assertiveness. Baudet tells us that for most of the period prior to the ocean voyages, Europe had been an invasion route from the Mediterranean into western Asia.21 It is from within this context that we can understand how two of European’s most prominent philosophers of the modern period, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, gave a great deal of attention to the meaning of Europe’s orientation in space—Kant in his unpublished lecture notes on anthropology and geography, Hegel in his Philosophy of History.22 The continent of Africa has been an important meaning for several cultures over at least three millennia; it is, however, only in the modern period that an Africana discourse became a practical and theoretical necessity. Mudimbe, as a part of his initial discussion of an African gnosis, poses this urgent question, “Would it then be possible to renew the notion of tradition from, let us say, a radical dispersion of African cultures?”23 Similar sentiment is echoed in the caution expressed by David L. Schoenbrun in an article devoted to the history of public health in East Africa. In this article he worries that the possibility for a distinctive novelty which might be forthcoming from these traditions is always in danger of becoming dominated by the discursive narrative of Protestantism or capitalism. He holds out the possibility of alternative narratives arising out of African history that would be in tension with the dominating Western discourses and would speak more directly to the traditions and rhythms 253

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of African temporalities.24 Schoenbrun alludes to a comment made by his historian colleague Steve Feierman, one of the contributors to the Africa and the Disciplines volume. Feierman’s essay shows how African history contributes to the dissolution of the notion of a “world” or “universal” history so admired in the academy. In the midst of his discussion of historians and historiography in several parts of the globe, he has this to say about the American Civil Rights Movement: “The slaves and the barbarians were not coincidental to civilization, aberrant at the margins; they were constitutive of civilization, the way civilization defined itself. With the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, similar perceptions began to emerge.”25 Had Feierman been as attentive to African American history in the United States as he has been to East African history, he would have realized that African Americans have been aware of the disjunction between colonial and imperial histories and other modes and meaning of time at least since the seventeenth century. In their important volume on the history of the geography of continents cited above, Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen devote an entire chapter to the Eurocentric/Afrocentric controversy. Some new light is shed on this debate within this context. Europe, simply as a geographical designation, is already an ambiguous, if not spurious, notion. Its legitimacy is claimed through the invention of its past, and its projection of its meaning within the world is created by navigation of the Atlantic Ocean. The ideology of Europe is not put forward as a limited cultural meaning of thought, truth, or value. Rather, European cultural meanings are assumed to be the correlates of universal values and norms. It is precisely this view of Europe that is being rejected by the Afrocentric camp. In many respects, however, the Afrocentric proponents share many of the structural characteristics of their opponents in their desire to locate and specify the origin of normative human value. For the Afrocentric position, the locus of this value is the continent of Africa. As a matter of fact, the two camps often claim the same personages as members of their respective traditions.26 The two points being made here, the impact of dispersed (diaspora) African cultures on the meaning of continental Africa, and the manner in which the study and meaning of their existence provide the basis for a radical critique of a Eurocentric universal world history, provide the substance for Joseph E. Harris’s edited work on the African diaspora. To date it remains the most substantial volume on the topic. First published in 1982, a second edition was published in 1993. It begins with an introductory essay by Elliot P. Skinner and ends with a concluding essay by St. Clair Drake. Intervening essays deal with the United States, Mesoamerica, Europe, South America, and topics covering religion, return of Africans to the continent, and Africans in Islam, and in Asia. The volume makes clear that any limitation of the African diaspora to the Middle Passage, as important as it is, does not exhaust the nature and meanings involved in the African diaspora.27 James A. Pritchett makes a similar point.28 Pritchett, in summarizing the concern for African diaspora studies, cites the African scholar Paul Tiyambe Zeleza:29 More recently, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza published the article, “African Diaspora: Towards a Global History.” On the one hand, Zeleza’s approach is clearly Afrocentric, framed by notions of dispersal from, and linkages to continental Africa. Yet, on the other, Zeleza, even more forcefully than Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, vigorously attacks the hegemony of prevailing Afro-Atlantic models in the study of the African diaspora. He notes, for example, that (1) not all Africans went west to the Americas. For centuries Africans were 254

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integral to both the Indian Ocean world and the Mediterranean world. There are longstanding Diasporas in both. Hence the constant focus on the Atlantic world, the Middle Passage as the model for African diasporic formation is simply not useful in the majority cases, and (2) even the Atlantic model itself is mostly a North American model, overly focused on Blacks in the US, wholly inadequate for framing much of the Caribbean and Latin American dynamics. … Zeleza urged increased intellectual reflection on the whole Diaspora enterprise, and especially on at least two foci: (1) the terms of analysis we adopt and (2) the problem of historical mapping.30 The concern for African diasporas in places outside the Western Hemisphere and in historical periods prior to the Middle Passage arises from two concerns. First, it allows us to contemplate meaning and movements internal to Africa that are not dominated by the discourses of imperialism and capitalism. Just as we seek to know more about cultural meanings within Africa prior to the modern period, the same care should be shown in a concern for African diasporas. In addition, whether one is in radical opposition to a totally Eurocentric discourse or not, the shaping and stylization within this framework often closes the door to alternative meanings and discourses. At this juncture I should like to revisit the 1971 article that first involved me in the religious meaning of diasporic religions.31 In this article I gave prominence to the meaning of Africa in African American religions. It should be noted that I did not equate religion with theology. As a matter of fact, one of my major aims was to make this distinction. I felt that the discourse of black theology might actually prevent serious consideration of the wider range of meaning in religion as a form of life, thought, and action. It was not my intention in this article to give a full-blown description of any African American religion. I wanted to provide the basis for these religions as the temporal/spatial template for an alternate discourse and epistemology in the modern world. From this point of view, my position seems close to that of V. Y. Mudimbe’s characterization of gnosis. The 1971 article focused on three major points: (1) Africa as historical reality and religious image; (2) the involuntary presence of the African American community in the United States; and (3) the experience and symbol of God in the experience of blacks; these points overlap. I pointed out how Africa for African Americans was obviously a reference to the continent of Africa but that it was that and more. It became an image and symbol for the possibility for another and alternative beginning and way of being in the world. Africa was indeed a continent with a very large landmass and simultaneously the basis for a powerful orienting discourse about the nature and being of peoples of African descent in the world. The involuntary stance and presence of African people in their diasporic existence in the New World is paralleled by the destruction of aboriginal peoples and acquisition of their lands. These events have prevented any ultimate trust in the rhetorics of egalitarianism and freedom that accompanied the ascendancy of Europe. The manifestation and naming of gods and divine beings as centering symbols of the orientational process express themselves in a precise manner within this situation and become the resource for the maintenance of one’s humanity within the context. Throughout this discussion I have attempted to pay attention to geographical, spatial meanings as the material basis in our discussion. This is especially true in any study of diasporas since they involve movement through space over land and seascapes. Diasporas 255

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define orientations within situations of transculturation. They emphasize the religious meaning evoked from the transhumance capability of the human mode of being. Sacrality is often understood through vertical metaphors, with the gods and divine beings above, the human below, and the earth below. Along with this vertical metaphor, diasporic orientations bring to the fore the horizontal dimension of sacrality and the role of distance and movement in the revelation of sacrality and knowledge. The term transculturation32 was first used by the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz to describe the existence and relationships between the indigenous African and Spanish populations in Cuba.33 He shows how these groups adapted to each other in modes of language, music, art, and agricultural work. The contemporary usage of the term has been enhanced by Mary Louise Pratt’s attention to the meaning of travel in the transcultural situation.34 For Pratt, transculturation brings into being “contact zones” within which cultures meet, clash, and grapple. According to Pratt the zones give expression to an improvisational modality. These contact zones have taken place for a long time over almost all the geographical spaces of the earth. The adaptation and improvisations coincidental to situations of this kind have to do with the pace and rhythm of the dominating culture, the number and variety of cultures in contact, and the rhetoric of occupation. There have been diasporas throughout human histories. The term itself received its classical definition as a description of the removal of the Hebrew from Israel to Babylon in 587 bce. The modern period is characterized by the intensity, number, and impact of the meaning and nature of diasporic formations. As a matter of fact, one might look upon modern Europe as a diasporic culture. I have already alluded to the dispersal of the Jews from Spain in the symbolic inaugural date of the beginning of modernity in 1492. Subsequently, European cultures established several diasporic communities throughout the world. The major ones were English-settler populations in East and South Africa and in North America and militarycolonial communities in India and Africa. During their rule of India, the English dispersed thousands of Indians to the Fiji Islands of the Pacific, East Africa, South Africa, and Trinidad and Tobago. While these were in fact diasporic communities, the rhetoric accompanying these movements avoided any implication or hint of diasporic meaning. Daniel Defert has noted that the early Europeans were pilgrims: prudentia peregrandi. They were taught languages as languae peregrinae, that is, not language of a given territory but language necessary for the activity of travelling. … This vast universe, known only to a few people, absent from the sacred texts and of which Antiquity knew nothing could have provided a field of endless invention and exaggeration. But the writer’s obligation to truth was the result of a hierarchical network of competition and political confrontation. No doubt the voyage of discovery should be situated historically between the medieval crusades which it miniaturises and the organization of the laboratory.35 Most of the diasporic communities in the modern world have come about as a result of the transcultural expanse of European culture. The kind of vulnerabilities and resources present in transcultural situations were not admitted to or expressed by the Europeans. Thus, transculturation involved for them, as Defert put it, “a collection of the world,” and in the

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language of Gaster, the evacuation of meaning from other cultures, or emptying, for the sake of European hegemony, or filling. Africa as a continent and Europe as a geo-ideological construct have had a special relationship over the last millennia, the intensity of this relationship intensifying over the last five hundred years. On the whole, diasporic cultures and religions have never chosen the binary option for any length of time. The binary as defining completely separate worlds has been the position of the Europeans who dominated. Diasporic communities accepted and made use of whatever they found of value in European cultures but did not justify its value within the ideology of European superiority. There was always the temptation to give up the tension created by the difference between the two modes of being in the world. From the side of African and other diaspora communities, there is always the utopian temptation to create a world of meaning only from resources that they define as original or “indigenous.” Such a position would represent a kind of mimicry of the Europeans who think that their cultures have never learned from or been dependent on others. It is furthermore almost impossible to designate any “pure” beginnings in any part of the world. It is at this point that I return to V Y. Mudimbe’s notion of gnosis. He makes it clear that by gnosis he is not referring to an episteme or a science. For me this indicates a lived or performed appearance—in other words, a mode of life where practice is to the fore but the theoretical implications of this practice act as critical principles. These principles allow room for the meaning of the practice to engage in all the implications of creating a world of meaning. This would be close to what goes on in religious communities. Let me give two examples of what I have in mind. First of all, I note that in his study of Candomblé, Roger Bastide tells us that he became a convert to Candomblé because he was able to see that the problems he confronted as a modern scholar of sociology were analogous to the problems this community had in dealing with modernity.36 There was one major exception: they approached the issue from another point of departure and were thus able to include many elements that a Western methodological position overlooked. The other example is presented to us in Wallace Best’s study of African American churches on the South Side of Chicago.37 Best juxtaposes the performances and action of these churches with the theoretical formulations of the University of Chicago’s sociological studies of African American migrations to the North and the studies’ dismissal of the religious traditions of the black populations as proper resources for the critical coping with urban modernity. Best is able to show that the congregations and the ministers of these communities were very much aware of the nature and structures of modernity and that they chose a way other than that of secular liberalism or fundamentalism for dealing with the issues. Some time ago, Paul Ricoeur pointed out that “the symbol gives rise to thought.”38 These diasporic religious communities enable us to find a new beginning for thought that has the possibility of avoiding the exclusivity and elitism that has too often accompanied the objective meaning of thought as a science of the rational. Not only these diasporic religions, but also the very conundrum of the continent of Africa as a whole, to echo Skinner at the beginning of this essay, may serve in the same manner as one of the most important ways that thought might be renewed—and the relationship of thought to action and performance.

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Notes 1. Peoples and Cultures of Africa, ed. Elliott P. Skinner (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, for the American Museum of Natural History, 1973). 2. Africa and the Disciplines: Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities, ed. Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xii (emphasis added). 3. For a general discussion of the archeology of hominid research within the context of the geography and peoples of Africa, see James L. Newman, The Peopling of Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 4. It is now generally agreed that the Chinese sailed in much larger ships to several locations in Asia, the Indian Ocean, and East Africa. See J.J.I. Duyvendak, China’s Discovery of Africa (London: A. Probsthain, 1949); and Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). A beautiful coffee-table summary of these voyages complete with commentary, photographs, and painting is found in Michael S. Yamashita, Zheng He: Tracing the Epic Voyages of China’s Greatest Explorer (Vercelli, Italy: White Star, 2006). 5. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 1:20–21. 6. Martin W Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), makes the continental status of Europe a major item in the configuration of the modern world. 7. Braudel, Mediterranean, 18. 8. Theodor Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East, rev. ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1961), 23–24. 9. See G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. B. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956). 10. George Peter Murdock, Africa, Its People, and Their Culture History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), viii. 11. See Newman, Peopling of Africa, 3. 12. Jacques Maquet, Africanity: The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, trans. Joan R. Rayfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 3, 5. 13. Joseph Greenberg, Studies in African Linguistic Classification (New Haven, CT: Compass, 1955). 14. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology, trans. H. M. Wright (Chicago: Aldine, 1965); see also Vansina’s Kingdoms of the Savanna (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966). 15. See further Hans Abrahamsson, The Origins of Death: Studies in African Mythology (New York: Arno, 1977). 16. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968). 17. Harold Scheub, “The Technique of the Expandable Image in Xhosa-Ntsomi Performances,” Researches in African Literatures 1, no. 2 (1970): 119–146. 18. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 19. Ibid., ix. 20. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Study of Religion (Aurora, CO: Davies, 1999), v. 21. See Henri Baudet, Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, trans. Elizabeth Wentholt, intro. Charles H. Long (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988). 258

What Is Africa to Me? 22. See David Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 529–564. 23. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, x (emphasis original). 24. See David L. Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa,” American Historical Review 3, no. 5 (December 2006): 1403–1439. 25. Steve Feierman, “African Histories and the Dissolution of World History,” in Africa and the Disciplines, 167–212. 26. See Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1988); Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans (New York: Macmillan, 1992); Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), and vol. 2, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 27. Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph E. Harris 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993). 28. James A. Pritchett, “Where Next in African Diaspora Studies?” Ruth Simms Hamilton Fellowship Awards’ Symposium: Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of “Toward a Paradigm for African Diaspora Studies,” Michigan State University, October 30, 2010, Occasional Papers, ed. Jualynne E. Dodson (East Lansing, MI: African Atlantic Research Team, 2010), 34. 29. See Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “Banishing the Silences: Towards the Globalization of African History,” www.codesnia.org/IMG/pdf/zeleda.pdf; “The Inventions of African Identities and Languages: The Discursive and Developmental Implications,” www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/36/paper1402.pdf; “The Ties That Bind: African, African American, Africana, and Diaspora Studies,” www.princeton.edu/ africanamericanstudies/event/details/2011-Ties-that-bind.pdf. 30. See Pritchett, “Where Next,” 34–35. 31. Charles H. Long “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States,” History of Religions 11, no. 2 (August 1971): 54–66; republished in Significations, chapter 11. 32. See my “Transculturation and Religion,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones, 15 vols. (Detroit, MI: Macmillan, 2005), 14: 9292–9299; also published as Chapter 12 of this book. 33. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), especially chapters 2 and 7. 34. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2000). 35. Daniel Defert, “The Collection of the World: Accounts of Voyages from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” Dialectical Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1982): 11–20, at 12. 36. See Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations, trans. Helen Seeba (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), especially the introduction. 37. Wallace Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Block Chicago, 1915– 1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 38. Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection,” International Philosophical Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1962): 191–218.

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CHAPTER 20 BODIES IN TIME AND THE HEALING OF SPACES: RELIGION, TEMPORALITIES, AND HEALTH

[L]et us make up our faces before the world, and our names shall sound throughout the land with honor! For we ourselves are our true names, not their epithets! So let us say, Make Up Our Faces and Our Minds! —Ralph Ellison Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to address the problematical issue of health within the black community. It is clear that though health and health-related issues are primarily focused upon the individual body, it is possible to see the self as an integrated whole and one that is situated in a set of social relationships that include family and community. These families and communities are situated and defined in specific times and places, which should be seen within a wider order of temporality. The institution of slavery and the subsequent history of oppression within American culture force us to raise issues regarding not simply the meaning of health within the community but the manner in which the issue of health has formed one of the basic meanings of community. According to Townes and Mitchem, “Health depends on social networks, biology, and environment. It is embedded in our social realities and is the integration of the spiritual, the mental, and biological aspects of our lives.” Here, I attempt to show how the issue of health arises within the black community and hope from this portrayal to find resources not only for alternative modes of health care but to indicate how the issue of health can define the nature of a moral community itself. Health for the black community has always been defined as an issue of public health and the viability and meaning of the public nature of the black community in this land. A discernment of the history of health within this community affects all the other problems and issues within the black community. I am, to be sure, concerned about the quality of health care in black communities—the access that black persons have to the various health institutions, as well as the black community’s general and chronic malaise noted by the statistics of HIV/AIDS, hypertension, sickle cell anemia, and so forth. I am equally concerned about the meaning and nature of the moral community in which black persons live and have lived. The nature of biological well-being, the very existence of black bodies in this country always take on the ramifications of political, economic, and social import. And here I reference the incidence of homicide among young black males, the rate of their incarceration, and the growing number of children who are not growing up within nurturing and caring communities. These are obviously issues of public health and are related directly and historically to the viability of black persons constituting a moral community. In a comprehensive and programmatic article, David L. Schoenbrun demonstrates how a “history of public healing reveals compelling notions of public health and forms of power that

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cut across the colonial period but were transformed by colonialism.” This transformation was neither linear nor progressive in the historical sense. Rather, “public healing was wrestled with shifting boundaries between a porous social body’s moral communities and the starker outline of an embodied, autonomous individual.”1 In his discussion, Schoenbrun shows how various scholars of African history have attempted to come to terms with the issue of cultural societal meaning and expression in the colonial encounter. Many have emphasized the African appropriation of Western forms of knowledge, others emphasize pre-colonial forms of African knowledge, while others see Africans and Europeans engaged in a struggle for power that allows for the emergence of several types of colonial middle figures such as nurses, paramedics, and so forth. In light of the several possible positions of the colonial encounter, Schoenbrun devotes special attention to a summarizing comment by his colleague, Steven Feierman. “[Feierman] worries that the specificities of colonial-cultural mixtures tend to make historical sense in terms of layered narratives that ‘originate in Europe,’ particularly the narratives of capitalism and of Protestantism, and the implicit, general sense of their historical relations to each other.”2 Feierman does not wish at all to rule out the kind of narratives that originate in Europe, he fears that the coherence that is endemic to such narratives fail to see how these kinds of narratives, “exist in creative tension with larger historical narratives … the central question is which larger narratives?”3 In the case of Africa, some aspects of the efficacious nature of the African traditions were extinguished. While not attempting at all to mitigate the violence done to African traditions, Fiereman’s point is well taken. Rather than speak of extinctions, the language of “fragmentation of traditions” might be more apt. This fragmentation also represents new forms of adaptation as well as the creation of new and fundamentally new modes of cultural orientation to meet particular challenges. My concern in this chapter is to describe as best I can the kind of entangled and fragmented cultural modes that arose during the time of slavery and the domination of white persons over persons of color in the United States. I agree with Dipesh Chakrabarty when he calls upon us, “to contemplate the necessarily fragmented histories of human belonging that never constitutes a one or a whole.”4 I have chosen to begin this chapter with an allusion to East Africa not because I wished to establish continuity between East African cultures and those of Africans in North America. My turn to East Africa was out of a concern for certain methodological insights and hints. For some time a group of scholars have attempted to make sense of East African cultures in terms of certain totalities in time and space.5 What is important in their work is the manner in which they include and regard the long past of the cultures as well as the changes wrought by other Africans and Europeans. This accounts for the fact that a great deal of their data is in the form of oral traditions, sometimes of intra-African derivation, but since the coming of the Europeans, often fragmentary and expressed in non-discursive modes of song, dance, or rituals.

Time on the cross: The body in bondage The authors of Time on the Cross insist that their cool, analytical, and dispassionate study of American slavery counter arguments that their study tends to make American slavery more acceptable by describing their aims in quite a different manner.6 262

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We have attacked the traditional interpretation of the economics of slavery not in order to resurrect a defunct system, but in order to correct the perversion of the history of blacks—in order to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without development for their first two hundred and fifty years on American soil.7 I am certain that this was the authors’ intent, and from the point of view of economic history their case might be plausible. One problem with this interpretation is that there is no tradition among those who were enslaved that gave expression to such a palatable view of slavery, and, if their interpretations are true, no tradition whether in the academy, business, or popular culture ever espoused such a view of the years of slavery. The authors might have added a third volume inquiring into the reasons why the culture, achievement, and creativity of African Americans was not accepted and immediately made a part of the general American culture after the Civil War. Fogel and Engerman attribute the misunderstanding of the economics of slavery and what they see as the degradation of the enslaved Africans to the influence of the abolitionists. The abolitionists’ influence began as a moral indictment and moved into a critique of the economic viability of the slavery system. As we shall see below, this argument did not begin with the abolitionists; it was first made by Southern slave-owning plantation owners during the Constitutional Convention. Fogel and Engerman hope in their study to document the craftsmanship and creativity of African labor and in the process to resurrect the image of the enslaved African. Volume two, Evidence and Methods, of their study is devoted to a discussion of their methods and sources. In it they take on other historians’ methods and conclusions and devise econometric equations for the positions they take regarding the nature and meaning of slave labor and its ramifications for the subsequent meaning of African American culture in the United States. We are left with the conclusion that enslaved Africans lived more or less like other Americans laborers during various periods of American history, with the exception that the Africans lived under a system of slavery. Given this conclusion and the methods set forth for it, it is strange that they would entitle their work Time on the Cross. We are not told how the authors selected the title or how seriously they took its implications. There is a certain vogue in placing titles that carry a quasi-religious overtone to books related to the study of African Americans, for example, Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, Sylvia Frye’s Water from the Rock, or Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters, for example. In some cases, the text and the suggestive intent of the title are congruent. There might be a slight congruency in the Fogel and Engerman volumes in so far as part of their discussion has to do with the exploitation of enslaved Africans. The more fundamental sense of any meaning of the notion of “time on the cross” is not carried through, however. The theological and iconographic meaning of the phrase is the passion and suffering of Jesus, the Christ, for the salvation of the world. The major image for this meaning is a crucifix—the suffering body of Jesus pierced by thorns and spear, abandoned and left to die on the cross. Little of the implications of these meanings are present in this work. Allow me to suggest another, albeit deeper, implication. Here, I reference the way the authors have made the identification between time and history. They have assumed that there is only one order and structure of time and it is expressed in their notion of history; though it includes the enslaved, they are not the actors or protagonists of this time as history. Their actions and voices have been made passive and silenced by the makers of history. 263

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Ira Berlin reminds us of the totalizing effect of American slavery. Berlin tells us that two markers should be to the fore in understanding the first centuries of American slavery: the first was a distinction between a society with slaves and a “slave society.” What distinguished societies with slaves was the fact that slaves were marginal to the central productive processes; slavery was just one form of labor among many. … In societies with slaves, no one presumed the master-slave to be the social exemplar. … In slave societies, by contrast, slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relationships, husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student. From the most intimate connections between men and women to the most public ones of ruler and ruled, all relationships mimicked slavery. As Frank Tannebaum said, “Nothing escaped, nothing, and no one.”8 Berlin’s second distinctive mark regarding American slavery was the coincidence of slavery with the revolutions of the eighteenth century; these included the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. In the case of the Haitian revolution, the slave system was toppled. In the American Revolution, slavery was legitimated and preserved. For the American republic this meant that the major societal and cultural institutions that developed from its founding obscured the fact of slavery the same moment that it legitimated the system of slavery. Though there is no explicit mention or language of “slave” or “slavery” in the founding documents, the issue of slavery was debated in the Constitutional Convention on an almost daily basis since “this peculiar property” was part and parcel of the debates that had to do with taxation, representation, states’ rights, and so forth.9 Obviously, the period of slavery was not a caring time for Africans in the American republic. By and large the rhetoric surrounding the enslaved during the founding conventions depicted them as lazy, shiftless, and a burden upon the owners. One might have thought that this would be one of the primary reasons for the abolition of the institution. The slave owners attempted to demonize the enslaved precisely to save the institution of slavery and through its preservation, to enhance their political power, wealth, and cultural prestige. Robin Einhorn reports the refrain of many southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention. “The main point … was that southern slaveholders were victims of slavery—and therefore should gain a tax break at the expense of northerners who did not suffer from owning unproductive workers. This was an outrageous argument, and the southerner delegates made it one after the other.”10 Some variation or derivative of this kind of outrageous statement of the Southern slave owners became a staple of a great deal of the rhetoric of American historiography. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, published in 1935, was an attempt to counter this style in American historiography. Since that time a number of American historians have attempted to rectify this style of American historical writing; there is, however, a deeper issue. I pose it in this manner—regardless of how one might structure the American historical narrative, is it possible for the passion of the time on the cross to stylize, inform, and engage in a therapeutic of history? The American republic in its founding and in the ordering of its institutions was consciously set up to place the enslaved Africans in a situation of dis-ease and imbalance, a most unhealthy situation. Enslaved Africans existed as the private property of the owners. The concern for their care and well-being was identical with what was good for those who owned them. Slaves were 264

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under the constant surveillance of their owners. As such, the masters or mistresses diagnosed their illnesses in light of the capacity they had to carry out the duties of the owners. Diagnoses were based upon various ideologies of the black body—its capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, and so forth. These ideologies of the black body were at the same time part and parcel of the apologia that affirmed the necessity for the system of slavery. Owners, as part of their diagnoses, were especially alert to discern the difference between what they thought was feigned illness as over against an authentic issue of health. Determination of illness, feigned or otherwise, was made in accord with the owner’s prerogatives. In all cases of diagnosis and treatment, the owners were concerned that their actions reinforced the hierarchy necessary for the maintenance of the slave system. Care for and healing of the body is normally exercised within an intimate and responsible community, usually the family unit. While several relatively stable unions of slaves existed, it is difficult to refer to them as families. And this is because all members of this so-called family unit, including offspring, were owned by another human being or family. The owner of the enslaved enjoyed the consciousness of determining the total consciousness of all the human beings in his possession. It was the slave masters and mistresses that made decisions in history; though the enslaved might carry out the actions, the origin and goal of these actions were determined by the owners. Obviously, husbands were sold away from their wives; children from parents, and so forth. This was the terror that lay at the heart of any and every intimate relationship among and between the enslaved. The very notion of family was highly ambiguous during slavery. Though the family was a normal and publicly recognized institution, many owners had two families: one African and enslaved, the other free and white; one legitimate, the other illegal and illegitimate. In addition, Nell Painter has pointed out the highly ambiguous psychological atmosphere created by the tensions and emotions evoked by the male and female owners, their enslaved paramours, and the offspring of these unions.11 In spite of this, many stable relationships analogous to the family unit existed among the enslaved during the period of slavery. Such unions were not inherent to the slave system and one cannot credit the slave owners for the viability of the slave family. This is a point overlooked by Fogel and Engerman. Herbert G. Gutman speaks directly to this point. The slave system, whether seen as demonic or benign, was the context for the unions, but Gutman explains: “the study of slave ‘treatment’ is in itself invaluable, it is not the same as the study of a viable slave culture with its own standards of correct behavior, what the anthropologist Sidney Mintz describes as ‘the repertory of socially-learned and inculcated resources of the enslaved.’”12 To the extent that there was care and healing during the period of slavery, it was due to the creation of a moral community by the enslaved within the structures of slavery. This moral community cannot easily be elided to the kind of “time on the cross” history that is represented by Fogel and Engerman. Schoenbrun raises this issue as it relates to Africa in this way: Health in Africa implicates histories of the environment, of the state, of gender, it is a social history. Healing in African history implicates other histories too—of morality, of the body, of the person, of relations between life and death, of notions of efficacy and capacity. They are histories of practical reason—as much as they are histories of the forces that cause illness and sustain wellness. African histories of healing intersect with all these larger narratives, but they must grapple with concepts of causality not 265

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easily translated across cultures and forms of action greatly concerned with social embeddedness of suffering and misfortune.13 One of the issues in the discussion of health and wellness in an enslaved community arises around the proper locus of the healing process. It cannot be that of private health because the slave possessed no privacy and while the institution of slavery was a public and legal institution, the enslaved person had no public persona. Thus, the health of the enslaved always redounded to the situation of the owner. Only within the orders of a moral community created by the enslaved themselves does a self or soul as the human locus requiring compassion, care, and concern appear.

Conjuring, care, and community Salo Baron, who held the first chair in Jewish studies in an American university, set the stage for his intellectual orientation in a programmatic article, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” published in the journal Menorah in 1928. In this article Baron undertook a critique of Jewish intellectuals who tended to interpret the history of the Jews as a tale of suffering and woe—what he referred to as a “lachrymose history.” In a concluding part of this article, he writes, “Surely it is time to break with the lachrymose history of pre-Revolutionary woe; and to adopt a view more in accord with historic truth.”14 I open with this allusion to the problem of Jewish history since it poses the issue of how a dispossessed and oppressed moral community deals with the meaning of its past even as it seeks to promote the goals of freedom. There are several profound differences between the Jewish and black experiences. First and foremost, the Jewish community has been able to maintain their traditions and languages well over a millennium even though for most of this time they lived in hostile territory. The similarity lies in the temptation or possibility of losing their identity through becoming a part of the majority culture that is the source of their oppression. I shall return to this topic as a methodological horizon in the last section of this chapter. I wish now to dwell upon the meaning of a “lachrymose African American history” in relationship to care, health, and healing. The origin of the African American communities in the United States must be seen against a backdrop of a sustained history of terrorism and violence. In another place I have suggested that African Americans’ beginnings as a moral community took place in the bowels of slave ships that brought them across the ocean.15 Sterling Stuckey makes this meaning more explicit: “The final gift of African ‘tribalism’ in the nineteenth century was its life as a lingering memory in the minds of American slaves. That memory enabled them to go back to the sense of community in the traditional African setting and to include all Africans in their common experience of oppression in North America.”16 Stuckey goes on in his analysis of African American folklore to decipher the meaning of Africa in the traditions of the enslaved communities. He places particular emphasis on the inclusive and incorporating ritual of the ring shout. In these areas [West Africa], an integral part of religion and culture was movement in a ring during ceremonies honoring the ancestors. There is, in fact, substantial evidence

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for the importance of the ancestral function of the circle in West Africa but the circle ritual imported by Africans from the Congo region was so powerful in its elaboration of an African vision that it contributed disproportionately to the centrality of the circle in slavery. … Wherever in Africa the counterclockwise dance ceremony was performed—it is called the ring shout in North America—the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and the gods, the tempo and revolution of the circle quickening during the course of the movement.17 Stuckey maintains that it was through the ring shout that newly arrived Africans were introduced and welcomed into the moral community of the enslaved on the plantation by other enslaved Africans. He shows how the ring shout expressed itself in many and varied forms of African American culture, within and without the Christian congregations, and in music, folklore, and folk drama. In a recent doctoral dissertation, “Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care, 1840–1910,” Margaret Geneva Long surveys the history of medical care in the African American community from 1840 to 1910. She gives several examples of the health care, thought, and rhetoric which the owners used to justify the treatment of the slaves. Much of the rationale for care was stated within a rhetoric of contestation. Margaret Long notes that plantation owners gained a great deal of information from agricultural journals of the day such as DeBow’s Review and Southern Planter. These journals gave advice on the feeding of slaves, the number of hours of sleep they should receive, and how much leisure should be allotted to the enslaved. Throughout the journals the writers hasten to assure their readers that African Americans have few resources for internal control—food must be rationed out frequently, lest slaves gobble it up at once and become ill. All fruit in the slaves’ garden patches must be inspected lest the greedy slave eat unripe watermelon. The exertions of the master in discipline, surveillance, and the encouragement of religion, are the only safeguards that slaves have against their own natures.18 The legitimacy of the institution of chattel slavery in a country founded on revolutionary principles of democratic freedom was the great contradiction and fundamental evil flaw of the American republic. This contradiction was expressed on the mundane level on every slave-owning plantation. The wellness of the enslaved was designed to enhance the owner’s property, but the enslaved must never be too well, lest such wellness lead them to contemplate notions of independence and freedom.19 Slavery and its practice defined an agonistic site—a battlefield, or better a minefield, that camouflaged and obscured within its pacific domesticity a strange and depressing dialectics of evil. This constituted a very complex situation for the enslaved person, who had to come to a knowledge of their situation as an enslaved person and invent modes of communication with his or her owners. The enslaved equally had to establish a way of being with and understanding those who shared their common fate, and in the midst of this find some region of consciousness and public space for the exercise of their inherent value as human beings. It is from this context that the modality of African American conjure emerges.

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Yvonne Chireau, in her excellent study of African American conjure, offers us several definitions and explanations of conjure and conjuring.20 I shall put together several statements that exemplify her position. Conjure is a magical tradition in which spiritual power is invoked for various purposes, such as healing, protection, and self-defense. … It is clear that in many cases, supernatural beliefs served to mediate relations between blacks and whites. Conjure also might have allowed black people to attain a measure of control over their lives, as bondspersons. The world that the slaves inhabited was unpredictable and uncertain. Anxiety over inevitable violence, separation from loved ones, or the unforeseeable risks of escape must have engendered persistent insecurity for African American slaves. … Conjuring constituted a pragmatic and realistic method, given a situation of extremely limited alternatives, that slaves could use to cope with their masters. Nevertheless, slaveholders often found that the dilemma posed by Conjure lay not in the question of direct efficacy—that is to say, whether such practices “worked” against them—but in the ways that the slaves utilized these beliefs to challenge their authority.21 Conjuring was a practice; it also constituted a divinatory epistemology and a deciphering process. Conjuring techniques, while heavily African in style, borrowed from European, Native American, and Christian notions and rituals. Chireau quotes with approval Albert Raboteau’s statement that conjure served as an alternative religious theory of misfortune for the slaves. Raboteau’s stated that “The concept of suffering for the guilt of the father is biblical; the concept of being victimized by a ‘fix’ is Conjure.” Raboteau adds, “Both attempt to locate the cause of irrational suffering.”22 The black body, individually and collectively, centered all the important dimensions of social life—politics, economics, and sexuality, as well as the range of exchanges of materials and affections that make up a human community. These dimensions were present for the enslaved and their owners but in quite different ways and for different purposes. Thus the health, disease, and wellness of the black body was not simply another dimension of societal life; the black body brought everything together into a single focus. Conjure expressed another source of power available to the enslaved, and this power was directly related to the body of the slave and to the total situation of enslavement. Conjure was theoretical and practical. In many cases it involved a precise knowledge of the effect of plants, herbs, and other potions on the body. The conjurer was also an adept social psychologist, able to read the moods of owners as well as the enslaved. The conjurer acted to provide so-called medicine for the body physical and the body social. Conjuring was based upon a body of knowledge, but like all knowledge of this kind, it changed over the course of time and from one place to another. What was sustaining in conjure was the orientation that it expressed. This orientation, this deciphering and divining another power of being, lay at the heart of the enslaved persons as the basis for a moral community. One should see conjure in the same way as Sterling Stuckey’s account of the ring shout referred to above. The ring shout dance, a movement remembered by the body from Africa, became the initiatory rhythm that brought new Africans into the moral community created by enslaved Africans in America. Thus, in this one rhythmic movement of the body, the newly enslaved Africans recreated Africa in the same moment that they became American. 268

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This is a powerful legerdemain, paralleling or even surpassing the Cartesian cogito for it takes place within a public and contested arena and not in the private abstractness of the individual consciousness; both the ring shout and the cogito have had profound ramifications for the modern world. The subversive and legerdemain character of conjure explains why it evokes the notion and concept of magic. This has been followed through in the work of Yvonne Chireau’s book on conjuring, Black Magic. Only in the subtitle, Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, does the notion of conjuring appear. Whether from an authentic intellectual concern or from a marketing strategy, it is assumed that American popular culture is familiar with the notion of so-called black magic. While this may be true, the notion and practice of magic is complex—present in almost all cultures, thus creating a very long history.23 Magic appears to be an aspect of all cultures past and present. In the modern period, magic tends to be discussed either in Western cultures of the past or its occurrence within non-Western cultures. This modern interest in magic reflects the dominance of science and scientific thinking as the norm of modernity. Theories and practices of magic are thus relegated to a nonscientific and non-rational mode of being in the world. This is not the occasion to review the various theories and practices of magic. Suffice it to say that magic is most often discussed in relation to and in distinction from science and religion. From the point of view of prominent contemporary anthropologists, both religion and magic rest upon the basis of the existence of a mystical and transcendent reality. Religion, from their point of view, expresses the manner in which a community participates and acknowledges this reality. Magic, while acknowledging this reality, relates to it in privacy and secretively for utilitarian purposes. Bronislaw Malinowski tells us that this penchant for the practical and concrete shows that magic, from this perspective, is somewhat akin to science.24 Modern theories of magic have, for the most part, come from anthropologists who describe and discuss the practice of magic in societies outside of the West. Implicit in their theories is that modern science and the rationalism of scientific thinking has replaced the necessity for magic and magical modes of thought and action. Hardly any notion or theory of magic pays attention to the inordinate and pervasive prevalence of magic in the astrology, games of chance, and the like in modern Western societies, nor has any theory of magic related it to colonialism or slavery in the modern period. Conjuring as a form of magic reveals a great deal about contemporary Western culture and its influence and impact upon the world during the period of Western colonialism and slavery. The magical modality is not simply a so-called child of deprivation; it expresses a critical and creative role in the cultures of the colonized and oppressed by deciphering and divining a new and alternate understanding of the human mode of being that refuses to prioritize social engineering and futuristic promises of happiness predicated on the continual conquest of nature and other human societies. In the case of African Americans, magic retained its secretive and individual modes but in addition to this it opened up and created possibilities of freedom that belied the spurious rhetoric and practices of the American republic. Margaret Geneva Long in her research on the history of African American medical practices describes how African Americans took on the mantle of “official medical care” based upon the scientific model. Obviously African Americans did not immediately nor gradually, for that matter, become members of medical societies and groups. While these medical societies and groups were scientific associations most still maintained an ideological and stereotypical view 269

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of black bodies. African American medical associations grew out of the older communities of African societies. In the antebellum North, there were several of societies of freedpersons. These societies spawned mutual aid, benevolent, and burial societies, and in the case of the African society in Philadelphia, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. These societies were not religious in the same way as the Christian churches. They were not at all in opposition to the Christian church; indeed, the orientation of the African societies expressed the profound orientation of African people in the United States. With regard to the medical societies of African Americans, Margaret Long, speaking about the difference between black associations and the Christian church, puts it this way: Black associations had no such ideological burden to bear. Although [Christian] congregations and societies often overlapped, their purposes and organization did not hold an outright spiritual charge. They were called into being to provide for the members in this world, and to provide a fitting sendoff to the next. The provision of medical and funerary benefits as well as fellowship had a decided secular focus. Their extension of charity to the wider community may well have sprung from a sense of Christian obligation, but it also reflected a consciousness of racial identity and an emergent sense of formalized obligation to a “community.” Their aid in times of distress was on their own terms and was more concrete and exclusive than that of the black congregations from which they often sprung.25 While I am in basic agreement with Margaret Long’s statement regarding the distinction between Christian churches and African societies, it does not define a distinction between the secular and the religious. The African societies express a form of religion—religion as ultimate orientation. The African American community in the United States, through the period of slavery and afterward, expressed a profound and specific ordering in the world, which is the source and resource of its identity. This orientation may be expressed in various religious organizations, as well as in music, dance, literature, and so forth. While conjuring did entail healing and a practice of medicine, this knowledge or practice was not posed by the African American community as an impediment to the knowledge and practice of official scientific medicine. Conjuring as an African American cultural hermeneutic enabled Africans in America to realize their true situation with all its limitations and resources and how to create a viable human community from them. This modality of the meaning of conjuring that enabled Africans in America to create not only another American culture but another meaning of American history.

Divining time, remembering bodies In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison describes a scene where Baby Suggs, an old black matriarch, brings the community together: After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, “Let the children come!” and they ran from the 270

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trees toward her. “Let the mothers hear you laugh,” she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then “Let the grown men come,” she shouted. They stepped out one by one among the ringing trees. “Let your wives and your children see you dance,” she told them, and the groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her. “Cry,” she told them. “For the living and the dead. Just cry.” And without covering their eyes the women let loose. Morrison goes on to describe the sermon she preached: She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. Baby Suggs then reminds them of the nature of this gathering: “Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh: flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just soon pick them out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off, and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!” The remainder of Baby Suggs’s sermon consists of an anatomical poesis of the black body and the need of love and care for it by black persons: This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. … So love your neck … And all your inside parts … The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that yet have to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.26 This passage in Morrison’s novel expresses that form of religiousness that comes into being from conjuring the mystery of the presence and experiences of the African people in America. Our English word “religion” is a derivative of the Latin term, religare. One of the central meanings of religare is binding and one of the purposes of religion is to bind together a group of persons around some fundamental and primordial orientation to the world. In the previously cited sermon, Baby Suggs calls upon those gathered to bind themselves together through dance, laughter, tears, and loving their black bodies, individually and collectively. In this sermon and ceremony the black body becomes the site of memory for an alternative meaning of the time and space of America. It is clear in Baby Suggs’s refrains that in the “yonder out there” they don’t love your body, your mouth, eyes, flesh, your neck, and so forth; she is speaking about a “yonder out there,” of history—of time on the cross. It is clear that the black body cannot become a body of health, individually or collectively, within the modality of the 271

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yonder, out there of time as history. Another meaning of temporality is called for if there are to be healthy social bodies in time. In Morrison’s novel, Baby Suggs conjures time, bringing into existence another meaning and mode of temporality—a temporality that is able to remember and recognize the individual and social bodies of black persons. Baby Suggs does not shrink from the meaning and necessity of the yonder out there—this time on the cross, this lachrymose history of blacks. She reminds the congregation that having undergone this time, it can become the site of healing, critique, and creativity. I was recently reminded of this issue when I read the essay of the African American cultural critic, Nelson George. In one of his comments he says: Remember black Republicans? Some of those early ’80s curiosities hold high positions in government in this tumultuous young century. But Condi Rice and Clarence Thomas prove that success of one or two individuals, the old role model ideology, sometimes has precious little positive effect on the masses. In the end it seems, for blacks to participate in this tenuous experiment called American democracy no longer takes exceptional skill or protest marches or the marshaling of moral suasion. It seems all you need now is a desire to fit in and embrace the values of a flawed nation that loves technology, materialism, vast military budgets, false piety, and interventionist foreign policy and hates visionary social programs, independent third world countries, and paying attention to the views of those who don’t accept American values. Mediocrity is a national obsession and, from top to bottom, African Americans joined the chase. And what of post-soul? I think that African Americans have passed through that phase and, in the twenty-first century are grappling with a new set of identity issues.27 If we juxtapose Baby Suggs’s sermon with Nelson George’s comment we seem to be facing the dilemma of a choice between the degrading “time on the cross” of history or becoming a part of its vanguard of oppression. This was alluded to as the temptation of method in Schoenbrun’s quote from Steve Feierman—that of falling into narratives of capitalism or Protestantism or both.28 The temptation is certainly there; indeed it was specified and discussed quite thoroughly by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. In a recent article dealing with Du Bois’s notion of the “Talented Tenth,” Carole L. Stewart shows how Du Bois faced the temptation of having to choose between the authority of a capitalistic Protestant ethic represented by Booker T. Washington on the one hand and a civilizing and triumphant Christianity as expressed by his friend, Alexander Crummel, on the other. Stewart makes clear that it was through Du Bois’s deciphering of the spirituals, the sorrow songs, those deeply poignant expressions of the lachrymose history of African American slavery, that he is able to specify another mode of temporality.29 Du Bois’s recourse to the spirituals is reflected in the attention Schoenbrun gives to what he refers to as “poetic stories.” Existentially poetic stories of the fragmentary are also stories of struggle. Flawed and freighted, history of public healing emphasizes the discourses and practices that people used in the “boundary-crossing struggle over the conceptual and moral bases of political and social organization” … Constituting the sources to meet these challenges—and 272

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asking how the sources have been constituted—is a necessary first step in exploring the multiple temporalities recognizable today in the moral community and collective action at the core of public healing.30 Precisely how are these sources constituted? I contend that we must imagine a modality of the temporal process that is capable of knowing and understanding the black body in the rhetoric of Baby Suggs’s sermon. These new and other sources will be recognized only within a new kind of time and space where black bodies appear in their authenticity within the modern world. I am defining this new time-space as a temporality that is congruent to the conjure mode of being and knowing. I am not for one minute recommending a contest between an old conjuring method of healing and contemporary biological medical practices, though I think that all modes of healing should be taken seriously. The basic point I wish to make here is that a healing and caring situation is a fundamental ingredient in the nature and meaning of community. Margaret Long’s research shows us that historically black bodies were bodies of the enslaved chattel; then during the Civil War they were war contraband; and after Reconstruction they were secondclass or quasi-citizens. The black body has always appeared as a fetishized body within the American republic. As a form of fetish matter, it carried all the characteristics of any fetishized body—portable, with no inherent value, fluctuating between the notions of desire, exorcism, denial, invisibility, yet possessing an overwhelming materiality. Lawrence Jones, former Dean of the Howard University Divinity School, described the conversion of enslaved Africans with this phrase: “they overheard the Gospel.” Jones in this phrase was describing something both simple and complex. It was simple in the sense that the enslaved African heard the Gospel from within their situation and not from the point of view of the intent presupposed by the bearers of the message. And this was not only the specific words but also the notion of the book and writing and notions such as the holy, sacred, or freedom. All of these meanings had to be conjured by a people in slavery. The complexity involved the world of meaning that was intended by American meanings of salvation and freedom. And finally, how did any or all of this relate to the nature and meaning of their black bodies that were dominated by other human beings? They overheard the Gospel, which means that they did not hear the Gospel with the same ears as the history makers who preached it to them. The phrase “overhearing the Gospel,” evokes eavesdropping, the sense of something subversive, of learning the true secret that is not known by all. In another place I described the situation of the dominated and oppressed in the modern period through the metaphor or speaking and specified the time-space of their being as the pause, the silence, between each word—a pause that is necessary for coherent speech. “The fact that silence presupposes words is what gives it this ironic twist. Without words there can be no silence, yet the sheer absence of words is not silence. Silence forces us to realize that our words, the units of our naming and recognition in the world, presuppose a reality which is prior to our naming and doing.”31 Kathleen Biddick raises a similar point when she notes the difference between the Jewish and Christian modes of coming to terms with modernity. In this discussion she has recourse to the Enlightenment Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, and she contrasts his way of thinking with that of Immanuel Kant, who comes from a Protestant Christian tradition. She tells us that Mendelssohn in his treatise, Jerusalem, posited something between speech and 273

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writing. In working out this meaning through the theological and psychoanalytic literature, she calls this in-betweenness the “Echo.” It is Echo, too, who now needs to intervene among the contemporary historicists who eschew lachrymose history without acknowledging the historiographical problem of thinking Enlightenment and Haskalah together. Mendelssohn’s understanding of Jewish speech and writing ask us to think of Echo as an unhistorical acoustic between speech and writing, between the circumcision of the foreskin and of the heart.32 And, I might add, between the blackness of our bodies and the nature and meaning of freedom and care. It is interesting to note how the probing for an authentic time-space for the individual and social bodies of the oppressed and dominated have tended towards various metaphors related to language, whether written or oral. Jones spoke of “overhearing”; Charles Long of “pauses between words”; and Kathleen Biddick of an “unhistorical acoustic between speech and writing.” I think that all have reference to a new kind of temporality in the world. While cognizant of the “master narratives of the Makers of History,” and living within that matrix, there is the desire and necessity to seek a more authentic ordering of time. It is clear that as individual and social bodies they can never become a part of history as authentic human beings. They are nevertheless a part of this history by virtue of not being a part of it. This is the history of Baby Suggs’s yonder, out there. The new nonhistorical temporality is nurtured by their various indigenous and lachrymose pasts where they were known and dealt with as authentic human beings. In the United States, the black body as individual person and as part of moral communities in time define a site for remembering the truth of the past of this land and also as a critical and creative renewal of the human venture. I have put forth the notion of conjuring as not only a technique of healing but equally as an epistemology and a hermeneutic of remembering. It was during the time of African Americans’ “weary years and silent tears”—their lachrymose history where they learned that the black body was not only the locus and site for health and the curing arts; it was simultaneously a site of memory. It was from within this mode of temporality that the black body escaped its fetishistic mode and ceased to be merely a pawn of the American constitutional order. Many of us who were born during the time of segregation and intense discrimination are appalled by the empirical situations that are rampant within the black communities throughout the country. Could it be that we as a moral community have forgotten the meaning of freedom, that we think that we can learn more about freedom from those who enslaved us rather than from those who cared for us? David Brion Davis told us some time ago that in the modern world it is only those who have been enslaved know the meaning of freedom.33 In 1900, at the turn of the century, James Weldon and John Rosamond Johnson wrote the great hymn of our lachrymose time, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Three year later, in 1903, Du Bois published his famous text, The Souls of Black Folk. Both of these texts set forth a new position within the modern world. The Johnson brothers gave back in song the resource of an ordeal that African Americans had undergone, but not in the sense of a conquering progress in the pursuit of happiness. The song asks us to reflect upon where we are, why we are there, and invites us to ponder the meaning of freedom from this perspective. Du Bois’s 274

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Souls anticipated much of what goes under the name of postcolonial thought today. To make use of the language of Kathleen Biddick, Du Bois’s Souls invited us into “the risk of thinking about ‘unhistorical’ temporalities—ones not about divisions between then and now, but about passages, thresholds, gaps, intervals, in-betweenness. These unhistorical temporalities that do not use time as a utilitarian resource to ground identity are temporalities that are not one.”34 Margaret Geneva Long titled her history of African American medical care and practice, “Doctoring Freedom.” It is clear that she saw the issue of health care as part and parcel of the meaning, nature, and fortunes of the black body in the time and space of the American republic. Her work echoes the pervasive description of slavery by Ira Berlin noted above. The last chapter of her dissertation is entitled, “The Fictional Black Doctor: Issues of Science and Medicine in Progressive-Era African American Fiction.” In this chapter she analyzes the role and practice of black doctors in the novels of Charles Chesnutt and Pauline Hopkins. I see her inclusion of fictive material as one way of coming to terms with other narratives and temporal modes of understanding the nature of health and healing within the black communities. Margaret Long ask this rhetorical question: And what of black healers in our era? … The problematic relationship between black doctors and a black folk, and the promises, or threats, of science to African American culture remain, but in a changed form. … More than a century after Chestnutt’s and Harper’s novels were published, public health statistics—rates of unintended pregnancy, smoking, obesity, and heart disease—continue, and efforts to ground public policy in the body, now abstracted to genetics, continue to impinge on discussions of race in America.35 The non-discursive, non-scientific expressions fit well into the stylistics of conjuring that I have attempted to set forth. In like manner, Nell Painter, in her survey of African American history, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present, includes over one hundred examples of African American artists. Painter makes it clear that the inclusion of the artwork was not an afterthought. As a matter of fact, she tells us that she would have included more if such inclusion had not made the price of the text almost prohibitive. The artwork is as necessary to her text as the discursive historical narrative. Although the selection of artwork is limited. Readers will notice that black artists have preferred certain subjects to others. Throughout the twentieth century, for example, black visual artists depicted two kinds of images repeatedly that were seldom features in American fine art: ordinary working people and violence inflicted upon people of African descent. Black artists illustrated—literally—the importance of these two themes. [Her book] Creating Black Americans reflects the abundance of these images by emphasizing the lives of ordinary people and the violence so common in their lives.36 The black body remains a site of memory—a body of the in-betweenness that tells another story of the times of modern times. The black body is the site for diagnosis, critique, and creativity. As Du Bois put it at the beginning of the twentieth century, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” Upon the wellness of these black bodies a great deal of the well-being of the world depends. 275

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Notes 1. David L. Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa,” American Historical Review 3, no. 5 (December 2006): 1403–1439. 2. See Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa,” 1405. 3. Ibid. 4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 255. 5. I refer to a tradition of scholarship that can be identified with the late Terence O. Ranger. They include Isaria N. Kimambo, Bethwell A. Ogot, and Matthew Schoffler. See The Historical Study of African Religion, ed. Terence O. Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); and Terence O. Ranger, Dance and Society in East Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 6. The title of this section, “Times on the Cross,” is taken from the controversial study of slavery of cliometric historians, Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. See Time on the Cross, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). 7. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:258. 8. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8. 9. See Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), for a thorough discussion of the role slavery played in the discussion on the Articles of Confederation and how slavery was implicated and resolved in the Constitution, especially as it was related to voting, taxation, and the significance of the House of Representatives as the branch of government that is able to propose taxation. 10. Einhorn, American Taxation, 123. 11. See “Nell Irvin Painter on Soul Murder and Slavery,” in Africans in America, https://www.pbs.org/ wgbh/aia/part4/4i3084.html. 12. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 32. 13. Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa,” 1417. 14. This quote and discussion of Salo Baron is taken from Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 76–90 (chapter 4), quoting from 78. 15. Charles H. Long., “Passage and Prayer: The Origin of Religion in the Atlantic World,” in The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, ed. Quinton Hosford Dixie and Cornel West (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 11–21; also published as Chapter 21 of this book. 16. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3. 17. Ibid., 12. 18. Margaret Geneva Long, “Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care, 1840–1910” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2004), 18–19. 19. After hearing so many Southern delegates at the Constitutional Convention minimizing the ownership of Africans as no more than that of sheep, cattle, or horses, Benjamin Franklin refused to mince words. “Sheep were totally different from slaves: sheep will never make any Insurrections.” Quoted by Einhorn, American Taxation, 122. 20. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

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Religion, Temporalities, and Health 21. Ibid., 12, 17. 22. Quoted by Chireau, Black Magic, 77–78. 23. A reliable reference is the articles devoted to magic in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones, 15 vols. (Detroit, MI: Macmillan, 2005), 8:5562–5594. The articles cover, “Theories of Magic,” “Magic in Indigenous Societies,” “Magic in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,” “Magic in Medieval and Renaissance Europe,” “Magic in Eastern Europe,” “Magic in Islam,” “Magic in South Asia,” and “Magic in East Asia.” 24. See John Middleton’s discussion of Malinowski in “Theories of Magic,” in Jones, Encyclopedia of Religion, 8:5566. 25. See Margaret Long, “Doctoring Freedom,” 134. 26. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1987), 92–94. 27. Nelson George, Post Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumph, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and before That Negroes) (New York: Viking, 2004), 229. 28. Ibid., 2. 29. Carole Lynn Stewart, “Challenging Liberal Justice: The Talented Tenth Revisited,” in Recognizing W.E.B. Du Bois in the Twenty-First Century: Essays on W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Mary Keller and Chester Fontenot Jr. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 112–141, especially 137–139. 30. Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa,” 1411. 31. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Study of Religion, 2nd ed. (Aurora, CO: Davies, 1999), 67. 32. Biddick, Typological Imaginary, 90. 33. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 564. 34. See Biddick, Typological Imaginary, 2. 35. Margaret Geneva Long, “Doctoring Freedom,” 292–293. 36. Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xii.

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CHAPTER 21 PASSAGE AND PRAYER: THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD

Prayer is at the heart of any religious attitude. It is the open acknowledgment that the individual and the community are dependent upon powers of being outside the human arena. Even before there are words or postures, prayer is an attitude, an orientation, the initial deciphering of a way to be in the world. Through prayer the gods are evoked and imaged. The religious community is brought into being through prayer and prayer then forms the context of its continued existence. It is difficult to conceive of a religious community that is devoid of prayer; one might say that prayer is the essence of religion, at the very heart of the religious experience. Indeed, prayer reveals both the form and content of the soul.

Forms of the soul The phenomenologist of religion, Gerardus van der Leeuw, defines the soul as the locus of the sacred in the human. In his classic, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, he sets forth the basic structures of this inner locus of sacrality. He undertakes a phenomenological description of the following orders and structures: The Soul as a Whole; Souls in the Plural; The Form of the Soul; The External “Soul; The Uniquely and Powerful and Divine Soul; The Immortal Soul; The Creature; The Country of the Soul; and The Destiny of the Soul. Underlying all these modalities and comprising the basic “matter” of the soul is what he refers to as “soul-stuff.” This soul then, as one whole, is connected with some specific “stuff.” It is not restricted to any single portion of the body, but extends itself over all its parts according as these show themselves capable of some kind of powerfulness, just as the blood is distributed throughout the whole body although certain organs are richer in blood than others. … For the “soul” designates not life and nothing more, and still less consciousness, but whatever is replete with power and effectiveness. It implies that there is a “life” which is more than merely being alive.1 Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological description is exceptional in the manner in which he has shown how the notion of the soul suggests a material quality of power—what he refers to as “soul-stuff.” This stuff of the soul manifests itself in forms of sacrality and power, thus implying that the power of being itself, and in this case, the manifestation of the being of the human, is simultaneously a showing forth of the sacred and the powerful. His analysis is limited to the phenomenological realm, and thus the historical dimensions of the manifestation of the soul

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do not enter into his study. In addition, the cultural examples are taken from ancient and socalled primitives cultures. Let us supplement van der Leeuw’s study with another exemplary statement on the soul in the modern period, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois’s study might be seen as a historical phenomenology, specifying the concreteness of the African American community in North America; its locus lies in the modern world and its relations and contacts account for the universal intent of its structure. Du Bois in Souls depicts the formation of the transatlantic African soul in its creative and tragic travails of manifestation within the vicissitudes of the modern world. One might observe that Du Bois seems to have taken the last two structures of van der Leeuw’s phenomenology of the soul, “The Country of the Soul” and “The Destiny of the Soul,” and related them to the order, possibility, and wider dimensions of the African American soul in North America. There is a river: Orientation and beginnings

The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; … We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience.2 Since the work of Melville Herskovits in the 1940s and increasing steadily in subsequent decades, especially in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, a number of works have appeared showing the connection and carryover of certain behaviors, artifacts, and other cultural forms from Africa to North America. Fewer works, however, have dealt with the actual passage across the Atlantic itself. Even when works devoted to this dimension have appeared, they have for the most part been devoted to statistical and demographical details of the number of Africans who were enslaved and brought into the world of the Atlantic. The Middle Passage—chained enslaved Africans in the holds of several ships of every Atlantic maritime nation—as never forgotten by the Africans, neither during slavery nor in freedom. The watery passage of the Atlantic, that fearsome journey, that cataclysm of modernity, has served as a mnemonic structure, evoking a memory that forms the disjunctive and involuntary presence of these Africans in the Atlantic world. From this perspective, religion is not a cultural system, much less rituals or performance, nor a theological language, but an orientation, a basic turning of the soul toward another defining reality. One hears the refrain in Negro spirituals, such as “Wade in the Water,” “Deep River,” or “Roll, Jordan, Roll” and in the great Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” This meaning has also been the inspiration for several scholarly works devoted to African Americans in North America.3 Obviously, Europeans and Africans were on the same ships in the Atlantic passage, the Europeans seeking a land of opportunity and conquest, the Africans sailing into a land and a life of slavery. They sailed upon the same ship but it is clear that they were making quite different journeys. And the Africans have never forgotten their initiation into the Atlantic world of modernity. Just as the Mediterranean Sea is the water of the ancient cultures of the world, the Atlantic Ocean is the watery passage of modernity.4 Fernand Braudel describes three orders of time 280

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in the Mediterranean world. The first is the time that expresses the imperceptible rhythms of the environment and the landscapes upon which human beings depend. The second is the time of societies and civilizations—social time. There is finally the time of the individual and the effects of individual acts in human societies. In his discussion of the Mediterranean, Braudel demonstrates how the Mediterranean Sea in its longue durée reflects and refracts in a primordial manner the other two notions of time. Braudel has also undertaken a study of the modern world in his three-volume Civilization and Capitalism.5 Braudel was preceded in this investigation of the making of the Atlantic world by The Modern World-System, the work of his pupil, Immanuel Wallerstein.6 Given these and other comprehensive studies of the origins of the Atlantic world of modernity, we find nothing in them of the primordial structures reminiscent of the Mediterranean. On the conventional level, it is clear that the Mediterranean seems to be a womb for the gestation and birth of religions—in van der Leeuw’s sense, soul-stuff—not only the world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but the ancient traditions of Zoroaster, Mani, and the even older traditions of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Atlantic world introduces us to the globalization of the meaning of humanity. It creates and intensifies the relationships among and between all peoples on the planet. The Atlantic is, however, not a revealer of deities, seers, and prophets; it is not under the sign of revelation but of freedom, civilization, and rational orders. This world manifests no regard for the layered thickness of time. It is a world justified by the epistemologies of Kant and Descartes, the English empiricists, and the ethical economies of Adam Smith and Marx. The world of the Atlantic lives under the rhetoric and mark of freedom—a freedom that was supposed to banish the specter of the ancient gods and reveal a new and deeper structure to the meaning of human existence. The Atlantic thus reveals no “soul-stuff,” no primordial ordering of time or space. The Atlantic may, nevertheless, be the revealer of a “negative revelation”—a revelation that has insinuated itself within the meanings of all the other relationships of the world of modernity. The Africans secreted within the bowels of slave ships of commerce that bore names like Brotherhood, John the Baptist, Justice, Integrity, Gift of God, Liberty, and Jesus were equally harbingers of modernity—structures of a primordium of the modern order of the world.7 Wade in the waters: The constitution of the soul [W]ater symbolizes the whole of potentiality; it is fons et origo, the source of all things and of all existence. … Principle of what is formless and potential basis of every cosmic principle, container of all seeds, water symbolizes the primal substance from which all forms come and to which they will return either by their own regression or in a cataclysm.8 Eliade’s descriptive symbolism of water allows us to imagine the potential inherent in a form of the nonhuman world. Water seems to possess its own autonomous structure, which colors and determines the relationship of this form of the world to the human mode of being. Eliade’s description, formed as it is within the morphological meaning of religious symbolism, operates in the same non-historical mode as Gerardus van der Leeuw’s phenomenology. If we look at this symbolism within the Atlantic world and the Middle Passage, a wider range of symbolic and actual meaning is possible. For the European maritime nations, the Atlantic, with all its ambiguity, is a fascinating reality. From the “discovery” of Columbus to the emergence of the great naval empires of Spain, Holland, England, and France, the Atlantic 281

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carried the basic meaning of novelty as the New World, a world not only filled with the signs and wonders of the marvelously new, but one that delighted the human spirit in the several modes and opportunities for commercial enterprises; for them it was clear that the Atlantic held forth a surplus of potential. And part of that potential as sign and wonder and commercial enterprise was the tens of millions of Africans who became one of the major cargoes in the establishment of the Atlantic world. For the Africans in the bowels of the slave ships, the Atlantic represented a cataclysm. As Du Bois put it, “they descended into Hell.” Or, as a spiritual remembered it later, And I couldn’t hear nobody pray, O Lord, Couldn’t hear nobody pray; ’Way down yonder by myself, And I couldn’t hear nobody pray. To whom does one pray from the bowels of a slave ship? To the gods of Africa? To the gods of the masters of the slave vessels? To the gods of an unknown and foreign land of enslavement? To whom does one pray? From the perspective of religious, experience, this was the beginning of African American religion and culture. In the forced silence of oppression, in the halfarticulate moans of desperation, in the rebellions against enslavement—from this cataclysm another world emerged. This other world was a correlate of, simultaneous with, and parallel to the other Atlantic world. Africans’ first expressions of the meaning of the New World took place in the experience of daemonic dread as they were forced into history as terror—the modern world-system. The position set forth here is that African American religion and its subsequent cultures began in the Middle Passage, in that in-betweenness of the continents of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Africans were brought into the modern world as slave laborers to cultivate sugar, cotton, indigo, rice, and other crops. They worked in factories that manufactured refined sugar, rum, and textiles, served as artisans, fishermen, and boatmen—they were servants of all kinds. They were part and parcel of the entrepreneurial and exploited world that led to mercantilism. It was not only through slave labor that Africans were insinuated into the modern Atlantic world. Their presence was the occasion around which the problem of value in the New World revolved. The issue may be defined as follows: what is the source of the inherent value of human beings and what or who guarantees the value of the production and exchange of human products? In the Mediterranean world this issue was defined in religious terms that held together the religious and the economic dimensions of human action. The practices and ideologies of the Atlantic world separated these two meanings. Within the modern world of the Atlantic, African bodies and their enslaved condition forced the older problematic of religion—the ultimate source of human value. In a brilliant series of articles appearing in the journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics between 1985 and 1988, William Pietz undertook a comprehensive and critical study of the concept of the “fetish” from its first appearance in Western languages to its present meaning in contemporary scholarly and popular discussions.9 These articles reveal that one of the major theories concerning the origin of religion was the notion of the “fetish” and fetishism; this origin was identified with Africans and Africa.

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More important than this, however, is Pietz’s analysis demonstrating how the discourse surrounding the fetish eventuates in a subtle transformation, equal only to the kind of legerdemain in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, that obscures and relocates the issue of both ontological/inherent values on the one hand, and the meaning of value as it relates to production and exchange on the other. Pietz sets forth four themes in his discussion of the fetish and fetishism: 1) the untranscended materiality of the fetish: “matter” or the material object is viewed as the locus of religious activity or psychic investment; 2) the radical historically of the fetish origin: arising in a singular event fixing together otherwise heterogeneous elements, the identity and power of fetish consists of its enduring capacity to repeat this singular process of fixation, along with the resultant effect; 3) the dependence of the fetish for its meaning and value on a particular order of social relations, which in turn reinforces; and 4) the active relation of the fetish object to the living body of an individual: a kind of external controlling organ directed by powers outside the effected person’s will, the fetish represents the subversion of the ideal of the autonomously determined self. (“Fetishism” treats the self as necessarily and in essence embodied.)10 Pietz in a masterful way demonstrates how fetishism as a theory about the origin of religion in Africa was in one movement applied to the enslaved Africans themselves as a false religion and in another, transferred to the notion of matter and materiality, this time to African bodies, which became a locus of matter in the form of chattel. In the first movement one is able to see how African slaves in North America could be treated as chattel, not persons, and in the other, how all material forms of the world and one’s relationship to them could be disenchanted into commodities, unifying the African and the fetish through the language of the commodity. In the larger sense of Atlantic ideologies, slavery might be seen as a fetish of freedom. This mode of thinking and acting became the source of the normalization of alienation as a mark of modernity. But what of the Africans themselves? Enslaved, deprived of selfhood, separated from their homelands, and lost in a world of strangeness, they had to begin again—from the place and time of a negative utopia. Even before they could make effective the remnants of their former cultures and before they could assimilate elements of the terrifying novelty of their new situation, they had to establish another basis for the human. One might argue that it was the resistance to their enslavement in Africa and aboard the slave ships, or, on the other hand, the simple desire to survive, in spite of the odds. In a more complex manner we might also surmise that their very being expressed the influx of what van der Leeuw has called “soul-stuff ” into the Atlantic world and into the world of modernity: life is more than being alive. From this primordium of soul-stuff another order of modernity has grown from the complex ambiguity of the Atlantic world. It expresses itself in resistance, prayer, and the ability to survive. It opens the community to the appreciation of the inviolable dignity of other persons and provides for an alternate meaning of the human as a free person. In speaking about freedom in the modern world, David Brion Davis had this to say: “man’s true emancipation, whether physical or spiritual, must always depend on those who have endured and overcome some form of slavery.”11

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Notes 1. See Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1937), part 2, section C, especially 276, 280–281. 2. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 727, emphasis added. 3. A sample of such works would include these titles: Vincent Harding, There Is a River; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers; Archie Smith, Jr., Navigating the Deep River; Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock; and the first volume of Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. 4. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds. 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), is the modern comprehensive study of the power and impact of the Mediterranean Sea. Braudel shows how this inner sea structures human and ecological relations and takes on the primordial structure of time and reality. 5. The titles of the three volumes are Structures of Everyday Life, The Perspective of the World, and The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). 6. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, Capitalistic Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), and vol. 2, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980). 7. See Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 25. 8. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), 188. 9. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17; “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987): 23–45; and “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (Autumn 1988): 105–123. 10. Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, II,” 23. 11. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 564.

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PART IV KINDLING, SPARKS, AND EMBERS

CHAPTER 22 UNDERSTANDING RELIGION AND ITS STUDY: AN OUTLINE FOR CONTINUING RESEARCH

Introduction In 1985 I published an article in which I traced the methodological history of the “history of religions school” at the University of Chicago. This article, “A Look at the Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions: Retrospect and Future,”1 though devoted to the “Chicago school,” raised more general problems concerning the meaning of the study of religion as a discipline or “science” in the Enlightenment sense of these terms. I pointed out that in the history of this “school” there were constant predictions of a time when the study of religion would become a systematic science. While methodological advances had been made and several new orientations established, in 1985 the Chicago school had yet to become what had been envisioned as a “science of religion.” This situation might be explained by several factors. First of all, one must take account of the range of meanings of religion in the United States and the kind of cultural history that has preconditioned both scholars and lay persons to think about religion in a certain way. Second, and this applies precisely to the Chicago school, the study of religion was always placed within the context of hermeneutics. The presence of hermeneutical methods and theories does not automatically rule out the possibility of a systematic human science in the Enlightenment sense but it does set up tensions between the vision of the totality of such a science in relationship to the other disciplines that had to be encompassed and comprehended in the definition of this science. The presence of hermeneutics might well have implied that such a science was destined to be in the words of Stephen Toulmin, “a would-be science.” Third, I think that precisely because of this hermeneutical concern, the Chicago tradition confronted very early the antinomies at the heart of the constitution of the Enlightenment meaning of the human sciences. In the article referred to above I suggested that we should give up the project of a “science of religion” and instead think in terms of a discourse about religion. This proposal came at the end of my article and could not be elaborated. I was rightly criticized for this proposal; the notion of a discourse about religion was, in the words of my critic, “too sloppy.” This research project intends to clarify the meaning implied in my proposal for a discourse about religion.

The construction of religion Scholars of religion were probably surprised with Jonathan Z. Smith’s oft quoted statement that “there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytical purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.”2 The radicality of this

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statement for scholars of religion is matched by Michel Foucault’s observation concerning the origin of the human sciences in general: The first thing to be observed is that the human sciences did not inherit a certain domain already outlined, perhaps surveyed as a whole, but allowed to be fallow, which it was their task to elaborate with positive methods and with concepts that had at last become scientific: … for man did not exist (anymore than life, or language, or labor); and the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success); … they appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived and that which is to be known.3 While the rhetorical style of these statements might well shock humanistic scholars out of their doldrums and cause them to think seriously about method, both statements say at once, too much and too little. Both statements help to disavow the perception that scholarly activity and research in the human sciences is merely the application of sophisticated methodologies to that which is “naturally given” as social and cultural reality. Both statements emphasize the constructed nature or the epistemological problem involved in the creation of the data of the human sciences. Neither of the statements, however, place the origin or the construction of these data within a proper historical cultural situation. Foucault’s notion of the episteme moves us beyond the automatic progressive notion of an evolutionary history of ideas but he fails to make adequate sense of the correlation of epistemic structures to the other meanings and levels of human reality. There is something to be said for Smith’s notion that religion, insofar as it constitutes a datum for study, is created in the scholar’s study but one must go a bit further and ask, which scholars and in whose studies and for what reasons? In my research I will respond to these issues by situating Enlightenment theories against the background of the nascent mercantile theories and practices of the countries of modern Europe. I shall also relate the epistemological theories from Descartes to Kant and the English empiricists to theories of mind that are constituted and reconstituted on the basis of a new notion of materiality and its exchanges, though paradoxically such theories of mind and human constitution were not to be contaminated nor profaned by the numinous grossness or enticing fascination of the materialism of mercantilism that formed its context.4 This kind of methodological purity results in the “ivory tower” construction of religion in Smith’s comment and the seeming rootless origin of the human sciences as expressed by Foucault.

The Enlightenment arche for the study of religion The new study of religion growing out of the Enlightenment sciences was based upon forms of data generated from two new sources—“the primitives” and the “religions of the East,” (Orientalism). These categories were formed to classify the new data emerging from the voyages of discovery undertaken by most of the maritime nations of western Europe commencing with the European discovery of the “new world.” These discoveries had caused an increase in trade and in a variety of other relationships with several cultures in every part of the globe as well as making necessary a new and intensified relationship among the nations of Europe. 288

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The ordering of these new data within the critical/creative orientation of those “sciences” that presupposed the Enlightenment orientation gave rise to a different understanding of both “the human” and the meaning of religion. The new conceptions of the human and of religion were now understood epistemologically and historically as part and parcel of the problem of human constitution. Given the general ideology of the universality of reason the strange and distant cultures which were now becoming known to Western cultures were more often than not placed within the context of an evolutionary meaning of history. The actions, behaviors, and customs of other cultures could then be seen as embryonic growths of reason or as reason hidden and obscured by its shadows. From this point of view, religion as a category became the depository of otherness in a double sense. It was the other in terms of a correlation between the valences of geographical distance and the foreign as awesome and exotic; this correlation was united with the notion of an ill-developed reason (the unreasonable or the irrational). General meanings of this kind allowed for the relationship with other cultures to be dominated by a discourse of difference. The stylization of discourses of difference operated simultaneously as the basis for description and observation as well as the source of critical principles for the new understanding of the human. With the end of the ideology and practice of colonialism and imperialism we are confronted with the theoretical and practical problem of another kind of difference. The former “sources of our data” have become speaking voices in our conversations about the human sciences; the empiricity of their presence necessitates a rethinking of the categories. This other kind of difference must, however, be seen within the context of a world which has been subjected in a variety of ways to the sameness of colonialism. In other words, all cultures in the world have experienced colonialism whether as colonizers or the colonized. The former colonized for all sorts of reasons are forced to admit of this situation; the cultures of the colonial powers having relinquished their rule have not yet come to terms with the intellectual and theoretical implications of de-colonization.5 The goal of this inquiry is an attempt to substitute the opposite of colonialism as an alternative meaning of thought for what was the reigning content and style of thought of the cultures of European colonizers. I shall, rather, seek to raise the issue of thinking out of those relationships, reciprocities, and meanings that were attested to but hidden and obscured during the long period of colonialism.

The new arche: Double consciousness and total prestations It is well known that in the Enlightenment context of the human sciences the problem of the “origins” of human institutions and behaviors was a favorite paradigm. The search for origins included the search for the origins of language, marriage, society, religion, and even the human mode of being itself.6 The quest for origins created a speculative primordial beginning, often correlated with contemporary “primitive” cultures for the sake of plausibility, as the arena for the meaning of what seemed to be perennial human behaviors and institutions. An example of this may be seen in Mircea Eliade’s work where a morphology rather than a phenomenology tends to dominate. In this work Eliade correlated the meaning of human constitution and experience with a form of nature.7 Thus, the sky and sky-gods are correlated with the very opening of consciousness itself; the sun, with rationalism and cognition; stones with the oppositional negative of reality as resistance, and so on. Eliade’s work is unique among works 289

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of this kind for instead of explaining originary constitution as only an internal ordering of consciousness, he always relates this constitution to something other than itself. The thematic structure and style of primordiality is woven through this work as the locus for originary forms. In an analogous manner I shall attempt to raise the issue of the constitution of religion and human consciousness but instead of seeking for an arena of primordiality I shall locate this arena within the time and space of the formation of the new extra-European cultures, the new mercantilism, and the ensuing relationships that took place during the modern period of imperialism and colonialism. My paradigm for this mode of procedure is a phenomenon that was discovered and named within the structures of the present human sciences; it is the cargo cult. I use Kenelm Burridge’s description of this phenomenon: Cargo movements, often described as millenarian, messianic, or nativistic movements, and also Cargo cults, are serious enterprises of the genre of popular revolutionary activities. Mystical, combining political-economic problems with expression of racial tension, Cargo cults compare most directly with the Ghost-dance cults of North America, and the prophetist movements among African peoples. Typically, participants in a Cargo cult engage in a number of strange and exotic rites and ceremonies the purpose of which is, apparently, to gain possession of European manufactured goods such as axes, knives, aspirins, china plates, razor blades, colored beads, guns, bolts of cloth, hydrogen peroxide, rice, tinned food and other goods to be found in a general department store. These goods are known as “cargo” or in Pidgin English rendering kago.8 I choose the cargo cult as a paradigmatic basis for the “origin” of a modern meaning of religion for several reasons. First of all, as a religious phenomenon it presupposes and takes place within a colonial setting. Second, it occurs precisely because of an assumed relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. Third, it is a new creative event and interpretation from the side of the colonized. Fourth, European manufactured goods are central meanings in their rituals. Fifth, the cargo cultists through their rituals attempt to bring about new modes of human constitution (to make new beings who are neither Melanesian nor Europeans). It is through a juxtaposition of this meaning of human constitution with that of its meaning in the tradition stylized in Europe from Descartes through Kant that I hope to establish a new theory of the study of religion and a new religious epistemology. The modern period has for the most part been incapable of showing how materiality enters into epistemological constitution. This has in part been due to the fact that the “disenchantment of the world” that took place within Europe beginning with mercantilism could find no way of religiously valorizing the manufactured commodity. Any meaning of materiality as far as religion was concerned was relegated to “other” cultures or to nature or occurred in theological ethical studies concerned with the proper relationship between a religious ethical orientation and materiality. The exception to this would be Marxists, but here again, Marx must deny the validity of a religious valorization of matter or the commodity for the sake of a deeper ethical concern.9 If colonialism is over we must make sense of religion in terms of the meaning and constitution of humanity over the last five centuries—a humanity that is what it is because of the long duration of colonialism. The “double consciousness” made famous by W.E.B. Du Bois is indicative of the structure of a modern consciousness that must come to terms with the facts 290

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of this epoch. Du Bois’s life and work are expressions of the premonition for an intellectual structure that is aware of the nature of culture as a system of total prestations. His notion of the double consciousness is an authentic attempt to think through a range of meanings that redefine the ordering and interrelationships of the economic, aesthetic, and religious dimensions of the cultures of modernity.10 It is not coincidental that aspects, dimensions, and insights which are writ large in the cargo cult are found in several cultures of former colonized peoples and among many persons and groups in Western culture and throughout the world. The intellectual and theoretical implications of this meaning have not been fully explored. I shall make use of Marcel Mauss’s theory of gift exchange and the cycle of prestations as total social phenomenon as the theoretical basis for establishing the locus for those relationships that must bear upon both the colonizer and the colonized during the colonial period.11 The structure and form of the “gift” and its reciprocities will, for example, revolve around the meaning of the commodity and the creation of the fetish and fetishism as well as the materiality of physical and social bodies (races, the underprivileged, primitives, civilized, and so on). In other words, I shall locate Mauss’s theory within a methodological space of mediation. This space of mediation will allow for deciphering and critique of the reciprocities, relationships, and discourses between the Europeans and their others. In so doing I emphasize methodologically that there is no place outside of otherness for a new science of the human. It is my hope that such a procedure will allow for another analysis of the history of colonialism as a reservoir for the data of religion and give specification to the known but unspoken languages of relationships and reciprocities that took place during the tragic and ambiguous period of colonialism.

Notes 1. Charles H. Long, “A Look at the Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions: Retrospect and Future,” The History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa (New York: Macmillan, 1985): 87–104. 2. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi. 3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 344. 4. I have learned that Professor Michel Despland is presently engaged in a study, “La religion à partir du XIXe siècle,” that will show how notions such as ritual, faith, and sacrifice that were the heritage of the Western religious tradition were changed in radical ways in a reorientation of nineteenthcentury western European thought. This reorientation had to do with the development of nationalisms in France, England, and Germany. I hope to show how these notions simultaneously became the building blocks for the new human science of the non-European “others.” 5. I do not mean that there is a lack of awareness of the theoretical problem involved in a decolonized world. I mean to suggest that the stylization of thought still tends to presuppose the same theoretical “centeredness.” While I admire a great deal of what is called “postmodern” thought or “deconstruction,” it is still in danger, in the words of Mircea Eliade, “of provincializing” itself. See also Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 205–227. 6. See Mircea Eliade, “The Quest for the ‘Origins’ of Religion,” History of Religions 4, no. 1 (Summer 1964): 154–169. 291

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CHAPTER 23 FROM COLONIALISM TO COMMUNITY: RELIGION AND CULTURE IN CHARLES H. LONG’S SIGNIFICATIONS

Interviewers: Carolyn M. Jones and Julia M. Hardy

JONES: In an interview with Bill Moyers, Maya Angelou said two things about home—about Stamps, Arkansas—that I thought were provocative: on the one hand, she said that it had to remain mythic for her, that she had to have some distance from it, that it had to remain an “unreality” to become a source of her art; then, on the other hand, she said that whenever one’s back is up against the wall, what comes out is home. You dedicated your book, Significations, to your teachers in Little Rock, Arkansas, and to your teachers at the University of Chicago. Will you talk about “home,” and what it means to you? LONG: I guess Little Rock and the University of Chicago are my two “homes,” and they were both existential and intellectual homes. I got the sense of the intellectual life from my home of origin in Little Rock—the whole community, not just the school. When I look back, I would say that the sense of living was an imaginative, exciting, intellectual meaning for me. I got this from many of the people in my community, the way they answered questions, the way they talked, the way they discerned things, and so forth. For that reason when I got to the University of Chicago, even though I hadn’t gone to all those kinds of schools that are supposed to prepare you for such a university, I felt that it was so natural for me to be there. I felt that it was a part of the continuity of my community of origin. Now if one looks at this from a sociological/ historical point of view, one sees these two places as juxtaposed or disjunctive, but I didn’t feel that way at all at the University. I always felt very confident at the University, and I think it was because of the character of that university. The two worlds might have been juxtaposed if I had gone to another kind of university—say the stereotypical Eastern university. What was important about Chicago as a university was that it also was seriously concerned about the relationship of the intellectual life to the ordinary life, and therefore intellectual matters took a prominence over all the conventions of ordinary existence. That is, no one was trying to make you fit into a certain kind of class structure: issues of class structure were not part of the structure or the sub-structure of the University itself. To the extent that you were interested in intellectual matters, you found a home in that university, and I was so interested, and therefore I found a home. My best teachers were the teachers in my two homes because they affirmed and enhanced what I felt was something natural to me. In both cases, I learned a great deal and have the kind of reverence for those two places defined by the term, “home.” JONES: So these two homes come together in Significations. It begins with two epigraphs: “Signifying is worse than lying,” which is an Afro-American quotation, and then, “The bond

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between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary,” from Saussure. There is a convergence of the two worlds in your definition of signification. Can you say more about that? LONG: Thinking about this in terms of what I just told you about these two homes, when I said “the roots of my intellectual life in my home of origin,” I didn’t mean that simply in terms of formal schooling (although there especially); but also in terms of the ordinary common life of that community. Being the kind of community it was—an Afro-American community—it had to live its life in a highly imaginative way, because of the general character of the history of slavery, racism, and the whole conundrum of “everybody’s equal, except they’re not,” and all of this kind of business. One had to find an imaginative way of living with all that, and therefore the meaning of being “signified” became important. That is, it was a community that, on the one hand—on the empirical/historical level—knew we were discriminated against and oppressed and everything else, but on the other hand, nobody wanted to admit this when they were talking about the United States of America. So here we were, a community that was being signified by another community; we had to figure out some way by which we accepted the sheer facticity of our situation as true, but did not accept it as the definition of who we were. That in itself was a kind of intellectual orientation for me. The problem for me was, how does one make sense of the situation?—not just negatively, not just in the sense of saying, “We are an oppressed people and that’s bad and we’ve got to get rid of that.” Obviously we had to do that, and my community was very much involved in that; but one also has to live every day. The problem was that you couldn’t live simply in terms of some goal you were going to reach, you also had to live in terms of what you were doing while getting to that goal—the process itself. To me that was an intellectual process, which I think the word “signification” covers: both the specifically intellectual part of that process, in terms of formal schooling, teachers, etcetera, and also the common-life character of that meaning, which was expressed by many persons who had either very little or no formal schooling. They were all part of this more imaginative working out of their lives. I also included the statement by Saussure, because if you lived in a community such as the Afro-American community I grew up in, the question was whether or not your present situation is determined by all kinds of theories or ontologies of natural law—that you’re supposed to be here or whatever—or whether or not it just so happens that it is the case; for whatever reasons or not reason, willynilly, this is what your community is. The latter was a better way of looking at it, which is to say: for whatever reasons, we in this century got caught up in some mess of this sort. It’s simply arbitrary, and if it’s arbitrary, it can be changed. It is not something that is ontological it is not something that is tied up with such heavy phrases as “the will of God” or whatever. It was best sometimes to treat it in a much lighter vein which did not rule out these other interpretations, but which simply said, well, it’s arbitrary, and if arbitrary, can be dealt with. It can be dealt with not simply in terms of radically changing it, but dealt with while it is going on, in a creative human way. I guess this is one of the reasons why, on the one hand, I’ve always been interested in the goals of liberation of all oppressed people, but on the other hand, have never substituted that kind of goal for the be and end all of life. The be and end all of life is to live every day, and therefore one has to find a way of making sense of life lived every day as opposed to life lived in terms of something that’s going to happen in the future. I find this way of talking about liberation to be a much more appropriate way for me to make creative sense of the situation. 294

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JONES: How are these creative responses accepted by the majority culture? In particular, how do you feel about the situation in which one voice is designated to represent a whole group of people? In literature it’s Alice Walker who is the “black voice” for the present generation of writers. At one time it was Richard Wright, at another, Ralph Ellison—you know, a kind of “talented tenth.” LONG: This is a problem. When you are an oppressed people, your group is never looked upon as possessing diversity or variety; it is always looked upon as possessing a much more homogeneous character. So in any arena which the majority culture has deemed to be important, there would be no more than one or two of the minority group that would be capable of creativity or accomplishment—except in arenas which are pleasing for the majority group, for the sake of their entertainment, such as sports or popular music or something of that sort. But if you look at it in terms of what they take to be the highest values of that culture—let us say classical music or pure science or whatever—they don’t allow the minority to engage in those activities to any great extent, and even when they do, they always limit their recognition within those areas to a certain qualitative level. This is a method of keeping not only a certain kind of political control, but more importantly, keeping a certain cultural, valuational control over the meaning of their own lives and those of the minority culture. The minority culture needs to find more creative ways of undercutting this control. One of my problems here is, while I feel that it is quite all right and necessary to make use of Baldwin’s expression “Always fight ‘The Man,’” one also has to find ways of being creative that don’t necessarily involve “The Man.” To me that is very important; you cannot spend your whole life as if “The Man” is God. “The Man” is not God. And it seems to me that if you spend all of your life simply fighting “The Man,” you turn “The Man” into a god. And if you turn “The Man” into a god, by definition in any theological equation, you cannot ever overcome God. JONES: That need you speak of for creativity in undercutting the control of the majority culture implies that there cannot be one voice that speaks for a minority culture. As you once said, if one finds something important in Ralph Ellison, one has to realize that there’s something important in Richard Wright, and then something important in James Baldwin and so forth. All of these, although all are Afro-Americans, are very different. What do these models, or these people who are chosen to be models, mean to the regular person? What does it mean when one person becomes the “voice” for a minority; how does that function; does it hamper or help? LONG: Let me put it this way. I’m going to mention a certain discernment of my own, that is, that I don’t feel that black Americans as a group—an ethnic group in America or a reading public—necessarily read these books. I doubt if the works of these writers can be found just willy-nilly in the homes of all black folk. Ralph Ellison’s acclaim, for example, was an acclaim that was expressed by the majority culture first, and I think it was the same with Baldwin, Wright, and others. Now, this does not mean that they are not important, neither does it mean that they have written something spurious that has nothing to do with black folk, nor that it was only the majority culture that said, “These are great works, so you black folk ought to read them.” I don’t think it’s that at all. I think they have really, authentically represented something true about the lives and meanings of black folk in America. But that doesn’t mean that black folk ran out and bought these works. This was one of the problems that some other

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black literary people had with, say, Ellison, and these other folks—they say these writers took the high road. That’s because what black folk were reading all this time was—at least during the early part of my life—black newspapers. They read the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News, and so forth—all the local black newspapers. There you had people working out of these traditions to give life a meaning. Let’s take someone like Langston Hughes who wrote a thing called Simple, a little cartoon thing. He was touching something right there, you see. To a certain extent someone like Richard Wright was trying to write out of that too, but he got it all tied up with a certain kind of ideology. In a certain way, he was close—was trying to be close—to that kind of tradition. Baldwin was too, especially in some of his autobiographical writings. The real issue here is how to find a mode of expression which lies close to the mode of understanding and learning that is endemic to that community. The black church or those institutions in all black communities—the church or maybe the corner bar or wherever—there’s a great deal of life going on there. I get a little upset when this kind of discernment is not taken seriously by black scholars. I know we have had some books done by white anthropologists on street corner culture and so forth, but this research was not done by black scholars; it was done by white scholars who went into black communities as fieldworkers. I think a literature arising out of that level would be very important. It may be that it’s not so much the literary mode but other kinds of modes which have expressed that level—say the music. Music, I think, hits that level much more immediately and directly than the literary form. It seems to me that there has to be a cultural renegotiation of the relationship of the cultural expressions of black people to the full meaning and range of that community as a totality rather than as simply exemplary forms falling out this way or that way in song. There have to be ways by which black expressions are reintegrated into black communities, not only for understanding but also for criticism and critique. I don’t mean just literary critique by black or white literary critics, but a critique from the point of view of a form of life in that community—where people read a work and say, “Well, you know that’s right up to a point,” and so on. I mean something beyond simply the academic meaning of critique, and I feel that maybe because of the contingencies of black communities in America that hasn’t occurred quite yet. But it will necessarily occur, I believe. HARDY: I noticed that the section on Significations at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting last year drew a disproportionate number of blacks; yet their questions and comments afterwards centered around their problems with your refusal to limit your scholarship to specifically black subjects and issues. Callaloo seems an appropriate medium in which to address these kinds of questions again. Can you explain why you as a black scholar of religions have chosen not to limit your studies to African and Afro-American religions and cultures? LONG: It just didn’t fall to me to do it; in other words, there was no decision to either limit myself or expand myself. It ended up being the way I am myself, I’ll put it that way. I would say that for me being a black person in America is a very concrete, important, and significant reality, but that reality does not necessarily mean that I must do this, that, or the other thing. It simply means that’s who and what I am. Now, being that kind of person, I happen to be interested in these issues, and I happen to be interested in these issues because of who and what I am. Part of what freedom means is that no one else can set my agenda for me; I think that black persons in various situations often feel that because they’re black, they have an agenda 296

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set for them. My feeling is that, if that’s the way you feel, then you do. But if you don’t feel that you have an agenda already set, you make your own agenda, and I happen to be one of those kind of people. I’m not talking about any kind of rampant individualism. I feel that being a black person in the United States of America at this time is a fact—a formidable fact, and it is not only a formidable fact for me, it is a formidable fact for the world. To the extent that other people understand that, that’s very good. But I also have to understand that for myself—that it is not just my personal business, my being black; my being black is a part of the objectivity of the modern world. That objectivity is a very important mode of objectivity in this world, and I think that I need to give expression to the kind of meaning that I think it expresses in this world, both as a part of my scholarship and as a part of my personal life. Just a note on that—when I first sent the manuscript of Significations to a publisher, the editor wanted me to delete some of the essays because he didn’t feel they were “black essays,” and of course we had problems with that. If essays are written by a black person, they are black essays in my definition, he also thought he had an agenda that was black; I told him, “Yes, there is a black agenda, and I just gave you one. That’s what it is, if you want to use those terms; that’s what it is.” I am not a person who dismisses the meaning of being black as not important, either in terms of how the world is put together or in my personal life; I’m simply saying that one should not a prior dictate what it means that this is the case. JONES: Someone at that section of the American Academy of Religion meeting questioned your not using an African model, an African language, or an African methodology in your scholarship. That provoked a strong response from you, that all the traditions of Western culture are yours. LONG: I don’t do that because, though I do claim some knowledge of Africa and though it is one of the fields that I have some competence in, the one thing I’m very clear about is that I’m not in Africa. JONES: Then do you think that kind of reaching out for African models and methods is still a way of critiquing from without rather than from within? LONG: Yes. Let me put it this way. You see, one of the issues with the black community in America is that it has always had this problem—at least since the time of slavery and maybe during slavery—trying to figure out what to call itself or who it was, what it was. In many cases you could say that black people in America have (when I say America I mean now the United States) always wanted to be something, anything, except black. When you look at the history of the name changes, we were negroes, then Negroes with a capital N, and the Africans, and so forth. Then finally in the sixties we started calling ourselves black. That was a tremendous meaning, because it meant we were through with all this name business. When we say black, we mean black in the sense of all of its negative connotations as well as all of the possibilities for creative form. I thought that was important because I would have hoped that would keep us from trying to act as a people that we are not. One of the reasons that Afro-Americans in the United States will often ask that kind of question (“Why is it that you didn’t take an African model?” or whatever) is precisely because, though they don’t understand this, subconsciously they’re trying to simply imitate their Euro-American compatriots who say, I’m Swedish or Dutch; I came from or my folks came from, England or Poland or Germany or France, and so forth. Therefore they have this allegiance, but that allegiance is tied up with the continuity 297

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of language, the continuity of customs, of books and literary figures and travelling back and forth and all that. They write letters to their relatives who are still there, and they can trace genealogies and lineages and so forth. Now if that were the case with me, I would affirm it. But it is not. In spite of Roots, if I wanted to trace my lineage in Africa I would have to get a grant of at least two million dollars from somebody and work at it for about twenty years, and still probably wouldn’t find any lineage. Now that doesn’t mean that there is not something African in me as a person and in the culture of my origin, but it has been so adapted—modified—made sense of in so many different ways that it is a thing that is no more African than it is European. It is another mode—another American mode. I just have to be clear about that. Nine times out of ten, those persons who say they have African this and African that don’t know any African language and if they do, they only know it in some kind of academic way. They don’t know any stories in it. They don’t know any nuances of it. They don’t know how to use its prepositions. They don’t know its meaning, they don’t know anything. It’s just an ideological assertion, you see. And it’s an ideological assertion against something, not an affirmative ideological assertion, because it can’t go any further than to say, “I’m simply asserting the fact that I’m different from you.” Now my feeling is, that difference does not need to be an assertion. That difference is a fact, and they can find the meanings of that fact very close at hand if they attend in a very definite and concrete way to the traditions of African people in the United States. When they look at those traditions, they will see that the African peoples in the United States were themselves changing the African traditions, not only because they were being pressured to change them by the situation in which they found themselves, but also because they needed to change those African traditions so that they could be viable people in a new situation which made them no longer African. JONES: That question (about using African models and so forth) suggested a political dimension that insists upon activism—for example, marches, sit-ins, and protests. Your answer implies that reflection can be a mode of action. LONG: Yes. I feel that for a person who was born in this culture, whose first language was the English language, who was formed by the culture of the United States in whatever part of the country that he was formed—it is too much to say that you can simply jump out of your skin. Many of the people who speak this way want to speak as if the structure of the United States is not an ingredient, an extension and an aspect of Western culture—it is. It is also a form and part of other kinds of cultures, and that’s the unique thing about this place. I think that if you lose that, if you try to act as if you’re not a Western person, it doesn’t make any sense; it doesn’t make any sense for you to go around asserting that you’re African in this world, in the United States. That is the presupposition of asserting this ideology. I would rather not do it negatively; I would rather do it positively. I would say that of course I’m a child of the Western culture; it would be foolish of me to deny what is the case. I speak the English language. I only know things I have gained from living in this milieu. Knowing several Africans, I know I’m not like them. We’re very good friends, but all we would have to do is talk about my community of origin and their community of origin and I would see vast differences between the two, and they would too. I would like for some of these people who make those kind of ideological assertions I’ve been talking about to go to Africa; I don’t mean to the big cities, but to the Africa that is the equivalent of Silver City or Fuquay-Varina, N.C. The Africans themselves would tell them immediately, “You’re not African. You’re an American or you’re European.” 298

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They would not say that on the basis of color. Often in this country we feel that color is such a big deal; color is not a big deal everywhere in the world. The Africans can tell when they look at you that you’re not African, even if you are as black as they are. They can tell you’re not African because you don’t walk like an African person. You don’t carry yourself like an African person. You can’t speak like an African person. There are so many things that you’re not, that the color becomes absolutely trivial. It’s incidental to whether you are African or not. African is what people outside of Africa call Africans, and of course Africans know how to be polite and accept that designation from people who don’t know any better, but within any particular place on the continent of Africa, you are known in a much more precise way. You’re never known by any general term called African. You’re known as a Yoruba or as an Ibo or whatever. The generalized term “African” is virtually unknown in many places in Africa. HARDY: This notion of reflection as a mode of action ties in with my earlier question about your refusal to limit yourself to black issues or black culture. Doesn’t that stance enable you to discover through your scholarship ways in which all the world has had to confront colonization and the imperialism of the West, and ways by which individuals and cultures have been able to rediscover their humanity in the face of that imperialism? LONG: First of all, let me clarify one thing: I think it is very important that all kinds and sorts of people devote themselves to and become interested in overcoming all forms of oppression, especially those forms of oppression which have to do with, to use an old theological term, “the way God made us.” That is, people should not be oppressed because God made them male or female or black or white or whatever, because God made them that, and one should not oppress that which God made. That to me is a very clear meaning which I affirm and I participate in. However, I feel that, given the history of colonialism and imperialism and so forth in the modern world, we might do ourselves, as part of groups of folk who have been oppressed in the world, to thinking that this is a meaning only important to us. I think that colonialism has been detrimental to all of the peoples in histories and cultures that had anything to do with it, including the colonizers. That often gets hidden when oppressed people or people of oppressed conditions argue against oppression, but claim only the same rights as those who oppressed them. They give a justification for a certain modality of the human that is capable of oppression, and therefore they don’t undercut the meaning of the oppression at the deepest level. This is why I have never wanted to devote myself simply to the political meaning of this form of oppression. I think it must be revealed that colonialism was a distinct sin or awfulness to the people who were the colonizers, and that it has affected them in severe ways. They need to come to terms with that, not simply by offering the rights of freedom and legitimacy to the people they oppress; it has to go much deeper than that. I feel that one has to find those modes of expression and modes of discourse that can raise that level of the conversation along with the political meaning of liberation. I just happen to be a historian of religions and I did it my way. I’m not saying that this is the only way this can or should be done, but this is the way it was given to me to do it. HARDY: When you returned from your trip to the Sorbonne for a conference on Eliade last year, you told me that you had finally and irrevocably lost any fascination you might have had for the European “mystique.” It seems to me that this “mystique” has been used to justify the way that scholars in general, and even some historians of religion, have, for the most part,

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allowed the products of the elite and powerful of white culture to represent the religious and intellectual life of America and the West on the one hand, while focusing on the popular or folk elements of nonwhite cultures on the other. By disregarding the class structures of nonwhites, while at the same time ignoring poor white cultures altogether, aren’t scholars participating in the perpetuation of notions which have fueled the adversarial relationship between blacks and other races? LONG: Oh yes. I’m going to come back to that latest trip to Paris, but let me say this first. What we had in colonialism was not just the colonizing of the darker races of people in the world. Hardly anyone refers to this now, but all the troubles in Ireland really have to do with the fact that the British once had a colonial empire over the Irish. Once you have the colonial mentality, it is not necessary that you be of the colored race to be colonized. Eugen Weber wrote a wonderful book in which he showed how the Parisians first colonized the rest of France and then went on to colonize the outre mer. The issue of colonialism is much deeper than the issue of race. It is a certain kind of propensity of humankind as it relates to power. If we look at the history of, let us say, eastern Europe, or if we look at the histories of places like the Slavic countries, we find over and over again this same kind of colonization going on. It just so happened that the most virulent form of it in the modern period became the colonization by the metropolitan areas of Europe of the wider areas of peoples and cultures who had darker skin colors. I think people ought to know that. I think we need to learn it very well, because it would enable us to understand that the meaning of it goes much deeper than simply the issue of racism. If we didn’t have racism, then we would have another -ism. There’s always going to be a reason that someone is going to give for doing someone else in. I feel that the loss of that knowledge has prevented many people who are not of color in various parts of the world from understanding their common cause with persons of color who are fighting against oppression of various sorts. Furthermore, I feel that a great deal of our education, insofar as it is tied up with the formation of persons in relationship to unexamined elitist structures that contain colonialism within them, almost makes it natural that people come out feeling a certain lack of regard for human beings who are not their kind, whether their kind be a class or an ethnic group or whatever. Now, when I made that statement about the Sorbonne, I did not mean that I don’t care about that kind of culture or the kind of learning that is associated with that distinguished institution in Paris. I meant it in a very different sense. I meant it in the sense that I was able to understand it, I think—that it was something that human beings do and it is important that they do it, but it was no longer for me exemplary as a model. It was something I could learn a great deal from; it was something I could always regard as having value, and as having value for me, but no longer as an exemplary model for my life. One has to, in this sense, find those ways by and through which one’s own life has been informed with structures and meaning and value, such that one can discover a significance within rather simply seeking for it in another place. HARDY: James Hillman wrote an essay called “Notes on White Supremacy,” in which he said that we are all “mulattoes of the mind.” He went on to say that “while we can’t crawl out of our skins, we can go out of our minds.” I think he is expressing something along the lines of what you have been saying today: that we need to recognize that we are Americans and that is something greater than being black or Indian or Asian—and that there is a potential for a new kind of creativity when this is recognized, such that America can for the first time express itself as a nation. 300

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LONG: In Shadow and Act Ralph Ellison wrote about W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of the double consciousness. He made some remark to the effect that given the situation of blacks, having a double consciousness is one of the saner ways of trying to negotiate in the modern world. I would like to consider that suggestion in light of the statement by Hillman. It goes back to the whole issue of colonialism. I think Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness might have been taken, somewhere or at some periods, perhaps even now, as a kind of negative statement—in other words, because one had a double consciousness, one could never figure out what one’s identity was. In contrast there were people who had single consciousness, and they knew exactly who they were. Now, I would say, given colonialism and its reciprocal effect upon the colonizers and the colonized, that those people during or after colonialism who think they have a single mind or single consciousness are hiding, oppressing, the reality of the situation, whether they be in the European world or in the world of the colonized peoples. The effect of that period of history calls upon us to reassess the very notions of consciousness and mind. We had only a hint of that in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; when Hegel introduces the dialectic, it is something that one cannot imagine apart from that particular meaning of European culture. As an American who does not identify oneself with that meaning, how does one deal with this kind of thing? I feel that it is probably related to the problem of finding the proper rhetoric with which to talk about consciousness in this world now. Du Bois’s notion of doubleness introduces the notion of multiplicities or decenteredness into the conversation. I would rather see this not just on the level of the kind of empirical social realities out of which Du Bois wrote that statement, but also much deeper intellectual levels. How can we talk about consciousness and mind in this new period? Furthermore, I think that one of the meanings that this country could contribute at this point is a way of pragmatically coming to understand that culture of the United States of America, a place that is filled with all kinds of different people from all over the world, a place that cannot ever be brought into one kind of centeredness. When one attempts to do that, what one does is to bring about a mode of oppression for several of these different peoples and groups. The empirical locus of the United States of America could become the basis for working out a different understanding of the nature of human consciousness for everybody in the world—precisely because everybody in the world has been affected one way or another by colonialism. We are all heirs and children of colonialism; nobody—nobody—is scot-free of that. The world has to come to terms with that fact, coming to terms with it means more than simply trying to act as if it didn’t happen, more than simply saying we’re sorry that happened but now we’re going to make y’all like us. It has to be something very different from that. That’s why I’m concerned about working this out, and it’s why I’m happy that I’m in religion, because I think religion gives us ways of thinking about consciousness which are possibly more open than some of the other disciplines in the academy. HARDY: You have often said that a new mode of thinking, new forms of creativity, new modes of being human will come from the Third World. What is different about the Third World experience that generates these new modes and forms, and why has the ideological structure of the First World been inadequate to the task? LONG: First let me say that we have for some time been characterizing the world in terms of first, second, and third worlds, and now somebody says there’s a fourth world. I might object to all these terms, but let’s just use the first, second, and third world metaphor for now. The Third 301

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World refers primarily to the ex-colonized nations of peoples of the world. I would say that the ex-colonized folks in the world necessarily have to admit that they are what they are in part because of colonialism. Now, folks in the First World hardly ever think that they are what they are because of colonialism. They hide this fact from themselves. Their cultural tradition hides this fact from them. Therefore they think of colonialism as something the First World did to the Third World, but recognize no reciprocity of meaning, relationships, etcetera. Insofar as the folks in the Third World must necessarily come to terms with colonialism, they have had to face the full fact of what is true for the whole world. As they face that fact, they are attempting to come to terms with the novelty of this new world, whereas the cultural and intellectual traditions of the so-called First World, which have obscured and hidden this from themselves, are for the most part simply trying to continue their own traditions as if nothing had really happened—as if the whole period of the last five hundred years had no impact on them in any kind of internal mood or understanding of their cultural traditions, their mode of thinking, or anything of the sort. I feel that scholars from several different disciplines in the Third World have taken the initiative in attempting to come to terms with the full meaning of who they are; at the same time they are expressing meanings that can or may be of universal significance for everyone in the world. HARDY: Doesn’t that tie very much into what you were saying earlier about Little Rock—like colonized peoples from other places, those who have undergone colonization within America have experienced it in a different way? The conjunctions and disjunctions of colonization where very real for them; it was a real experience out of which a new kind of creativity arose as a response, which then becomes something which all of us can use in some way in our living in the world. LONG: Exactly. In this sense I would say that the whole world is really a third world, but only the people in the empirical Third World know this. HARDY: You’ve mentioned that some of the Western scholars who have attempted to deal with colonization with the same old scholarly modes—within the trajectory of the Enlightenment, as you put it—rather than providing any real solutions, are in a sense evading the responsibilities of colonialism. LONG: I think that there is a very powerful temptation to think that the way to confront the situation is to become a radical member of one of the intellectual or social traditions of the First World. This is one of the great attractions of Marxism, for example, to certain Third World peoples, and one can understand that. I’m not arguing against that. What I am arguing against is adopting any of these traditions as a solution, without dealing with the conjunctions and disjunctions between that tradition and one’s native tradition. What one always has to come to terms with is the disjunctive nature of reality. You may have a wonderful history of ideas, but a history of ideas often overlooks the disjunctive nature of life. It is at the level of the disjunctive nature of life that new ideas come into being, or the range of possibilities for new ways of thinking comes into being. People in “new” parts of the world must feel that they are capable of thinking new thoughts. This does not mean that they must dismiss thought from any other area, but it means that they must also undertake the necessity of the creation of new thought—not only new thought for themselves, but new thought for everybody. This is something which is on the agenda for persons who are conscious of the disjunctive character 302

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of the world that colonialism brought into being, here I’m speaking of colonialism not simply as an economic/political force. I’m speaking of it as one of the intense, ambiguous, historical forces that serve to shape the world as we know it now. As such, it carries with it not only those economic and political structures, but a whole range of imaginative, literary, religious, and other kinds of meanings. We must come to terms with that, and in coming to terms with it, we have to experience the disjunctive character of that meaning of colonialism. HARDY: I’ve heard you talk about Gandhi as an example of someone who turned his creativity toward that disjunction. LONG: Yes. HARDY: Would you elaborate on that for us please? LONG: First of all—many people may know this and many may not—in any case, although Gandhi grew up in India in a Hindu family, he later went to England and became a very proper English person, attending what we would call law school there. Then he went to South Africa to practice law. He was involved in the social movement there, but then he went back to India. Now when he got back to India, he no longer knew India, and what he did was to make himself a disjunctive person there, he was disjunctive in terms of the Hindu tradition, and also disjunctive in terms of the Western tradition. He carved out a place for himself. When I say he was a disjunctive person there, what I mean is that he partook of and also undercut the Hindu tradition. He also partook of and at the same time undercut the Western tradition. In other words, he had to make a new space, a new mode of being for himself. Now here we have a good example of what I’ve been talking about. He didn’t go to India and say, “Look, what we need is to bring all this Western stuff into Indian civilization, modernize it,” and so forth. Neither did he go back to India and say, “We need to throw out all this Western stuff and go right back to the good old Hindu stuff.” He did a very different thing there, and we can only understand the possibility of a Gandhi to the extent that we understand that he is a product of colonialism. He represents one of those modalities of creative thought arising out of colonialism which establishes a new mode of possibility for understanding the nature of human beings and at the same time deals concretely and pragmatically with those meanings of liberation, freedom, politics, state, society, that are the necessary ingredients of any modern society. One of the things that one can discern in Gandhi and in some other people like him would be their willingness to undertake a meaning of restraint as a creative human meaning. Looking at Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, you will see that—he said he got this from Gandhi—there is also a restraint there. He is saying, “Now do this. Undergo this!” That’s precisely what I meant when I used that phrase in Significations; we must now willingly undergo that which we were forced to do in another time. Within that one finds restraint. One could say that the passivism which was present both in Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., was a political strategy, if you want to call it that. But more importantly, it brought into being a meaning of restraint as creativity, in which it is now absolutely necessary for an individual to undergo that meaning in order to express something that is creative for that person and the community. We in this country think we have to have an historical identity; we think we always have to be number one in everything. It is not just that you are in the race and you’re out there in reality, you’ve got to win every time, see. That’s part of what that whole business of historical destiny does to one. Early in his life Mircea Eliade went to India, and there he found a culture in which people said 303

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about historical destiny, “Well, for those who got ’em it’s all right—but it is not the only destiny you can have. There are all kinds of ways of being human without fooling around with all this historical destiny business.” In this country we are all presented with exemplary meanings of the human that have to do with having great historical destinies: being the leader of this, the president of that, the head of this, the ruler of that, the hero of this, or whatever. Somewhere in our lives, either early or late, most of us realize that we are not going to be that. So there are all these people who live—and we used to talk about this often in the fifties—meaningless lives. The problem becomes, what other level can one live upon? There can be another way of looking at the world, of being human, than the one that is offered by the proponents of historical destiny. HARDY: How does the idea of historical destiny relate to the fact that it’s impossible for a black growing up in America not to realize that matter is real? In Significations you talk about the oppugnancy of matter; that if you come up against it, it will smash you. LONG: In connection with this I would like to mention a little problem I’ve always had with Eliade. Though he laid out the modes of perception of gross forms as imaginations of matter in Patterns in Comparative Religion, he says that when members of a community perceive a stone, for example, in this imaginative way, they are perceiving the stone under an archetype. What I want to say is that they are perceiving the stone as a stone. That is the initial perception, not the idea of stone, not the image of stone; it is stone. The initial perception in that sense is unspeakable because it is the perception of the sheerness of that matter, and therefore any language or expression about it now has to be a symbol of it. One cannot really discourse or speak about the sheerness and the virtuality of that experience as such. I think what was afforded to people of African ancestry in this country was precisely that oppositional character of matter, whether that matter be the matter of the land or the matter of the country or the matter of the people; it opposed itself to them as something “other.” When I was a graduate student, I took a seminar on spirit with theologian Bernard E. Meland. I wrote a paper for him in which I made a big case that spirit is that which says “NO.” I went to class one day after we’d turned our papers in, and he took off on one of the papers; strangely enough it was the paper I had written. He didn’t identify me as the author of the paper, but he went on to devote the whole lecture to a denial of the notion of spirit being that which says “NO.” That was the beginning of a long conversation which still continues whenever I see Bernard Meland. The longer we’ve had that discussion, the more convinced I am that I am right in the way I put it. I didn’t experience spirit simply saying “yes.” What I wanted him to understand is that coming out of the concreteness of the modes of my life, spirit says “no.” That “no” is an oppositional structure which is not simply negative, but is that which allows one to understand one’s authentic situation in life. The more I have thought about that and the more I’ve lived with it and learned it, the more I can understand why for Meland, spirit said “yes.” I guess what I’m really trying to say is that one has to speak out of where one is. Now, it may be that spirit sometimes says “yes,” but spirit doesn’t say “yes” to everybody. Spirit says “no” to that one. One has to make adjudications about that, because for Meland, a child of first or second generation immigrants from Norway, I think it does say “yes, yes, yes.” Everything they turned their hands to said “yes, yes, yes,” whereas from the time when my ancestors first got on the boat, it was “no, no, no.” It is out of that “no” that they must create and understand their humanity. They understand that there are limitations and restraints upon the ways in which human beings can 304

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deal with matter. I often have this sense that one of the negativities of the American “yeahsaying” of the spirit is that they have no regard for matter. They don’t understand that matter is, if not eternal, something that lives longer than we do. I often think of this in relationship to the whole environmental, ecological movement. One of the fallacies I find with the whole ecology movement is that they say they are doing this because they are helping nature. They say, “Don’t do this because you are killing the little fish” or “Don’t do this because you are polluting the water.” That’s fine until they start talking about this little fish and the little this and the little that as if nature needs us. Water will purify itself if it takes two billion years, because water doesn’t live in our time-frame. So, in that sense I say, don’t do anything for the water. If you are going to regard the water, regard it because it is water. You don’t need to help it, see? You have to understand the regard for water, so that you undergo water instead of thinking you are helping water out, because that still makes you the determiner of reality. Even though I like all this ecology business, given all the alternatives, I still think it is missing the regard for that mode of matter; because it misses that regard, it does not seek a deeper meaning at the level of human consciousness. HARDY: Given your feelings about all of these issues—from racism to colonialism to ecology— tell us what the year 1992 signifies to you. LONG: The year 1992 is the five hundredth year after that great symbolic event when Columbus supposedly discovered the New World. After five hundred years of the New World being a part of the totality of the globe in all of its ramifications, 1992 ought also to mean that the New World has become an entity in itself, an entity that is no longer to be explained on the basis of its causal relationship to Europe. It is time for the New World to begin to understand itself as a new entity and, therefore, to understand the possibility of a new mode of being on this globe. From this perspective, the New World can realize its relationship to the Old World through a reinterrogation of the meaning of that Old World from the point of view of the New World. I feel that the longer we continue to emphasize the identity of the New World through its causal relationships to Europe, the longer we will extend the kind of stagnation and sterility which prevents us from thinking anew about what has happened over that five-hundred-year period.

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CHAPTER 24 MIRCEA ELIADE, JOACHIM WACH, AND CHICAGO: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVÍD CARRASCO

CARRASCO: Okay, so during the next thirty years, Eliade became famous and a prime mover in the rise of religious studies in universities in the United States, altering the way students came to understand the power and richness of the place of the sacred in human life. Can you recall for us the first time—I don’t know if you were there when the Haskell Lectures took place—the first impression you had of Eliade? LONG: Yes. Let me go back a bit. The Haskell Lectures are part of a lecture series that has a counter, another lectureship, the Barrows Lectures which are delivered in India. These lectures grew out of the World Parliament of Religions which took place in Chicago in 1893 as a part of the World’s Fair. One of the Haskell Lectures is always given at Chicago by a scholar from some other place in the world. Prior to this, I had heard the Haskell Lectures by Hideo Kishimoto, a Japanese scholar, who worked on sacred mountains in Japan. The Haskell Lectures are scheduled when enough money has accrued in the account to support the lectures. The year—I think it was 1954—Wach knew that the Haskell Lectures were coming up. And so, in one of his classes—now in his classes were all of the students in history of religions—he told us that the Haskell Lectures were coming up. He asked, “Whom do you suggest we invite?” And I think to a person, we all said, “Mircea Eliade.” At that time, probably the scholarly group in the United States who knew of Eliade’s existence was that little group in Chicago. His work had not been translated into English. Most of us read French. And I had read his Myth of the Eternal Return. Wach said that he would see Mircea Eliade at the next meeting of the International Association of Historians of Religion Conference that would take place in Rome the following year. And, sure enough, Wach saw Eliade there; Eliade appeared on a panel with Claude LéviStrauss. Eliade, at that time, was eking out a rather paltry living in Paris. He discussed with him the possibility of giving the Haskell Lectures in the next term. Subsequently, this all came to pass. Wach died in the summer of 1955, so he was not able to welcome Mircea to Chicago. Now there we were; at that time, there had been only two professors in history of religions, Joachim Wach and Joseph Kitagawa, and now Wach was gone. CARRASCO: At the Divinity School? LONG: At the Divinity School, yes, but more precisely in the Federated Theological Faculty of the University of Chicago. I need to say a bit more about the situation at Chicago at this time. The Federated Theological Faculty was a consortium faculty composed by the combined faculties of several theological schools adjacent to the University: the Chicago Theological

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Seminary (Congregational/United Church of Christ), Disciples House (Church of Disciples of Christ), and Meadville House (Unitarian). Problems occurred within the Federation regarding the “philosophy of theological education” and other matters. The Federated Theological Faculty did not survive and broke up. And that meant that the Divinity School reverted back to simply being the Divinity School of the University. And since the Divinity School was going to be just a Divinity School, it needed a dean. Because before that, the dean of the Federated Faculty and the dean of the Divinity School were the same person. But now with the break-up, the Divinity School required a separate dean. Walter Harrelson, a biblical scholar in Old Testament, came to Chicago as dean of the Divinity School, while Jerald C. Brauer remained dean of the Federated Faculty. While all the faculty and students were aware of the break-up of the Federation, few of us had any information regarding the re-formation of the studies in religion and theological studies at the university. Hardly any of us had any understanding of the administrative arrangements that would come into being. Over the last four years at Chicago I always held a “regular summer job” at Donnelly’s Press, a press that produced the Chicago Telephone Directory, the Montgomery-Ward and SearsRoebuck catalogues, Time Magazine, and later, Sports Illustrated. I was working on my summer job in the summer of 1957. I had made an appointment to see Dean Harrelson because I wanted to request a tuition and housing grant for the next year to complete my dissertation. I was to see the dean at 9:00 AM on a Monday morning. On the weekend prior to that Monday I had gone to a resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to meet and be interviewed by a dean from the University of Denver about a position on their faculty. It was a rather awkward journey because he was late getting there and thus I missed the scheduled bus for my return to Chicago. He felt obligated to drive me back to Chicago, which he did. I got home around 6:00 AM on Monday morning. I needed some sleep and rest because I was to report to my job by 4:00 PM that afternoon. I asked my wife Alice to call the dean’s office and reschedule my appointment for another day that week. I thought that such a request was rather pro-forma. It was summer and not so busy and the request I had was not difficult. Surprisingly the dean’s office called back and his secretary made it clear that the dean insisted on my keeping the original appointment. I didn’t know exactly what was going on but since I was on the “asking end” of this appointment, there was no choice. I could not believe my ears when Dean Harrelson showed little interest in my request. It was clear that he had something else to say. He told me that he was the new dean and as such he inherited a student body that he did not know and that he was also unfamiliar with the dynamics of the curriculum and the comprehensive examination system. In so many words, he was new. He needed a dean of students and he thought that I would make an excellent one. Wow! This was almost too much. I had no idea that they were looking for a dean of students, and my heavens, no idea that I would be in the running for any such position. Everything Dean Harrelson was telling me had been unthinkable for me just an hour ago. Of course, I would accept the position but this was not what was primary at that moment. I had to get a sense of reality again and I knew this would not happen until I was able to share this with Alice. So, I told him I would think about this and let him know. I rushed home to share the news! I really don’t know how this came about. I was not a part of it at all. I have surmised that there must have been discussions with Dean Brauer, former dean of the Divinity School, 308

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Bernard Loomer, Nathan Scott, the senior African American on the Divinity Faculty, and Joe Kitagawa, who probably orchestrated the entire move. I have never delved into this on the principle of “not looking gift horses in the mouth.” CARRASCO: So, at that time, you were a graduate student? LONG: Yes, I was a graduate student. I had completed all of my Ph.D. examinations, but I hadn’t finished my dissertation. Wach was now dead. I became first, advisor to students, and later dean of students in the Divinity School and instructor in the history of religions on the faculty of the Divinity School. I taught the general course that all the students were required to take in World Religions. I also would teach one other course on some special topic in method. CARRASCO: Then I guess it was 1956 that Mircea came to give the Haskell Lectures. LONG: That’s right; this was the situation when Mircea arrived in the fall of 1956. We were all waiting for him, you know, Mircea—remember, none of us had ever seen him, knowing him only from his books. I remember that day very well: I was in my office on the first floor of Swift Hall when I got a telephone call from Joseph Kitagawa. He said, “Could you come to my office? Mircea Eliade is here.” I said, “In your office?” He said, “Yes.” So I rushed out to go to Joe’s office. When I got to Joe’s office, there’s Mircea sitting over in a corner. I’m was surprised, for some reason I imagined him to be very tall; he was rather short and looked very humble. Joe introduced us. He came over, and we shook hands and he said, “Oh I’m so happy to meet you.” And I felt within myself, “Oh, man.” You know, I expected him to be a big man, a towering physical figure. And that was the beginning. And then I attended the Haskell Lectures that took place in the auditorium in the Social Science Building, on the first floor. I was quite familiar with that building. It was the first university building in the United States devoted to the then new “social sciences.” I had taken several seminars in the history department there: seminars in Medieval History and the Revolutions of 1848, as well as seminars in anthropology with Professors Robert Redfield and Milton Singer. I was doing work in anthropology because Wach had assigned me to write a dissertation on Robert Ranulph Marett, an English anthropologist who had written a number of wonderful books on religion and religious experience. Marett always said that he was the last of the armchair anthropologists at Oxford—that after him, no anthropologists could just sit in his university and study and write; they had to do fieldwork. Anyway, when later I talked to Eliade about my dissertation—you see, once Wach died, I had no dissertation advisor—so I talked to him about my work. He responded like this: “Oh. You know, Marett is important, very important, but why don’t you write about a specific religious orientation in a specific culture where there is an actual religion?” I really liked that idea. Since coming to the University I had heard hints of an academic argument posed in the scholarly debate between Professor Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University and Professor E. Franklin Frazier of Howard University, and in the stellar example of the Chicago school of urban sociology. The issue had to do with the survival of African cultural traits and traces in the cultures of North Americans of African descent. I’d heard rumors and hints about this but knew precious little in any detail. I knew nothing about Africa in general or West Africa in particular. I thought that this was a good time to learn something about that. So I decided to write on religious orientations in West Africa, which meant that I was starting brand new again. 309

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Obviously, when Wach died, and I didn’t know Mircea was coming, I was going to go back to my second love, which was Buddhism. I had begun learning Sanskrit, because I was going to do something in Mahayana. But, when Mircea came I turned in the direction of a more empirical historical work; this proved to be one of the high points of my educational career. I am so pleased that he suggested that, because the research techniques, the kind of methodology, and how you have to go about doing this kind of research became significant. Out of that, for me, several things happened. But I don’t want to get into that now, because we’re talking about Mircea. CARRASCO: So, when you think back about the Haskell Lectures, which I guess were on patterns of initiation in world religions, Eliade ended up coming. What was the power or the appeal of those lectures to you, to your students? Some people come and give lectures and they’re not invited back. LONG: The lectures were published as Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meaning of Initiation in Human Culture. Let me make a couple of things clear here: Eliade was invited to present the Haskell Lectures because he was acknowledged as a distinguished scholar of the history of religions, so the lectures were not in the genre of a “job-talk.” He was invited to give the lectures by Wach before his death. Had Wach not died he still would have given the lectures as a scholar in the history of religions. Wach’s death at this time was fortuitous, for while Wach was alive, Wach himself and the history of religions students at Chicago already had a very high regard for Mircea’s work. The lectures were great. Later, I found out that in Australia, Australian scholars thought that his work on the aboriginal religions of Australia might have been improved if he had spent some time there. But anyway, he was hired on the basis of being a senior scholar of the history of religions. In other words, he did not come there to give Haskell Lectures, and then, on the basis of those lectures, we’d decide whether to hire him. He was hired on the basis of all kind of other work he had already done, work which historians of religions knew about. Now we’re here at Harvard. I should tell you, Harvard had never heard of Mircea Eliade. And there is a reason for that. Because Harvard’s understanding of what we call history of religions was the “great world religions.” In other words, they only dealt with religions where people had texts. And they dealt with them in that very conventional manner of the way the great world religions had been defined in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Max Müller. Whereas, at Chicago—and this is a Chicago tradition—even though for some strange reason the present historians of religions at Chicago deny that there was ever a Chicago school or tradition in the history of religions, at least from the time of Eustace Hayden, the question was not simply the “great world religions.” The question was rather, “What is religion?” And so, once you ask the “what is religion?” question, then you don’t make that demarcation at world religions, primitive religions, and civilized religions. You say, “What is religion?” And that cuts across everything. That is one of the reasons I was studying anthropology as a historian of religions, you see. The best dissertation written on Malinowski was done by one of our history of religions students, Jay Fussell at the University of Chicago. This is the best thing that’s ever been written on Malinowski. That’s what anthropologists in Chicago said. And we ask this, “what is the religion question to Buddhism, Christianity, Jews—people in Africa, Indonesia, Japan, wherever—the moon, if we could get there. So that’s a very different 310

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thing. Now, if you look at Mircea’s work, a great deal of it is about what he called “archaic societies.” He hardly ever—really never—used the word “primitive” in his writings. That word did not come up in his scholarly vocabulary. He used, “archaic, archaic, archaic.” And the other thing about him is that he chose topics which were not or didn’t seem to be a part of that agenda of western European scholarship, you see. In other words, there was not this kind of Germanic Enlightenment kind of imprint and stylistics, or this kind of English empiricist imprint on his style. His style was of another kind. Now, he knew all about the Enlightenment, loved the Enlightenment and all that. But it wasn’t his style. His style came more out of a kind of Mediterranean modality, more out of a different kind of sensibility that did not simply have this disdain for anything that was prior to the French Revolution. In other words, it was a style that could express regard for meanings that were not to be undergirded by some futuristic pursuit of happiness. And that was in his style; that made a lot of difference. So you had a person here who was a scholar, who could write books which dealt primarily with archaic cultures, and, at the same time, could write learned books about Hindus, who have all these texts, and whatever. So it was just absolutely great. CARRASCO: Yeah. So you talk about Eliade’s styles. So here you are, Professor Long, an African American from Little Rock, Arkansas. And, so far, you’ve talked about these two Europeans, Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, whose approach to the question of what is religion really appealed to you. LONG: Yes. CARRASCO: Why is that? That would seem to be a surprise to some of us. LONG: Well, as I’ve just got through listening to recordings of Eliade speaking and what I was saying about Wach, it struck me that both of these men had experienced a profound exilic experience in their lives; they had both been, if you will, “on the run.” That is, Eliade for one reason or another couldn’t go home again. Wach and his people were faced with extermination and run out because of Hitler and the Holocaust of the Jews. So both of them were on the run. Now, there were no other faculty people I knew who were on the run. That is, this sense of knowing that there was somebody after you, that you were not welcome somewhere. Now I didn’t realize that at the time. Eliade said that it was a secret, that he’d write something, and then he’d read it ten years later, and it seemed to have lost its meaning. But there was a meaning. It came out in very different ways. In other words, I never heard either one of them talk in an extensive manner about “those times,” about the bad people who had them running. But they were on the run. Now, as a person growing up in America, this is my home. But I’m not welcome at home. My people have never been welcome at home. And so, it may be that there’s something about that. And the other thing is, in my real home of family, with my parents and siblings, we had the sense, in all of the oppressive situations, as a family, we knew who we were. That we were not waiting to be somebody. That even under oppression and Jim Crow and all the mess they handed down, that we had the sense that no, we are already somebody. We are not waiting until they pass this law. We are not waiting, you know. We are who we are. So we escaped when a large number of black people didn’t escape. And that was that sense of buying into the American dream as if one day, it’s going to happen. But you never examine 311

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what the dream is. You should accept, point blank, there is this dream. And they got it, and I want it. But you never ask, “What is this dream? Who has this dream? What do people with the dream do?” Well, what people with the dream do is oppress you. That’s what they were doing. All those people who were running everything while I was growing up, they were the movers and the shakers of society. They had made it. They had the American dream. And they were oppressing me, all right. One had to examine the dream. One had to become, in that sense, a psychoanalyst to look at your dreams! But anyway, that element was there. And it’s the first time that has come to me, when you asked that question. As a matter of fact, in my study, I have two photographs, one of Wach and one of Mircea, because they were the ones who gave me that—who affirmed that sense that I grew up with. CARRASCO: You have mentioned this to me before, tell us about the first time you met Joachim Wach and this exchange you had about religious experience. LONG: Oh yes. Well, I had come to the Divinity School, I didn’t know why I was there. You know, I had had some little funny crises in my life, and I thought it might be a sort of curative antidote. I didn’t come there because I wanted to be some kind of liberal Christian or I wanted to be involved in a social gospel or anything like that. As a matter of fact, I had never heard of such a thing. I was terribly, terribly unsophisticated about religion. I just felt that religion—that’s what we did in church. I went to church when I was little, and all through my life. And my father was a minister, and he preached, and he talked about Christianity. I knew there were different kinds of churches: Methodists and Baptists and whatever. It didn’t bother me, you know; I’ve never had any great, big wondering about God, what God was doing, and whatever. Those types of wonderings never possessed me. But then, when I was experiencing failure far from the intimacy of my community, I knew that I was in very deep trouble. I talked to the folks I was living with, my relatives, and they gave me a sense, as they put it: “Well, maybe you, you know, you need to get back to your religious roots” and steered me toward religion. So I did that. Anyway, I ended up at the Divinity School. And I’m taking these courses. And I am startled. I was surprised that I was liking all this—all these ideas and meanings that I had never heard before. I had never seen a group of people so dedicated to worrying about the meaning of religion. It was in the spring of my first year there. I was still living in the city and taking public transportation to the campus. I lived on the Near North Side. One spring afternoon, I was leaving Swift Hall. And I was walking down that hall next to the Commons Room. In front of me was Joachim Wach. I knew about Wach, but I had taken no courses with him. I had never even spoken with him. But I knew he was Joachim Wach and he was a professor. And he was a professor of the history of religions, though I didn’t know what that meant. But anyway, Wach was carrying books, a white box that you put cakes in, you know, a cake box, and an umbrella. Now, at the end of that corridor, there is a great big oaken door. And there was no way Wach was going to negotiate the cake, the books, the umbrella, and that door. So I saw that, rushed ahead, and opened the door. And Wach, in a wonderful little polite voice, said, “Thank you.” 312

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I asked, “Are you going this way?” Since I was going down to Cottage Grove, I said, “Because I can help you with some of that.” And he was grateful. So I took the books and the umbrella and so on. Then Wach, inquiring all the time, he was a very inquisitive little man, said, “Are you a student here?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “What do you study?” I said, “I’m in the Divinity School.” He said, “Ah, yes.” He said, “Well, what year?” I said, “I just came last fall.” He said, “Oh. Well, how do you like it?” And I said, “Well, I like it, but it’s strange.” He said, “Oh?” I said, “Well, for example, in Professor Pauck’s class”—Wilhelm Pauck taught the History of Christian Thought—“he was saying, you know, Paul’s idea of Revelation, or Augustine’s idea, or Origen’s idea.” And I said, “That’s strange talk for me.” And Wach said, “How so?” And I said, “Because, where I come from, people don’t have ideas of Revelation. They have revelations.” And he said, “Ah so, religious experience.” Now that impressed me. I didn’t know it had impressed me, but it did. It impressed me because this is the first time—see, you have to understand what it means to be a black person in America. Almost everything you are about is either extra—extra or pathological. So that, if you are going to study black religion, it’s going to be extra. It’s not a part of what you regularly study. Or, if you’re going to study society, you don’t study black society. You study the pathology of black society. Now, what I heard in Wach when he said “religious experience” is that we were all in. This was not extra. This is what human beings do, you see. It wasn’t extra. It wasn’t pathological. It was just what human beings do. My focus was already there. Now, there was no other discipline in the humanities or social sciences at that school, at that time, at that university, and maybe still at Harvard, where a black person is, “Well, this is what human beings do. That’s what I do, see.” And that got me. So, it came time for me to decide what area I’m going to do my Ph.D. in. Now you have to understand, even though I was in the History of Religions Club, and there were about ten or twelve of us, I didn’t run with those folks, because they were very esoteric, funny people. I ran with a whole bunch of people, especially the theologians, for by and large, I felt that the people who were doing theology were the smartest ones in the school. And that’s where I was supposed to be, all right, with Schubert Ogden, Frank Nelson, and, you know, people like that. So, when it came time for us to choose, they just presupposed I was going to do theology. Everybody was doing process theology and Alfred North Whitehead. And I had taken all these courses. I knew Whitehead. I had taken a course on Whitehead with Charles Hartshorne. And I had taken American Religion with Sidney Mead. And I knew Charles Sanders Peirce. I knew John Dewey. And I had taken the whole philosophy courses, from Aristotle and Plato right up through the modern period. I had taken courses in Russian philosophy, you know. So I was all right. So we’re down at Jimmy’s because we were talking about making our declarations, because we had to begin the following year. CARRASCO: Jimmy’s, the restaurant? LONG: Yeah. So we’re talking and they say, “Well, Chuck,”—they called me Chuck in Chicago— “are you going to do theology? You ought to do well. You just have to pick an area. You already got this background.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” They said, “Oh come on.” They thought I was having trouble picking a particular area or issue in theology. I said, “Well I’m, I’m going to do history of religions.” And I can still hear right now Schubert Ogden’s reply, “So what the hell is this?” 313

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CARRASCO: Schubert Ogden said that? LONG: Schubert Ogden. CARRASCO: The great Schubert Ogden? LONG: Yeah. He said, “You’re just going to waste your time.” He said, “You’re going to waste your time studying people who waste their time looking at their navels. It doesn’t make any sense!” But that’s when I remembered Wach saying, “Ah so, religious experience.” That made all the difference, you see. And I never regretted it. CARRASCO: So then Eliade comes into the picture? LONG: Yes, Eliade comes into the picture. And he just fulfills that. CARRASCO: So Eliade comes; what did you find at that time to be the appeal and effect of Eliade’s thinking and style on you? LONG: Well, let me make the contrast. See Wach was always consciously and unconsciously fighting the abysmal logical problem, because the issue for him was that, well, people who are studying religion, they always want to turn it into something else to study—the problem of reductionism. In other words, they want to say, “Well, we know religion doesn’t make any sense, but the people are religious because society has to work this way. Or people are religious because they got psychological issues. Or people are religious for this or that reason.” In other words, we can’t study religion. We can only study why people are religious. And that’s extradisciplinary—psychology, sociology—whatever. But there’s no discipline for studying religion. Because everybody knows that religion doesn’t exist, you see. That’s their nightmare, all right. So Wach was always subconsciously and unconsciously training us to be able to defend that there is stuff that is religion. So in everything we did we were buttressed with so many methodological, philosophical things. Man, I mean, we knew how to make use of thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. We also knew the methodological stances of the disciplines of anthropology and sociology. We were not methodologically naïve. CARRASCO: As a Wach student? LONG: Yes, as a Wach student. Because, you know, we were not shabby. You see, if you read Wach’s work, you will see its architectonic structure; I mean it’s really heavy, weighty, built up, especially in sociology of religion. When Eliade comes we were waiting for him to show us his method. But you see, as I said before, Eliade didn’t come out of that post-Enlightenment tradition, that western European tradition. So he would just presuppose. He never thought he had to defend this stuff. He would just be reading and say, “Now here, in this ritual, they come and they do that. And they put this in the center. And then they make a circle. And then one person would point up and then down. And then they stand there. And then the god appears. He never said, “They think the god appears” or “They are under the illusion that the god appears.” He takes it right there: “And then the god appears.” So you see he prevents you from having to make that argument, because he said, “Now this is the document.” Now your thing is that you could make this argument; you could say, “Well, they thought the god appeared.” He said, “No, the god appeared.” Because how do you know? It appeared to them. They said it. All right. But then, you have a general theory of the world 314

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where gods cannot appear. All right. But that’s your general theory of the world, you see. They have a general theory of the world where gods appear, all right. Now, if you want to understand what they are talking about, you have to understand that, in that world, the gods appear. Now, if you don’t want to understand what they are talking about, then you don’t need to read it, because you already have your world. If you’re reading it, and you’re going to place it only in your world, then there’s no point in reading it. You know your world. So the question is, what appears? It goes back to the old phenomenological problem. Or it goes back to the kind of issue that Peirce had in his logic, the phaneron, the firstness of things. So Eliade never took on that great big old methodological issue. He was aware of it, but he didn’t spend his time worrying about it. He worried about: What is this text? What are they saying here? Who is this god? What is this? So, in that sense, he is not oppressing you. He’s not oppressing. See, a great deal of Western scholarship is very oppressive. It has the sense that its form and mode of knowledge is superior to every other form and mode of knowledge. Therefore, when there are other forms of knowledge that they are not familiar with, they tend to overlook them or to destroy them or to oppress them. And I think that one of our big problems now is that the West doesn’t know everything. And they have to come to realize they don’t know everything, and will never know everything. And that a great deal of what other people and cultures know, the whole world needs. And this one stylistic way of knowing is not adequate for us to understand the world as we know it. Because we also have to remember that the West’s mode of clarifying knowledge as scientific was part and parcel of the colonial endeavor. And so, it’s just taking it as colonialism was, as it related to epistemological issues, and you only need to read the history of modern geography to see how this is all related. But we digress. CARRASCO: Beautifully. Beautiful digression. Beautiful digression. Let’s talk a little bit about Eliade in America, that is, the meaning of that, because as you and I have talked about this in my little film idea, you have counseled me to say, look, we don’t want to deal with Eliade in Romania and what they’ve done with him over there. We want to talk about his meaning and impact within the American context. LONG: Yes, well, we could talk about it in two kinds of ways. We can talk about it as the person, Mircea Eliade, scholar in America, or we can talk about the impact of Mircea’s work and life in America. All right. Now, let me put it this way. And I’ll always go back to Professor Wach. When Wach came, you know, Wach was very inquisitive. He read a lot about America. He knew a lot about America. As a matter of fact, he had read probably more books about America than most people on the faculty. He knew all kinds of things. He knew about the Gold Rush of 1848. He knew about the German Freethinkers going out there and starting anew. He knew all kinds of stuff. And then Wach wanted to learn more about America. Wach was the one who introduced me to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which I found one of the most fascinating things I ever read. And it’s still alive. But it was Wach who introduced that to me, not some historian, not some sociologist. And, in the summers, Wach would take a bus. He would get a bus and then go through various parts of the country, to see what they were like, and talk to the people. And one summer he took a bus to North Carolina because there was a big Moravian community there 315

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in Winston-Salem. And he went over, and he talked with them, and so on and so forth. And then another summer he went to Hollywood because he wanted to see what that was like. And he met Robert Taylor. And he said, “You know what?” He said, “He’s short. They put him on a little stand.” But it was just curiosity, like Tocqueville. He would say, “I want to see what this place is. What are they doing? How can they be? What is it?” That’s the way he was. Mircea, you could almost say, was totally uninterested in America. He didn’t hate it, and he didn’t regret being here. He liked the university. He loved the University of Chicago. He would never leave. He just loved it. But the rest, you know. See, Mircea, would go to New York, and he would go to San Francisco or someplace like that. In other words, he would get out of his apartment, get in a limousine, go to the airport, get on the plane, arrive in New York, get in a limousine, go to his hotel, meet people, maybe go to a concert, and then get back on a plane. That was America. He was not interested in all of that. Now he was interested in little bitty things, you know, like idiosyncratic behaviors of persons, children, etc. He wrote about the squirrels. He liked little things. “I’m just looking.” And he and I would walk in the afternoon. When he came over to get his mail, it’d be time for me to go home. So I would walk with him. And we had wonderful talks. I was always surprised that Mircea presupposed that I knew so much. He would say, “Well, you know Wittgenstein said, what was it?” Now nobody had ever talked to me about Wittgenstein. I read him on my own. But he just presupposed I knew Wittgenstein. It was precisely because he presupposed this that we had such rich conversations. This is why I say that Mircea was in America, but he never arrived. In other words, he never really came here. He was here, but he didn’t come here. He didn’t arrive. He never got off the boat and went through the process of being here. CARRASCO: He didn’t want to become American? LONG: Very good. He didn’t want to become American. So that was part of that. Now the other part is his impact on America. Now that’s very strange, because hardly anybody had read any of his material before he came. I mean not only in Chicago, but anywhere in America. And his most important works hadn’t been translated. And so from the time he came, and by the mid-’60s, I think his impact was felt, with his book on Yoga, the Haskell Lectures, and Patterns in Comparative Religions had been translated into English. And we were sending our students to teach in public universities since this had been made lawful. They were using these texts almost exclusively. This was also a very volatile period in American culture. America was about to explode. The Civil Rights Movement was taking on intensity. People started worrying about Vietnam, because they had a draft then, you know. And all these little rich upper and middle class college boys were going off to this war. Now, if we still had a draft, I doubt that we would be in all these messy wars. Now we have paid soldiers. And they just go out and fight anywhere we want them to. We don’t call them paid soldiers because they are patriotic young people who don’t have a job or education. So we put them in the Army. If they weren’t in the Army, many of them would be unemployed or in jail. But no upper class or rich kid is volunteering to go to the Army. I just threw that in, but anyway, things were piling up. Now, during this same time, there is this thing going on about teaching religion in colleges. The government is supporting a lot of colleges, but they’re not supporting religion in those colleges. That is, if your university is getting any money from the government, if it’s getting money for atomic research and you’re over there teaching people to be Christian or Jewish or whatever, you can’t get the money. 316

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So the question here is, is there a viable way for non-private schools to teach religion? And there were some people in Washington who said, “No. Any time you teach religion, you’re telling people that you’re trying to convert them. You’re telling them about some other world and so on and so forth.” And then, when they tried to find something that would be palatable for the politicians, such as something going on in Congress that makes something intelligible to all those knuckleheads about how you could teach religion, you know, you get Wach. Wach is hard for scholars and impossible for politicians. And then you had that whole thing about, well, it’s nice to be tolerant and know about everybody. That was kind of weak. But then Mircea comes in. See, the translation of his stuff is taking place while this argument is going on. And then, Professor Robert Michaelsen, this man out at UC Santa Barbara, wrote this brief, and he made a lot of that, you know. In other words, Mircea’s works came in precisely at this moment. And, at the same time, all of these kids who are looking for another world are looking for a world other than the American dream world, a world other than the world where they’re all fighting, and they don’t know why, in a place they don’t know where or what it is, that they’ve never heard of before. And they don’t know what they’re fighting for. And so, in that whole sense of what was going on in the ’60s, Eliade’s work was giving a kind of structure or ordered meaning to other worlds, to the character of worlds that were not just the world of the capitalist nation-state. Now, he never said any of that in anything he wrote. As a matter of fact, he hardly ever made a political statement in anything he wrote that was translated in America. So, in that sense, he was totally apolitical. But, in another sense, there is the context of the reception of his work. See, at that time, you know, there was this guy, Alan Watts. And Alan Watts was going around popularizing Zen and all kinds of “oriental practices.” All kinds of drugs were en vogue. I remember one of the seminars Eliade had taught was on yoga. And I remember these guys from Harvard, who had started, what was it? CARRASCO: You mean the Center for Comparative Religions? LONG: No, no. These guys—what was it? CARRASCO: Robert Evans Schultes? LONG: What’s that stuff? CARRASCO: LSD? LONG: LSD. They came. They came and sat in the seminar. I saw them. They were trying to figure out, you know, these altered states of consciousness, you see. Now Eliade wasn’t into that. But Eliade was trying to say that this kind of world that was made by the West and its sanctification of everything, is not everything. So you can see how his serious scholarly work was commodified and popularized in the cultural modes of that time. CARRASCO: So he had been to India? He knew yoga? LONG: He had been to India. He had been to India long before people started going to India, and long before Indians started coming here. And, you know, he had written articles on witches and witchcraft. And, you know, they were very good, scholarly pieces. But all of a sudden people were seeing here is a serious scholar who takes this stuff seriously. 317

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CARRASCO: Shamanism? LONG: Shamanism. He takes it seriously. It’s not this thing like we’re beyond all that superstition. It was not so much that we have left everything behind. It was more of a “we are moving on ahead” kind of attitude, which a great deal of the West was involved in. CARRASCO: Okay. So let me ask you a couple more questions, then we’ll let you go back and relax and rest. So you have been watching some video of Mircea, seeing him again. LONG: Yeah. CARRASCO: What feelings do you have? What does it bring back to you, when you see these images of Mircea talking and gesturing? LONG: Well, it’s a funny thing. I think I could describe it better by talking about what I feel is the different perception you and I have of Mircea. One, I see Mircea as the man, the person. But for me, that man and person is about a very thick and important structure of my life, you see. So I don’t tend to see him so much in a singular kind of way. I guess I see him as a part of something, and how that something would not be if he were not a part of it. So that, in that sense, I just see how strange life and the world can be, that if you tried to plan this ahead of time, it would never be, you never could have come up with it. But out of just what would seem to be random incidents, something so powerfully meaningful occurred. So when I hear all these people, Johnny-come-latelies and so forth, talking about Mircea, I don’t know what they’re talking about. I think what people do, they make up their own Mircea. And most of it is talking about Mircea in Romania. And I’m trying to say, “You’re American. You don’t know what was going on in Romania. You didn’t know him then.” And then, for them to be saying that he was, you know, anti-Semitic and all that, I say, I don’t know anything about that. I know that I never heard him say anything anti-Semitic, but that’s not the argument. The argument is, and what bothers me about Americans, as an American, is that they don’t understand that most of them are fascists, that I grew up under fascism, that most black people know fascism. And they don’t seem to understand that. And it’s right below the surface—white power. And we don’t have a right to undertake this kind of critique of anybody until we get our own stuff together, you see, because people want to disregard what they did here. They want to act as if, “Well, you know, Native Americans, or black people, we got over that.” So what bothers me is that none of these people have ever taken a real hard-nose stand against this mess. They think that this little business of being liberal—liberal in their politics— is enough. It’s not enough. And it doesn’t wash with me. So, if you want to talk about something on a scholarly level that is in disrepute, okay. I’ll agree. Anybody who is supporting fascism, including Mircea and most of my compatriots, let’s get on with that conversation. But let’s talk about something we both know about. Let’s talk about something close to both of us. Let’s talk about something we have access to. Let’s talk about something we have data, records, testimony, people, whatever. Now the one conversation you cannot have in this country, on an ordinary level, with most white people, is a conversation about race. They will not talk to you about it. But you have all these euphemisms. Right now, all you have to do is listen to these Republicans having these debates. And, you know, they get very close to saying, “We want that black man out of there,

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because it’s not our country when a black man is running it.” See that’s what they’re appealing to, and everybody knows it. But the newspeople won’t say anything about it. So, you know, they think we’re crazy. So they’re going to tell me, “When Mircea was a young man in Romania, in ’23, he supported the Iron Guard and the Iron Guard went on to help Hitler fight for the fascists in Spain.” Well, let me tell you about Spain. America was on Hitler’s side in Spain. And the only Americans who went to Spain were in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And they were volunteers who went over there to help the rebels. CARRASCO: Yeah. LONG: And I knew some of them. But most Americans were hoping—they hoped—that little dictator Franco would win. So don’t bring up all of this Romania stuff, I mean, you don’t know anything, so just shut up. Did you have a question you wanted to ask before we go? CARRASCO: Okay. Is there anything else you want to say about Mircea? LONG: Well, you know, some other things will come up later in the project. But the other thing that was very powerful in Mircea was the weight and profundity he gave to the imaginary world and to the work of the imagination. It is not only the imaginative act but equally a practical meaning. CARRASCO: So I think that’s good. I mean we want to get you back and get you some rest. LONG: That will be good. CARRASCO: Yeah.

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CHAPTER 25 THE HUMANITIES AND “OTHER” HUMANS

With us, it is an old conviction that Western philosophy is dangerously close to “provincializing” itself (if the expression be permitted): first by jealously isolating itself in its own tradition and ignoring, for example, the problems and solutions of Oriental thought: second by its obstinate refusal to recognize any “situations” except those of the man in historical civilizations, in defiance of the experience of “primitive” man, of man as a member of traditional societies.1 —Mircea Eliade The humanities have traditionally been understood to form the basis for the college curriculum. This meaning of the college curricula is taken seriously in most distinguished universities as well as in the myriad of small liberal arts colleges that are spread across the landscape of this country. What is at stake in this concern for the humanities? It seems to me that this concern expresses the desire to form and inform students with a special and precise insight into the nature of the human mode of being. Stated in this way, it is the intention of the liberal arts or the humanities to provide a perspective from which one is able to understand human life as a total meaning—total in any one of its manifestations as well as total in the many configurations and manifestations that human existence might take. It is this sense of the totality of human life that allows for attention to and assessment of its essence as an intention and a possible realization. So it is through the humanities—in the main through the disciplines of art, history, music, religion, philosophy—that we are supposed to come to terms with the kind of data from which these issues emerge. Through the natural sciences our minds are able to contemplate the manner in which our species is determined by and capable of the determining order of those human and non-human forms of the world that contain us, form us, define the possibilities for our enhancement as well as constrain us within the limits of a common human community. It is therefore the inter-relationship of totality, essentiality, and value that forms the critical issue in the humanities. Notions of this sort obviously give rise to contention regarding the value or worth of human existence, whether as individual or cultural expression. But the humanities must always be defined in terms of the actual or possible worlds of those who undertake to be informed by this orientation. For the most part in the Western world since the Enlightenment, the humanities in this sense have formed, if not a “theology,” at least an ideology of the West. In most cases the humanities curriculum is dedicated to those kinds of cultural data, those sorts of cultural meanings that have emerged from the Hebraic, Greek, and Christian forms of our culture. In other words, these data defined a normative meaning of our actual and possible human worlds. One of the crucial issues in the humanities today has to do with a definition of the meaning of totality in terms of human worlds. In the first instance, how are we to define the human species? Are all human beings to be defined as constituting the human species? Are all human cultures, both past and present, to be included in the study of the humanities? Are all human situations part of the

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possible constituting data of the humanities? In other words, the question is raised, given the actual or possible worlds we live in, is it adequate for the humanities to derive its fundamental orientation, meaning, and data from simply the Hebraic, Greek, Christian meanings of our culture? Our late colleague, Mircea Eliade, often reminded us that the West was in danger of provincializing itself by not taking account of other human situations, those of past history— especially, he would say, those of archaic cultures and other human situations in our contemporary world represented by the cultures of India, China, and in other parts of our globe.2 In this sense, the meaning of the humanities as it relates to the issue of totality must be rethought. One of the striking things about our times is that all human beings in the world know about the existence of all other human beings. What has come to fruition is the notion that was enunciated some years ago by Wendell Wilkie, the Republican candidate for president of the United States in 1940; one of his slogans was “one world.” Most of us at that time did not understand the full implications, theoretical and practical, of the meaning of one world. It is very clear today that this notion is no longer simply a slogan; we are conscious of just how we are inextricably bound to all other human cultures in all parts of the world. Any meaning of actual or possible worlds must perforce take account of all human beings. Now to the issue of essentiality. The humanities in the American sense represent a translation of the German term, Geisteswissenschaft, which means the “science of the human spirit”; but the nuances of this term are lost in translation as we don’t speak of “spirit” in this way. What is clear, however, is the notion that it is possible to undertake a serious and systematic investigation and understanding of that which is characteristically and irreducibly human, those expressions and qualities without which there would not be a proper way of even raising the issue of the specific mode of the human being. There have been many ways by which this problem has been posed. More often than not, the posing of the issue itself has led to definitions, methods, and disciplines around the specific quality or meaning being essentialized; this is understandable. For example, there is the attempt to understand the human as a religious being, homo religiosus, and thus within this perspective any understanding of the human must take into account the predilection of human beings to live their lives in relationship to that which is sacred or holy; the implication is that this meaning is pervasive in all cultures and times. The totalizing and essentializing of a quality enables one to come to terms with that which is unique to each and common to all. We also have definitions of this kind of essential quality of the human in art, music, literature, and so on. Since the Enlightenment, other generalizing notions have been put forth: homo socius, human beings live in social groups; homo geographicus, human beings must orient themselves within their space. Rivaling religion, however, as one of the notions regarding the human is the meaning of history—human beings and human societies are what they are by virtue of their historicity. The notion of history is often confusing because it is weighted with a number of meanings and connotations. For the most part, within our Western tradition history has always carried theological baggage, even for the secular historian. The theological baggage has grown out of the normativity of the Hebrew and Christian orientations of our culture; that specific mode by which they call history is revalorized into a theological value. This meaning may be expressed in the following manner. The historicity of the human community, the understanding that humans work in relationship to the deity and in the temporal arena can interact to create a new entity, gives a specific meaning to the notion of temporality. From this point of view, primacy is given to 322

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human events; those novelties in time that have come about because of the volition of human communities and individuals, which in turn forms the locus of value for an orientation in the societies of the Western world which is both theological and secular. This orientation carries with it a critique—a critique of those cultures and societies who neither accept nor have acted upon this understanding of human temporality. For example, the long temporal period before the beginnings of urban communities in Mesopotamia is referred to as prehistory, an era before history! Now, in one sense, all human beings are historical beings insofar as we all live in a temporal-spatial continuum. When we say “pre-history,” however, we are saying that there is something not quite normative, not quite authentic, about those persons and cultures who did not accept a certain valuational meaning of human time; therefore, most of our ancestors who lived before urban traditions came into being are said to have lived in pre-history. Another valence of this same meaning is expressed in our regard for those cultures and societies of our modern world who have not been involved in history-making activities, that is, those societies and cultures in the world whose mode of being was not predicated upon bringing into being new historical constellations and meanings. These cultures have been variously referred to as “primitive,” “uncivilized,” “savage,” and so forth. In other words, the very notion of history from the Western point of view creates other worlds, other peoples, and other cultures who by definition, given this categorization, are looked upon as being lesser in value than the history makers. Following closely upon this theological historical meaning of the human is the Marxist understanding. Marxists are nothing unless they are historical, and in this sense they keep alive that theological-historical tradition in the Western world, albeit from an anti-Western religious point of view. The meaning of history for Marxists must be looked for not simply in the volitional acts of human being and communities. For them, the fundamental meaning of the human act is not the amalgam or discernment of the action of a deity with the human community but through the modes of production and reproduction in societies; the modes of production and the meaning of the division of labor are for them the keys to the understanding of the nature of the human act and the mode of being. Marxists hope that through history all human societies may be liberated; that is, attain the fullness of the human mode through discerning the right relationship between modes of material production and the creativity of human beings working together towards this end. On the level of material modes of production and distribution, this liberation would at the same time bring about a meaning of the human that is consistent with our understanding of the human through both the human and natural sciences. From this perspective, the Marxist understanding fulfills the ideal of the Enlightenment. Presiding over or undergirding any notion of totality or essentiality is a more pervasive meaning of the human—a meaning so deeply imbedded in our tradition that we hardly ever bring it into consciousness: this is the notion of the human as a rational being. We posit this meaning at the beginnings of the West in the Greek classical tradition and see it as the enduring structure of the Western cultural tradition. It is the simultaneous extension and critique of this meaning of the rational in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment traditions of the West that evoke the problematical nature of the humanities and the ensuing debates about the meaning of such an orientation.

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One could argue that the critique of the Enlightenment orientation was brought about by the Enlightenment itself. Prior to the Enlightenment orientation, the meaning of the epistemological issue of meaning held together two necessary structures: the capacity and limitations of human reason and the givenness of the creation by God. Thus the proper understanding of any form of creation was predicated on an inherent order of its meaning as given in creation and upon the wisdom and grace of God as the provider of human reason for the purpose of understanding the created order. Knowledge as accumulated wisdom, as well as the processes of knowing, were predicated upon a transcendental meaning of the otherness given through creation by God and the inherent otherness of the forms of the world. The epistemological issue of the Enlightenment centered around the proper way of knowing the forms of the world apart from an inherent structure of transcendence within these forms or within the knowing subject. Alexander Pope’s aphorism that “the proper study of mankind is man” may seem commonplace to us today, but it represents a great divide on the epistemological level, for we have moved away from an understanding that presupposed that the proper locus for an understanding of the human was in and through God. Instead, we find emphasized the human understanding of humanity now acknowledged as the most certain, creative, and beneficial meaning of human understanding. The meaning of reason and rationality kept pace with this epistemological shift. All human beings are rational beings and this is the key to human understanding. Human understanding is possible because the person or community who wants to know is represented by a commensurate rationality in the beings or things to be known. All systematic acts of knowing must of necessity stylize what is to be known in the modality of an object. This stylization is the essential problematic of knowledge itself; it is also the basis for the possible resolution of the problem of knowing. When the meaning and notion of God created the stylization of alterity and otherness in the manner of the “Wholly Other,” as in the language of Rudolf Otto or Karl Barth—when God was that which was “wholly other,” or when this “wholly other” represented the transcendent context of the problem of knowledge—the object to be known could never be exhausted by any mode of human understanding. Any object or being of creation could be known completely only in God and by God. In the Enlightenment worldview, there was a denouement, an eclipse, a reversal, a distancing of the meaning of deity as a structure of the epistemological problem. Western culture, through its philosophical orientation, brought about the creation of other cultures and peoples as “empirical others”; that is, their alterity is not from this point of view rooted in their inherent givenness as a structure of the created order, but as a creation of the human order and orientation of simply another human culture, “with the right methods.” One is able to discern that these “empirical others” possessed in a debased form some of the characteristics of the archetypal meanings of a deity of former times. They were distantiated, not by an infinity of time and space, but in geographical space and empirical time. They were different from normative human beings but in terms of a qualitative superiority but as inferiors. One’s relationship to them was ambiguous; they at once repelled and attracted. The discourse of the relationship to them expressed intimacy to the extent that they were members of the human family, but not an intimacy that defined the Hebraic tradition of justice and love but the more “objective intimacy” of objects of human knowledge. The ambiguous, debased, and sentimental relationships to these “objects of human knowledge,” created through the sciences and categories of Enlightenment reason, brought 324

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about what every Enlightenment epistemology had to face sooner or later: the antinomies of reason, those conundrums of reason that appear in its practical and instrumental expressions, that radical difference in reason that seems to lie at the heart of reason itself. We see this in the great work of Immanuel Kant, but it is equally present in Hume’s Dialogue and in the English empiricists’ discussions of the philosophical origins of the human community. It appears in a quite different manner in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel posed the problem of the antinomy of reason in the form of a dialectic and used the historical metaphor of the master-slave to illustrate this dialectic in a concrete form. Hegel’s posing of the antinomy of reason in terms of this metaphor represents the concrete rendering of a meaning of reason, for it mirrors the historical times of the Enlightenment. The basic issue raised here is, how, within Enlightenment categories of reason and humanism, does one make sense of the practical and instrumental usages made of reason, given the mercantile imperialism of the nations of modern Europe? If otherness is to have no substantive transcendental structure, but is only a moment in the epistemological process, then there seems to be an internal necessity of reason to create “empirical others” for philosophical and economic reasons. These “empirical others” are the others of the New World, of Africa, of India, of China—of the entire extra-European world. Now, Hegel’s Phenomenology makes it clear that there is a relationship between the understanding of others and the political power over the objects to be understood. This is a different kind of meaning of the others in relationship to what we call civilization. I put it this way because the very notion of civilization—a notion and word that appears in Western languages only at the end of the eighteenth century—is directly related to the problematical issues of the “empirical others” and alterity. While the word “civilization” does not appear until this late date, all cultures have always had some discourse that enabled them to specify the difference between themselves and other cultures. This sort of difference, though often imputing superiority to one’s own culture, was at heart made only on a descriptive level. The new meaning of “civilization” as it emerges from the Enlightenment worldview is not simply descriptive of the cultures of the West; it appears as a necessary philosophical construction within the problem of knowledge. The problem of knowledge is now formed and structured in relationship to a creation that in its very formation constitutes an epistemological problem. The West is defined in terms of its geographical position in relationship to other parts of the world; more importantly, however, the West is what it is as that culture that has undertaken the economic, military, and philosophical creation and simultaneous conquest of a world. The “primitive” and/or the “Orient” constitute necessary meanings of the Western world: the empirical designations of “others” is both an issue of practical and theoretical reason. Antinomies of reason in this form lie behind the problematical meaning of the humanities in a post-Enlightenment world. The cultural languages of the modern Western world, in both their popular and sophisticated discourses, all possess a special meaning for the “empirical others”; there is a place in every Western “sentence” for those necessary alterities. Sometimes this placement is explicit, as with a word at times it is the necessary and silent pause between the words; at other times it provides the basis for a negative definition (we are not like x). This placement of word or space is thus not so much a description as it is the embodiment of a conceptual and categorical orientation. Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, Nigerian man of letters, once told of his invitation to deliver a series of lectures at Cambridge University. Upon his arrival at Cambridge, he discovered that 325

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the faculty of the Department of English Literature were very surprised that he had chosen to lecture on African literature. For them, there was no such category as African literature; this, despite the fact that he was at the time a professor of literature in Nigeria. His colleagues at Cambridge, however, determined that there was to be no category of African literature. Though his lectures dealt with African literatures, Soyinka ended up giving his lectures under the auspices of the Department of Anthropology. The reason for this is very clear, and one should not fault the faculty of English literature at Cambridge too severely, as they were being faithful to a received tradition of the academy. In Western cultural languages, to say anything about Africa means that you are dealing with “primitives,” and the university discourse about primitives is found in the anthropology department. It makes no difference whether one is talking about politics, music, economics, or whatever; all aspects and dimensions of the primitives belong in the same place. They belong there categorically and conceptually because this is the place we have made for them within the economy of our Western categorical languages. This problem has led to various responses in American universities. In an attempt to redress the issue, new intellectual orientations have been added to our curricular structure; we now have African American studies, women’s studies, Native American studies, and so on. All of these additions to our curricular structures are attempts to make up for a lack in our former understanding of the nature of the human and the humanities. We are adding on; we are making a redress; we are reforming. It is precisely at this point that a peculiar problem arises—an antinomy. The humanities as traditionally structured in our universities were based substantively, conceptually, and methodologically upon the exclusion of those whom we are now attempting to include. The “humanistic sentence” remains intact in the midst of the socalled reforms; the structure still holds. We can see this clearly in the debates that have gone on over the last two decades in Anthropology when many scholars realized that the term “primitive” carried a negative valence. A name-change was called for: instead of “primitive,” we’ll use the terms “non-literate,” “smallscale societies,” “cold” societies as over and against the West’s “hot” societies—or whatever. What has occurred is simply the creation of tactful synonyms, an exercise in good manners. The sentence remains because as long as the only possible world for the meaning of humanitas is a world that is in continuity and consistent with the meaning, rise, and deployment of the Western world—that is, the Western interpretation of these meanings—we will never raise the pressing problem of the humanities in our time. One discourse about the West creates its continuity and coherence through founding its arche in the Hebraic cultures of the Ancient Near East and the city-state polities of Hellenism. The modern West is understood as simply an extension of this continuity. The meaning of the modern Western world as a reciprocal relationship between the cultures of the world through the navigation of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the founding of a stability for Northern Europe, and its ability to break from Mediterranean ideologies and powers, is overlooked in most meanings of the modern Western world. The ideological foci of most interpretations of the West were choices to look backwards instead of forward. These ideologies created a glorious history precisely in the orientations that they were rejecting. The paradigmatic case is the Protestant Reformation’s rejection of the Mediterranean Christian Church; the most intense and ambiguous form is the American rejection of Europe without claiming the authenticity and related meanings of being in the 326

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world across the Atlantic. In these rejections, the meaning of the humanities was allied with the historical thrusts of imperialism and colonialism. This alliance does not imply that all scholars and scholarly work were fueled by the ideological meaning of imperialism and colonialism; it does mean, however, that a corpus of scholarship about human beings and their worlds was fashioned within the context of this ideological construct. Any notion of the humanities in our time must come to terms with the relationship of the continuity of the Western discourse with the correlative history of Western imperialism from the fifteenth century to the present. It is for reasons such as these that many of us interested in the humanities today might sound a bit nihilistic to many humanists and humanistic scholars. An attack is being waged upon every form of the Enlightenment meaning of the human. This attack grates the ears of many humanistic scholars because within the constellation of meanings and values, coming from both the Greco-Roman-Christian and the Enlightenment traditions, humanism—the highest values and valuation of the human mode—expressed as the norm and the epitome of religious and cultural possibility. But these attacks upon the various humanisms, whether they be Greek, Christian, or even Marxist, are really attacks upon the categorical and conceptual language that must of necessity create “empirical others” in worlds that must be conquered and dominated. An example of this is found in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of a famous argument between Lévi-Strauss and Jean-Paul Sartre reported in The Savage Mind.3 Sartre had remarked that one of the great things that should and might occur after the Second World War was the decolonization of all areas of the globe: all of these peoples and cultures in the various parts of the world could join humanity by becoming a part of history. Lévi-Strauss’s rejoinder was that Sartre, because of his humanism, did not understand that all of these peoples and cultures in the several parts of the world had always been fully human—before colonialism, during colonialism, and, presumably, after colonialism. All peoples in all parts of the world were already, and had previously been, totally human! What meaning can the humanities have if we take seriously the import of Lévi-Strauss’s rejoinder? While the discussion began in the terms of a political meaning, the rejoinder has implications for the order of knowledge. Given the world in which we live as both actual and possible, what directions are possible in the definition of a new form and structure of the humanities? I, for one, am not of the opinion that we can solve this issue by simply making a smorgasbord, creating the humanities out of a little bit of this culture and a bit of several other cultures. Any definition of the humanities as an academic orientation should possess some systematic meaning. We might begin by trying to define the kind of world that is being experienced, understood, and participated in by most human beings. The world we live in operates in a very different rhythm since the end of the Second World War. It contains different and varied modalities of the human and many of those previously categorized as “empirical others” in the past are now giving expression to a meaning of the Western world in terms of reciprocity rather than objectivity. The empirical and symbolic locus for a meaning of this kind may be seen in that phenomenon that anthropologists and historians of religion have called the “cargo cult.”4 Cargo cults resulted from the impact of modern Western culture on non-Western peoples in various parts of the world since the sixteenth century. The cargo cultists have taken account of the materialism and mercantilism involved in the contact; they have experienced this through technological and military power. They have also seen the destruction of their cultural meanings. By and large, they have been forced to 327

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live in two worlds at the same time. They have been forced to come to terms with a world that is not insured to them through tradition. They have assessed the impact and meaning of the relationship among humans as defined by a money economy; they have worried about work, its value, and its structure. And through all this, they have attempted through their thought and behavior to create new human beings—new in the sense that these persons will be neither mimics of the West nor persons who wish to go back to their old traditions. Such newness should be the case for Westerners also. The cargo cult presents us with the possibility that the study of the humanities will reinstitute a structure of intimacy and reciprocity into its methodological orientations. The goal of the cargo cultist might very well specify an ideal for the new structure of the humanistic venture.5 Before such an ideal can be attained, the reality of the humanity of the “empirical others” will continue to force a critique of the present order and the meaning of this orientation. The meaning of essentiality, wholeness, and value might well form the continuity in this debate and discourse, but these meanings will now have a new locus. The new placement of these meanings in the several cultures of the world will compel us to undergo what Ashis Nandy has called a debate among “intimate enemies”6 before we are able to embrace a new and fuller meaning of a humanities that, in fact, humanizes. Cargo cults are, on the one hand, an expression of the contact, but they are equally expressive of a response to this contact. In this response, the cargo cultist hopes to create a world that will afford both the Westerner and the extra-Western culture the opportunity to participate creatively in an-other world of human beings.

Notes 1. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), x. 2. Ibid. 3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 245–269. 4. There is an extensive literature on cargo cults. See, first of all, Peter Lawrence’s entry on the topic in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. Lindsay Jones, 15 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005), 3:1414– 1425. The bibliography accompanying this article is excellent. See especially Kenelm Burridge, Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium (London: Methuen, 1960). 5. I have explored the broader parameters of this possibility in my article, “University, the Liberal Arts, and the Teaching and Study of Religion,” in Beyond the Classics? Essays in Religious Studies and Liberal Education, ed. Frank Reynolds and Sheryl Borkhalter (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 19–40; also published as Chapter 9 of this book. 6. See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), passim.

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CHAPTER 26 HISTORY, RELIGION, AND THE FUTURE

Though my title places emphasis on the future and may seem to refer to my powers of prophecy, I must state at the beginning that I am a historian, one accustomed to thinking about and interpreting things past rather than things future. Historical study, however, brings to one’s consciousness the fact that the past is only a part of a temporal sequence—a sequence which is complete only if the moment of the present and the thrust toward a future is added to the dimension of the past. The historian’s discussion of the future should not be confused with the pronouncements of prophet or seer, though these embody valid types of experience and expression. The historian’s role is a more modest one. In speaking about the future the historian attempts to recover something of the meaning of the human venture, not to prove that the past is always repeated or that the golden age has already come to an end, or any other general speculative theory about the final meaning of time itself. As a historian I study the past to understand the human presence as it has confronted and been confronted by the reality of nature, man, and the gods. The understanding of the human mode of being may cause us in the present to discover new resources for the continuation of the human enterprise. The historical object may appear in the form of a potsherd, coin, manuscript, myth, dance, or other archaeological or ethnological artifacts. It does not, however, simply exist back there, in itself and by itself. We are rather referring to a relationship between the expression of a type of human reality and the appearance or givenness of this reality to a person, age or culture. Therefore it is composed of two poles—the givenness of the expression and its appearance to the interpreter. It is therefore necessary to understand the context in which the modern study of the history of religions has arisen. This will throw light on what we have to say about the nature of religion for the present or the future. If we had to make one statement regarding the difference in the religious attitudes between the medieval Western and the modern temper I would point to the fact that during the medieval period religion seemed to permeate and define the totality of life in symbolic terms. Not only was it a reality on the level of inwardness and piety, but it also defined the public and mundane dimensions of everyday life. For the medieval man, religion defined reality par excellence.1 The modern temper as it relates to religion begins in the Renaissance and reaches its peak in the nineteenth century. The new discoveries which man made about himself and his world tended to cut him off from the traditional religious symbols and meanings. The reality of religion was progressively relegated to a minor role, and the prestige of man’s rational capacities and the new science and technology seemed progressively to undercut the validity of the traditional symbols and orientations. At first glance it may therefore seem paradoxical that the study of the history of religions as a discipline has its roots in the Enlightenment. But this is not so strange if we remember that with all of its innovating spirit, the Enlightenment still had a feeling for that prestige which is related to the beginnings of things. In addition to this, the study of the history of religion was undertaken by many Enlightenment thinkers

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because they felt that the truth about religion could be discovered only by a person and in an age which itself did not set a great store by religious meanings. The effect of the Enlightenment studies in the history of religion was the progressive rationalization of the meaning not only of religious symbols and structures as they appeared in history but also, and more importantly, the rationalization of history itself. The high point of Enlightenment understanding of religion was reached at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One could almost say that the Western world “rediscovered” religion. Now, this rediscovery of religion was obviously related to movements internal to Western culture itself. The scholars and artists of the Renaissance had already turned to the Greek and Roman myths in their search for a new cultural orientation. By the time of the Enlightenment knowledge of the classical pagan religions had been supplemented by a vast amount of materials describing the primitive cultures of Africa and the New World and the great cultures of India and the Far East. The convergence of these two sources of non-biblical religious data formed the objective pole of this new discovery of religion. The interpretative pole of this rediscovery may be seen in the two interdependent hermeneutical theories which resulted from Enlightenment historical interpretation. Professor Frank Manuel described these theories thus: “the bulk of eighteenth-century thought on the origins of religion and the significance of myths was divided between the Euhemeristhistorical and the psychological schools, the fundamental alternatives which still remain open to the analyst of religion.”2 These two theories must be seen as a part of a more general Enlightenment worldview which was characterized by positivism and evolutionism. It is in fact their positivism and evolutionism which enable us to understand the reductionistic tendency in the euhemerist and psychological theories of interpretation. In the last analysis the Enlightenment interpretation of religion tended to camouflage the specifically religious elements in the data. The reductionistic theories resulting from a rationalistic interpretation of the history of religion could not do justice to the specific symbols through which religion found expression. Thus the employment of rationalistic principles in the study of the history of religion produced a residue of religious forms which could not be explained in rational terms. A predisposition to define the residual elements in nonrational terms developed. We may observe several orientations to religion which are indebted to this form of interpretation. For example, Edward B. Tylor’s definition of religion as a “belief in Spiritual Beings” was predicated on what David Bidney has rightly called “a psychological delusion and mistaken logical inference.” Tylor thought, Bidney continues, that “Primitive man is said to confuse subjective and objective reality, ideal and real objects.”3 Tylor is, however, unable to explain adequately why this irrational form of thinking takes place in religion. Sir James Frazer’s separation of religion from magic is another example of the same orientation. Later interpretations such as those by Robert Ranulph Marett and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl are directed even more precisely to the emotional and nonrational interpretations of religion. The difficulty posed by a nonrational understanding of religion is not that this understanding is wrong but rather that it claims too much for itself. All religions give expression to the fact that the religious reality cannot be exhausted by a rational conscious expression. They have not, however, tried to reduce the religious reality to something which is essentially irrational. In every case from Tylor on, reductionist theories of religion have tacitly assumed that there existed in fact nothing which was religious. Religion was not the expression of the reality which 330

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it purported to be about but really of something else—ignorance, underdeveloped rational capacities, psychic structures, and so on. The modem religious problematic centers around this question: have we in fact explained religion away? Another point of view is represented by those who have insisted on the sui generis nature of religious experience and expression. For these interpreters the religious consciousness is an irreducible dimension of the human mode of being; though related to the rational, moral, aesthetic, and unconscious dimensions of life, it is not reducible to any of these dimensions. Neither can any of these dimensions singly or in combination exhaust the meaning of the religious life. The boldest statement of this position may be found in Rudolph Otto’s Idea of the Holy.4 It is in this work that Otto defines with precision the nature of the religious experience and expression. His description of the Holy as mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans remains the classical statement regarding religious experience. The importance of Otto’s work is that it made it possible for religion to be studied as religion—as a unique human reality which required its own method because it referred to its own object. Though Otto carefully delineated the character of the religious experience and expression, his theory still presupposed a nonrational basis for religion. The uniqueness of his interpretation was expressed by the isolation of the nonrational element in the religious not only from rational categories but also from other forms of the nonrational. This religious nonrational element could not therefore be understood in terms of the general laws of psychology. But what was at stake here is more than simply the right to study a phenomenon with an appropriate method. This any investigator would concede. The implication of the definition of religion as sui generis referred not only to the existence of a specifically religious experience in historical materials but also to the possibility of religious experience for modern man. Otto and his followers insisted on their methodological view and appealed to the study of the history of religions as not only data but confirmation of homo religiosus as a methodological principle. This methodological principle prevailed in historical religious studies. It had the value of making precise the nature of the religious object, and it had ramifications for the understanding of history itself. I stated above that the study of the history of religions in the Enlightenment tended to rationalize the religious object and the history in which it appeared. The new orientation to the religious object instituted by Otto carried with it a new orientation to history, which in turn led to a new hermeneutics, a new approach to the problem of understanding. For if man was to be defined in his religiousness and if this religiousness expressed itself through myths, symbols, and sacred forms, a rationalistic approach was no longer possible. Rationalization was unwarranted because it did not do justice to the subject matter and because it tended to lose sight of the religious uniqueness of the data. Contemporary methodological developments in the history of religions have moved beyond Otto’s nonrational orientation. Instead of limiting religious experience to the expression of the nonrational, the new methods, in the words of Mircea Eliade, are concerned “to present the phenomenon of the sacred in all its complexity, and not only as it is irrational. What will concern us is not the relation between the rational and nonrational elements of religion but the sacred in its entirety.”5 Similarly, Joachim Wach emphasizes the note of totality in his definition of authentic religious experience. For Wach religious experience “is a response to what is experienced as ultimate reality”; “religious experience is a total response of the total being to what is apprehended as ultimate reality.”6 By paying special attention to man as homo religiosus, contemporary historians of religion have shown that the history of religions describes the specific existential situations in which 331

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man has given a human order to the world. It is the obligation of the sacred which expresses the ultimacy of man’s being. The exploration of man’s being and the discovery of new dimensions of reality are at the same time a confrontation with sacredness and ultimate reality. It is not accidental that the basic and fundamental discoveries of human culture are related in religious language. Vestiges of this orientation may be noted as late as the nineteenth century. Alexander Graham Bell is reported to have remarked when he contemplated his invention, the telephone, “What hath God wrought?” It is therefore in the history of man’s religion that we confront man as the unique and ineffable creature. His religious history cannot be spoken of in terms less ultimate than the realities which are expressed in it. For this reason, historical interpretation in religion must introduce the most adequate human scale, for it is the scale which creates the phenomenon! It is, in fact, our awareness of the critical human situation of our times which has generated the great interest in historical religious studies. Our turning to history as a mode of orientation is itself indicative of our crisis. To the extent that the study of history is the study of the past, it is the study of death and things dead, and, as expressed in words from the last chorus of one presentation of Oedipus Rex, “the pattern of a man’s life cannot be known until the end.”7 What is true of an individual’s life may also be true of the life of mankind. Our preoccupation with history, historical methods, and problems, an interest which has dominated academic and theological studies for a century, is a sign that some type of basic pattern in human life has come to an end. Indeed, Henri Breuil, the distinguished archaeologist and paleontologist, once remarked that the disruptive character of our times is due to the fact, as he put it, that “we have just cast off the last moorings of the neolithic age.”8 If this is true, and one must certainly respect the word of such a reputable authority, we conclude that a basic cultural pattern which began some 10,000 years ago, a pattern which has been intensified and diffused over the entire habitable globe, has come to an end and that man stands on the borderline between past and future, that fragile and pregnant moment which is the present. Will the past of the human presence which began some 2,000,000 years ago prove to be the millstone around our necks—dramatizing that the entire human venture represents a sickness and that the man-creature is pathological, a diseased animal running to its ruin like lemmings rushing to the sea? There is, I think, another possibility—a possibility which opens to the future because it opens us to the past. It is a historical possibility and a religious possibility. This possibility opens up to us the past of mankind as a religious resource, and it gives ultimate seriousness to the new world community which is slowly and painfully emerging today. In former times the traditions and histories of the peoples of the world served as dogmatic authorities and barriers. While the traditions served as models for humanity, such human models were achieved always at the expense of separation from other traditions and cultural orientations. There is in all historical and cultural traditions this pathological tendency. Such a history cannot serve the new human community. If the new human community is to encompass the whole of mankind, its history must be the history of all men. Its history must be a history which delineates the existential situations and, more importantly, the basic intentionality of man’s confrontation with the sacred. If the history of mankind is to be recovered, it must be as a history of religion. For us in the Western world, reality is given in the form of history. We know from the study of man’s religious life and also from our own participation that we are able to accept the 332

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givenness of life only if it appears to us as sacred or in revelation. It is abundantly clear that man has been able to accept and therefore humanize his natural environment only when it appeared to him as a sacred reality. This is the explanation of the worship of nature. Before man worshipped nature he did not “have” it. We know that it was there before he worshipped it, but it was there for him either as a neutral cipher or as a profane terror. The same may be said of his sexual life and even of the interior realities of his being, his intellect, will, and emotion. It is through the will of God that man discovered his own will, and the act prior to the discovery of the intellect is the experience of wonder. The givenness of human history now looms before us. Either it is there as a neutral cipher and profane terror or it is there as a religious possibility. This fact explains in part the modern preoccupation with history. The search for an adequate pattern of human history—a search which may be seen in Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin, and Kroeber (to name only a few of the giants)—reveals the ambiguity and pregnancy of the religious problem as the historical problem. The religious problem of history will yield only to a religious resolution. It is the scale that creates the phenomenon! We already observe the religious crisis in the problem of history in Friedrich Nietzsche and all those who chant with him that “God is dead.” What they insist upon is the understanding of death which is inherent in history as the past. God is dead, they say, because the form of reality as history is no more than a neutral and dead cipher signifying nothing. Though negative, the chant of the followers of Nietzsche remains religious. This is a religious orientation, for just as man came to know his own life as human when he discovered a living god, he came to a realization of his own death when he discovered the religious moment which is the death of God. But there is yet another form of attentiveness to the givenness of reality. It is found in different forms in the religious traditions of mankind. The religious man in observing the dead and dry bones asked, “Can these bones live again?” Though staring at the grave, he looked forward to a resurrection from the dead. While participating in the predetermined order of a meaningless world of suffering the religious sages of India understood suffering itself as a spiritual technique leading to salvation. Similarly religion in the future must make a religious and historical affirmation. The great world religions today represent in their inception precisely such a religious revaluation of history. They are all refinements of old archaic religious forms. They have all humanized and made holy the dead weight of history into the religious reality of the sacredness of life. It was given to a select few in the great world religions, the religious geniuses, to experience that vision of the totality and integral nature of man in his confrontation with ultimate reality. These geniuses, the mystics, expressed in an individual and personal manner what is now a religious imperative for the emerging world community. Man in his totality is a symbol of human solidarity. The humanization of the world community must at the same time be a revaluation of the existing world religions. Religiously speaking, it is possible to have a future because all the religious symbols and situations of the past are still awaiting the ultimate fulfillment of their meaning. To be sure, time as a neutral entity measured by a clock will continue, but from a religious point of view, the future is the new mode of humanness. The cosmos which is given to us is not a cosmos as nature but a cosmos as history. The cosmos since paleolithic time appeared to man in the form of nature. It now presents itself under the forms of history. But the basic religious problem remains the same—is it possible for the profane to be made sacred? 333

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It is not therefore strange that the most successful historical method is at the same time the most human method. I refer here to the increasing importance of the phenomenological method in one attempts to know the reality without destroying it, to renew oneself by understanding the “other.” Similarly, the Jewish theologians Martin Buber9 and Max Kadushin10 have emphasized, respectively, the dialogical principle and the “hallowing of life” as basic theological principles. On the popular level I see in the young people’s folk song fests and hootenannies an attempt to recover, learn from, and be renewed by singing songs which have come from another time and another place. The new religious reality, like all religious realities, is already here, in our past and in our present, but as with all sacred things, man must have faith if he is to receive them. He must have faith, first of all, in what is given to him, and he must have faith in what is to be given to him. This is the point at which all religion begins, and this is where all history begins. We cannot describe that first religious act which took place 2,000,000 years ago when Homo habilis,11 at a certain moment, became man and assumed the human condition. The religious traditions of mankind in their cosmogonic myths have never tired of trying to describe and venerate that moment. We may understand in our time the meaning of these cosmogonic myths, for if mankind is to survive, he must assume a new mode of being—a mode of being in which the power of life and the terror of our past is made sacred in a new creation. The religion of the future may not be called Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, or any of the familiar names but will and must be the religion of mankind. Only through some new revelation leading to that religion will we have a future. Our future lies in our past, not as repetition and imitation, but as the New Being who undergirds the novelty of every creation.

Notes 1. For a brief but adequate discussion of this issue in relationship to the problem of hermeneutics see Friedrich Gogarten, Demythologizing and History (New York: Scribner, 1955). 2. Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). 3. David Bidney, “The Concept of Value in Modern Anthropology,” in Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, ed. Alfred L. Kroeber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 686–699, at 686. 4. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925). 5. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 10. 6. Joachim Wach, Types of Religious Experience: Christian and Non-Christian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 32–33 (my italics). 7. This line was taken from a production of Oedipus Rex presented by the National Players at Ohio University on April 17, 1964. 8. Quoted in Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 213. 9. See Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Smith (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1937).

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History, Religion, and the Future 10. See Max Kadushin, Worship and Ethics: A Study in Rabbinic Judaism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 11. Louis S. B. Leakey and his associates have designated the oldest genus of the man-like creature as Homo habilis, which means man the able, handy, or mentally capable. See Louis S. B. Leakey, Phillip V. Tobias, and John R. Napier, “A New Species of the Genus Homo from Olduvai Gorge,” Nature 202, no. 4927 (April 4, 1964): 7–9.

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CHAPTER 27 ENLIGHTENMENT, ANCESTORS, AND PRIMORDIALITY: A NOTE ON MODERNITY AND MEMORY

I would like to make three moves in this paper. First, I want to say something about how the meaning of primal traditions and ancestors came to be a part of my intellectual ancestry. I then want to move to the phenomena of ancestors in those cultures where this meaning is venerated. Finally, I should like to say a word or two about the intellectual and existential impact of these two kinds of ancestry.

The story of a friendship Now to the first point. I begin with the story of a friendship of two Parisian intellectuals, Maurice Leenhardt and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Leenhardt was a Protestant missionary who spent more than three decades in Melanesia; Lévy-Bruhl was a professor of modern philosophy at the Sorbonne. The friendship was rich; it expressed regard for the personal as well as the intellectual dimensions of the two men. This friendship also defines a moment in the study of religion. Maurice Leenhardt has left us an important legacy in his work Do Komo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World,1 and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl is remembered best by his books on the primal traditions, Primitives and the Supernatural, How Natives Think, and The Soul of the Primitive. An abiding meaning of this intellectual friendship and an important document in the study of religion was the posthumous publication of Lévy-Bruhl’s Carnets, which is partly due to his conversations and associations with Leenhardt, and in which he modifies his former notions of a “primitive mentality.” Though there have been relationships between the scholar and the missionary before—and in some cases the scholar and missionary have been the same person—in this case the relationship is more complex. While both men are concerned with religion, they approach the matter from very different perspectives. Leenhardt was a confessing Protestant missionary in the field, while Lévy-Bruhl, who was from a Jewish background, was part of that sociological tradition in France that included Marcel Mauss, Émile Durkheim, Henri Hubert, and Marcel Granet; the tradition is still carried on in the brilliant analyses of primal traditions by Claude Lévi-Strauss. In addition to the sociological and anthropological contexts, Lévy-Bruhl lectured and wrote major treatises on modern philosophy, dealing especially with Leibniz, Jacobi, Comte, and the English empiricists. His fame is based, however, on the six volumes devoted to the analysis of the notion and meaning of the “primitive mind”; he is the philosopher of primitive mentality par excellence. As rare as this relationship was in Paris between the Great Wars, it is equally complex. It is Lévy-Bruhl, the philosopher, who created the Institut d’Ethnologie at the Sorbonne and it was the

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missionary, Maurice Leenhardt, who preceded Claude Lévi-Strauss in the Chair of Comparative Religions of Non-Literate Peoples at the Collège de France! This relationship, this crisscrossing of orientations, vocations, and disciplines, raises one of the central problems related to the meaning of the study of religion in the modern period. The seeming confusion of disciplines, with a confessing missionary becoming a professor in the neo-positivistic tradition of French ethnology and a professor of modern philosophy devoting most of his career to the study of primitives, bears closer scrutiny, for it evokes questions about modernity, religion, and the primitives. From an academic point of view we are accustomed to keep separate the advocacy of a particular religion from the more “objective” study of religion, yet it is the missionary, Leenhardt, who spent more than twenty years in the field, and the scholar, Lévy-Bruhl, who was the armchair propounder of theories about the nature of the “primitive.” It is precisely this curious relationship that might shed some light on the study of religion at this time. I leave this story for the moment; I shall return to it at the end of this presentation and evoke certain nuances from the story of this friendship.

Who are the ancestors? Professor Max Gluckman observed in 1942 that in “Zululand, on the whole, the ancestral cult has largely died out while beliefs in sorcery and magic have survived.”2 Subsequent critical studies have shown that Gluckman was only partly right in this assessment. For the most part he was referring to those urbanized Zulus who had been subjected to some form of Western schooling. It is clear that the meaning of the ancestors is closely related to the structure of the Zulu cosmos. While the ancestors are in the place of the dead, they are equally present in the mundane details of the living and not simply evoked or remembered in funerary rites and ceremonies. Axel-Ivar Berglund has wisely suggested that we should avoid the term “ancestor” and the phrase “ancestor cult,” for they give the wrong impression of what is really taking place in cultures of this kind. He suggested the use of “shade” instead. One reason for not using the word ancestor is that the English idiom suggests ascendants who are dead (according to Western concepts) and, as a result, there is a distance between them and the living. There is, in other words, a separateness between the living and the dead. This is not descriptive of Zulu concepts, which … assume a very close and intimate relationship and association within the lineage between the departed and their survivors. To quote an informant: “My father is departed, but he is,” the idea being that the father is present and active although he is no longer living as the speaker was.3 Berglund’s work on the Zulu shows how the shades are expressed in a direct and indirect way throughout the society of the Zulus. They have a force and power in the determination and structure of gender, in healing practices, in divination, and in the understanding and possession of the Zulu land. The notion of the role of ancestors or shades in the possession of the land is equally strong among the cultures of West Africa. Jack Goody’s Death, Property, and the Ancestors is a monograph dedicated to the funerary rituals among the LoDaaga. He shows how the rituals of death are directly related to inheritance and to the continuation and integrity 338

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of the lineages and how property as land and the power to influence is made a responsibility for the community in the midst of the breaking of the lineages by the fact of death. Peter Metcalf has remarked about what almost every casual observer from the modern west notes when, in commenting on the Berawan, he says, Nowadays, the Berwan speak of their religion as adèd luna (luna = old), or in Malay adat lama. But this is a new term designed to distinguish traditional religious practices from Christianity, which has secured many converts in the last twenty years. The concept of adèd is wide but precise, and I can find no exact English equivalent. It is simply “the way of doing things,” and the adat lama, the traditional religion, is the old way of doing things.4 With this statement Metcalf introduces us to the entire round of funerary rites and what he refers to as the eschatology of the world of the dead and its bearing upon the living. 1) The natural and the supernatural world are inseparable; each is intrinsically a part of the other. 2) Natural entities are endowed with spirit and with spiritually based power. 3) Humans and natural entities are involved in a constant spiritual interchange that profoundly affects human behavior. 4) The spiritual interchange between humans and nature is dominated by hostile forces. Let me conclude this section at this point, since we have already heard detailed discussions of the meaning of ancestors from our colleagues. We had the advantage of hearing from many colleagues who were members of the cultures that they discussed. I shall attempt to make an analogy to that of my colleagues by trying to evoke my ancestors, intellectually and personally, out of the cultures of which I am a part. At this juncture I return to some of the echoes of the first section.

Ancestors and modernity For all sorts of reasons the brilliant group of scholars centered around the Durkheimian school were from a Jewish tradition. They were not practicing Jews, most of them being agnostic or atheistic in their orientation. They had accepted the modern intellectual option outlined and carried through in the Western Enlightenment, thus establishing a record of scholarship in the study and analysis of other cultures, other places, and other times. Their work was, however, contextualized within the problematics of modernity itself. This problematic was not of their own making. In the French tradition it can be seen as early as the work of Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America, where in the midst of his querulous admiration and wonder about the new democracy in North America, he constantly reflected upon the longterm viability of a people or a culture that had no ancestors, who had nothing old, who had no memories, who could evoke no supernatural meanings in their habitation of the land. In reflections of this kind, Tocqueville had reference not only to the practices of the Americans but equally to the ideological position of the Jeffersonians, who were most radical in their position regarding the ancestors. They in fact carried on a war against the ancestors—and this 339

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is not simply in reference to the Revolutionary War. It was equally a war against setting up and institutionalizing a cult of ancestors. They were against inheritance; the dead should have no power or influence over the living! These Jeffersonians would turn over in their graves if they knew that they were being venerated in their country by being referred to as Founding Fathers!5 But back to the sociologists. Durkheim, in his scholarly work, was concerned with this same sort of issue. In Anomie he raised the issue of the relationship of meaninglessness as a modern cultural phenomenon to the issue of tradition and memory—the locus of religion. One might read his work, as well as those of the Durkheimians, as an attempt to evoke within the structures of modernity some echo of the meaning of tradition by introducing the world of modernity to their imaginative reconstruction and to the sources of the religious sentiment in other cultures. Lévy-Bruhl attempted to decipher the primitive mind vis-à-vis the mind of modernity as expressed by Kant, Hume, or Hobbes. Was there another kind or type of mentality, or did human mentality constitute a universal order of being? If the latter, where has the capacity of our memory gone—the ability to know the ancestors, the presence of them in our lives, and the constitutive meaning of power? This is not simply an intellectual problem. The modern world is a world that is simultaneously a world in which millions of people have been displaced from their ancestral traditions. Now, this displacement has not been as other displacements, wherein one culture had the option of accepting the ancestors of the new culture or cultures. The world has been displaced by a culture of modernity that denies the efficacy of all ancestors. The Christian tradition, as part of this spread of modernity, has presented several cultures with the option of being “born only from above.” The adjudication of the issues of the land, kinship lineages, the world of the dead and their well-being and influence in the world of the living—all of this is left to chance. For my culture, a part of the African diaspora in the modern world situated in the United States, a country with a decidedly Calvinist and Enlightenment orientation, the meaning of ancestry has always been a social, political, and religious problem. Unlike the situation in the Caribbean and South America, there was a conscious effort made to destroy the efficacious meaning of the African ancestors in North America. Our ancestry was directed to that of the country of our enslavement, with little space or time given to the imagination or creation of meaning for that space that the ancestors formerly occupied. For different reasons this situation is becoming the lot of several other peoples and cultures in the world. In my case I cannot, in any simple or directly authentic way, attach myself to the African ancestors; the ancestors must be truly my ancestors, related to the intimacies and existential structures of my life, and not simply ideological constructions. What can ancestors mean in the anti-ancestral traditions of modernity? It is clear that even in the cultures of modernity and displacement there is still a yearning for the ancestors. This yearning expresses itself in sentimental and demonic forms, through recourse to racisms, jingoisms, and nationalisms of various sorts. These modes attempt to use the valuation of the ancestral orientation to set forth the most virulent forms of modernity. Nevertheless, the space for the ancestor in the human mode of being still remains. What meanings may be gleaned from the cult of ancestors? Ancestors define a primordial and existential structure of intimacy. In traditional societies they are ritualized at the times of creation, initiation, marriages, and death, and the many other mundane relationships surrounding the extensions of these events into the ongoing life of society. All of these situations define the necessary exchanges that must take place among and between human 340

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beings. Ancestors prevent us from forgetting the vulnerable but necessary risk involved in all human exchanges. They also remind us of the death of the flesh and the perduring values of the bones that become the datum and our trace, and in this sense the literal meaning of “datum” as the giveness of the mystery of human community and generation. While the modern period has been anti-ancestral, it has not been devoid of exchanges. It is out of the order of these exchanges that a new meaning of ancestry must emerge, an ancestry that must take account of the mixture of exchanges, the negativity of these exchanges, and the ambiguity of the ancestry of this tradition. We cannot deal with the meaning of ancestors as simply a sentimental survival of a former period. Our ancestors may no longer be those beneficent shades and elders who have presided over the well-being of our communities; they are no longer the unambiguous la donne described so well by Marcel Mauss in his classic text of the same title. But neither should we allow them to be trivialized and voided of their value by the ideological interpretive schemes of either Marxists or the capitalists, who evacuate the seriousness of exchanges into the sterile language of commodities. There are, indeed, ancestors of modernity. They need our help to be, and we their help to survive. “We are what we remember, so the historian and his [sic] art of remembering are of paramount importance to all societies. They are especially important in our societies which are modernizing madly.”6 What does it mean to have ancestors today, and what does it mean to exercise a critical act of memory in regard to the past? We are, all of us, products of several strands of memories, traditions, ancestries. Our pasts, individually and collectively, do not define singularities and purities; our ancestral traditions are composite, mixed, contextualized. All of our ancestors have undergone the complexity of exchanges of goods, services, bodies, meanings—that entire complex that is the heritage of the world of modernity. We can do no better than to honor all of our ancestors with a critical account of their sojourns as living actors in the world. As scholars and historians this means that we must create the possibility of memory so that a new kind of history can emerge for our future. To return to the first part of this essay, we must combine the evangelism of a Maurice Leenhardt with the critical skepticism of a Lévy-Bruhl or Marcel Mauss. We must revere our specific traditions, not simply by preserving them in their purity, but seeing them equally as modes of intimate imagination of that chaotic past through which all our immediate ancestors lived.

Discussion Rubellite Johnson Those of us who know what it is like to practice ancestor worship have not said much about the immense obligation that is entailed, especially in the practice of rituals. Hawaiian children often have to make a decision when they get to school about whether they are going to continue all those kapus or let them go. Many simply decide that they are not going to go back home again. They run away. Charles Long The fact that it is ritualized means that you don’t always have to have a powerful sense of meaning every time you perform the ritual. That’s the whole point of ritual, to keep you from 341

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having to invest all your time in producing meaning. In my paper I mentioned Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish intellectual group in Paris. It’s very important, I think, to realize they were all Jews, and that they were a certain kind of atheist or agnostic Jewish intellectual. They grew up in a ritualized culture right within modernity. They later gave it up, but they never forgot it. Among the essays that Lévi-Strauss wrote was a piece on table manners. He wrote about his grandfather who was a rabbi and all the rituals they had when they sat down to a meal. Lévi-Strauss gave all that up years earlier, but he was able to come back to it in his writing and ask, “What was my grandfather doing? What was that all about? Why do human beings find it necessary to live a ritualized life?” In the process, he was able to address a whole range of other important issues. So the question is not whether to give up a practice. The crucial questions are how we want to think about the practices we engage in, and what can be evoked from a practice as a basis for thinking. It seems so wrong-headed to suppose that we think about things first and then go out and do them. Ritual is one of the things that prevent us from thinking that we have to produce meaning all on our own. That’s the power of the ritual, or the power of ancestry that provokes the ritual act. Rubellite Johnson Your comments earlier about the displacement that has occurred in recent historic times seem to me to be related to the tensions that exist today within the Hawaiian community. The present political situation is very difficult and you find a lot of different responses to it even among the Hawaiians here in the room. For me there is appeal both in my cultural heritage and in the Jeffersonian project. New avenues of thought and action have opened up to me because of my Western training and education. Yet there is always this pressure for Hawaiians—and for most native people these days—to be completely pure, to be true to our aboriginal religion. But you can’t actually return to the past, and most of us probably don’t really want to do that. I don’t want to give up all the other things I have gained through contact with other societies of the world. Charles Long I have a curious way of seeing the world I was born into. There are no pure traditions as far as I can tell. To put it another way, it’s not an issue of purity and danger; purity is danger. When purity is invoked in relationship to a people or society or culture, you are already in danger. What is being denied there is the fundamental, historical materiality of the modern world, which has to do with displacements and with a wide variety of exchanges. So if there are “primal traditions,” they are traditions that must come to grips with the traditions of modernity before they do anything else. There is no way to jump over that and get back to some original tradition. In that sense, you simply can’t go home again. To go home again means going through the traditions that separated you from home and, unless you go back through those traditions, you will never get home. Maybe it is clearer if I change metaphors and say you can’t fly home. You can’t simply start here and jump back over there. I always have this argument with my friends who are African Americans, who feel that if they get on an airplane and go to Africa, they have become a part of Africa again. I tell them, “No, we have to go back to Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, New Orleans, and all those other places first and 342

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work through that.” That’s the hard way home. If you don’t go home the hard way, then the place you get to will not really be home. It’s in that sense that I am looking in a critical way at modernity and trying to move away from the temptation to think that there is an easy way of dealing with ancestors. My ancestors lived very ambiguous, mixed up, strange, almost unrecorded histories. I know about it and it’s in my culture and in my bones. That’s the only resource I have for doing anything. I can’t act as if that doesn’t exist, but I find that it’s a great temptation for people who have been colonized or oppressed during the modern period to think that there is an easy way out. I don’t think there is. It’s an extremely difficult problem. But at the same time, it’s the only way out for them, and possibly for everyone else on the planet as well.

Notes 1. See Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kama: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Note especially the introduction by Vincent Crapanzano. For a biography of Leenhardt, see James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 2. Max Gluckman, “Some Processes of Social Change Illustrated from Zululand,” African Studies (Johannesburg) 1, no. 4 (1942): 243–260, at 258–260. 3. Axel-Ivar Berglund, Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism (London: C. Hurst, 1976), 29. 4. Peter Metcalf, A Borneo Journey into Death: Berawan Eschatology from Its Rituals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1982), 5. 5. See Steven J Friesen, “Introduction: Modern Ancestors,” in Ancestors in Post-Contact Religion: Roots, Ruptures, and Modernity’s Memory, ed. Steven J. Friesen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, for the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2001), xvii–xxix, at xix–xx. 6. Albert Wendt, “Novelists and Historians and the Art of Remembering,” in Class and Culture in the South Pacific, ed. Antony Hooper et al. (Auckland: Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Auckland; Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1987); quoted in Vilsoni Hereniko, Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma, Pacific Island Monograph Series, 12 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 131.

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CHAPTER 28 MATTER AND SPIRIT: A REORIENTATION

Alfred North Whitehead wrote: “The function of Reason is to promote the art of life. … I now state the thesis that the explanation of this attack on the environment is a three-fold urge: (i) to live, (ii) to live well, (iii) to live better. In fact the art of life is first to be alive, secondly, to be alive in a satisfactory way, and thirdly, to acquire an increase in satisfaction. … This conclusion amounts to the thesis that Reason is a factor in experience which directs and criticizes the urge towards the attainment of an end realized in imagination but not in fact” (The Function of Reason [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1929], 3, 5). Whitehead situates and defines reason as a necessary and inherent dimension of human existence; reason is an activity imbedded within life itself. Throughout this week we have been discussing the meaning of what we have characterized as two kinds of spiritualities, the primal and the axial. We have not only raised questions about the meaning and content of this classification as the expression of the total modes of human orientations in the world, we have also been engaged in critiques of these terms as the best ways of indicating where the points of significant differences are in the history of human societies. But there has been another level to our discussions. That level has had to do with a soteriological or ethical concern. This concern arises out of the human problem of our times— the crisis of modernity. This is a genuine crisis, not just a restatement of the general human problem. To be human is to realize the problematical nature of our existence, the contradictions we all face, the issues of our finitude, the actuality and problematics of evil; all human beings and societies have always faced problems of this sort. For most of the time in all human societies there was a way of giving significant expression in a specific manner to the human problem—a significant statement that would be adequate to the problem, on the one hand, and lead toward some sort of resolution, on the other. The ability to define the human problem in a specific manner and situation is a creative product of the human community. In our time, we don’t even know how to state what the problem is, though we know that the problem is intense and catastrophic in its implications. We can state the problem in a piecemeal fashion as, for example, the economic problem, the ecological problem, the problem of war, the problem of self-determination and freedom, the problem of minorities, of women, of gender and sexual preference, and so forth. All these are problems, and in any one group of their respective adherents, their problem becomes the one and only problem. But to deal with it adequately means that it impinges on another or on all the other issues. We have no language able to sum up adequately and humanly all the problems—and this itself is a problem! We are unable to state what the problem is in an adequate manner. I am told by my colleagues in physics that the fundamental statement of a problem is not accomplished in a piecemeal fashion. Although several equations might state some part of the problem, the real statement and resolution must finally achieve an elegant style, for example, e = mc2, a case

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where all the complicated relationships are expressed simply, profoundly, and comprehensively in a single formulation. Christian theology knew how to state the human problem; it was sin. This manner of statement leads one into the formation of narratives, the meaning of time, a soteriology, and ritual, the entire complexity of human existence. Somehow our cultural resources have not enabled us to state our problem adequately. Our delving into the issues of “the primal” and “the axial” is as much a way of trying to find a way of stating the issue as it is an attempt to find a way of resolution. In speaking to this issue in the language of “human spirituality” we are attempting to speak of a wider, deeper, and pervasive mode of human orientation that, while encompassing the religious traditions of humankind, is not limited to these traditions. We are attempting to find those human resources in the past and in the present that will enable us to restate and reconfigure, to refine and find again a proper way of speaking and acting in terms of the human mode of being in our time. Let me put forth one notion that follows from my quotation from Whitehead. By situating reason within life and not as simply a mode of observation or analysis of life, Whitehead touches on the totality of human meaning as a mode of human orientation. If, for the sake of this discussion, we are willing to say that there are two general classifications of human cultures in history based upon how they “reasoned” life, one the primal and the other the axial, what do they have in common at their best? In both of these sorts of traditions we find that the human community was able to define the proper mode of being human for their time and space. And in both orientations, they were able to recognize in very different ways the necessity of limits, of boundaries, and to have a proper regard for the essential meaning of the human within these orders. It was this ability that enabled these societies to achieve a perduring sense of order within their common lives. What has stylized our lives so much in the modern period is that we have been led to believe that there are no limits to the human mode of being, that the human being itself was identified with Being Itself and thus there were no limits outside of the human species. The human as the insatiable being has been a mark of our modern world, and we have come close to creating our ultimate limitations as the tragic outcome of our insatiability—the destruction of the entire world through war or ecological insensitivity. This insatiability has also eroded the relationships among and between human persons and groups, such that now all people stand armed against their neighbors. We must, in whatever orientation or reorientation we accomplish, define within our spirituality a place to be still, to be quiet while being active, and a stance from which we may be active while being quiet. I find this to be a trace and a meaning that we might think about from the cosmic orientation of the primal traditions and from the metaphysical orientation of the axial traditions. We might from this point of view of our modernity undergo the critiques of both these traditions as the first step toward an adequate and new orientation of the human mode of being in our times. We should not attempt to return to either of these orientations, but we must think and live through them without the mistaken assumption that our times represent the epitome of the human species. I should like to begin this reconsideration and critique through the recovery of the literal and metaphorical meaning of matter and materiality. In one way or another, all of our pressing problems might be subsumed under some notion of materiality. Whether we are talking about ecology, gender, or ethnicity, the issue of matter or materiality is to the fore. In the modern Western world, however, we have thought of matter as inert or neutral or have relegated it to 346

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the realm of commodities and commodity exchanges. But whether we are speaking of our bodies (personal or social) or the issue of economics or of the spirit, in one way or another we are speaking of matter, of that which forms the relationship among and between ourselves and other human beings and the created world. I am placing the locus of matter and materiality precisely at the point of relationships, contacts, and exchanges between and among human beings and between human beings and all other forms of life and meaning. We are speaking of how our bodies are embodiments, and this fact ought to cause us to have regard for the human matter and its place in the universe. Both the primal and the axial traditions make use of a richer and more subtle vocabulary in their discourses about matter and materiality than our modern cultures. For the most part we have not been concerned with their understandings of this important dimension of human life. No one in either the primal or axial traditions would have thought of matter in the crude and gross manner in which we have dealt with it. Only the physicists in the modern world approach the kind of sophistication that reminds us of the importance that matter and materiality had for the other traditions. In the modern world of the West we seldom think of matter and spirit in the same context. We have dismissed matter as a possibility for the meaning of human spirituality, and now we are attempting to resurrect our old notion of matter and materiality and clothe this old notion in the garments of spirituality. Something might come from a serious reflection upon whatever hints appear in the two general orientations to this issue. We have, for the most part, left the issue of materiality to persons and scholars who have little regard for spirituality—the Marxists and the economists. We deal with spirit, they deal with matter, we have been resigned before this situation. A serious reflection upon the nature and meaning of matter and materiality in our time is more than a critique of the Cartesian dichotomy; it calls for a profound reflection and critique of modernity itself. If we begin with a reflection on matter and materiality, we will touch upon an issue of human orientation that will allow many peoples and traditions to contribute to the discussion of spirituality in our time.

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CHAPTER 29 THE WEST AFRICAN HIGH GOD: HISTORY AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

In a recent article, “The Withdrawal of the High God in West African Religion: An Essay in Interpretation,”1 Father James O’Connell raises the central problem of the paradoxical nature of the high god. Most West African religions have a high-god who is also a sky-god. But he is often a withdrawn high god, a deus otiosus. There is an apparent contradiction between the supremacy of the high-god and his withdrawal from concern with the world. The attributes assigned to him heighten this effect of contradiction. He is said to be at the origin of things, often as a creator; he is all knowing and all-powerful, he introduces order into the chaos of the universe, he is the final arbiter of right and wrong. … But in spite of these attributes the high-god is not usually directly worshipped, he has no priests and no shrines are dedicated to him; people may make a token offering to him in every sacrifice but hardly ever do they offer a sacrifice exclusively to him.2 O’Connell attempts to resolve this apparent contradiction by approaching the problem through the interpretations of two historians of religion, Mircea Eliade and Raffaele Pettazzoni. He quotes Eliade’s contribution to this problem from his Patterns in Comparative Religion: What is clear is that the Supreme sky god everywhere gives place to other religious forms. The morphology of this substitution may vary, but its meaning is in each case partly the same; it is a movement away from the transcendence and passivity of sky being towards more dynamic, active and easily accessible forms. One might say that we are observing a “progressive descent of the sacred into the concrete”; man’s life and his immediate natural surroundings come more and more to have the value of sacred things. His belief in mana, orenda, wakan, etc., animism, totemism, devotion to the spirits of the dead and local divinities, and so on, place man in quite a different religious attitude from that which he held towards the Supreme Being of the sky. The very structure of religions is changed. … Every substitution marks a victory for the dynamic, dramatic forms, so rich in mythological meaning, over the Supreme Being of the sky who is exalted, but passive and remote … the supreme divinities of the sky are constantly pushed to the periphery of the religious life where they are almost ignored; other sacred forces, nearer to man, fill the leading role.3 Pettazzoni’s analysis of this same phenomenon is given as follows: How can we explain this otiositas, which contrasts so strikingly with the dynamic character of the Creator? It has been supposed that we have here a secondary development, a kind

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of elimination of the Creator in the face of other deities who in the end pushed him into the background. It may, however, be the case that otiositas itself belongs to the essential nature of creative Beings, and is in a way the complement of their creative activity. The world once made and the cosmos established, the Creator’s work is as good as done. Any further intervention on his part would not be only superfluous but possibly dangerous since any change in the cosmos might allow it to fall back into chaos. Once the world is made, the existential function of the Creator could be nothing but prolonging its duration and ensuring its unaltered and unalterable stability. The otiositas of the creative Being, this wu-wei, so to call this sort of instinctive presence, is the most favourable condition and the one naturally best suited to maintain the status quo. This, I think, is what the idleness of creative Supreme Beings signify; it is due not so much to their character as Supreme Beings as to their being Creators.4 O’Connell makes the following objections and qualifications to these approaches. Pettazoni’s approach proves too much, for if the high god withdraws because there is nothing more for him to do after his original creation then it is difficult to explain why the high god in West Africa who is the ultimate upholder of the ethical order is thought to intervene to restore justice in the creation or why he is appealed to in cases of extreme distress and, lastly, why the lesser gods are understood as channels through which man makes contact with the high god. If Pettazzoni’s thesis is correct, then, says, O’Connell, “he [the high god] should be completely withdrawn ever since creation.”5 O’Connell accepts a part of Eliade’s thesis. Eliade is right, according to him, in insisting on the worshipers’ concern with the concrete and accessible lesser gods, but this concern points only to what he refers to as psychological—“But while the lesser gods loom larger psychologically in people’s minds.”6 The lesser gods are associated with creation, but the worshipers know that they are not responsible for it. In extreme situations the appeal is made “over the heads” of these beings. Furthermore Eliade’s thesis does not account “for the careful handling of myths of beginning and creation and for the reciting of these myths so as to guarantee the stability and order of things … contrary to Eliade’s thesis we want to hold that the lesser gods come forward not because they manage to push the high-god into the background but because he himself withdraws and leaves the scene to these beings whose natures are known and whose interventions can be predicted.”7 Finally O’Connell summarizes his own position by reinterpreting Eliade and Pettazzoni. It seems as if the nature of the high god can be explained by “a conjunction of relative indiscernibility of features and almighty power.”8 It is through his almighty power that he has created the universe, but just because of this power there is a loss of preciseness regarding his concrete features. The worshipers are thus unsure of the all-powerfulness and all-purity of this high god and would rather deal with lesser beings who can be known more precisely and intimately. “These gods are warm blooded, and sometimes wanton. Their personalities invite humans to enter into intercourse and even familiarity with them. Though they are connected with the creator-god, they do not—unlike him—involve the kind of all purity that shows up the anguish of human guilt and makes it too difficult to bear. So they can become the intermediaries that they are considered to be in most of the religions.”9 Two commentaries on this article, one by E. O. James10 and the other by Robin Horton11 of the Anthropology Department, London University, have been printed in subsequent issues 350

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of Man. Horton’s commentary is the more substantial and critical in tone. James seems to be in general agreement with the position of O’Connell, though he does supplement his point of view with additional details. I shall not go into a discussion of Horton’s rather lengthy critique; I will, however, mention one aspect of this critique which should be of primary interest to historians of religion. In proposing an alternative orientation, Horton suggests that we should attempt to “make a careful distinction between those features of the African high god which are constant, and those which are variable.”12 It is precisely this factor which is missing in O’Connell’s interpretation. Perhaps a different interpretation would have resulted if O’Connell had dealt with this issue. For the historian of religion this issue may be stated as the problem of “history” and “religion.” By “history” I mean the particular temporal-spatial cultural situation in which man responds to that which is sacred and by “religion” I mean the structure of the myth, symbol, or religious response through which man apprehends the sacred. The historian of religions is interested in understanding the enduring structure of these responses—a structure which may be discerned regardless of the history and culture in which they appear. These religious structures enable us to speak of the specific religious meaning which is intended by these myths and symbols. Religious apprehensions and responses occur in history and thus the meaning of any religious symbol must be sought in the enhancement and re-evaluation of the history and culture in which it occurs. The issue simply stated is the interdependence of phenomenology and history. O’Connell, in my opinion, did not pay enough attention to either history or phenomenological structure. While the problem of the high god presents itself in many religious systems, it cannot be discussed without references to particular religions and cultures. Though the title of his article refers to West African religion, he makes only passing references to particular examples of West African religion and tends to give an overly intellectualistic and ethical interpretation to these forms.13 I propose in this discussion of the high god, first, to pay attention to the historical situation which seems to be indicated by the myths and, secondly, to deal with the religious meaning of the high god as a specifically religious phenomenon. Jürgen Zwernemann has given us a résumé of the structure of the sky-god among the Voltaic tribes.14 His résumé covers the Mosi-Dagombo, the Atakora, the Gurunsi, and the Gurma groups and includes over twenty-five tribes. After an analysis of this phenomenon in these tribes, he makes the following conclusions concerning the sky-god of the Voltaic peoples: (1) There is a linguistic and religious association of the sky-god with the sun. Atmospheric phenomena are often attributes of the sky-god. (2) The sky-god is a creator. He possesses the power of life and death. (3) Prayer and sacrifices are made to him, but generally his cult is weak. He is in the background because it is necessary to serve the intermediary deities, for example, earth, ancestors. (4) The conception of a divine couple formed by the sky-god and earth-goddess is a general characteristic of all of the tribes. Let us turn immediately to the last two points. If the high god withdraws or is pushed into the background by lesser deities, these lesser deities must be understood, in the words of Eliade, as “part and parcel of the discoveries which man has been led to make about himself and his world.”15 One should be able to document these discoveries in the history of any particular culture, for no culture continues to worship only a high god. In every case of the religious life there is already a development from the high god to more specific deities. The divine-couple motif in myth is obviously a symbol of fertility, and in the case of West African culture it is most probably a symbol of fertility in the form of agriculture. It is difficult to know 351

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when agriculture was discovered or invented by the West Africans. George P. Murdock has recently put forward the theory that there was an independent discovery of agriculture in West Africa.16 Murdock believes that the Mande (Manding) represent the nuclear cultural group in West Africa and that the Voltaic and Plateau Nigerians are instances of the diffusion of this nuclear Mande culture. Marie-Henriette Alimen describes the Neolithic of West Africa as a coming-together of the Caspian culture of hunters, fishers, and pastoralists with the Tumbian agriculturalists from equatorial Africa. The Tumbian culture tended to become stronger as the Caspian culture grew weaker.17 Finally, Hermann Baumann has delineated three types of agriculture in Africa, an old hoe culture which is probably autochthonous and is dominated by women; a higher hoe culture in which men do most of the work along with women; and a plough culture which represents the diffusion of European and Asiatic elements.18 Baumann recognizes that the old autochthonous hoe culture, which he calls “Old Sudanese,” is itself a culture innovation in West Africa. “For instance, it appears from many hunting legends, myths, and masked dances that the old-Sudanese were once, in remote ages, something other than soil cultivators.”19 It is impossible to know precisely what type of religion the presoil cultivators practiced, but if they were nomads, it is quite possible that worship of the Supreme Being as a sky-god loomed quite large in their religious life. The development from this form of religion, if we follow Baumann and Alimen, would be in the form of an early form of agriculture. This old form of agriculture is referred to by Baumann as the “Old Sudanic” culture in Africa. Baumann and Alimen think that this form of agriculture was diffused from the equatorial region of Africa, whereas Murdock holds to a belief in its independent discovery among the Mande. In any case this early form of West African agriculture seems to have been matriarchal in form. Baumann’s second stage of agriculture in Africa is represented by the younger Sudanic culture, a high-grade Asiatic cultural diffusion which gained a hold in Africa in Abyssinia and pushed westward into the West Sudan. This culture emphasized the dominance of the male in agricultural activities and displaced to a great extent the matriarchal elements of the Old Sudanic culture. The withdrawal of the high god in West African culture may be directly related to these new discoveries.20 The transition from the Old Sudanic to the younger Sudanic culture seems to be documented in the mythical and religiopolitical and social structures of West Africa. Zwernemann in his description of the sky-god among the Konkomba confesses the confusion of mythological forms in the figure of Wumbor. Among the Konkomba the conceptions are not absolutely clear. On the one hand, Wumbor is the creator of everything, including the earth, of which Wumbor is also master, but on the other, Wumbor is merely the son of the earth, Ketink, and the skyatmosphere, Ketalagabon. … The conceptions of Wumbor as son of the sky-atmosphere, a civilizing hero, and an atmospheric god himself show us that today’s Wumbor is the result of a fusion of several personages.21 The figure of Wumbor shows the transformation of an atmospheric sky deity into the figure of a fecundator and a cultural hero. Germaine Dieterlen has collected a myth which she believes portrays the general structure for the social organization and religious life of all West African groups.22 In this myth the homology is made between the seed fonio (Digitaris 352

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exilis) and the creation and ordering of the cosmos. There is also an emphasis on the world egg, twinness, bisexuality, and androgyny as creative principle. Baumann has suggested that these emphases in the myth have reference to the religious meaning of the powerful antithetical symbols of sexuality and that their origin lies in the Oriental and Mediterranean cultures.23 Following his interpretation of African hoe culture, it is likely that these elements have come into West Africa with the younger Sudanic culture. If Baumann is correct in his judgment concerning the antithetical sexual symbolism it is safe to conclude that those West African myths which emphasize the world egg, twinness, bisexuality, and androgyny portray the tension and resolution of the older Sudanic and younger Sudanic cultures in West Africa. The role of the queen-mother in the state of the Akan of Ghana may also be interpreted as a method of resolving the matriarchal/patriarchal tension: “The actual ruling of the state, state affairs, in particular war is left in the hands of her son, the king, the exponent of the masculine principle in life. Nevertheless the queen mother was, and in some respects still is, the most important person in the state. In olden days she had a decisive voice in all state affairs and could influence the decisions taken by the king and his counselors.”24 The prominence of concrete fertility deities thus seem to be related to the discovery or diffusion of agriculture in West Africa. The prominence of these lesser deities and cults of fertility cannot be understood apart from the historical-religious discoveries in this cultural area. We have, however, dealt only with two types of agriculture in West Africa. I have only made a suggestion concerning the transition from what may have been a cult of the high god to the more concrete fertility deities. I have buttressed my speculation concerning the possibility of a cult of the sky-god with the research of cultural historians and archeologists. It is important to note that the old high-god symbolism has persisted throughout this rather dynamic history. This persistence of the high-god symbolism has taken place through the transference of some of the attributes of the high god to the sun. If we turn to the first point of Zwernemann’s conclusion, we see the religious expression of this transfer. The sky-god is identified or associated with the sun. It is clear that we are here confronted by what Eliade has called the “solarization” of the supreme being.25 Eliade points out that this solarization of the sky deity does not mean that the deity has taken on form. However this may be, it is the solarization of the Supreme Being which opens its structure to concrete embodiment in more specific cults and deities. The sun takes over the role of fecundator and other sacred personages are born. This is not always the case. Baumann has pointed out that among the Ewe an old earth-goddess has assimilated herself to the sky-god in one of her aspects, while still preserving her character as an earth deity.26 Among the Akan, the king is a representative of the Sun. Eva Meyerowitz tells us that the “king, who represents the Sungod and impersonates him on earth, is therefore made the dynamic centre in the state, which in olden days was constructed after the likeness of the world as it was known to the early Akan.”27 It may be that sacral-political office of the Akan king represents in relationship to the queenmother the assimilation of an old matriarchal structure to a younger Sudanic patriarchal form. The sun thus symbolizes the religious manner in which power and transcendence is transmitted into concrete forms. Among the Dogon the sun does not play a large role as a creative being. This role has been taken over by the water genii, the Nommo; however, Ogotemmeli, the old Dogon philosopher always wished to give an idea of the grandeur of the sun in his mythological descriptions. At one place he attempted to estimate the dimensions of the sun. “Some people, he said, estimate that it is as big as the camp, that would make it thirty ells. In reality it is bigger. 353

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Its surface exceeds the district of Sanga.”28 The grandeur of the sun is thus related to its wide and almost inexhaustible extension. The sun seems in this case to approximate the power and absoluteness of the celestial Supreme Being. Meyerowitz’s discussion of the dead king leads us again back to the sky. “The divine king who has gone ‘elsewhere’ lives on in the sky,’ where his divine kra has joined Nyame’s.”29 The sun hardly, if ever, becomes among the West African simply another one of the concrete deities. Though a fecundator he seems more related to the Supreme Being in the form of a high god of the sky. I have presented this cultural-historical material to show that the variable features in the structure of the high god are related to the historical situation of the West Africans. I have used the term “related” advisedly. I do not mean to say that the religion of West Africa is just a reflection of their history. The history of West Africa is a history of new discoveries of reality. These discoveries are apprehended religiously or mythically. This explains the religious evaluation of the events of West African history. The religious or mythic apprehension is the constant feature in the structure of the high god, or for that matter, any other religious symbol. O’Connell seemed to have limited his interpretation to this aspect of religious symbolism. I have taken the position that an adequate interpretation requires a discussion of both history and religious experience. We might legitimately begin this part of our discussion by asking what, from the strictly religious point of view, does the high god symbolize. For Eliade, the Supreme Being of a celestial structure seems to represent the archetypal norm of the religious experience par excellence. Even before any religious values have been set upon the sky it reveals its transcendence. The sky symbolizes transcendence, power, and the changelessness simply by being there. It exists because it is high, infinite, immovable, powerful. That the mere fact of being high, of being high up, means being powerful (in the religious sense), and being as such filled with the sacred, is shown by the very etymology of some of the god’s name.30 The very structure of the celestial Supreme Being seems to be a correlate of the optimum religious experience. Compare, for example, Joachim Wach’s four formal criteria for authentic religious experience. 1. Religious experience is a response to what is experienced as ultimate reality; that is, in religious experience we react not to any single or finite phenomenon, material or otherwise, but to what we realize as undergirding and conditioning all that constitutes our world of experience. 2. Religious experience is a total response of the total being to what is apprehended as ultimate reality …. 3. Religious experience is the most intense experience of which man is capable …. 4. Religious experience is practical, that is to say it involves an imperative, a commitment which impels man to act.31 For Eliade the vault of the sky and its religious symbolism is the most profound and at the same time the simplest symbol of transcendence and ultimacy. This symbolism can evoke what Rudolf Otto has called the mysterium tremendum—the otherness and awesomeness of 354

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ultimate reality or the religious desire to be related and identified with this power in the form of mysterium fascinans. It is true that most religious symbols are able to evoke these responses. Eliade himself speaks of “primary intuition of earth as a religious form … the first realization of the religious significance of earth was indistinct.”32 The difference, however, between this primary intuition of the earth as a religious form and the primary intuition of the sky is that the earth in this religious experience “is the cosmos— repository of a wealth of sacred forces.”33 It is the foundation of every expression of existence. The sky, on the other hand, “needs no aid from mythological imagination or conceptual elaboration to be seen as the divine sphere.”34 The exfoliation of the latencies within the earth produces the concrete, dynamic, and dramatic character of lesser deities and religious symbolisms. The atmospheric deities which are associated with the structure of the celestial high god do not, however, represent a “tendency towards the concrete.”35 Eliade is careful to point out that the solarization of the celestial high god is not a case of the production of divine forms. The most primary intuition of the sky as a religious structure among the most archaic peoples already allows us to see the totality of the meaning of this religious symbolism, and this totality corresponds to the most profound religious experience. Wherever the religious experience associated with this type of symbolism occurs, we have a tendency toward monotheism. Paul Radin rightly associates “monotheism” among primitive peoples with certain types of men,36 for it is always the exceptional person, the religious genius, who is capable of the most profound and intense religious experience, and this type of man is found in every period and culture. Raffaele Pettazzoni in one of his latest discussions of the problem of the Supreme Being offers an alternative view.37 Pettazzoni has distinguished three types of supreme beings, the Celestial Supreme Being, Mother Earth, and the Lord of animals. Each one of these types has its own history and phenomenology. Neither seems to be an exemplary model for the others. They are all aspects of the more fundamental religious form of supreme being. The religious form of the Supreme Being springs from man’s existential anxiety. This existential anxiety will take on a religious form which is consistent with the culture and historical circumstances in which it occurs. Pettazzoni rejects G. van der Leeuw’s distinction between Yahweh and the Supreme Being. Van der Leeuw had contrasted Yahweh’s power, will, personality, jealousy, and intervention in human history with the Supreme Being’s distance and passivity. For Pettazzoni these apparent contradictions between the two sets of descriptions is resolved by seeing them as “two aspects of a unique two-sided structure, one cosmic and the other human: on the one side the creation of the world and its conservation in status quo, as a condition that guarantees the existence and endurance of the universe; on the other side the establishment of the social order and its restoration when man has subverted it.”38 It is good to have an emphasis such as Pettazzoni’s made in this context. The analysis of religious structures should never be undertaken apart from history. I have insisted on the same point in this paper, but the specifically religious question still remains, even after we have dealt with history. Pettazzoni refers to this non-historical dimension of the problem when he speaks of existential anxiety. I should rather speak of revelation, for this term places the problem in its proper context. To be sure, the modalities through which the sacred is mediated to us are products of history, but we must ask whether the reality to which we respond through the various modalities is also just a symbolization of historical conditions. 355

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Is it not possible for the modalities of history to reveal to us something quite fundamental about the nature of ultimate reality and at the same time something quite fundamental about the nature of man? Eliade’s argument concerning the Celestial Supreme Being would lead us to this conclusion. The celestial structure of the Supreme Being points to something which is basic to the religious life as such—a desire for transcendence and a total response to what is revealed as ultimate reality. The abstract phrase “existential anxiety” would not enable us to make this judgment. Now it is a commonly held notion that the structure of the celestial Supreme Being is most prevalent among pastoral nomads. The physical and religious accessibility of the phenomena of the sky among these peoples leads one to this conclusion. However, two facts should be borne in mind. First, we know of no tribe or culture that worships only a celestial high god and, secondly, the celestial Supreme Being occurs among peoples who are not pastoral nomads. I am suggesting here that the religious meaning of the celestial Supreme Being or high god is as much a product of religious experience as it is of history. Religious experience seems to predicate a tendency toward a structure which approximates the modality of the celestial high god. Historical conditions may be the efficient cause, but not the prime cause in the structural symbolism of the celestial high god. Wach, in extending his first criterion for the authentic religious experience, quoted William James’s remarks on this subject: “It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the particular senses.”39 It is this characteristic of the human consciousness which predisposes man to have a specific religious experience. The structure of the celestial Supreme Being or high god seems to correspond to this primordial level of the human consciousness. If we can understand how this religious phenomenon approximates a more fundamental predisposition for religious experience, another factor emphasized by Wach must be taken into account. His fourth criterion states that religious experience is practical, that it involves an imperative, a commitment which impels man to act. This is followed by another proposition which states, “religious experience tends towards expression.”40 It is this element in the religious experience which may explain the withdrawal and substitution of the high god in favor of lesser deities who define the concrete dimensions of existence. The withdrawal of the high god, this passage from “creator” to “fecundator,” this slipping of the omnipotence, transcendence and impassiveness into the dynamism, intensity, and drama of the new atmospheric, fertilizing, vegetation figures, is not without significance. It makes quite clear that one of the main factors in the lowering of people’s conceptions of God … is the more and more all-embracing importance of vital values and of “Life” in the outlook of economic man.41 Can it be the practical element in the religious experience and the overpowering need for expression which is alluded to in this historical summary? The variable features in the structure and morphology of the high god are related to the constant and essential features of this form. I cannot agree with Horton’s understanding of these variable features. He believes that the worship of the high god is related to size of the population and its active contact with the wider world. He states: “We know that, in general, 356

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the lesser gods provide an interpretation of the special features of the microcosm formed by a limited population maintaining intensive social integration within a limited territorial area, whilst the high-god provides an interpretation of the world seen as a whole.”42 His other explanation of the variable features is described by the ascription-achievement variable. If the individual’s status is ascribed by ascription, the community will dictate his value symbol. Thus the idea of the lesser gods comes to the fore. If achievement plays the greater part in value determination, explanations of individual vicissitudes may refer not to the lesser deities but to the high god who is concerned with the wider order of things. Both of these explanations are external to the subject matter under discussion. In addition, the first explanation is contrary to the historical factors. The symbolism and worship of the high god is most prevalent among pastoral nomads, relatively small groups of people. In general these peoples always manifest a suspicion of city life and agriculturalists—the basic factors in the growth of large, stable populations. It is precisely in the agricultural city centers that the worship of the high god is weakened by the proliferation of lesser deities. The second explanation is sociological, and though it may clarify the relationship between sociological categories and ethical values, it does not offer an adequate explanation of the religious symbolism. It is possible that Horton is here attempting to modify Radin’s position concerning primitive monotheism. I would rather look for the explanations in history, because in history we are able to deal with the intrinsic relationship between the events of time and space and the enduring religious structure. If certain cultic activities still center around the high god in West Africa, the religioushistorical explanation may be seen in the assimilation of concrete lesser deities to a more basic structure of religious experience which had been revealed at one time in the history of West Africa. Baumann reports that for most of the West Sudanic peoples one can observe a double veneration of a sky deity and an earth deity, but in the majority of cases only the sky deities are the first creators, the earth deities creating only indirectly.43 He reports that the Bobo know a god, Dofini, who is a “dieu generateur.” However, this creator god lives in the earth. Baumann explains this rather paradoxical situation by pointing to the strongly developed Old Sudanic cultural elements which still dominate among the Bobo. Baumann also interprets the use of caste formations in West Africa to the tension between an aristocratic clan which subjugated the older cultivators. This tension is expressed in the myth by the repression of the earth-cult and the identification of the ruling class with the sun-sky-god. Baumann’s analysis is worked out along cultural historical lines. Religiously speaking, we are able to see the assimilation of the concrete deities to the power and transcendence of a sky-god. Even the old matriarchal god of the Bobo tends to take on some of the power of a sky-god. The inherence of the structure of the high god cannot be understood in purely historical terms. We have no myths from those West African peoples who discovered the high god, yet this structure continues in West Africa because it is that religious symbolism which approximates the religious experience par excellence. Finally, a word should be said about monotheism. It is clear from a study of the history of religions that a monotheistic tendency exists in all religions. It is, however, only in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that this tendency has become the dominant characteristic of the religious life. The powerful word of God which descends to create the vital life forms of Genesis 1 is coupled with the powerful verbal ascent of the word by the prophets—a word which places all concrete forms of life under the dominion of the high god again. 357

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I agree with Pettazzoni that monotheism is a rather late form of religion. It is late because the power of the high god is enhanced by taking unto himself again all of the particular powers which have been revealed since his withdrawal, but as a religious norm, it has always been there—an enduring structure of the religious experience itself. The historian of religions may often be tempted to make a sharp dichotomy between history and religion. We must never forget that man is a spiritual being by virtue of history and that he is a historical being by virtue of his spiritual life. These two important dimensions must always be held together.

Notes 1. James O’Connell, “The Withdrawal of the High God in West African Religion: An Essay in Interpretation,” Man 62 (May 1962): 67–69 (no. 109). 2. Ibid., 67. 3. Quoted by O’Connell from Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), 52, 43. 4. Quoted by O’Connell from Raffaele Pettazzoni’s Essays on the History of Religion, trans. H. J. Rose (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1954), 32–33. 5. O’Connell, “Withdrawal,” 68. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 69. 10. E. O. James, “The Withdrawal of the High God in West African Religion,” Man 62 (July 1962): 106 (no. 178). 11. Robin Horton, “The High God: A Comment on Father O’Connell’s Paper,” Man 62 (September 1962): 137–140 (no. 219). 12. I recommend Horton’s article as a careful analysis of O’Connell’s position. In many respects I agree with his commentary, especially in his critique of O’Connell’s understanding of the essentially moral element in the high god. Horton seems to pay much closer attention to the specific elements in the myths concerning the high god and is thus not tempted by a too intellectualist interpretation. 13. This is especially true of his discussion of the separation motif in a West African myth. He speaks of the high god’s withdrawal as a result of being hit by a pestle while a woman was pounding yams. No significance is given to the fact that the high god withdraws because of the action of a woman, nor to the fact that the woman was pounding yams. 14. Jürgen Zwernemann, “Les notions du dieu-ciel chez quelques tribus voltaïques,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, ser. B, Sciences humaines, 23 (1961): 243–272. 15. Mircea Eliade, “Structure and Changes in the History of Religions,” in City Invincible, ed. Carl H. Kraeling and Robert M. Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 351–366, at 355. 16. George P. Murdock, Africa, Its Peoples, and Their Cultural History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 64. 17. Marie-Henriette Alimen, The Prehistory of Africa, trans. Alan Houghton Brodrick (London: Hutchinson, 1957), 234–235. 18. Hermann Baumann, “The Division of Work According to Sex in African Hoe Culture,” Africa 1, no. 3 (July 1928): 289–319. 358

The West African High God 19. Ibid., 300. 20. Baumann, “Division,” 296, thinks that it is quite possible to detect a backward movement of agriculture—a movement away from agricultural work by both sexes to a situation in which only one sex practices agriculture. In some cases this has been caused by the conquest of cattle-breeders. In this connection it is interesting to note that the Dinka of the central Nile basin in the Southern Sudan have a myth which portrays the sky-god’s withdrawal as a result of being hit by a woman’s grain pounding pestle. On the other hand, Dinka religion is permeated by homologies between the cosmos and cattle (see R. Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka [Oxford: Clarendon, 1961]). 21. Zwernemann, “Notions,” 264–265: “Chez les Konkomba les conceptions ne sont pas absolument claires. D’un côté Wumbor est le créateur de toute chose, y compris la terre, dont Wumbor est aussi le maître, mais d’un côté, Wumbor n’est que le fils de la terre, Ketink, et du ciel-atmosphère, Ketalagabon. … Les conceptions de Wumbor comme fils du ciel-atmosphère, comme héroscivilisateur et comme dieu atmosphérique lui-même nous montrent que le Wumbor d’aujourd’hui résulte d’une fusion de plusieurs personnages.” 22. Germaine Dieterlen, “The Mande Creation Myth,” Africa 17 (1957): 124–138; and “Mythe et organisation sociale en Afrique occidentale,” Journal de la Société des Africanistes 29, no. 1 (1959): 119–138. 23. Hermann Baumann, Das doppelte Geschecht: ethnologische Studien zur Bisexualität in Ritus und Mythos.(Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1955), 377ff. 24. Eva Meyerowitz, The Sacred State of the Akan (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 38–39. 25. Ibid. 26. Hermann Baumann, Schöpfung und Urzeit des Menschen im Mythus der afrikanische Völker (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer [Andrews und Steiner], 1936), 136. 27. Myerowitz, Sacred State, 57. 28. Marcel Griaule, Dieu d’eau: Entretiens avec Ogotemmêli (Paris: Fayard, 1948), 23. 29. Meyerowitz, Sacred State, 63. 30. Eliade, Patterns, 39 (italics mine). 31. Joachim Wach, Types of Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 32–33. 32. Eliade, Patterns, 242. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 54. 35. Ibid., 67. 36. Paul Rodin, Monotheism among Primitive Peoples (Basel, Switzerland: Ethnological Museum, 1954). (Also issued as Special Publication of Bollingen Foundation, no. 4.) 37. Raffaele Pettazzoni, “The Supreme Being: Phenomenological Structure and Historical Development,” in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, ed. Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959): 59–66. 38. Ibid., 63–64. 39. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1902), 58. In this connection another psychological interpretation should be mentioned. I refer to Rosemary Gordon’s “God and the Deintegrates,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 8, no. 1 (1963): 25–43. Miss Gordon sees a correlation between the “pieces of God” (the concrete and lesser deities who push the high god into the background), and the psychological growth of the individual. “The diffraction of God, just as the deintegration of the self, forms the basis for differentiation and for the emergence of separateness and individuality” (42). The importance of this analysis is that it emphasizes the enduring morphology of the high god as a structure of the psyche. By this method she is able to avoid the intellectualistic and ethical emphasis of O’Connell. 359

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CHAPTER 30 PRIMITIVE/CIVILIZED: THE AXIAL AGE IN A WORLD CONTEXT

Centers, powers, and spaces I have chosen to address the general topic of this conference in this manner because I wish to probe the presuppositions regarding the relationship between the notion of the “center” or the “axial” and the meaning of knowledge. These are, indeed, two very powerful meanings and metaphors involved in our title, the notion of the “primitive” or primal and the notion of the axial or, as Mircea Eliade has taught us, the “axis mundi” of history. Karl Jaspers in defining the axial age rightly rejected the identification of the center of human history with the beginnings of Christianity and its influence in world history. In so doing he has equally rejected the notion that Christianity is destined to bring about the unity of humankind. Jaspers, however, has not rejected the notion that there is a center in history or that humanity is destined to be unified. He found the original hint for his notion of the axial age in two previous thinkers, Lasaulx and Viktor von Strauss. In locating the axial age within a certain historical period covering almost a millennium and expressed in several cultures, Jaspers posits the future unity of humanity upon a certain structural meaning of humanity that emerged in several cultures in different parts of the world during this fortuitous millennium. One summarizing statement regarding the axial age is stated as follows: What is new about this age, in all three areas of the world, is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence.1 This is a highly metaphysical, if not theological statement, regarding the nature of humanity and history. One might structure a discussion of it within the framework of a metaphysics of history à la Hegel, Troeltsch, Toynbeee, or Kroeber. It implies that there is a certain necessity in the order of the world that appears at a particular moment in history and this order ordains a destiny for the previous and subsequent history of the world. It is clear that such a statement, even if true could emerge only from one of those cultures of the originative axial period. This chapter is based on a discussion paper prepared for the Third International Conference on World Spirituality, “An Exploration of Contemporary Spirituality: ‘Axial Age Civilizations’ and ‘Primal Traditions,’” East-West Center, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, June 10–14, 1991

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The statement further implies that cultures and historical periods excluded from the axial age or its subsequent influences must be defined negatively in relationship to the axial age. He speaks, for example, of the general modification of humanity during this period as spiritualization, a modification in which the unquestioned grasp on life is loosened and the calm of the polarities becomes the disquiet of opposites and antinomies. It is the time for the philosophers; it is the time when the specifically human in man appears.2 I have problems with the evolutionary moral tone of Jaspers. There is no way to prove, apart from self-serving, the metaphysical, theological, or spiritual-moral evolution of humanity; it can, at best, be regarded as an insightful assertion. One may, however, affirm the meaning of the axial age without such presuppositions. I should like to affirm the fundamental meanings of his position and see if it is possible for these concerns to be seen as general characteristics of the human in all times and places. What seems unique to the axial age is the specific historicalsociological situation presented at this time.3 An alternative position is possible on the basis of a work such as Paul Wheatley’s The Pivot of the Four Quarters, where the cultural-historical geographer raises the issue within the framework of the “neolithic revolution” problem. In my opinion, this assumption provides a more solid basis for the axial age; it need not, however, substitute for the issue as put by Jasper but it cannot be avoided. One must ask the prior question about the nature of the kinds of societies we are dealing with during the axial age, including how many kinds there are, the demographies of these groups, whether they are farmers or mercantilists or both, the nature and character of trade, and so on. I am not playing the positivist game here. In Wheatley’s work these questions are asked and answered with due regard for spiritual matters. Wheatley undertakes to analyze the religious and cultural meaning of “centeredness” in seven areas where we are able to document urban genesis—the beginnings of that mode of human habitation we call the city or the urban form. In the first instance, he rejects the position of V. Gordon Childe and his Marxist-inspired theory of the “neolithic revolution” as enunciated in the aptly titled work, Man Makes Himself. He rather sets forth an alternate theory, one already adumbrated by Thorkild Jacobsen in his Mesopotamian studies. The first urban communities are based upon a ceremonial center. This ceremonial center is the site of the revelation of sacrality; it sets forth the possibility for the effective use of space. One might say that it is the archetypal meaning of space as a human container. The ceremonial center allows for the “domestication” of space. The urban community may occupy the site of the ceremonial center or be founded at some distance from it; in any case, the ceremonial center is the power that generates the creation and sustenance of every other form of the space of the urban environment. In all seven of these centers of urban genesis, in the ancient Near East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, similar processes are at work. A particular urban form identified with the ceremonial center becomes the locus of power and thus creates all the areas around it as peripheries, dependent upon the power of the center. The relationship between the center and the periphery fluctuates between the centrifugal and the centripetal dynamics of power. Power moves from the center to the periphery and then back to the center. Power is authenticated to the extent that it participates within the center and all powers and meanings at the periphery must seek their legitimation through their participation in the center. It is within this structure that the axial age civilizations appear. Through the discovery of agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the intensification of the range, quantity, and the 362

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materials that formed the exchanges within these societies, new definitions and possibilities for the understanding of human existence were forced upon these cultures. To put it another way, they have increased the range and modes of dependencies necessary for the life of the human community. These dependencies brought about a situation not only for a new and specific form of human dependence upon the human but also the dependence of the human community upon that modality of life and experience that revealed the very possibility for the urban genesis, itself, the sacred expressed in forms that undergird and sustain the urban mode with all of its exchanges, demographies, dependencies, and intensities. At this point I should like to expand on the allusion I made in endnote 3 regarding Eliade’s notion of primitive ontology. Since the publication of Jaspers’s work in 1949 the very stylization in which we make scholarly conversation about non-citied cultures has changed. We no longer are asking the “how natives think” type of questions, nor do we presuppose the kind of nonrational or pre-logical mind. If, indeed, we think about issues of this sort they are thought of in terms of the structural meaning of human consciousness itself. In the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and even more so in works like Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics, we are able to discern a possibility for the meaning of spiritualization related to and emerging within the matrix of the materiality and sociality of the common life. Sahlins’s work, inspired by the seminal thesis of Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don, should cause us pause regarding the centrality of the meaning of the axial age and the meaning of human spirituality. The notion of the axial age is an alternative to the crude Marxist “suddenlies” of V. Gordon Childe, but its over generalized metaphysical meaning of the destiny of time stands in need of correction in light of the subsequent critiques of this kind of metaphysical and conjectural history. One might say at a more even-handed level that the axial age might be characterized as the first crisis of the citied traditions of the world. Insofar as these traditions were the latest and most innovative modes of human community since the beginnings of Homo sapiens sapiens on the face of the earth, this was a crisis involving the problematics of the domestication of the environment as well as the domestication of the human consciousness. If we follow through on this notion there is no reason why we should not have included Islam and Mohammed as part of the axial age; why worry about five hundred years or so if the structural principles are the same, especially since we are dealing with temporal quantities in thousand year units anyway. I say that we are witnessing during the axial period the first and most severe crisis of the citied tradition. In one sense the structural characteristics of the city/state/empire with its hierarchical orders and its center-periphery order worked; it worked and it was repeated. But through this repetition something new and revelatory was emerging within the very modality of the social order. Prior to the city-traditions, human discoveries were always discoveries within the realm of the not-human nature. These discoveries, which were at the same time sacred revelations, enabled the human community to discover some aspect of their own being, simultaneously and analogous to the discovery of the otherness in the forms of nature. With the establishment of the Neolithic and the intensification of the dynamics of the urban form, the arena of the human being and the human community became the field of exploration. In other words, the consciousness as “wild” moves into the “fields” of the human as the nondomesticated realm of investigation. But such inquiry should not be equated with the task and vocation of the philosopher as the person of leisure. The task is forced upon various members of these communities because of the complex issues that are attendant to the intensification 363

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of the urban form. There is of course, the classification of persons and groups in relationship to their labor. There is a distinction between those who are “native-born” and those who are foreign, for instance, traders, prisoners of warfare, slaves, and so on. The urban form, having made itself a center of an entire territory can no longer order itself in terms of the intimacies of kinship and face-to face relations, nor in terms of a “common language” in the cultural or empirical sense. This is the first and most severe situation of the meaning of heterogeneity as a characteristic of the urban form. I should rather see the meaning of the way these things are the axial in these terms rather than in the way talked about in Jaspers’s metaphysicaltheological language. But this is not just a biased preference; it allows me to set forth some notion of the meaning of the “primal” or the “primitive” in relationship to the meaning of the power, structure, and languages of the centers of urban genesis. In all the centers of urban genesis there are cultural languages that make modulated distinctions between the privileged groups at or near the center and those on their peripheries, and those totally outside the peripheries. In other words, it is always from the centers of urban genesis that those outside these centers are defined and characterized. They must necessarily be regarded in this manner for the project of the center must always express a universal and allencompassing ideal; it must have a place for everything and everybody, and if fortune smiles, everything and everybody will be in their respective places. For the most part the traditions of all the centers of primary urban genesis have always attempted to define and conquer through military and cultural power all the other areas and arenas made possible through their configurations of power and sacrality. The latest expression of the normativity of this structure occurred in what we now call western Europe beginning in the late fifteenth century and extending into the present. This period witnessed the movement of the basic concerns of the human community from the Mediterranean to the world of the Atlantic rim and from this origin to the entire globe. It is within this movement that the new recognition of the “primal” and the primitive must be noted. This last configuration of urban genesis carries some of the characteristics of the older axial age, but unlike the axial age it is more dependent ideologically, economically, and militarily upon the cultures at the periphery and even outside the periphery; as a matter of fact, this new axiality must of necessity express a fluidity of borders between centers and peripheries.

The new “primitives” and the otherness of the world One cannot imagine the meaning of the modern term “primitive” or “primal” as we have it in present-day usage apart from the modern world-system. This system was well on its way by the middle of the seventeenth century but its origin lies in that series of voyages commencing with the Portuguese explorations of the islands off the west coast of Africa, then along the coast of West Africa itself. This series of voyages reached their peak with Columbus’s voyages to the New World; these voyages set the stage for the European conquest of the oceans of the world. Through these voyages European explorers and navigators were introduced to an entire new world of humanity. At the same time the identity of the status of a western European humanity was at stake. It was in the crux of these discoveries of extra-European cultures that the peoples and customs of these people were epistemologically categorized within the perceptions of otherness and exotica. The early conquest and exploitation of the cultures of 364

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Mesoamerica by Spaniards was carried out through an ideology of exotica as otherness rather than in the terms of the “primitive.” It was only later in the nineteenth century that the notion of the “primitive” appears as a scientific term of anthropological sciences. The category appears in the discourses in the human sciences devoted to the search for origins. Extant cultures of our world were made the analogue for the conjectural history of the earliest human cultures. These cultures were looked upon as “survivals,” as cultures immobilized in time, having failed to advance at the rhythms of the dynamic progress of the world. These areas of the world were characterized as being on the periphery of the centers of the new world order which was located in the metropolitan centers of western Europe and in the United States. The centers of the new world system were in Europe; the peripheral areas in other parts of the world provided in one way or another “raw materials” that were then refined or traded through the intermediation of the centers of trade and mercantilism. There thus existed a necessary and causal relationship between the centers and the peripheries. The new world system did not, however, create a language that was capable of speaking of this relationship outside of purely economic, scientific objective, or sentimental terms. While related intensely within the structures of the new world system, these cultures were recreated in the languages of a distant and far away past. It may be that only in the crisis of this new world system we are afforded the chance to rethink the meaning of those cultures and peoples who have been tragically caught up into the machinations of the nations and peoples who were the makers of the modern world-system. It may be that now, in a period when the legitimating language of the new world system (colonialism, imperialism, and so on) has lost its efficacy that we have a chance to rethink the realities of those persons and cultures designated as “primitives” during the long period when their reception and recognition as humans was designated and compromised by their place in the economic and ideological meaning of the last vestiges of the axial age.

Visions of the vanquished: The human as heterogeneity4 The fact that there was this long term relationship that failed to produce a language of reciprocity nor one expressing the dynamics of contact and relationship from the point of view of the representatives of the normative centers of power was a cultural rather than a personal or individual predilection. It has its origins in a number of orientations and movements in the Western world. One might make a case for a certain kind of Calvinism that stressed an inwardness and piety as a mode of objective subjectivity or one might turn to the pervasive affects of the Cartesian Meditations as forming the basis for the meaning of a subjectivity that is capable of denying all “outside” meanings or things in the creation of consciousness. In any case, the modern world-system generated a stylistics of the objectivity of consciousness that was able to deal with the ambiguities of the mercantilism of the new world system. Such a stylization of thought could, on the one hand, move towards a universalism as later expressed in Enlightenment theories of the human, while at the same time affirm the legitimacy of the mercantile enterprise with all of its exploitation of the peoples of the “primitive” cultures. I don’t think that this is simply and only a matter of personal or cultural deceit; it is rather part 365

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and parcel of the ambiguity of the very notion of “centeredness” or “axiality” when it defines the totality of the relationship between itself and the others. In this sense there probably has never been a true center, rather, in the language of Jonathan Z. Smith, we have had, more often than not, “wobbling pivots.” It is precisely the meaning of the center as a “wobbling pivot” that finds its expression in those “primitive” or primal traditions of modernity. Forced willy-nilly into the new meaning of axiality of the new world-system, they have been forced to come to terms with the actuality of the relationship between themselves and the institutions of the new order in the world. By and large, their accounts of the last half of the millennium have not been considered. Nathan Wachtel states it well when he says, For generations of Western historians, Europe was both the center and the standard by which the history of mankind could be measured. According to a simple, linear representation of human development, all societies were thought to pass through identical stages on the path to progress and civilization, with Europe as the most advanced model. In the onward march, non-European societies brought up the rear as examples of less civilized states. Such a view of history provided an ideological justification for Western expansion and worldwide hegemony.5 I should like at this point to refer to two modes of the meaning of spirituality that have come from the side of the primal traditions. One of them, cargoism, represents the attempt on the part of the cultures of Melanesia to come to terms with the fact of contact and colonialism. In the cargo cult they raise the fundamental issue of the relationship of their culture to the substantive meaning of Western culture, especially as this relationship is mediated through the ideology of Christianity on the one hand and the commodities of the West, on the other hand. What is most interesting in the cargo cult is the perception on the part of the Melanesians that the commodities of the Western world carry spiritual significance. It is the spiritual significance—what Marcel Mauss referred to in his description of the hau, or spirit of the gift among the Polynesians—that is adumbrated here. Whereas the Westerners had categorized their gift of spirit in terms of the “gift of the Christian gospel,” the Melanesians saw their true gift related to the substantiality of the cargo/commodity. Maurice Leenhardt, who had spent most of his adult life as a Protestant missionary among the Melanesians, returned to Melanesia for a visit after the end of the Second World War. He was very surprised when one of his old friends, who was a convert to Christianity, responded to his musings that the one thing that the missionaries had brought to Melanesia was the meaning of “spirit.” His old friend corrected him spontaneously and in a state of shock. He said, “You did not teach us spirit, you taught us the body!” In other words, it was a new meaning and mode of materiality that had been conveyed to them. The old friend told him that they already knew about the spirit before the coming of the missionaries. What we might learn from cargoism is a new and profound meaning of the intricate relationship between spirituality and materiality. It is this meaning that has been lost within the cultural and ideological languages of the West. The reverse of this is the case in most cultures that had to undergo the creative conquest and ideological domination of the Western world. But this is not simply a task of putting together body and mind. If taken seriously it calls for a

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new way of talking about human constitution itself—a way that must be at least as serious as the Meditations of Descartes or the various commentaries on Calvin’s Institutes. The other issue arising from the study of “primal traditions” that I wish to discuss is that of the meaning of the “fetish” and “fetishism.” Since this term was introduced into Western cultural languages by Charles de Brosses, it has become a subject of discourse for almost all the disciplines of the human sciences as well as having its own meaning in popular culture. It was used as a foil for the evolutionary development of humankind by both Kant and Hegel and, of course, its popular usage is probably due to the currency given it by Freud and the psychoanalytical movement. William Pietz has shown us that this term, if mined correctly, reveals a great deal about the interrelationship or the avoidance of the meaning of the interrelationship between the actual situations of the contact and reciprocities that were being forged in the new world of mercantilism. The first characteristic to be identified in the notion of the fetish is that of the fetish object’s irreducible materiality.6 The truth of the fetish resides in its status as a material embodiment; its truth is not that of the idol, for the idol’s truth lies in its relation of iconic resemblance to some immaterial model or entity. This was the basis for the distinction between the feitiço and the idolo in medieval Portuguese. For Charles de Brosses, who coined the term fétichisme in 1757, the fetish was essentially a material and terrestrial entity; fetishism was thus to be distinguished from cults of celestial bodies (whose truth might be a sort of proto-deist intimation of the rational order of nature rather than the direct worship of natural bodies themselves). Second, and equally important, is the theme of singularity and repetition. The fetish has an ordering power derived from its status as the fixation or inscription of a unique originating event that has brought together previous heterogeneous elements into a novel entity. But the heterogeneous components appropriated into an identity by a fetish are not only material elements; desires and beliefs and narrative structures establishing a practice are also fixed and fixated by the fetish, whose power is precisely the power to repeat its originating act of forging an identity of articulated relations between otherwise heterogeneous things. There are two other themes related to the problem of the fetish, its materiality, repetitive power, and singular fixation of heterogeneous elements; these are the themes of social value and personal individuality. The problem of the non-universality and connectedness of social value emerged in an intense form from the beginnings of European voyages to sub-Saharan Africa. Thus one of the earlier voyagers to West Africa, the Venetian, Alvise da Cadamosto, who sailed to Senegal under a Portuguese charter in the late 1450s was moved to write of the natives of Gambia, “Gold is much prized among them, in my opinion, more than by us, for they regard it as very precious; nevertheless they traded it very cheaply, taking in exchange articles of little value in our eyes.” Now it is important to note that the situation from which the accounts that led to the notion of fetishism are defined by the trade, commerce, contact, and intercourse of the communities on the coast of West Africa and the Europeans, mainly Portuguese traders. Pietz in one section of his articles defines this geographical situation as one of intense heterogeneity even of anarchy. The inhabitants of these coastal regions were not parts of African communities that were simply located on the coast. They were of all sorts—Christians, Muslims, Africans, even Jews, and every admixture among and between them. We are reminded here of the same kinds

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of communities of brigands described by Fernand Braudel as inhabiting the northwest coasts of the African Mediterranean. The problem of the fetish anticipates the meaning of the relationship of value to heterogeneity and the meaning of the constitution of the human consciousness within the structures of heterogeneity. Pietz implies quite strongly that it is through the discourse surrounding the fetish that the possibility of a movement from the Christian theological meaning of materiality to the modern world-system meaning of materiality in terms of its situational value within the structure of a fluid market came about. What did not occur, however, was the accompanying meaning of human consciousness in terms of its possible heterogeneity or doubleness. “Fetish,” has always named the incomprehensible mystery of the power of material things to be collective social objects experienced by individuals as truly embodying determinate values or virtues, always judged from a cross-cultural perspective of relative infinite degradation … Fetish discourse always posits this double consciousness of absorbed incredulity. The site of this latter disillusioned judgment by its very nature seems to represent a power of the ultimate degradation and, by implication, of the radical creation of value. Because of this it seems to hold an illusory attractive power of its own: that of seeming to be the Archimedean point of man at last “more open and cured of his obsessions” (quoting Michel Leiris), the impossible home of a man without fetishes.7 Throughout this paper I have argued by implication for a methodological approach that embodies a theory of practice. In so doing I am attempting to situate the problem of the “mind” or second-order reflection. I do not think that there is any such thing as “pure reason”; such a notion has heuristic but not absolute value. If, for example, I chose linguistic as a metaphor for my methodological approach in the manner of a Claude Lévi-Strauss, it would not be structural linguistic but pidgin and creole linguistics—a linguistic theory that arises out of the history of colonialism and contact. In creole linguistics we contemplate the absolute fact that humans possess language but that this language is acquired in contingent and heterogeneous situations. As one of the most brilliant creole linguists has put it, “Catastrophe is the rule, uniformitarianism is the law.”8 The same might be said in the contact of human cultures, at least since the creation of western Europe and the expanse of this culture throughout the globe.

Notes 1. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976), 2. 2. Ibid., 3. 3. It would interesting to compare the position of Jaspers with that of Mircea Eliade and his delineation of a “primitive ontology,” as well as his presentation of the archaic as a corrective and reformist meaning for contemporary cultures. One must note that Eliade tended to conflate archaic

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The Axial Age in a World Context and “traditional societies.” Some of his traditional societies would coincide with some of Jaspers’s axial age cultures. 4. The phrase “vision of the vanquished” here comes from Nathan Wachtel’s The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977). 5. Ibid., 1. 6. I am indebted to William Pietz for a series of journal articles he published on this topic; see “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17; “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987): 23–45; and “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (Autumn 1988): 105–123. 7. See Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, I,” 14. 8. See Robert Nicolai, “Is Songay a Creole Language?” in Pidgin and Creole Languages: Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke, ed. Glenn G. Gilbert (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 469–484.

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CHAPTER 31 THEODICY AND MODERNITY: COMMENTS ON MARK SCOTT’S “THEORIZING THEODICY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION”

Mark Scott states that the aim of his paper is to “develop a theoretical paradigm of understanding how theodicy has functioned in religion” (1).1 While Leibniz was the first to conceptualize theodicy in a text of 1709 bearing that title; the notion becomes central in the writings of Max Weber. To be sure, human groups throughout their existence on the face of the earth have given expression to their mortality and finitude—the fact of death, the experience of misfortune, and exposure to the various ephemeral and structural faults of the species. This does not mean that they were at the same time expressing what Leibniz and the epigone of the Enlightenment meant by theodicy. While the content of theodicy is coincidental with the aforementioned human difficulties, the concept, theodicy, as a mode of posing issues, is neither congruent nor compatible with these expressions in a non-Enlightenment context. Scott seems aware of this fact when he quotes Weber to the effect that “With the rise of reason … the inequities of the world came into sharper relief: Individually ‘undeserved’ woe was all too frequent; ‘not good’ but ‘bad’ men succeeded” (2). Scott adopts Weber’s conceptual understanding of theodicy, taken from his essay, “Das Probleme der Bedeutung,” where the German scholar sets the stage for the problem of theodicy. Scott intends to present “an approach that will have heuristic value for the study of theodicy in all its plurality within and between religious traditions” (20). Following Jonathan Z. Smith, he sets forth the notion that “theodicy, at its core, is the attempt to create and sustain meaning in the face of evil” (1). Central to Scott’s discussion of theodicy is the notion of “making meaning” (2). While his concern for meaning is most immediately derivative from Smith, its ultimate source is Max Weber. It is against the template of Weber that he interprets the theorists Clifford Geertz, Peter Berger, and, in passing, Charles H. Long, David Tracy, and Paul Tillich. Weber is a formidable figure in the study of religion and modernization processes. I devote a major part of my comments to his notions as they are involved in Scott’s essay. Though Max Weber may seem an apt or even exemplary theorist of a modern notion of theodicy, there are drawbacks to his centrality in setting forth a general theory of theodicy. Weber’s position often seems fettered by the very observations he has put forth in his understanding of the relationship between religion and modernity. He may not have been the theorist who would enable the author to carry out his own project of transposing the notion of theodicy from a macro to a micro level. Weber, though paying attention to other religions and cultures, accepts the normativity of modernity as specified and expressed in Western history from the

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Reformation through the Enlightenment, to Protestantism. All other religions and traditions are seen through this lens. Weber attributes the modern problem of theodicy to the “increasing rationality” of “worldviews,” or how religion evolved from “primitive to rational,” or his reference to the “traditional,” “belief in magic,” or “archaic beliefs” (2–3). Given Weber’s specification for the locus of the theodicy problematic, one cannot then identify the perennial expressions of human finitude and misfortune with Weber’s concept of theodicy. Ernst Cassirer described the Enlightenment conception of God in terms of a juxtaposition of index symbols. He tells us that what had established and justified the other concepts of human existence now finds itself in a position of a concept which requires justification. This task of logical justification was taken on by thinkers from Descartes to Malebranche. Leibniz’s theodicy continues the tradition of philosophical logic in his theodicy. In this tradition, God is necessary as an integer in the human logic of explanation. Weber’s meaning of theodicy breaks with this logical tradition of theodicy and seeks a meaning of God in the historical and socio-logic of modernity. Weber does not raise the issue of the source, origin, or creation of the cosmos. His concern is with the “worldview” of modernity—the world that modern human beings have made for themselves. It is this fact that defines the Weberian theodicy as the problem of meaning. Creation myths, narratives of how the cosmos came into being, often include a scenario describing how the fault, the finitude, the “the crucial negativity of a primordial happening” became a part of the human condition. This is a dominant meaning in cosmogonic myths. In other words, misfortune and evil are understood as dimensions and aspects of life itself and not a separate and distinct issue that called for an explanation outside of the constitution of human condition itself.2 In this regard, one notes that in Scott’s paper no distinction is made between his usage of “cosmos” and “worldview.” This is probably because Weber made no such distinction and this usage is followed in his discussion of Berger and Geertz. While “cosmos” is a term from ancient Greek thought, “worldview” is a very modern Enlightenment notion stemming from subjective epistemologies. I would make a distinction between the two, a dialectical distinction rather than an identity or binary based upon separation or static or stadial views of culture. I would state it in this manner: In the act of creating one’s world (worldview), one discerns that it is already given (cosmos). It is precisely this distinction that is lost in Weber’s formulations. This is what leads him to the antinomies and tautologies of modernity. Weber’s “disenchantment” of the world that leaves modern human societies in their “iron cages,” with little hope forthcoming from a sterile and abstract ideological future. Instead of the logical legerdemain of Descartes’ cogito, Weber presents us with his own version by describing how capitalistic accumulation is camouflaged by the inner asceticism of Protestantism. In Weber’s case the historical and sociologic has turned upon itself. Weber is very much aware of the strange and quixotic logic of the thesis he set forth in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Its last chapter, “Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism,” is a sober and even chilling summary of where the kind of world he described has led us: “in the United States the pursuit of wealth stripped of its ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.”3 One of Weber’s most astute interpreters put it this way: “Rationalization and disenchantment have created, according to Weber, a world with no ascertainable ground for one’s conviction. Under 372

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the circumstances, Weber saw the modern self torn between the irresponsible agitation of subjective value and bureaucratic petrification of objective rationality, and thus incapable of taking disciplined moral action.”4 It should be made clear here that this loss of meaning or what Weber understands as the failure of modernity to fulfill itself is not one shared by all those who look upon the modern period as a time in which more peoples and cultures in the West gained dignity and satisfaction in their lives. In other words, many would not agree with Weber’s loss of meaning as a mark of the modern period. One must understand Weber’s critique in terms of what he thought was the purpose and goal of modernity from the Reformation to the Enlightenment through Protestantism; this was the trinity of rationality, discipline, and freedom. It is clear that the view of theodicy put forward by Weber and followed by Scott is stated in terms of the history of ideas or ideologies. Some practices are referred to but seldom is there a full blown discussion of practices. For example, Weber’s Protestant Ethic is peppered with references to the United States and especially to Benjamin Franklin, but there is no mention of how the American democratic constitution legitimated chattel slavery. Unlike previous works, such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America or Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, no specific incidents or events are narrated. It is difficult for one to see how this method will allow Scott to move from the macro to the micro levels of the problem of theodicy.5 It is this point of view that allows for stylization of the issue in terms of binary oppositions. This is clearly seen in Weber’s use of the binary—archaic/modern, magic/science, primitive/ civilized, asceticism/hedonism, and so on. While Weber may be forgiven for this way of thinking, it is difficult to understand how one could discuss any serious issue concerning the meaning of the West during the modern period without taking into account the simultaneity and interlocking ideologies and practices of colonialism, imperialism, and international slavery in the making of the modern world. And these were not simply additional facts but also expressions of relationships that have and still have consequences for the way we speak of human beings and their contemporaneous possibilities. When one is cognizant of the totality and range of the relationships, the binary stylization of the human problem, whether posed as one of a religious cosmos/chaos, as in the case of Berger, or unintelligibility on the one side and lucidity on the other as in the case of Geertz, is simply not adequate. The events of modernity have taken us beyond binary formulations as a statement of the issue. Thus the issue of theodicy, if there is authentically such an issue, must move beyond the Western Enlightenment’s statements not only about the evil but the very formulation of the human mode of being itself. Those who suffered most during the “rise of the West” during the modern period did not succumb to the temptation of meaningless. W.E.B. Du Bois after describing the involuntary transfer of millions of Africans into the lands across the Atlantic as the largest involuntary movement of human beings in history goes on speak of this as “a descent into Hell.”6 And then there is the Holocaust. What is one to make of this event? It can surely not be placed within the continuity of the Western conception of time rationalized by the Enlightenment and theologized by Hegel. It is a surd, a hole in the systematic conceptions of Western meanings. Scott turns to the metaphor of floundering and disintegrating boats in the water to give us the sense of the urgency and radicality of our situation in relationship to theodicy. Before proceeding I cannot resist the temptation to point out that this was not a metaphor for millions of persons during the modern period. One only needs to recall the thousands of boats in the 373

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Atlantic waters filled to capacity with the human cargo of African bodies, having been captured and enslaved, not knowing the reason for this enslavement or the destination to which they were proceeding. Let us think of these kinds of facts alongside the metaphors of meaning presented to us by Scott. The floundering boat upon the sea metaphor was made famous in our time by W.V.O. Quine, who derived it from the philosopher, Otto Neurath. Here is the way Quine stated it: “Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat. Our boat stays afloat because at each alteration we keep the bulk of it intact as a going concern.”7 While this states a crisis situation, I think that Neurath’s original statement is a bit more dramatic: “No tabula rasa exists. We are like sailors who must rebuild their ships on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials. Only the metaphysical elements can be allowed to vanish without a trace. Vague linguistic conglomerations always remain in one way or another as components of the ship.”8 I find this statement a bit starker than Quine’s paraphrase and thus I like it better. Like Neurath and Quine, I don’t think it is an issue of navigation at all but whether or not we have a viable boat or ship in these very turbulent waters. To continue the analogy, as planks and other accoutrements of the original vessel are lost, we might be able to pick up flotsam and jetsam floating by—debris from the several debacles of the West during the modern period. We must make use of this material to keep our vessel afloat (our worldview). However, in the midst of this dire circumstance of making a world, a cosmos of the given will appear as both limit and resource. What is at stake is not a matter of navigation but whether the human mode of being is capable of survival.

Notes 1. Mark S. M. Scott’s “Theorizing Theodicy in the Study of Religion” can be found at: . 2. See Charles H. Long, Alpha: The Myths of Creation (New York: George Braziller, 1963). The cosmology may also be seen from the perspective of mortality; see Hans Abrahamsson, The Origin of Death: Studies in African Mythology, Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia, 3 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 1951). 3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1948), 183. 4. Sung Ho Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 130. 5. Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949), offers another account of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism. It has the merit of being centered on usury which allows for the description of the nature and meaning of exchanges within the ordering and meaning of community, something lacking in Weber’s thesis and gives it the magical unconscious sense. 6. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 727. 7. W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960), 3–4. 8. Otto Neurath, “Protocol Sentences,” trans. George Schick, in Logical Positivism, ed. Alfred J. Ayer (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 199–208, at 199. 374

CHAPTER 32 RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF SOME RECENT DISCUSSIONS

While many debate the question concerning the relevance of religion in the modern world, there are very few who would question the importance of religion in the cultures of premodern man. The continuing number of publications which are devoted to the religion and mythology of premodern cultures attest to the vitality and interest in this area of human history. These studies represent something more than a stereotyped academic interest in that which is dead, esoteric, and irrelevant. Rather, these works reflect the intense interest in historical studies as a possible orientation in the impasse created by the ambiguities, tensions, and terrors of the modern world. All knowledge, especially historical knowledge, begins in curiosity, but there is a seriousness in the curiosity of these recent works which one does not find in the classical writings of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. As we have said above, this seriousness is evoked in part by the contemporary situation of the historian. Another aspect of this situation has to do with the proliferation of methods of approach to the human reality in history. Any historian writing today must make his peace with the new methods arising out of anthropology, ethnology, phenomenology, existential philosophy, and depth psychology, to mention only a few of the new factors. While large “gaps” still exist in our historical knowledge, the major problem today is not our lack of information; it is rather the problem of finding a hermeneutic which proves to be an adequate interpretative schema for the historical content which already confronts us. The three books discussed in this article are The New Golden Bough: A New Abridgment of Sir James Frazer’s Classic Work, edited with notes and foreword by Theodor Η. Gaster (New York: Criterion, 1959); Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: Viking, 1959); and Edward Norbeck’s Religion in Primitive Society (New York: Harper, 1961). It is well-nigh impossible within the scope of this article even to approach an adequate review of any edition of The Golden Bough, much less an edition by Theodor Gaster. The Golden Bough has a history of its own since its publication. It has been the subject of reviews and critical comment for such a long time that one should not take the time to repeat what one has learned from scholars more competent than one’s self. It is important for us to understand why Professor Gaster has found it necessary to re-edit this work and to investigate the method he used in putting together this present edition. To present the proper context for this discussion, I quote from the dust cover of the one-volume, abridged Imperial Edition of The Golden Bough, sixth printing (Macmillan, 1958). The publishers state the following concerning the contents: Here, as in no other book, you can trace the gradual evolution of human thought from savagery to civilization. Here you can discover the roots of our scientific, social and religious ideas. You will find savage man enmeshed in a nightmare of magic, wizardry, taboos and superstitions … a creature of such fears and terrors that you will wonder

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that he kept his sanity. You will see the bit-by-bit modification of his weird and often bloodthirsty customs. You will watch the halting entry of religion, as opposed to magic. You will trace from their primitive sources many of the beliefs of our ancestors which still warp our lives today. In a word, The Golden Bough will spread before you the whole panorama of man’s long, bitter struggle—not yet won—to emerge from the tragic welter of superstitious fears and hates, into a clearer understanding of the world we live in. To be sure, this statement is a part of the advertisement of the book and should not be taken as a scholarly résumé of the contents of this edition of The Golden Bough. There is, however, evidence in the book which does in fact parallel the advertisement on the dust cover of this sixth edition published in 1958. Gaster believes that the value of The Golden Bough should not be limited to the rather naïve evolutionary point of view which Sir James Frazer held. The Golden Bough is more than this for him. It is, in his words, a classic—a classic which placed before the eyes of Western man a panorama of religio-historical behavior and attitudes. But if this classic is to become something more than a repository of facts, it deserves, as Gaster puts it, “periodic pruning.” Gaster proves to be a competent pruner, for not only does he handle the pruning shears of scholarship deftly, but he also has a genuine and tender feeling for the tree. By rearranging the subject matter under new headings, by subjecting some of Frazer’s theories to critical examination, and by adding his own commentary and bibliographical references to those of Frazer, he has indeed made this classic work usable for the contemporary historian. Gaster’s modification of Frazer’s work may be seen in three parts. First of all, historical scholarship has shown that many of Frazer’s conclusions regarding religion—conclusions based on Frazer’s historical knowledge—are no longer tenable. For example, Frazer’s interpretation of the priesthood of Aricia has been rejected by classical scholars. Similarly, his understanding of a single, over-all Corn or Tree spirit has not been able to survive subsequent historical studies. The second form of modification results from Frazer’s rather strict typological schema which did not permit him to understand the meaning of religious symbols in their multidimensional complexity. Therefore, he often interpreted the intention of a religious form in a rather obvious and naïve manner and seldom took into account the variety of socioreligious meanings carried by the form. Gaster points to this in Frazer’s understanding of the divine king, the scapegoat, and the fire festivals. Gaster is also aware of the influence of Frazer’s notions of evolution and animism on his historical interpretation. In modifying Frazer’s position at this point, the theories of magic and of the “dying and reviving” gods must be eliminated. In the last analysis, these two notions, as they were used by Frazer, led him to most of his wrong conclusions about the history of religion and resulted in the description of his work cited above. Finally, Gaster remarks that Frazer “pays far too little regard to the necessity of a cultural stratification, tending to place all ‘savage’ customs and beliefs on a single vague level of ‘the primitive.’” This is very important, for it forces us to recognize the fact that all cultures have a history and that there is a certain specificity peculiar to each historical situation and to each culture. This does not mean that we must give up the comparative historical method. It simply means that we must become more sophisticated in our employment of it. But if we prune away these two bases of Frazer’s method and all that is implied in them, are we not saying that 376

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The Golden Bough is simply a survival of a past era with little relevance for historicalcomparative study? The points of modification by Gaster do constitute a serious critique of Frazer. We are, however, in agreement with Gaster that the value of Frazer’s work still remains. If we admit that no historical work can be immortal either because of its content or method, then we must look to the intention of Frazer’s work as a model. Gaster states this intention when he says: “It is this attempt to construe the data in universal terms, just as much as in its unparalleled coverage of them, that the distinctive significance of The Golden Bough really lies; and it is this that has earned for it the status of a classic” (pp. xix–xx). If the task of the historian of culture and religion remains the same as it was for Frazer, namely, “to construe the data in universal terms, just as much as in its unparalleled coverage of them,” this task is carried forth by Joseph Campbell in his book, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. If one can no longer accept the rationalistic-evolutionistic methodology of Tylor and Frazer, then the raison d’être of myth in human history remains a central problem. Not only the general question of the “why” of myth but also the more precise questions regarding the meaning of specific mythological symbols and their appearances at various times in certain geographical areas must become a part of any discussion of myth. Historical-cultural studies in religion are today quite aware of the “cultural stratification” referred to by Gaster. Problems of this type lie behind Professor Campbell’s orientation to the history of mythology. Let us discuss his book within the context of these problems. First of all, why myth? Campbell is obviously aware of the definitions of myth and religion in the well-nigh classical formulations of Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Mircea Eliade. While he does not take issue with any of these men, he seems to wish to go beyond these general definitions and to give an empirical (and in his use of the term, “natural”) explanation of this dimension of human experience. Taking a leaf from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Campbell interprets the play element in culture as a fundamental need of man. Play is understood by him as that necessity of man to free himself from the ordinary character of his life. “Such a highly played game of ‘as if ’ frees our mind and spirit, on the one hand, from the presumption of theology, which pretends to know the laws of God, and, on the other, from the bondage of reason, whose laws do not apply beyond the horizon of human experience” (p. 28). The myth does not, however, serve simply to facilitate man’s transcendence of the ordinary. It functions at the same time to integrate and order the individual into a harmonious community. This is the integrative aspect of mythology—an aspect which Durkheim made clear in his book, Les formes élémentaire de la vie religieuse. Myths and mythological symbols serve a dual function. On the one hand, they are symbolizations of the communal existence, and, on the other, they serve as the boundaries of the workaday world. The world beyond these boundaries is the world of play and transcendence. It is at this point that Campbell makes use of the Sanskrit word upādhi. Upādhi means deceit, deception, disguise, but also limitation, idiosyncrasy, or attribute. The science of comparative mythology is for Campbell a comparative study of upādhis. One is reminded here of the classical distinction between the sacred and the profane. It is possible for the upādhi in at least one of its meanings to be understood as the boundary between religion or myth as an integrative function of society and religion or myth as a designation of play and transcendence. The duality of meaning in the notion of upādhi is extended to another level of meaning. “There are those (upādhis) inevitably deriving from the primary conditions of all human 377

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experience whatsoever (la condition humaine), and those particular to the various areas and eras of human civilization (die Völkergedanken)” (pp. 55–56). To be sure, those upādhis “which inevitably derive from the primary conditions of all human experience whatsoever” are always given expression within a particular cultural-historical situation. One can, from Campbell’s point of view, be reasonably sure that they are generically human expressions—expressions which give symbolic form to birth, youth, and old age. The particularistic elements are those which cannot be understood apart from the peculiar cultural environment, in which they find their expression. As an implication and elaboration of the above sources of mythical symbols, the historical development of cultures opens new horizons for symbolic expression. In some periods of cultural history specific mythical symbols which homologize the environment emerge. The response of man to the human condition is accounted for in Campbell’s interpretation by the existence of “innate releasing” and “central excitatory mechanisms” (pp. 30–31, 37). The innate releasing mechanism is a description of the inherited structure in the nervous system that enables an animal to respond to a circumstance never experienced before. The central excitatory mechanism describes the ability of animals to receive stimulation from within and without and moves the organism to “appetitive behaviour” (p. 37). Campbell suggests that these mechanisms correspond to Bastian’s elementary or innate ideas. He then gives us a full discussion of the meaning of these responses to the human condition. In the chapter entitled “The Imprints of Experience,” he deals with the following topics: “The Structuring Force of Life on Earth,” “The Imprints of Early Infancy,” “The Spontaneous Animism of Childhood,” “The System of Sentiments of the Local Groups,” and “The Impact of Old Age.” The force of his argument in this section is to demonstrate how myth arises necessarily out of the sociobiological structure of the human organism. The historical and ethnic aspects of myth must now be explained. These aspects of myth are explained through Campbell’s notions of “mythogenetic zones” (p. 387) and diffusion. Since the concept of mythogenetic zones is important to his construction of history and is a new concept in the methodology of comparative history, I shall quote at length his definition of this concept: We have already spoken of the biological theory of a “zone of hominization”: a limited yet sufficiently broad area of the earth’s surface, relatively uniform in character, where a large population of closely related individuals became affected simultaneously by a series of genetic mutations conducing to the appearance of a considerable variety of man-like forms. I should like now to propose a comparable theory for the origin both of our myth and the art of cultivating plants, with which it is affiliated. For we can be certain that from one end to the other of Province A [from Africa to India] there was an effective communication of thought and techniques; slow, indeed, according to modern standards—requiring centuries instead of seconds—yet eventually effective, nevertheless. And so we may think of this broad area as a continuum in which a fairly uniform state of human affairs prevailed and which, consequently, was characterized by a fairly uniform state of psychological readiness for the reception of an imprint. … We may term such a zone a “mythogenetic zone,” and it should be the task of our science to identify such zones, and clearly distinguish them from “zones of diffusion” as well as from zones of later development and further crisis. (pp. 386–387) 378

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To show how the mythogenetic zones enable one to interpret prehistory, Campbell divides prehistory into six stages. Stage 1 is the stage of Plesianthropus. Plesianthropus is very clearly related to the apes, but Campbell believes that there is enough evidence for us to believe that he was capable of playing with patterns of thought as well as with patterns of movement. Stage 2 is that of Pithecanthropus, who lived around 400,000 bce. Already diffusion from the zone of hominization of Plesianthropus can be discerned. This diffusion from South and East Africa was in two directions: northward into Europe (Heidelberg Man) and eastward to Java (Pithecanthropus). There is another diffusion from Java northward into China (SinanthropusPeking Man). The most significant achievement of this stage was the development of the hand ax. In stage 3 we meet Neanderthal Man (ca. 200,000–75,000/25,000 bce.). For the first time we have reliable evidence of the establishment of rite and myth. In stage 4 the mythology of the naked goddess and that of the temple caves is clearly evidenced. These new mythogenetic zones appear in the Ukraine and in northern Spain and southern France. The Caspian period is stage 5 in prehistory, and stage 6 begins with the birth of civilization in the ancient Near East. In summary, the cultures of prehistory may be explained through biological development and diffusion. The mythogenetic zones are areas of Urkultur and the fundamental and most significant elements in the subsequent development of culture in prehistory. Throughout this very long development certain ethnic and particularistic mythological elements appear. These particular elements are seldom isolated, for, if we follow Campbell’s use of mythogenetic zones and diffusion, we are able to explain the amalgamation of mythological elements in the course of this long history. But wherever the symbol appears, at whatever level of culture, it appears in the form of upādhi. The human condition remained, but at each stage it was homologized in different ways. In speaking of the contrast between the hunting societies and the early agricultural societies, Campbell remarks: “Among the primitive hunting societies the way was to deny death, the reality of death, and to go on killing as willing victims the animals that one required and revered. But in the planting societies a new insight or solution was opened by the lesson of the plant world itself, which is linked somehow to the moon, which also dies and is resurrected and moreover influences in some mysterious way still unknown, the lunar cycle of the womb” (p. 180). However, out of hunting societies there emerges a new religious social type, the shaman, who stands, in Campbell’s work, in sharp contrast to the religious social type represented by the priest in agricultural societies. These two types of religious experience and men continue to be perennial forms in religion. They represent the two aspects of the mask of god or the upādhi. The two types of mind, thus, are complementary: the tough-minded, representing the inert, reactionary; and the tender, the living progressive impulse—respectively, attachment to the local and timely and the impulse to the timeless universal. In human history the two have faced each other in dialogue since the beginning, and the effect has been that actual progress and process from lesser to greater horizons, simple to complex organizations, slight to rich patterns of the art-work which is civilization in its flowering in time. (p. 471) The history of culture and religion thus reveals that which is perennial and that which emerges as new and novel in human experience, but neither the perennial nor the novel can be discussed without recourse to the mask of god. 379

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In discussing the meaning of human sacrifice, Campbell has the following to say: There is no way, in sheerly economic terms, to account for the phenomenology of a primitive social system in which a tremendous proportion of time and energy is given to activities of an elaborate ritual nature. The rites are expected to afford economic wellbeing and social harmony; that is true. Yet their inception cannot be attributed to an economic insight, or even a social need. Groups of a hundred souls or so do not require the murder of their finest sons and daughters to enable them to cohere. The flowering of rites derived from a cosmic insight—and of such force that the whole scene, the formal structuring principle of the universe, seemed for a certain period of human history to have been caught in it. (pp. 178–179) The problem alluded to by Campbell in the latter quotation raises the problem of a genuine sociology of religion—a sociology of religion which is informed in the area of religion and the social sciences. Edward Norbeck’s book, Religion in Primitive Society, is an interpretation of the meaning of religion within primitive society. It is a comparative work drawing materials from many societies and many sources. The general method can be defined as that of functionalism. The book is divided into two major divisions entitled “Primitive Religion, An Overview” and “The Role of Religion.” Many new sources and a great deal of new data are discussed in this book, but the book lacks a new theoretical approach to its subject matter. The positive contribution of functionalism as a methodological approach is that it forces the investigator to focus his attention on the actual role which religion plays within the life of society. This is an important aspect of every religious system, but, surely, the manner in which an institution comes to be is a part of what it is. It is this lack of historical insight which makes many functionalistic studies appear incomplete and naïve. There is another preliminary issue with which we must deal. By and large it seems as if Norbeck writes his book over against what he considers to be the theological point of view. Norbeck states on page 137: “This [actual observable behavior] is in sharp contrast with the practice of theologians, who have concentrated on wholly theological matters and until recent years have hardly been concerned with religion in action.” This statement is simply not historically true, whether one has in mind the early Church Fathers, the Reformers, or such modern theologians as Tillich or the Niebuhrs. While we admit that the approaches and goals of the social scientists and the theologians are different, the issue lies at a deeper level. It is the issue of a humanistic orientation to human reality as over against an “objective scientific” approach. This problem is discussed in detail by the late Robert Redfield in his article, “Relations of Anthropology to the Social Sciences and to the Humanities,” in Anthropology Today, edited by Alfred Kroeber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Religion in Primitive Society cites many examples of religious beliefs and ceremonies, but the principle by which these various data are integrated is not discussed. We are not aware that any notion of cultural stratification or theoretical apparatus or typology is the integrating principle. Such a principle would possibly have prevented Norbeck from making the assertion that “the great change in conceptions of the nature of the universe and of religion in the West arose with the growth and acceptance of science. Before that time there were no truly basic differences between Western religions and those of primitive society” (p. 272). If one is to disavow historical interpretation in his basic methodology, he should also refrain from making historical judgments. Norbeck’s interpretation, while representing a certain level of competence 380

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from the functionalist point of view, adds very little to our understanding of religion. It is not as exciting or as informative as Malinowski—the original functionalist. It does not deal with basic theory as did the works of Goldenweiser, and it does not show the insight of a Robert Lowie. It does serve to remind us that the sociology of religion remains a fertile area of research. Joachim Wach’s pioneer work, Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), building on the work of Weber, remains as the most significant attempt in this area. His student Joseph Kitagawa extended Wach’s method to a study of types of religious community. The definitive work remains to be done. In such a work the best insights of the humanist must be combined with the precision of the scientist. The issue here and in the other two works discussed in this article is hermeneutical. We are able to see quite clearly the inadequacy of Frazer’s method, and it is for this reason that we appreciated the bold, exciting, and synthetic approach of Campbell. The problem is an urgent one, but the urgency of the problem should caution us rather than lead us to precipitous solutions. In Campbell’s presentation we have felt that he is forcing cultural diffusion to answer too many important questions. He does not deal adequately with the geographical and historical gaps in our knowledge regarding diffusion. There is, furthermore, too much speculation involved in a theory as fundamental to his system as the existence of mythogenetic zones. The sharp dichotomy between shaman and priests is not historically sound, and the concept of play is not discussed adequately enough to establish it as a type of religious ultimate. In spite of these problems, Campbell outlines the issues on which historians of religion and culture must work.

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CHAPTER 33 OTHER TIMES, OTHER PLACES: MYTHS AND CITIES IN MESOAMERICAN RELIGION

Review of Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myth and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition. By Davíd Carrasco. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1983. Pp. xii + 233. This book accomplishes two major tasks. In the first instance, it sets forth an outline of religious history of citied traditions in Mesoamerica. Second, in the accomplishment of this project it offers a critique and integration of the several methods, theories, and speculations in the history of interpretation of these cultures. In pressing an interpretation that does not rest on precise written data, Professor Carrasco reminds us of a statement of J. C. Beaglehole: “Circumstance are also facts. Circumstances indeed become essential facts” (pp. 119–120). In a sense this judgement may apply to the entire history of the interpretation of Mesoamerican cultures. The issue of circumstance forms a methodological context for the understanding of the history of this cultural area, and while the lack of written documentation is a problem for some periods of this history, it is not the major problem. The major issues have been the circumstances surrounding the interpretation of this cultural history. Carrasco alludes to this problem when he states, “Between us and the preColumbian city and its symbols stand not just time and wear, distance and cultural diversity, and renewal within a tradition of wisdom but also the conquest of Mexico and the invention of the American Indian” (pp. 6–7). The primary written documents of this tradition were altered into European styles and languages, translated within the theological polemics of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Christianity, and interpreted within the context of the social, religious, and political dynamics of colonial culture. These written documents, of which sixteen important ones survive, are for the most part scattered in the archives of several European countries. Issues of this sort are compounded by the ideologies of a geographical primitivism, extending from the conquest to the present. These ideologies of the “otherness of the New World” created taxonomies, theories, and speculations that more often than not confused the data and mesmerized the student of these cultures. The very history of interpretation of Mesoamerica is a methodological circumstance, a formidable fact. Early on in his work. Carrasco recognizes this situation and with precision outlines the data, resources, and stylistics of this complex history of interpretation. He begins with the history of misinterpretations. His point of departure is the presence of citied traditions, a datum that has been taken for granted by almost all of the interpreters since the conquest. This work is, in point of fact, a history of the symbolic spaces in pre-Hispanic Mexico. Carrasco deciphers the religious meaning of the citied traditions by employing the methods set forth by Paul Wheatley and Stanley Tambiah in their discussions of the beginnings of citied traditions. As a historian of Mesoamerican citied traditions he is at the same time a comparativist and one is thus able to

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discern the valences and nuances of the meaning of religious symbolism in his deft and subtle interpretations. The historical religious reconstruction of pre-Hispanic citied traditions is based on the meaning of Tollan as the beginnings of the citied tradition and thus the ceremonial center par excellence of this tradition. As such, Tollan was inextricably related to the symbolism and myths of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. The expression of the beginnings of this tradition in the space of Tollan and in the myths and symbols of Quetzalcoatl becomes the basic paradigm for his study: “(a) the cosmological/earthly setting for (b) the organization of a ceremonial city by (c) the hero. The Toltec paradigm contains the models of sacred kingship and ceremonial city, sovereign leadership, and the effective organization of space as they were understood, revered, and developed by Toltec and Aztec elites” (p. 65). He combines and correlates an interpretation of architecture and written documents to convince us of the symbolic and primordial nature of the foundation of Tollan. What indeed is remarkable is the manner in which the symbolism of this founding, the image of Quetzalcoatl, is the archetype for all citied foundings and at the same time the basis for the symbolic changes. The integrity of the myths is as much, in the various foundings of cities among the Toltecs and Aztecs as in its initial expression. He contends and marshalls evidence to demonstrate that Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl of Tollan is the central thread of a genre of archaic historical thought that is the sacred history of the cultures under discussion. “In Mesoamerican capital cities from the eleventh century on just such a sacred history was taught; it represented the great moments when the sacred was incarnated in the city of Tollan through the heroic and inspired career of Quetzalcoatl. Further it seems possible that Toltec sacred history contained the closest thing we have to a Mexican aretology” (p. 78). But just as Quetzalcoatl is the symbol of locus and effective space, the history of this tradition is at the same time an exploration of the symbolic structures latent in the image of Quetzalcoatl. The history of the citied traditions, their foundings and refoundings, is simultaneously the expression of the completion and perfection of the symbol of Quetzalcoatl. From the birth narratives of Quetzalcoatl in the Anales de Cuauhtitlan and the Codex Vienna through the founding narrative in the Florentine Codex to his image as Hombre-Dios as the actuality of the mythic-cosmic container itself, the structure of his symbolism endures as integration, an interpretative meaning of the citied tradition in all of its different manifestations. Another kind of integration is revealed in Carrasco’s work—an integration of methods, for in setting forth this interpretation, he has brilliantly integrated the many partial and fragmentary studies stemming from archaeology, art history, ethnology, history, and other areas into a history that is both plausible and aesthetically adequate. The citied tradition symbolized by the ceremonial center of Tollan and the mythological cycles of Quetzalcoatl are the bases or archetypes for the “other Tollans,” the city-states of Cholollan, Xochicalco, Culhuacan. As such, Quetzalcoatl was a symbol of foundation and legitimation of space. Precisely because it was such a symbol of primordial order, Quetzalcoatl was capable of containing the changes and innovations expressed in the “other Tollans.” Carrasco states that Teotihuacan, an early manifestation of the city tradition, was the “first Tollan.” First, not only in the historical sense, but also in the sense of principle and ideal, for it fulfilled and exemplified the fullness and ecstasy of the ceremonial center as city in one locus. It is therefore not strange that the great Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan integrated not only the spatial order of the city and thus legitimated the sacrality of political 384

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and legitimate authority but also equally represented an archetypal model for the histories of all subsequent “Tollans.” We see this continuity and change in the discussion of the last Tollan, Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire. As a city of the periphery, it equally expressed the galactic tension between other city-states of the periphery and an intense tension with the center. The rise of Aztec hegemony within Tenochtitlan with the arrival of the Chichimecas and the assumption of the role of ruler meant that they inherited both the political authority as well as the symbolic history represented by Quetzalcoatl. Having gained imperial legitimacy through access to a sacred genealogy, conquest, and adaption, the Toltec Aztecs are fated to live out the symbolic history of the myth of Quetzalcoatl. And it is this tragic and ambiguous residual meaning of the myth of Quetzalcoatl that explains the immobility, hesitancy, and querulous consciousness of Motecuhzoma II (Xocoyotzin) before Hernán Cortés and his armies. The possibility that Cortés is in fact the returned Quetzalcoatl as predicted in the myths leads to a military and political impotence that is the cause of the defeat of Tenochtitlan. This struggle of conscience may have been occasioned by the practice of mass human sacrifice in the symbolic city of Quetzalcoatl who, in all of the mythological cycles, opposed such sacrifice. The return of Quetzalcoatl could be a judgment as well as a rectification. The deeper tragedy is the fact that the Aztecs, who were themselves internal conquistadors, could recognize Quetzalcoatl/ Hombre-Dios in Cortés, a figure which was strangely enough a mirror image of themselves. This study brilliantly shows the meaning of the religious understanding of space in preHispanic Mexico and documents the value of the methodological approaches of Mircea Eliade, Paul Wheatley, and Stanley Tambiah. It is not, however, simply a study of the usages to which religious and symbolic interpretation might be put in understanding sociopolitical formations. While the mythological cycles of Quetzalcoatl allow for this interpretation, the meaning of the myth must be something more than its application to these interpretations for it to be valid at this level. Carrasco, in the last episode of the meaning of the myth for Motecuhzoma, adumbrates another meaning of the myth which has continued as a strand throughout the study: that myth, while finding its expression within history and society, possesses at the same time a structural integrity that reflects and creates forms of society and history. This is an important study and will be referred to by Mesoamerican scholars and historians of religion for some time.

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CHAPTER 34 THE DREAMS OF PROFESSOR CAMPBELL: JOSEPH CAMPBELL’S THE MYTHIC IMAGE

Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and thinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up to find that he knows nothing. —Plato, Statesman

Introduction Not since the publication of Erwin R. Goodenough’s Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, between the years 1953 and 1968, or perhaps Heinrich Zimmer’s The Art of Indian Asia in 1955 (2nd ed., 1960), has the Bollingen Foundation presented us with such a prodigious text. It must for Professor Campbell surely represent a labor of love. One feels when going through the volume that Bollingen acceded to Campbell’s every wish in the production of this volume, for literally everything—choice of paper, typestyle, format, photographs, and so forth—has been carefully chosen; each page is marked by the precise sense of the author. No compromises seem to have been made, and thus the volume represents in every detail the intent of the author. It is an unstinting, handsome, lavishly illustrated text. Such meticulousness is obviously a sign of the regard which the publisher holds for the author, but in this case the attentiveness and pains for detail are directly related to the basic orientation of the work; the objective of the book could not have been accomplished in any lesser edition. Campbell suggests two approaches to his work. We might, first of all, deal with the volume as a pictorial essay since “Pictures invite the eye not to rush along, but to rest a while and dwell with them in enjoyment of their revelation. In the fashioning of this book, therefore, my thought has been to let the spirit of the pictures rule, and to arrange it so that the reader might enter into the pages at any turn he liked” (xi). If we take this approach and browse through the book, we begin with a beautiful reproduction of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Eve, find ourselves enticed into the dreamlike moods of William Blake and Gauguin, are confronted suddenly with the monumental architecture of the Ancient Near East and Mesoamerica, are forced to ponder mathematically arranged astronomical and chronological charts, experience the wild and erotic images of Tantric Buddhism, and then are lulled again into the archaic and ephemeral beauty of Paleolithic South African rock paintings. Thereafter we are taken up by voluptuous Venuses, Yaksas, sleeping Buddhas, crucified deities, gruesome sacrifices, winged genii, and so forth. From this first approach we are indeed made to experience the text as a dream, for in this sense there seems to be no necessary connection among the images that appear to us, at least no necessary connection in the historical sense, neither in the methodological nor ideological senses of the disciplines of the human sciences.

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In this sense the images are discrete—residues, survivals, leftovers from other times and places; and they float before us in a panoramic vision which flows from and back into another time and place. Now, while we are invited to enjoy the book in this manner, Campbell has not left the issue of order simply to our devices, for he offers us a second approach, contradictory and complementary to the first one. The principle of this second approach is stated in the first section of the text and can be discerned from meditation upon the Table of Contents. It is his argument “that through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dream, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so indeed, does life” (xi). The Table of Contents may be seen as a method for the elucidation of this thesis. It begins with a first chapter entitled “The World as Dream,” followed by chapters on “The Idea of Cosmic Order” (II), “The Lotus and the Rose” (III), “Transformations of the Inner Light” (IV), “The Sacrifice” (V), and, finally, “The Waking” (VI). If we continue our meditation with a perusal of the quotations at the beginning of the text, we move to another stage of our initiation into the method of this book. These quotations are as follows: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

There is a dream dreaming us. 

—Shakespeare, The Tempest

—A Kalahari Bushman

The Chinese sage Chuang-tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and on waking wondered whether he then had been a man dreaming, or might not now be a butterfly dreaming it was a man. That we come to this earth to live is untrue: We come but to sleep, to dream. —Aztec poem, Anonymous La vida es sueño: Life is a Dream

—Title of a play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

And so it is dream and myth that we confront in this text. It is no surprise that we should meet this problem in this latest work of Professor Campbell. From his early work, A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, through his four volumes on the Masks of God, to this text, the relationship of the dream to myth has been his central concern. In many circles he has been called a Jungian, but it is my feeling that his Jungianism is secondary to the central problem of dream and myth, and that he has used Jung as a guide, a helper, in the endeavor to unravel this problem that haunts him. Both this problem and Campbell’s interpretative orientation have a venerable tradition. Dreams and oneiric modalities are part and parcel of almost all religious traditions. In the Western tradition of interpretation we may note the use of the dream in Plato, Augustine, and Vico, to mention only a significant few from the past. 388

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If we look at The Mythic Image within the context of the Campbell oeuvre, it appears as if it should have been the first of his published works, and that his works beginning with The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God should find their places as extensive commentaries and footnotes to The Mythic Image. The key to this interpretive relationship is found in Creative Mythology, the fourth volume of The Masks of God, where he states that, In the context of a traditional mythology, the symbols are presented in socially maintained rites, through which the individual is required to experience, or will pretend to have experienced, certain insights, sentiments, and commitments. In what I am calling ‘creative’ mythology, on the other hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his own—of order, horror, beauty, or even exhilaration—which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain depth and import, his communication will have the value and force of living myth—for those, that is to say, who receive and respond to it of themselves, with recognition, uncoerced. … The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is: the second being to render an interpretive total image of the same, as known to contemporary consciousness. … It is the revelation of waking consciousness to the power of its own sustaining source (4). Again, on pages 671–672 of this same work, we read: In art, in myth, in rites, we enter the sphere of dream awake. And as the imagery of dream will be on one level local, personal, and historic, but at bottom rooted in the instincts, so also myth is delivered to the sphere of bliss of the deep conscious, where it touches, wakes, and summons energies; so that symbols operating on that level are energy-releasing and -channeling stimuli. That is their function—their “meaning”—on the level of Deep Sleep: while on the level of Waking Consciousness the same symbols are inspirational, informative, initiatory, rendering a sense of illumination with respect to the instincts touched, i.e., the order subliminal of nature—inward and outward nature—of which the instincts touched are the life. Campbell’s previous works have attempted to show how myths arise at specific times and places during the history of humankind. In their localized appearances, myths become the archetypes for order, meaning, and behavior, for idiosyncratic local, ethnic, or nationalistic groups. In this sense the mythologies and myths are “charters for conduct,” to use Malinowski’s phrase; and in Campbell’s words, they are “the public dreams that move and shape societies; and conversely, one’s own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself ” (Campbell, 1974, 362). But even in their localized settings, myths express an intentionality that goes beyond their limited context and a meaning that pushes toward universality. Myths, however, arise from the dream so that the primordial order of all myths is that of sleep and the activity of sleep, the dream. It is Campbell’s attempt to write a book within the structure of sleep and dream that renders the text essentially esoteric and exotic. But such esotericism and exoticism come about, not because sleep and dream are distant and foreign, but because of the common and surdic nature 389

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of dream itself! The dream, like language and sexuality, is commonplace and complex, simple and totalizing; but unlike sexuality or language, it occurs as a passive modality, seemingly unrelated to or defying in its passivity, the volitional consciousness. In spite of its occurrence during the passive mode of sleep, the dream, like all languages of the body, is “incomparably more ambiguous and more overdetermined than the most overdetermined uses of ordinary language.” Pierre Bourdieu, to whom we owe the above insight, continues this discussion of the problematic character of “languages of the body” by saying: “This is why ritual roots are always broader and vaguer than linguistic roots, and why the gymnastics of rituals, like dreams, always seem richer than the verbal translations, at once unilateral and arbitrary, that may be given of it” (Bourdieu, 1977, 120; italics added). With this introduction let us continue to the substance of the text. The world dream The first chapter of the text is entitled “The World as Dream.” If the world is a dream, then who is the sleeper, and who the dreamer? In one sense, Campbell suggests that each culture, each people, each person is a dreamer; but if the world is a dream, our problem is a bit more complex. It is of the very nature of the dream phenomenon that only the awakened one is able to relate the dream; and thus the dreamer, the sleeper, and the interpreter often constitute a continuity, if not an identity. The first section of this first chapter is entitled “Sleep,” and it is sleep as the context for the dream that undergirds the entire text; for the myths and mythological motifs are presented in every other chapter and section as dream phenomena. Sleep thus envelops the text. The images of sleep presented are those of the ultimate dreamer, Vishnu, floating on the Cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent, Ananta, the meaning of whose name is “Unending” (7). But it seems that even within the dream a reflexive and reflective structure is present—a nonwaking, nonrational order of reflection and reflexivity. The dream is not therefore a chaos; it manifests its own logic. For in dreams things are not as single, simple, and separate as they seem, the logic of Aristotle fails, and what is not-A may indeed be A (8). We opened this work with a motto from the lips of a Kalahari Bushman: There is a dream dreaming us; and we are closing under the spell of a suggestion from the pen of Schopenhauer, of this whole universe of milky ways and ourselves within it as a vast dream, dreamed by a single being, in such a way that all dream characters dream too (497). If there is an oneiric logic, it is of the most complex kind, and it is only in the light of such a logic that we may hope to understand the character of this text. Instead of attempting simply to reduce such a logic (if there be such) to written languages, we are also invited to allow images to appear before us. There is yet another pattern present—a pattern that possesses a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is the first flow of symbols of life and birth. But within the death-like nature of sleep, life as expression appears within the symbolic orders of death. In a sense, the first life is already a resurrection from the dead; this initial form of life is presented as the duality of life-death—the totality of the image of life and/or of death. The mythology 390

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and iconography of Isis and Osiris form the first structure of the images of the beginnings, and this leads us on to the symbols and myths of the Wonder Child. But if there is the symbol of the child as new life and Savior, there is simultaneously the symbol of the Mother. In the forms of Mother and Mighty Goddess a cosmogonic principle of veiling, projecting, and revealing power is manifested. Following the etymological roots of Māyā, from the Sanskrit root mā—to measure, to create, construct, exhibit or display—the feminine is shown as the creator-revealer and limitation of life. The pictures accompanying this description are Christ in the Virgin’s womb, the Vierge Ouvrante, a boxlife sculpture which, when closed, shows the Virgin with child and, when opened, reveals Christ upon the cross against the background of a Father God holding up the cross. The first emergence or episode of the world-dream in the images of death and resurrection, the wonder child, and the mighty goddess are still closely related to the modality of the passivity of sleep-death. The images of the world-dream, while creative and totalizing, are still closely bound to the instinctual rhythms of life. The next section or episode of the world-dream is that of the “Idea of a Cosmic Order.” Campbell introduces this section with a discussion of methodological issues. Beginning with a discourse on the similarity of the emblematic numbers designating eons of years in India, the Icelandic Poetic Edda, and in Berossos, he observes that such similarities are not due to the sheer independence and contingency of mind or culture. He proposes at this point a theory of cultural diffusion which is a variation of his theory of the mythogenic zones put forth in Primitive Mythology, the first volume of The Masks of God. This theory states that at certain times, in particular areas of the world, radical transformations of life have occurred, the effects of which have been diffused to the quarters of the earth. The second methodological issue has to do with the distinction between literate and nonliterate cultures. Campbell makes clear that as a first principle of method one must make a distinction between literate and nonliterate orders; and further—in relation to the latter—to recognize a distinction between truly primitive traditions, such as those of the bushmen of the Kalahari desert, and those, like the Polynesian, that are, at least in part, regressed, i.e., provincial forms, survivals and local transformations of traditions originally stemming wholly or in part from one or another of the major matrices of literate civilization (74). He continues: The present work is devoted chiefly to literate traditions: firstly, because for these we possess dependable written interpretations from the hands of those who developed and employed them; secondly, because it is necessary to become acquainted with the main figures, themes, and motifs of the literate traditions before attempting to distinguish between primitive and regressed features in the nonliterate. But finally and principally, because it has actually been from the one great, variously inflected and developed literate world-heritage that all of the philosophies, theologies, mysticisms, and sciences now in conflict in our lives derive (74–75; italics added). These methodological principles may be sound and will not be under criticism at this point, though we shall take them up at a later point. What is striking is the appearance of this discussion at this juncture in The Mythic Image. First of all, the title of this chapter is 391

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not “The Cosmic Order,” but “The Idea of a Cosmic Order.” How does an idea appear within the structure of the world-dream? A clue may be found in the distinction made between the literate and the nonliterate. Campbell makes the argument from continuity the basic reason for his distinction. Our culture and our dilemmas are derivative from the diffused mythological and cosmological traditions of the citied traditions of the world. He does not, however, tell us anything about the relationship between literacy and religious symbols and images. What effect does writing, which is usually part of the complexity of urban centers, with division of labor, hierarchical social structures, imperialistic possibilities, and so forth, have on dreams? Not only has this issue not been discussed by Campbell, but he is equally silent regarding that very fundamental change in human culture from hunting-gatherers to citied traditions which is the context for literacy. In any treatise on the world-order as the world-dream, such an issue is of paramount importance. What theory of dream or of the order of psychic structure explains this radical shift? After having made so much of the distinction between literate and nonliterate, in several instances Campbell nonetheless bases his case on examples from nonliterate traditions. On page 184 there is a photograph of Northern Aranda Australian Aborigines sitting before a sacred ground-painting, which is the center and mythological representation of the beginnings. Again on pages 424–425 we are given pictures of a rain sacrifice and a ritual murder scene from rock paintings from South Rhodesia and Basuto-land in South Africa. It is worthy of remark that in announcing the exclusion of primitives and nonliterates from his text, he excluded the one group who spoke of the world-process as a dreaming. I am, of course, referring to the Australian aborigines whose primordial time is called Alcheringa, the dreaming. The next two chapters, “The Lotus and the Rose” and “The Transformation of the Inner Light,” are designed to deal with the cumulative episodes of the world-dream, the contradictions of the beginnings, the objective centering in the cosmologies of the literate traditions, and the tensions among these episodes. In “The Lotus and the Rose” the resolution and/or the raising of the contradictions to a higher level are discussed under the aegis of feminine symbolism. Hence we meet with the feminine not only in the form of creatrix and mother but as transformer and integrator. She is shakti, the Sanskrit term whose meaning covers power, capacity, energy, faculty, or capability. In Campbell’s usage, the term denotes the energy or active power of a male divinity as embodied in his spouse. Carried further still: the word connotes female spiritual power in general, as manifest, for instance, in the radiance of beauty, or on the elemental level in the sheer power of the female sex to work effects on the male. It is operative in the power of the womb to transform seed into fruit, to enclose, protect, and give birth. Analogously, on the psychological plane, it is the power of a woman to bring a man to his senses, to let him see himself as in a mirror, to lure him to his realization—or destruction: for it is the power also to bewilder and destroy (217). This image may be seen in the Madonna, Queen Dedes of Java, Shri-Lakshimi, Tara, and in Dante’s Beatrice. Power of this kind is supported symbolically by vegetative symbolism and more precisely by the rose and the lotus. It is equally manifested in water symbols and in the alchemical germ that is able to transmute the common into the most valuable. If the lotus and the rose are symbols of the ultimacy of feminine principles, then the succeeding chapter, “Transformations of the Inner Light,” describes the forms of transformation 392

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as masculine modes. In this movement the symbols of the former chapter are internalized, abstracted, and overcome through ascetic disciplines. A great deal is made of yogic techniques and the Tantric lore of the doctrine of the seven circles or lotuses which must be passed through or overcome if one is to achieve freedom. Whereas in the previous chapter the lotus is externalized and made the support or basis for the exfoliation of a cosmos, in this chapter the lotus is internalized and constitutes the support for the ladder of charkas through which the images of cosmic creativity are surpassed. In the next to the last chapter, Campbell raises the issue of annihilation within the context of a discussion devoted to sacrifice. While accepting Frazer’s theory of sacrifice as magic—religious and moral—he adds to these intentions a third, the mystical or the mystic, who, “thinking neither of God nor of man as an ultimate term but simply in awe of the marvel of being and absorbed in the difficult task of self-transformation, striv[es] to extend the range of his own realization of the Body of Truth” (431). From this point of view one is able to observe similar nuances in the death of Christ and in the Bodhisattva doctrine of Buddhism, but of special interest in this chapter is his discussion of the pig and the boar as symbols of deity and the numerous responses of awe and fascination which surround these animals in various cultures and religious contexts. The waking: The boar, the blacksmith, and the Buddha The last chapter of the text is given over to a description of the symbolisms of the Last Supper of Jesus Christ and the Parinirvana of the Buddha; the symbolism of the Parinirvana is dominant. A parallel is made between Chunda and Judas, Ananda and Peter, and Jesus and the Buddha, who are the willing victims of the sacrifice. A text from the Mahapari-nibbanasutta of the early Pali scriptures is quoted in extenso. The Buddha in the company of his faithful disciple Ananda proceeded from Bhogama to Pava where he was invited to share the hospitality of one Chunda, a worker in metals. After listening to the Buddha’s discourse, Chunda prepares a meal of rice, cakes, and boar’s meat. The Buddha instructs Chunda to serve the rice and cakes to the other listeners and reserves the boar’s meat for himself. After eating his fill, the Buddha tells Chunda to bury the remainder of the meat in a hole; for he knows of no one in Mara’s or Brahma’s heaven, nor of gods nor men, who is capable of eating and assimilating the boar’s flesh. After eating the flesh, the Buddha is taken ill and dies. While in his death throes, the Tathagata says, The offering of food after which, when a Tathagata has eaten, he attains to supreme and perfect insight; and the offering of food after which, when a Tathagata has eaten, he passes away by that utter passing away in which nothing whatever remains behind: these two offerings of food are of equal fruit and of equal profit, and of much greater fruit and much greater profit than any others (488). We learn from the Parinibbana-sutta that the Buddha comes to his death in a very ordinary manner; he dies from eating swine served to him by a blacksmith (Chunda). The blacksmith is a religious symbol of transmutation through his technique of making hard metal from the soil of the earth; the blacksmith symbolizes the transcendence of the human condition. Swine, the flesh eaten by the Buddha, is a symbol of the divine itself. In the previous chapter, Campbell has this to say regarding pig sacrifice in Malekula: 393

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Whereas, on the other hand, the sacrifice of such a pig by a master eligible to assimilate its spiritual charge confers a degree of authority beyond the touch of any threat whatsoever, either of life or of death. He becomes one who has incorporated in his person not only the powers of all pairs of opposites—male and female, life and death, being and nonbeing, and the rest—but also whatever powers beyond such polarizations a man who had become verily a superman might be imagined to subsume (460). The Buddha is the Awakened and Enlightened One, for he transcends all the opposites of the dream and goes beyond them. He shook ten thousand gods in ten thousand worlds by eating the flesh of divine ignorance. He destroys the dream and takes one to the other shore by showing that the other shore never existed. The Mythic Image began with the ultimate symbol of sleep, Vishnu, reclining, and in his sleep dreaming the universal in all of its forms, contrasts, and integrations. It ends with the reclining figure of the Buddha in his parinirvana, who has exhausted the dream in his waking moment of Enlightenment. Within this mythological structure, the boar is a symbol of the desires of the flesh that created the limited, illusory, and false consciousness expressed in the specific myth-dreams of the historical cultural mythologies. The eating of the flesh of the boar at once identifies the Buddha with the valences of the particular myth, while, at the same time, it transmutes the Buddha beyond the limitations and barriers of the specificities and false consciousness of particular myths. The Buddha is thus the paradigm of the Savior Figure. Other archetypal paradigms of the symbol are Jesus as the Christ, who is obedient, even to the death of the cross, or Vishnu as the Cosmic Boar. The Savior or the Enlightened One (the Buddha) is that symbol in the world-dream that is able to partake of all the limited modes of human consciousness, but in partaking of these modes (a meal that leads to existential death and annihilation) the Savior Figure transcends the existentiality and the particularity of both the personal and cultural ego. The Savior Figure manifests, for Campbell, the true and absolute consciousness, beyond the contradictions of male/female, nature/culture, existential/ontological. This consciousness, following the rhetorical style of the text, is the true consciousness that has dreamt the dream of life and has awakened from the dream: “That is to say, not only is the mighty Savior one with the cosmic dreamer of the dream into which he has entered as an incarnation, but all beings, all things, are also of the substance of that dream, at one with it in essential peace” (497). Campbell ends with a paraphrase of Schopenhauer: Everything, the entire universe and ourselves within it is “a vast dream, dreamed by a single being, in such a way that all the dream characters dream too” (497). Thus we are enveloped within a dreaming dream. We are, in our personal and cultural beings, a dreaming, but not only this; our own personal and cultural dreams are at the same time dreams being dreamt by the world-dreamer. There is a dream dreaming us!

Oneiric structures: Myths, dreams, and narratives What now are we to make of this world-dream and its awakening in the revelation of the symbolism of the Buddha? Many will take exception to Campbell’s choice of iconography, photographs, and paintings and to his general interpretation of these materials as part of his theory. Feminists and certain minorities could have a veritable heyday at this level of criticism. I will not engage in this kind of critique, for I have been at pains to render in skeletal form 394

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the basic intent of the work. My criticism will be addressed to the general theoretical and methodological issues generated by the problem of the authorship of the text, attending to detail as necessary to support this criticism. Earlier in this essay I noted that there is an “oneiric logic” that holds together the major theory of this text, but that this logic is complex. It is through such a logic that we may hope to understand the character of this text. Nevertheless, how does one “take hold” of the text? It is a text whose context is dream and whose loci are myths. From the point of view of dream interpretation we are warned that the oneiric does not follow the normal expectations of logic (supra, pp. 263ff); the myths, which give expression to the modality of the dream, have been interpreted in a precise manner, and Campbell has made rather explicit decisions, not only about the specific genre of myths, but more precisely about where these myths appear within the unfolding of the world-dream. We are presented with a narrative in the form and modality of the oneiricism of a world-dream. To “get at” or to “get hold” of this text we must treat it as a narrative that possesses, if not a logic, at least a pattern that expresses a beginning, a middle, and an end. Since the Enlightenment in the West, several theories of myth have been put forward. There are evolutionary theories based on the correlation of the development of human consciousness with historical-cultural changes in the world. These theories may range from the Urdummenheit theory of Theodor Preuss, who viewed the earliest stages of human cultures as manifestations of a primordial stupidity, to Wilhelm Schmidt, who saw this early primordiality as the birth of the transcendental human consciousness that finds its symbolism in the “high god.” Subsequent stages of human consciousness in history reveal a degeneration of this transcendent meaning. Other, mediating theories and positions have dealt with the appropriateness of myth as expressions of various historical stages and strata of culture. These theories extend from E. B. Tylor’s notion of “animism” and Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of “pre-logical mentality,” through Max Müller’s “disease of language,” to Malinowski’s marriage of myth and social structure in his formulation of myth as “charters of conduct,” and finally to the “concrete logic” of Lévi-Strauss. Strangely enough, none of these positions is taken up or even alluded to by Campbell, not even the theories and interpretations of Mircea Eliade, who deciphers the meaning of myth as revelatory of an ontology—a position that at first glance might seem close to Campbell’s. Why this coolness and distance from the interpreters of myth en vogue? In the first instance, the probable reason is that most of these interpreters locate and understand myth as a primary expression of primitive cultures—cultures which Campbell has consciously eliminated from his consideration in this study. In the case of Eliade, who incidentally emphasizes the a-historic and oneiric nature of myth, Campbell is, in The Mythic Image, setting forth a different and alternate meaning of the history of the religious symbol than that put forward by Eliade in his Patterns in Comparative Religion and From Primitives to Zen or in his History of Religious Ideas. Campbell in the work before us has more of a purely literary concern; he is, it seems to me, attempting to write an epic, but not an epic that is limited to local or provincial histories or cultures, but rather a world epic based upon the traditions, myths, and memories of all literate cultures. Two structures are employed to hold together this world epic, one empirical, the other speculative and rather vague. On the one hand, he makes use of the empiricity of cultures with written languages, and this is allied, on the other hand, with the oneiric order of the dream. So we have, if you will, an oneiric epic. 395

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Epics, generally, consist of a series of myths and legends connected through the webs and rhetoric of kinship and are composed in a metric style appropriate for the oral recitation of the culture. Though the epic may be spoken through the mouth of a story-teller, the true epic is of anonymous authorship, and its origins are coincidental with an exemplary expression of the cultural language itself. Epic as a genre arises in literate societies. It is obvious that one person, Joseph Campbell, is the author of this text, but the literary style evoked by its language, photographs, colors of pages, and so forth—the entire kaleidoscopic and panoramic presentation—seems contrived to convey the sense of the anonymity of authorship and the passivity and sheer “givenness” of the images and meanings. We are invited to experience the world, “worlding” or doing whatever the world does in its aseity. The dream and the mythological languages of the cultures discussed are analogies and substitutes for the family antagonisms and kinship structures that undergird the true cultural epic. The mythical events of the text, even when they are expressions of the active, volitional, and passionate, are in point of fact really expressions of an anonymous, autonomous, passive expression of the world showing itself under the aspect of the dream. The paradigm for this epical vision can be seen in that great epic, the Mahabharata, or in any of the various reconstructions of the Indo-European epics produced by Georges Dumézil. Closer to home, however, the use of the dream as the basis for the epic structure can be noted in the medieval writer Macrobius, who classified and analyzed the literary typology of dreams as literary devices (see Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis). Macrobius classifies dreams into five types: (1) insomnium (the nightmare); (2) visum (the apparition); (3) visio (the prophetic vision); (4) oraculum (the oracular dream); and (5) somnium (the enigmatic dream). The first two types, according to Macrobius, are of little worth since they have little prophetic significance. The third type, visio, is a dream in which future events are so clearly seen that little or no interpretation is necessary. The oraculum is a dream in which a parent, revered person, divine/demonic being, or the voice of any one of these personages reveals something to the dreamer and suggests what action is to be taken or to be avoided. The enigmatic dream of somnium provides the greatest possibilities for literary use, for it is a symbolic dream in which what is revealed to the dreamer is ambiguous and requires an interpretation. The somnium can be further divided into five subcategories: (1) the personal, in which all actions and experiences are those of the dreamer; (2) the alien, a dream in which someone else is the locus of action; (3) the social, which involves the dreamer and others; (4) the public dream, which reveals public misfortune or benefit; and (5) the universal, in which some change takes place in the heavenly bodies or regions of the earth. A case could be made that Campbell was consciously aware of Macrobius or that Macrobius’s theories are a part of Campbell’s heritage as far as the literary use of dreams is concerned. Steven Fischer (1978) has clearly shown the literary use of the dream in the Song of Roland and Tristan and Isolde. In the case of these legendary epics, the story falls upon the ears of those who have been prepared to respond to the epic by the folkloric sediments of the story. While there were exemplary story-tellers and bards, even in their presentations they remained anonymous since the archetypal motifs of the story formed not only the structure of personal consciousness, but were equally archetypal for the common cultural consciousness. As I have said earlier, Professor Campbell seems methodologically anonymous throughout this text. Could it be that one of the difficulties in “getting hold” of this text stems from the fact that as

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a dream-epic told as such, the posture of anonymity does not fall within a common public or cultural language? Our cultural language is fragmented in such a way that there are no common folkloric sediments to Campbell’s story. For, while the dream has always been a private matter, its discussion, language, and rhetorical valence was, during the medieval period, a matter of the public cultural arena. To turn to another issue that is essential in the use of dream as a literary device in the modern period—the introduction of the dream as a phenomenon of depth psychology— raises several imponderables. First of all, the introduction of the dream as a serious motif must immediately deal with the demythologizing and remythologizing of this phenomenon within depth psychology. Second, the work of depth psychology must also be seen within the context of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment subjective epistemologies; the dream was “rediscovered” in our time as the symptom of a private pathology; the prophetic and public nature of the dream receded and could only be recovered as a primordial structure dependent on the science of biology or the general laws of nature. In other words, though the literary devices of dream interpretation might seem apt, the phenomenon of the dream itself has changed, and different problems are presented by this change. The loss of correlation between a public language and a language of dream interpretation common to the public situates the dream and its interpretation within an arena of privacy. This private locus cannot easily be transferred to a public, much less a global, arena. Campbell plays fast and loose with us when he interprets particular and specific cultural myths as if they were “universally-private,” that is to say, as if the archetypes revealed in these myths are at once local and provincial and expressions of universal archetypes. In point of fact the myths, or myth-dreams, that he makes use of are myths and dreams revealed and narrated as a public language within their original cultures. It is precisely for this reason that in traditional cultures dreams could become the basis for epic narratives and why the interpretation of dreams in traditional societies is so conservative. Roger Callois (1966, 25) remarks that “the human mind seems strangely conservative on these topics. I suppose it is so of necessity, for human nature in its essential difficulties allows for very little modification. … The interpreter must therefore reduce their [the dreams’] infinite multitude to the small number of events that are certain to occur to everyone in the course of his brief life.” The myth-dreams do not seem to be subjected to any systematic method and thus are reported by Campbell as if they were original dream experiences. None of the critical or hermeneutical strategies of the Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment are employed, but neither the a-causal logic of the dream nor its “literal narration” can substitute for a postEnlightenment theory and method of dream and/or myth interpretation.

The Enlightened One and the post-Enlightenment world: The Buddha and the professor This is the fundamental issue of The Mythic Image. What is the relationship between the Enlightenment and the “Enlightened One”? Does the Enlightenment have reference to the hermeneutical stance of Professor Campbell—a stance that would place him within the Methodenstreit of interpretation theory? Since issues related to interpretation theory do not

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constitute a part of this work, are we not justified in seeing some analogies between the Buddha as the “Enlightened One” and Professor Campbell as interpreter? The Buddha, in his moment of Nirvana, saw the ten thousand limited and illusory worlds of gods and humans pass before him in succession. The style of Campbell’s text tends to approximate the Enlightened One’s experience. However, beyond the stylistics of the text, the fundamental question of method recurs: “Who is the dreamer, and what is the dream?” Let us be absolutely clear about dreams. A statement of Samuel Weber’s is quite appropriate when thinking about the nature of dreams: In recalling a dream, we seem to be reproducing something that has already taken place, at a particular time, usually the night before, while we are asleep. This something, however disjointed or absurd it may appear in our memory, will generally be supposed to have possessed a certain formal coherence. That is, it will be considered to have begun at a certain point in time, to have unfolded, and then to have reached an end, or—as is often the case—to have been interrupted; in any case, to have stopped. We thereby tend to cast ourselves, the morning after, in the role of a spectator seeking to conjure up something that was, that we then seem to watch as we would view a film, a sequence of images vis-à-vis, even if we are more or less dimly aware that we cannot simply be the spectator in such a process, but must at least double as the narrator (or, to stay within the film metaphor, as the projectionist). In any case, this vague awareness does not usually alter our sense of being somewhere quite apart and detached from the dream we seem merely to see before our mind’s eye, as we remember it. … The simple model of a subject facing an object, of a mind repeating something that once was, progressively falls apart. We come to realize that we are not simply the spectator or projectionist of a dream, but the projector, the screen, the camera and film, the actors, extras, stagehands, and stageprops, in short: the entire production crew and the conditions of production (including the various forms of censorship, disseminated, un peu partout). What is remarkable in all this, however, is that although the dream is thus “our creation” or “product,” we, as creators or as producers, are not situated outside, above, or beyond our work. On the contrary: we are, quite literally, part and parcel of a process that “we”—our conscious selves—can never entirely comprehend; and yet which at the same time we cannot but apprehend. Were we not to apprehend it, in one way or another—and it is perhaps apt here to recall that one of the meanings of the word, not dormant, was to “feel the force of, be sensible of,” in short: to be grabbed by … it could hardly be said to exist, or in any case to be discussed as such. (Weber, 1978, 22–23) This raises the problem of the meaning of language in dream interpretation. This is a problem separable from the meaning of myth, for whatever else myth may be, its arena is public. Campbell has enveloped the myth within the language of dream and thus used the oneiric to camouflage any access we might have to a critical interpretation of myth. So be it. Let us deal with the a-causal nature of the dream. Now, while the dream is private, it becomes a dream—a specific kind of discourse—only when it is told to another. Émile Benveniste (1971, 66) has described this kind of discourse as follows: For if he [the analyst] needs the patient to tell him everything and even to express himself at random and aimlessly, it is not in order to recover an empirical fact, which will not 398

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have been registered at all except in the patient’s memory; it is because empirical facts have no reality for the analyst, except in and through the ‘discourse’ which gives them the authenticity of an actual experience, without regard to their historical reality and even (perhaps, especially) if the discourse evades, transposes, or invents the biography which the patient gives himself. Benveniste concludes that the “syntax” in which these unconscious symbols are strung together does not obey any logical necessity; it recognizes only one dimension, that of succession, which, as Freud saw, also signifies causality. This “language” of overdetermination should not be confused with an organized or empirical language. “As infrastructure, it has its source in a region deeper down than that in which education instills the linguistic mechanism (Beneveniste, 74). It is finally with style rather than syntax that we are concerned. It is in the realm of the metaphor, the metonymy, and the synedoche that this discourse resides, and this is where Campbell is most problematical. Because of the confusion of dreamer and interpreter in these tropes, the problem of double narration runs through the text. This is an old problem in dream interpretation but becomes even more crucial for Campbell. E. B. Tylor (1958, 25) alludes to this issue in Augustine: St. Augustine tells one of the double narratives which so well illustrate theories of this kind. The man who tells Augustine the story relates that, at home one night before going to sleep, he saw coming to him a certain philosopher, most well known to him, who then expounded to him certain Platonic passages, which when asked previously he had refused to explain. And when he (afterwards) enquired of this philosopher why he did at his house what he had refused to do when asked at his own: “I did not do it,” said the philosopher, “but I dreamt I did.” And thus, says Augustine, that was exhibited to one by phantastic image while waking, which the other saw in a dream. The problem of double narration is present in two ways. First, what is expressed by fantastic image (the myths), while awake, is known to the other as a dream. Who is this other who knows in the waking state what is expressed by fantastic image in the dream? Is this other Professor Campbell or the world, and are the two identical? Second, the place, situation, and language of the dream must define a public arena of discourse. This is in fact the meaning of dream as an interpretation of the dream. The meaning of dreams is problematical only in the waking state, but the waking state is obviously different from that of the dream. Campbell as an interpreter of the “world-dream” fails to establish a locus for his interpretation; he fails to let the reader know his methodological stance in relation to the authorship of his text. Is he a dreamer or is he an “Awakened One”? He fluctuates between the two. He wishes to give us the sense that he is an “Awakened One” who is within the dream and who is thus able to render an interpretation of dream from within the dream itself such that those of us outside of this dream will be able to understand the “dream as dream”; but then again, he is the Enlightened One who stands on the other side of the dreams and the dreamers, and is thus able to establish the true meaning of the dream and the dreamers. One is therefore confused about the nature of the discourse as well as the posture of the author. It does not evoke the rhetoric of cause, neither does it possess the precision of the language of decipherment, and it is not the kind of “motivational language” that issues from 399

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the patient and the therapist in psychoanalysis (cf. Benveniste, 1971, for a fuller statement on motivational language). It is the language, not of the critical professor, but of the ultimate knower, of the Enlightened Buddha. I mentioned above Campbell’s treatment of primitive or nonliterate cultures in The Mythic Image. In every case his treatment emphasizes the primitive/civilized distinction. The most telling mark of this distinction is that of writing. From this distinction that other distinction, nonhistorical/historical, follows. While these distinctions may be descriptively valid, the value placed upon them as a definitive taxonomy of humankind has given rise to a history of misinterpretation, exploitation, and terror. For this distinction to appear in The Mythic Image is most unfortunate. Here is a work devoted to a new understanding of religion in the entire history of the world, and, furthermore, a work that makes use of the dream as the basis for continuity of religious meaning. Now, the dream is precisely that human phenomenon that is in fact present in all cultures at all times, and thus one would think that in this work the old primitive/civilized or literate/nonliterate dichotomy would be seriously attenuated if not destroyed. Such is not the case—the distinction is continued on the same old basis of writing and history. Campbell renders his oneiric interpretation invalid when he makes crucial distinctions in terms of history, as he does when he sees our dilemmas as expressive of the literate heritage of the human community. Neither Freud nor Jung delimited the meaning of dream in this manner. In point of fact, all dreams in all cultures are “pre-historic” in a certain sense, and this is what accounts for their enigmatic character. Some of the fundamental theories about myths and dream have emerged from attention to and study of the so-called primitive societies. There may be valid problems related to writing and dreaming, but they are of another kind. What, for example, is the effect of writing on society, how does this phenomenon affect not only the public nature of culture, but the deeper strata of the psyche? What is the relationship between repression and writing, power and expressiveness, sexuality and knowledge, and so forth? These are the kinds of questions that might have been explored through the oneiric analysis, but none of them is raised. Professor Campbell has given us a large and beautiful text, but what are we to make of this “literate dream” when we awake? Are we left with a pictorial essay designed simply for our enjoyment, or has the oneiric pattern elucidated a deeper meaning? The answer to these questions should be sought in the symbol of the Buddha, who at the end of the essay is the Awakened and Enlightened One. There are, however, two interpretations that are evoked by the Buddha, and, perhaps, a third if the two interpretations are combined. Upon being confronted by his disciples asking his responses to the four metaphysical positions set forth in the avyakrta—(1) whether the world is eternal or not, or both, or neither; (2) whether the world is finite (in space), or infinite, or both, or neither; (3) whether the Tathagata exists after death, or does not, or both, or neither; (4) whether the soul is identical with the body or different from it—the Buddha’s answer was silence—a silence which is symbolic of the Enlightenment and Nirvana. But though Nirvana is inexpressible, its meaning involves a grasp of the true nature of the multiple forms of existence. Knowledge of these multiple forms of existence, analogous to the myth-dreams of Campbell’s text, as ways to Nirvana or as Nirvana itself is gained through a knowledge of what the Buddhist refers to as skillful means (see Pye, 1978). It accounts for the meaning of the practical and the pragmatic, the common itself, in gesture and discourse, as equivalent to or identical with 400

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salvation. This Buddhist hermeneutic requires a subtlety of interpretation and a precision in the hermeneutical act. It is the lack of this aspect of the Buddha symbol that accounts for the loss of a common structure of interpretation in The Mythic Image. The notion of skillful means frees the Buddha from even the desire to save others. The soteriological structure of The Mythic Image has not extricated itself from this desire, noble as it may be. But if one is not freed of this desire, one is thrown into the arena of common discourse or into silence. Without skillful means, one must simply remain “the professor” or the “wise man”; or if one remains silent, it must be a silence enveloped in common language and discourse. 6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical …. 6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend the propositions, and then he will see the world right. What we cannot speak about we must pass over into silence. (Wittgenstein, 1961) There is either the silence of the dream or that of the Enlightened One. The silence of the Enlightened One is deciphered through the “skillful means” of the Buddha, and its analogue in our time is a hermeneutic that is able to retain silence within the structure of the common and conventional. The Mythical Image raises many issues and implications regarding the common, but when we inquire about these matters, we are confronted, not with common discourse, but with a silence. We still must inquire whether the professor is silent because he is asleep or because he is awake.

Bibliography Benveniste, Émile. “Remarks on the Function of Language in Freudian Theory.” In Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek, pp. 65–75. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology, 16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Callois, Roger. “Logical and Philosophical Problems of the Dream.” In The Dream and Human Societies, edited by Gustave E. von Grunebaum and Roger Callois, pp. 23–52. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. New York: Viking, 1959. Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Creative Mythology. New York: Viking, 1968. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. Campbell, Joseph. The Mythic Image. Assisted by Marie-Jeanne Abadie. Bollingen Series, 100. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Campbell, Joseph, and Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958. 401

The Collected Writings of Charles H. Long: Ellipsis Eliade, Mircea. From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Fischer, Steven R. The Dream in the Middle High German Epic: Introduction to the Study of Dream as a Literary Device to the Younger Contemporaries of Gottfried and Wolfram. Berne: Lang, 1978. Goodenough, Erwin R. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. 13 vols. Bollingen Series, 37. New York: Pantheon, 1953–1968. Murti, T.R.V. The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1955. Pye, Michael. Skilful Means. London: Duckworth, 1978. Tylor, E. B. Religion in Primitive Culture. New York: Harper, 1958. Weber, Samuel. “It.” Glyph 4 (1978): 1–31. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. Zimmer, Heinrich Robert. The Art of Indian Asia, Its Mythology, and Transformations. 2nd ed. Completed and edited by Joseph Campbell. 2 vols. Bollingen Series, 39. New York: Pantheon, 1960.

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CHAPTER 35 THE GIFT OF SPEECH AND THE TRAVAIL OF LANGUAGE

Thus it is thanks to this organization that the Spirit, like a musician, produces language in us and gives us the capacity for speech. We have no doubt about this because our lips assure us, even though they are burdened with the heavy and painful responsibility of receiving our nourishment. Because of this, the hands have assumed for themselves that responsibility and thus through our hands our mouths are liberated for the service of the word. —Gregory of Nyssa, Treatise on the Creation of Man It all depends on what you mean by freedom. —Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom

Origins and beginnings A hundred years ago in the United States one of the greatest of world’s fairs, the World’s Columbian Exposition took place. In the history of world’s fairs, this one was truly exemplary. It launched Chicago as a major world city of trade and commerce and symbolized the “manifest destiny” of the America republic for the coming century. The World Parliament of Religions took place as a part of the fair; permanent buildings were dedicated to the new world of science, technology, as indices of this new venture. The American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, set forth his famous “frontier thesis” as an interpretive framework for North American history. His speech explained the meaning and evolution of North America from the point of view of the “settler” cultures and offered an apologia for the meaning of freedom from this perspective. Turner pointed to the complex inter-relationship of geography (“free land”), the primal experiences of exploration, trapping, trading, and agriculture as the sources for the energy and buoyancy associated with freedom in the American context. The frontier thus appeared as both a limit and a lure creating a new mode of human being, Homo Americanus. An apocryphal story has it that Turner gave his speech in the Museum of Science and Industry, one of the permanent buildings erected during the fair. The symbolism of this location was meant to undergird the thesis set forth—the challenge of the geographical frontier had been met and overcome; science and industry constituted the new frontiers awaiting the Americans of the United States. My alma mater, the University of Chicago, came into existence, almost on the very site of the fair, at this time. This fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition was, indeed, one of the most This essay was originally presented as the T. B. Davis Lecture, at the University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, on August 24, 1993.

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exemplary world’s fairs of all time; it became the model for all the other world’s fairs from that time until 1933. The fair was a representational model, presenting a style and paradigm of an intellectual cultural language and an exhibitionary ordering of knowledge as the ideological basis for the meaning of Western hegemony in the Atlantic hemisphere. The very spatial arrangement of the anthropological exhibit, showing the ascending order of the races of the world, the World Parliament of Religions, which sought to bring the religious worlds of humankind under the umbrella of Protestant liberalism, the historical method put forth in Turner’s speech—all of these portended and anticipated America’s, though late, hybrid, but nevertheless, powerful foray into the world of colonialism as a new and unique power. With the pacification of the aboriginal populations of North America and the derailing of any meaning of freedom that might have come from the emancipation of the slaves during the American Civil War, the country was poised to join the New World System as another one of the white conquerors’ nations of modernity. Thus before the century was over American imperialism took shape in Cuba, in the Philippines, and shortly into the twentieth century, real teeth were put in the Monroe Doctrine through American intervention in Central and South America. The apotheosis of the Columbian venture had produced this form of culture and humanity. It all seemed to have worked. This great world’s fair of a hundred years ago marking the four hundredth anniversary of the Columbian event had been prophetic in setting forth a blueprint for the next century of American dominance. And yet this year, 1993, the five hundredth anniversary—a much more highly significant numerical symbol, is devoid of any celebrations in the United States. On the contrary, the very Columbian event is shrouded in controversy and ambiguity. Columbus, himself, the heroic discoverer, is vilified and serious doubts are expressed regarding almost every phase of the voyages across the Atlantic. No city—not Chicago, the city of the great fair of 1892–1893, not New York, the greatest of American cities, nor San Francisco, Atlanta, New Orleans—not one of them, no city, large or small has undertaken to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the Columbian venture. The Los Angeles urban riots, the general mood of resignation, the waning ideology of the American dream, are better indications of the American situation at the present time. What had been overlooked in the World’s Columbian Exposition of a hundred years ago was the fact that another and other mode of the human was simultaneously coming into being. These were the cultures of the vanquished and the oppressed. Forced out of their own cultural and historical contexts through slavery, incursions, conquest, and disease, evacuated of their cultural meanings and orientations, they were forced to accept the degraded situations imposed upon them by their conquerors and oppressors. Through traces of memory of a forgotten past, through reinterpretations of the meanings of their oppressors, through the latent possibilities of language, through a forced and new orientation to the land, they discerned and deciphered another possible meaning of human freedom. This new embryonic meaning of freedom has been a-borning for almost five centuries and those who experienced this meaning in the world of the Western Hemisphere were destined to know, understand, and meet their brothers and sisters in analogous circumstances in all other parts of the globe. They have all embodied knowledge within their personal and collective bodies and within the bodies of their time and space. A language and space must be created through which we might bring to consciousness this structure of humanity as a resource for the human community. In the fourth century 404

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of the Common Era a Greek thinker was faced with a similar dilemma. Gregory of Nyssa, a Cappadocian, found himself caught up in the controversies about the nature and destiny of the human mode of being. In the midst of this polemical and turbulent argument from within and outside the Christian community, Gregory had recourse to a meaning of beginning, primordialities, and origins. He addressed this issue in one of his treatises, “On the Creation of Man.” Like many before him, he employed the metaphor of the body to speak of this creation but unlike other Christian theologians who followed the stylization of the bodily symbolism set forth by the biblical tradition where the metaphor of the body is hierarchial with the head presiding over the materiality of the body and where the lower parts are subordinated to the higher parts, Gregory has recourse to an integrative metaphor of the body—a meaning of the body in its making and functions that infuses the entire body with materiality and intellect. Thus, says Gregory, it is the hands that have assumed the responsibility to release the mouth so that it may speak, and, it is the capacity of the human to speak and to exchange communication that creates and forms the intellect. The facility of the hands in their craftiness and utility open the mouth as an organ of speech. Thought thus originates in the body and through the instrumentality of the hands. Intellectual meaning arising from the exchange of thought in language is a consequence and necessity of the total ordering and integration of the body; the gift of speech emerges from the primordiality of the work of the hands. One might characterize the modern period as a time in which the connection between the body and language, the body and exchange, and the body and the intellect was subverted. A worldwide culture triumphed in which persons, cultures, and processes of the body were silenced and intellectual meanings that commoditized the materiality of human existence defined the modern agenda. Thus the modern period presided over a slave trade that defined the human as chattel while at the same time evoking the language of democratic freedoms; the modern period speaks of inalienable rights while practicing colonialism; the modern period evokes the notion of reason while creating the repressive categories of race. The powerful new and creative languages of the modern world which were used to subdue and exploit the world have been placed in jeopardy; its mighty words have been overwhelmed by those cultures, people, and histories who were made silent in its execution. This language has been prostituted by the techniques and practices that brought it into being, and after having been used and misused so long by so many, this language is no longer trusted in the cultures of its origin. W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American intellectual, saw this connection between the intellect and the labor of the hands, or should we say the laborers—those who had undergone the oppression and travail of the modern period, when he wrote the following concerning the silence of their voices and meanings in the modern world. The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transport of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of the mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world has ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greeks; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience … And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology 405

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of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.1 At this juncture of modernity, at the end of the modern period or what many have called the beginning of the post-modern, we must recover a meaning of language that does not continue the stylistics, rhetorics, and structural characteristics of oppressive ambiguity. We need again to explore the original possibility of human language and speech as exchange and as gift—a meaning of the totality of language contextualized within the freedom of the human mode of being, not in speculative systems and ideologies, but from the inscripted bodies of time and labor. It is from a reflection upon their oppression, suffering, and labor over the last centuries that the gift and freedom of speech will be forthcoming.

Opacities: Bodies and knowledge I should like to explore this meaning through recourse to an examination of a text by W.E.B. Du Bois who at the inception of the twentieth century in his The Souls of Black Folk discerned another beginning and another originary structure.2 Du Bois rejected the Cartesian formula which established consciousness in the evacuated spaces of the materialities of the body and temporalities, he rejected as well the conjectural philosophical cosmogonies of the English empiricists. He rather defined beginnings at that place where the contact, reciprocities, ambiguities and tragedies actually took place—the black bodies of African slaves brought simultaneously into the new worlds of modernity and the Western Hemisphere. I have chosen to comment on this text as the basis for my remarks this afternoon. In Souls, Du Bois offers us a descriptive text of modern oppression from which we might discover an alternative basis for the formulation of new modes of thought from the silenced side of the oppressed. By making this text the subject for a commentary I mean to regard it in the manner of a venerated text. The commentary as a genre is best known in its relationship to the Bible. Every year innumerable texts are published as commentaries on the books of the Bible. The accumulation of these commentaries has probably kept the genre of the commentary alive as a literary form. There is, however, a more generalized notion of the commentary. The commentary may be a critical edition of a text, establishing the text or contextualizing a text within an ouevre; both these descriptions of the range and meaning of the commentary as a literary genre describe the enduring significance of the commentary as a theoretical and practical mode of literary creation; it has, however, remained rooted in its relationship to the descriptive and critical elucidation of the Bible as an authoritative text. Implicit, therefore, in the notion of commentary is the establishing of a basis for meaning and value. One borrows an older form to generate a transference of authority to another arena for other purposes. In my remarks as commentary I place Du Bois’s Souls within and among similar texts of modernity; I have already alluded to those of early modern philosophical texts. I must mention another text, this one from the Western Hemisphere. The author is Garcilaso de la Vega and his text is Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru.3 It is instructive to observe that Garcilaso’s mother was Inca and his father Spanish; he lived in the

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dual world of the conquering West and the vanquished world of the Incas. The foreword to the University of Texas translation of his text was written by the late Arnold Toynbee. Two points are noted in this preface; in commenting on the double descent of Garcilaso, Toynbee has this to say, Thanks to his mixed Andean-European descent and to his initiation into both his ancestral traditions—a double education was his privilege, or burden, of his mestizo blood—Garcilaso was able to serve, and did serve as an interpreter or mediator between two different cultures that had suddenly been brought into contact.4 Toynbee’s second point is as follows: A special name was invented in the Russian language for this interpreter class, after the Russian people had been brought into intimate relations with the West at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The new class of Western educated and Westernminded Russians that this encounter called into existence came, in the nineteenth century, to be called ‘intelligentsia.’ This hybrid word, with a French root and a Russian termination, was coined to denote something that was new in Russian experience.5 Toynbee goes on to place Garcilaso within a distinguished company; Berossus who interpreted Babylon to the Greeks, Manetho, the Egyptian, Philo and Josephus from the Jewish tradition, and Radhakrishnan in our own time from India. Toynbee’s language obscures both structural and historical situations in his neutral rendering of impact, incursions, and mixtures, he overlooks the meaning of the relationship between conquest and oppression and the necessity for creative thinking and action on the part of the oppressed and thus fails to grasp the fact that the intelligentsia are always forging a new foundation and locus for the act of thinking itself. Before moving into Du Bois’s text a biographical word is in order. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868; he died in Accra, Ghana, shortly after renouncing his American citizenship in 1963. At the time of his death he was at work on an encyclopaedia of Africa. His death was first announced at the Great Civil Rights March in 1963 at which Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech.6 The Souls of Black Folk is the most popular and lasting work of Du Bois and contains some of his most quotable statements. It is here that he articulates the symbolism of the veil; it is the text of the double-consciousness, and it is also here that he asserts that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line. Much has been made of these terms in African American history and culture. I make use of them as deciphering techniques that will allow me to meditate and recognize the structures and meaning of forms of thought and speech that emerge from the opaque bodies of the those who underwent the oppression during the era of the modern world-system. Souls portrays a mode of “concrete thought” that demonstrates the travail of language that moves towards the originary form of speech as a gift. From the hands and bodies, the toil and sweat, Du Bois in Souls opens the mouth for speech thus creating a distinctive intellectual structure.

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The doubleness of historical consciousness In the first sentence of the first chapter of Souls Du Bois sets forth a stylistics that is followed relentlessly throughout the text. I quote: “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of framing it.” The very notion of the pervasive “unasked question” points to an intimacy of relationship that is hidden within the interstices of the power of domination. It is the stage on which is played all the popular and scholarly languages of imputation and knowledge. The “unasked question is always deferred, always placed on a later agenda, and always finessed in such a manner that bodily presence of the oppressed is rendered invisible and intractable. It is a question, though unasked, is always being answered. That question is the question behind the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” But this problematic is not simply and only disguised in the public forum of culture, it insinuates itself within the structures of the internal consciousness. It raises in a critical way the very constitution of consciousness itself. In this same chapter Du Bois states the most oftquoted of his remarks. [T]he Negro is sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this two-ness—an American, a Negro, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. This statement of the double consciousness is thematized and adumbrated throughout the text. It is spoken of again in chapter 9, “Of the Sons of Masters and Man,” and again in chapter 13, “Of the Coming of John.” This critical problematizing of the constitution of a modern form of consciousness reveals the tormented weight of such formation as the very locus of the structures of consciousness. Implicit in this revelation is the critique of other modes of consciousness that avoid this doubleness through the exercise of power portrayed in dominance. For it is not only the oppressed who find themselves in the location of dominance; such is the situation created by the oppression of modernity. The burden of doubleness is an authenticity for all to bear; it is the avoidance of this doubleness in the constitution of consciousness that creates the ambiguities of the innocent who speak freedom while enslaving and who preach Christian love in the midst of oppression. It represents the avoidance and denial of conquest cultures to understand the modes of exchange within the structures of consciousness itself and the derivation of these exchanges from wider ranges of material exchanges in the social body. Ashis Nandy has reminded us of the necessity of this duality in the constitution of every form of consciousness in the worlds of modernity. As folk wisdom would have it, the only sufferers of colonialism are the subject communities. Colonialism, according to this view, is the name of a political economy which ensures a one way flow of benefits, the subjects being the perpetual losers in a zero-sum game and the rulers the beneficiaries. This view has a vested interest in denying that the colonizers 408

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are at least as affected by the ideology of colonialism, that their degradation, too, can sometimes be terrifying. Behind all the rhetoric of the European intelligentsia on the evils of colonialism lay their unstated faith that the gains from colonialism to Europe, to the extent that they involved material products, were real, and the loss, to the extent they involved social relations and psychological states, false.7 Ashis Nandy’s study in very precise ways shows what happens to the arbiters of colonialism when they fail to admit the necessity of a doubleness of consciousness within the range of the ambiguous tragedies and intimacies of the colonial period. Thus, in the first chapter and throughout Souls, Du Bois muses on the existential, ontological, and historical constitution of the soul of America, the souls of the Western Hemisphere, and the souls of those formed in the new world system. He was not, however, the first to pose this issue of the constitution of the self/soul in the world of modernity; it has a long tradition extending from Descartes through Kant to Thomas Jefferson in the United States. The forging of the modern self as non-problematical, singular, and non-relational, possessing a purity in regard to itself is a legacy of this tradition—a tradition that was wedded to the new cosmology and practices of mercantile capitalism. Du Bois orients us to another “country of the soul.” The section of his text called, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” is, in fact, a meditation on the possible new space and country of this novel modality of the soul—a soul that has been ingressed by its thickness and plurality—a soul made to bear the weight of its extension—a soul whose inwardness and outwardness partakes of the blackness of the flesh as well as the opacity and terror of history. The soul, dual and plural in its constitution, textured within the thick realities of modernity, vulnerable to the valences of power—a soul seeking a world equal to the terrain of a time and space wherein its true reality might find authentic expression. A soul and body seeking the originary modes of language as a gift. This work of language is matched by a travail of the historical bodies of the subjects of colonialism.

The Veil “[T]he Negro is sort of a seventh son, born in a veil.” As we noted above this is from the first chapter but even before this chapter, in the “Forethought” to the reprint of the 1903 McClurg edition of the text, Du Bois mentions the veil. In outlining the forthcoming chapters, he says, Then, in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two world within and without the Veil, and thus have come to the central problem of the training of men for life … Leaving the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses—the meaning of its religion, the passion of human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater soul. Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there shall he live—a Negro and a Negro’s son … I saw the shadow of the Veil as passed over my baby, I saw the cold city towering above the blood red land. If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things dwells Eternal Good, pitiful and masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. 409

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What is the Veil? There is no logical consistency to his usage of this symbol. It is at once a barrier and a protective container, an inner world that nurtures and limits. But more than this, from a literary point of view, the investment of the power of speech is congruent to the meaning of the Veil. The Veil is the numinosity of experience, negative yet creative, that is revealed within the ambiguities of history. It is the mysterium trememdum et fascinans inscribed within the oppression of colonialism. It is the materiality of the transcendental ego clothed in the opacity of the new world. The Veil is the possibility of a permeability of historical experience that holds open the possibility that the colonized and colonizer might engage in mutual critiques and undergo the constitution of double consciousness. It is the only hope that oppression might lead to a language of community gleaned from the recognition that we were all formed and have been affected by the same colonial formations. It is the place of critique, confession, and hope.

Conclusion Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is almost a century old and is still in print. It survives because in an almost prophetic manner it delineated for the first time the structures and critical possibilities for a new world arising from the dispossessed of the modern world-system. He realized that this world should not be an imitation of the world of the oppressors and he recognized at the same time the negativities of the oppression. He sought a locus for an alternate world through a return to an originary form of language—a language silenced and rendered subversive in the history of the rise of the West in the modern period. Sooner or later the hands and bodies of these voices would open our faces in a language that could become the basis for a new human mode of freedom. The world of colonialism and oppression contextualizes the modern tradition. In all of its ambiguity, tragedy, and terror, it yet remains the only sensus communis that cannot be denied by any in the world today. It is filled with tragic reciprocities, denied mutualities, and the creation of the stylization of rhetoric as hypocrisy. Du Bois’s descent into this historical world of oppression as the basis for a redeeming consciousness is a sign of his brilliance. But Du Bois was not a sentimentalist; this was not his first nor last book. He was the author of fifteen major scholarly texts and over six hundred articles. He was an activist, one familiar with agitation and organizing. He knew that the originary gift of language was directly connected to the work of the hand and the body. His first scholarly work dealt with the abolition of the slave trade and he always knew until the day of his death that freedom as a total mode of the human must be rooted in the freedom of the body and the work of the hand. David Brion Davis has noted this relationship in his book, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (an excellent book that strangely enough does not mention Du Bois). In commenting on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as a description of the constitution of modern consciousness, he remarks, Above all, Hegel bequeathed a message that would have a profound impact on future thought, especially as Marx and Freud deepened the meaning of the message: that we can expect nothing from the mercy of God or from the mercy of those who exercise worldly lordship in His or other names; that man’s true emancipation, whether physical 410

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or spiritual, must always depend on those who have endured and overcome some form of slavery.8

Notes 1. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 727. 2. I am using the 1973 edition which is a reprint by the Blue Heron Press edition of 1953. The long introduction to this edition by Herbert Aptheker, his longtime friend and literary executor, gives us a thorough account of various editions of the text and justifies his claims that this is the most faithful edition of the text in print. 3. Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, Part One, trans. and intro. Harold V. Livermore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966). 4. Ibid., viii. 5. Ibid. 6. He attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and took his Ph.D. from Harvard University. While a student at Harvard, he spent two years in Europe, primarily at Berlin University. He received the Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895; his dissertation, titled The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States, 1683–1870, was published in 1896 as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Series. The Souls of Black Folk was published in 1903. It was his third publication, the second being The Philadelphia Negro which appeared in 1903. With this auspicious beginning in the world of letters, he moved into a prolific publishing and activist life; his publications include every genre: poetry, novels, essays, scholarly texts in history and social sciences, and autobiography. As editor of the Crisis, the official organ of the NAACP he was at the forefront of all issues affecting the nature, meaning, and role of persons of African descent in the United States in particular and in the world at large. 7. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 30. 8. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 564.

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CHAPTER 36 INTRODUCTION TO THE WESLEYAN EDITION OF HENRI BAUDET’S PARADISE ON EARTH

I discovered Henri Baudet’s insightful essay roughly a decade ago. At that time I was engaged in research on the origin, history, and usage of the binary “primitive/civilized” as a precise scholarly and technical phrase as well as its more general usage in the cultural languages of the West. My research had yielded a number of excellent monographs, articles, and studies. The phrase itself has had a checkered history in the West, and while other cultures may possess analogues to this binary, Baudet’s work threw considerable light on its meaning as a revelation of the more fundamental structures of Western civilization. Thus in a rather happenstance way, I was prepared for Baudet’s work; it provided the most appropriate context and synthesis for my research. Franklin L. Baumer, who wrote the foreword to the English translation in 1965, noted that Baudet’s work was “timely and original.” This was especially true for me at that stage of my research, but its timeliness and originality has not diminished over the years. For any scholar interested in the attempt to understand Western culture as a specific philosophical orientation in the history of culture, Baumer’s judgment may be more relevant today than when it was first written. The rise of the West—its formation, expansion, and influence throughout the world— calls for a general philosophical reflection regarding this cultural configuration. Baudet’s study raises these general issues in a very precise manner. The subtitle of the book is Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man. Thus Baudet emphasizes the meaning of the outsider or the “other” as an interpretative key to understanding the meaning of the West. For those peoples and cultures throughout the world who are identified in one way or another as “non-European,” Baudet offers a meaning of Europe based on that specific premise, and for those who are identified as European or Western, he deciphers the intricate and often enigmatic meaning to show how this notion and ideal was fashioned. Baudet’s work is, in the words of Baumer, “about ideas rather than facts.” This is not, however, an essay in the “history of ideas,” for the ideas or philosophical meanings are delicately and subtly interwoven with historical details and interpretations of historical periods. Not only has Baudet made the most plausible case for the transference of Mediterranean orientations into the world of the Atlantic, he has likewise made sense of the shift in modern historiography from optimistic universalism to nationalism as a norm for the interpretation of history in the nineteenth century. To be more precise, the beginning of Europe does not constitute an identifiable and definite geographical locus that allows one easily to designate those outside its boundaries. Baudet takes with utter seriousness the notion that Europe is a promontory of Asia; as a locus and meaning it comes into being within a context of flux and contestation amid the amalgam of peoples, ideas, and images set in the space between Asia and the Mediterranean. Tensions,

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contradictions, ambiguities, dualisms, and dialectical significations follow from and lie at the heart of this culture. Europe as a problematical civilization is thus obsessed with a curiosity of alterity born from these inner tensions. Two basic and antithetical tendencies sum up Western ambivalences regarding the others and the outsiders. One is political. Here the political, military, socioeconomic, and missionary strategies loom large. These modes define the concrete relationships that the West establishes with others. The other tendency is that of the imagination; it is the domain of images and symbols formed of non-Western peoples. These imaginative configurations are not derived from concrete relationships; they are not the result of observation, experience, or perceptible reality but have their origin in a psychological urge. The intricate mixture of these two tendencies in the origin and formation of the West enables us to understand how in the search for new lands—lost Utopias and paradises—empirical lands and peoples are symbolized and brought within the political and imaginative orbit of the West. This basic ambivalence is the model for all the other ambivalences and ambiguities, for example, a tendency on the one hand toward regression and on the other toward expansion and aggression. The regressive element has its origin in Christian charity; the expansive and aggressive tendency leads to the creation of the “noble savage”—as Baudet puts it, “an image of man in a remote and unknown society; his exemption from our heavy burden of ancient culture leaves him untainted and good, as we too are supposed to have been until the dawn of our history” (p. 10). The image of the noble savage is the lure that draws the Westerner into the creation of imaginary worlds for habitation and conquest; through this image’s order the others, as the extra-European peoples, are canonized, classified, and categorized. We learn for example that the African or Ethiopian was canonized first in terms of the Mediterranean images of the black expressed in Prester John, the mythical Ethiopian monarch who would save the Europeans from the Muslims. The subsequent images of the black arose from the Atlantic orientations of the European and fell under the images and myths of the Amerindians as “noble savages.” The ambiguities, ambivalences, and dichotomies are not static; they are drawn upon at different times in diverse ways as the basis for understanding and justifying the actions of the Western mode of being. Through all their changes they remain the questions before the formal questions, the presuppositions upon which historical actions and modes of thought are established. For those of us in the Western Hemisphere, the largest and most intense locale of the Western diaspora, there is an added significance. If, as Baudet states quoting Valéry, Europe emerges as a geographical concept—“a promontory, an outpost of Asia: Cap d’Asie”—then the Western Hemisphere is yet another outpost and extension of the meaning of Europe. In 1992 the cultures of the Western Hemisphere will have occasion to commemorate and reflect upon the meaning of Europe’s impact on the New World after half a millennium. The New World has become a part of world history as an extension of Europe, and in this regard it may be seen as continuous with Europe. This continuity must, however, be seen against disjunctions and discontinuities—the independent and separate social, economic, political, and religious formations that have taken place over the last five hundred years in the New World. The term New or Other World as a designation of the Western Hemisphere simultaneously bears the trace of continuity and defines a point of radical disjunction. 414

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Regardless of how this meaning of the New, Other World is defined, Baudet’s original interpretation of the meaning of Europe suggests the most adequate basis for understanding and assessing the authenticity of the world across the Atlantic. This is because Baudet’s interpretation has to do with the manner in which geographical and cartographical orientations are interwoven with philosophical and symbolic meanings of alterity as one of the central themes in the meaning of European civilization. The aim here is not to suggest that “geography is destiny” but rather to understand geography as both empirical reality and imaginative construct. This work of Baudet cannot help but enhance a scholarly public that is now familiar with the synthetic world history of William McNeill, Donald Lach’s works on the impact of Asia on Europe, Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean, Marshall Hodgson’s study of Islam within the structure of a world history, Edward Said’s study of Orientalism, and so on. However, the reappearance of this work invites another conversation. Baudet has shown in this masterful essay that the geographical and imaginatively expansive nature of the West did not result from purely historical and fortuitous circumstances; it is internal to the meaning of the West itself. In so many ways Baudet shows that the European or Western orientation in the world is, to use the phrase of W.E.B. Du Bois, the product of a “double consciousness.” I find this extremely interesting; for since Du Bois coined the phrase it has been understood as the sign of those “others” who have had to come to terms with the effects and meanings of Western colonialism in the modern period. Baudet does not mention Du Bois, but his presentation marks Du Bois’s position as one of the most interesting and appropriate modes of thinking, albeit from the other side, regarding the meaning of human orientation. It is the specificity of this convergence that signifies an important point of contact between this work and the heritages of those cultures and peoples who have had to experience the meaning of Europe during the last five hundred years; another group of scholars and intellectuals have now entered the arena of discussion and debate. Their heritages are defined by the impact of the West upon their cultures during the modern Western period of imperialism and colonialism; they have undergone the political and symbolic conquest by the West. Among the intellectuals I am thinking of here are Ashis Nandy in India, Wole Soyinka in Africa, Octavio Paz in Mexico. It will be most interesting to place this essay within the context of their definitions and interpretations of the tensions, dichotomies, dualisms, and images. All parts of the world have been affected by the West. Not only did the West discover and name a New World in the Western Hemisphere; as a culture it brought all cultures and peoples into contact with itself and with each other. The entire globe, after this intense contact, has become a New World. Baudet tells us how this happened. We look forward now to another discussion, one that will deal with the impact of the others on the West and the making of a New World culture. The contours of this new discourse will be defined by the reciprocal and mutual influence of the West on others and others on the West. In my opinion Baudet’s work will be enhanced and renewed in the ensuing conversation. I welcome its reissue at this time and look forward to this new discussion.

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CHAPTER 37 HOW I CHANGED MY MIND OR NOT

Introduction Thank you, Emilie and Davíd. Your introductory remarks set the right template for my talk. When Emilie Townes invited me to address the American Academy of Religion in a plenary session at the annual meeting marking her apotheosis as president, I was delighted and responded affirmatively immediately. I told her that I didn’t know exactly what I would talk about. Emilie responded that when I came up with a title, I should let her know but that I shouldn’t really worry about a title too much; she would take care of that. And she did. The rather ubiquitous title, “How I Changed My Mind or Not,” is her doing and it fits me well on this occasion. At this stage of my life, and given my academic career, the title suggests that I should give an account of myself and my ideas and notions to my colleagues and friends. Thirty-five years ago, I was honored to serve as president of the American Academy of Religion. That year, 1973, the academy met in this city, in this hotel, and I probably gave my presidential address in this very auditorium. I am honored and blessed to experience this wonderful repetition. This time and place provides a kind of mark—a trace and apt time—from which to orient myself and my remarks this evening. I have joked with my friends that given the title of my address this evening and the fact that I addressed the academy thirty-five years ago, I would simply read the first speech as a response to the question implied in the title of this evening’s talk. Hardly any of you in the audience today was present then, and, I dare say, most of you might not even have been born! I will not quite do this but I do indeed plan to refer back to that speech of 1973 in my address this evening. As I look back to the year 1973 and the speech I gave on that occasion, “Cargo Cults as Historical Religious Phenomena,” I see it as a turning point in my methodological researches in the study of religion. I shall from time to time make reference to this speech as part of my remarks this evening. Prior to 1973, I had spent twenty-three years at the University of Chicago as student and professor. My epistemological sensibilities had been formed in the tradition of South German Kantianism, which led me into phenomenology and hermeneutics. This school of Kantianism always saw Kant as primarily an epistemologist. The 1973 speech was the beginning of raising new epistemological issues from the probing of the notions and categories of objectivity. I discerned that something—I should say a great deal—had been lost and overlooked in the interpretation of religions and cultures and peoples by Western interpreters. In one of the reviews of my work, Robert Segal observed, If I have nevertheless managed to decipher Long’s work, his main theme is most provocative: that there is an analogue and perhaps even a causal connection between the This essay is an address presented in a plenary session at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Chicago Hilton and Towers Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, on November 2, 2008.

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“other” in religious studies and the “other” in the modern West. The “other” of religious studies is the sacred, or the “wholly other.” The “other” of the modern West is the oppressed non-Europeans: the Third World, American Indians, and American blacks. According to Long, the focus of religious studies on the metaphysical other makes it the best discipline for understanding the human other and even vice versa.1 Segal is close to my intent in his understanding of my work, especially over the last quarter of my life. I have, faithful to my tradition in hermeneutics, practiced a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion. I thus pose a skepticism regarding conventional meaning of the nature of religion as well as the rationalizing tendencies of a neutral secularism. Ian Jarvie’s book The Revolution in Anthropology,2 which was the touchstone of my 1973 address, argued primarily with anthropological theory whose regnant theories appeared inadequate when it came to dealing with the phenomenon of cargo cults in particular or the broader nature of religion in general. To a great extent the issue posed by Jarvie still remains— and it is indeed a difficult one. The issue posed is at once complicated and subtle and requires precision in methodological procedure for it is too easy to interpret these phenomena under the bludgeon of certain ideologies of rationalism or the moralism of ethnocentricisms. My words this evening, as were those of 1973, outline modes of procedure in this endeavor. I approach this procedure under the sign and tonality of W.E.B. Du Bois’s prescient and poignant meaning suggested by his admonition, “Let Us Cheer the Weary Traveler.”

The study of religion The study of religion as an academic discipline has its beginnings, along with most of the other disciplines of the human sciences, in the Western academy out of the intellectual orientation referred to as the Enlightenment. In the general intellectual history of the West, the Enlightenment appears at the end of various movements in the West, from the Renaissance, through the Protestant Reformations, as a history of the freeing of the human mode of being from dependence upon otherworldly transcendent beings and their earthly embodiments as guarantors of their status in the created order. In a very apt statement, Ernst Cassirer makes this point quite clearly: “An exchange of index symbols takes place, as it were. That which had established other concepts, (God, the transcendent), now moves into the position of that which is to be established, and that which hitherto had justified other concepts, now finds itself in the position of a concept which requires justification.”3 It is important to note that the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement did not seek to prove the non-existence of God; God is still a prominent meaning, for example, in the philosophies of Descartes and Kant; rather, the Enlightenment was more concerned with a relocation of the gods. And one of the most powerful loci for the gods was in the cultures and among the peoples outside the West. This is why it is well known that the modern study of religion is a “child of the Enlightenment,” and also why Friedrich Max Müller, the Oxford philologist and Sanskritist, is often referred to as the “father of Religionswissenschaft.” For the study of religion, the cultures outside the West were divided into those cultures that possessed written languages and those that did not. This broad taxonomy already presages the notion of language in the Enlightenment sciences carried with it the idea that certain forms and modes 418

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of linguistic expression possessed power. The latter were referred to as “primitive cultures,” while the cultures of written languages were often given the appellation of “ancient,” or more commonly, “Orientals.” Coupled with this distancing of the gods in cultures outside the West was the notion of the evolution of cultures and the “origins” of practices, meanings and orientations that the modern West considered obsolete and non-rational. Through these intellectual procedures, the problem of knowledge as related to these nonWestern cultures, as well as the more perennial philosophical notions of time and space was objectified. The non-Western cultures were objectified within a structure of time that was conceived of as stages and steps on the way to the “rise of the West.” Knowledge of these cultures was gained through an examination and interpretation of their written documents in the case of those cultures with written languages.4 In the case of those cultures without writing, the so-called “primitives,” an elaborate epistemology of “fieldwork” was conceived whereby the Western scholar/“fieldworker” went among the cultures but was never to relate to the people and the culture at the level of a common humanity. Now while the Western Enlightenment was the intellectual watershed of a method for the study of the cultures of the world, its very possibility had begun with the commencement of the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the fifteenth century; Columbus’s voyages were the beginning ventures of the creation of the Atlantic world, a world that has led to the globalization processes that have reached their apex in our time. While the voyages of Columbus and their immediate subsequent results tended to express a model and mode of an older Mediterranean orientation in its extension of Roman Catholicism and its dependency on the hierarchical efficacy of monarchial rule, by the sixteenth century, the new forces of the North Atlantic world, that world largely influenced by Puritan Reformation and revolutionary tendencies, had subverted and risen to prominence in creating a new and distinctive meaning of the Atlantic world.

“Primitives” and exchanges: Modernity and the hiding of religion Let me now turn to that other broad category for the study of religion that emerged from the Enlightenment “sciences,” the so-called “primitives,” those cultures that did not make use of written languages. While the “primitives” appear as the binary objects of study in contrast to those cultures with written languages, they are much more than this. In the case of those cultures with written languages, investigators had to deal with the specific languages themselves and the cultural forms attendant to them: cities, notions of time, artifacts, and so on; the notion of primitive languages and cultures allowed for an almost total creation of the object of study. The very name “primitive” is not derivative from anyone of these cultures, for example, Indic, Chinese, or Egyptian cultures and religion. Primitives are found everywhere—in Australia, Africa, North and South America, the islands of the Atlantic and Pacific; they are omnipresent all over the globe. I have chosen the cargo cult as the site of my methodological procedure for it represents one of the rare discussions of religion in the language of one of the Enlightenment sciences where a religious phenomenon is defined precisely by the contact and relationship between a non-Western culture and the Western culture in terms of place, language, and material goods. 419

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The publication of Francis Edgar Williams’s The Vailala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonials in the Gulf District in 1923 marks for me a watershed in the interpretation of religion. Williams, a government anthropologist, had written a report describing and explaining the strange ceremonials taking place in the Gulf District of New Guinea. This “Vailala Madness” was later labeled “cargo cult” because the “madness” centered around the religious valorization of Western material commodities in a millenarian expectation of the end of the present world. With the publication of Williams’s work, similar phenomena of this kind were noted all over the world. Though Westerners initially accounted for the cargo cult in terms of the ignorance of the native cultures, closer examination reveals that the adherents of these cults were in fact undertaking a total reorientation of their culture from the perspective of the contact of their culture with Western culture. Modern Western cultures, since they did not regard their conquest and domination of other cultures in terms of notions of reciprocities were hardly ever aware of the impact of other cultures upon their own. As a matter of fact, the various representatives of the West—missionaries, settlers, colonial officers—guarded themselves assiduously against “going native,” that is, taking on any semblance of the cultures with which they were in constant and intimate contact. Before continuing, I will give you some descriptions of cargo cults, beginning with Williams’s portrayal of the Vailala Madness: Originating in the neighborhood of Vailala, whence it spread rapidly through the coastal and certain inland villages, this movement involved, on the one hand, a set of preposterous beliefs among its victims—in particular the expectation of an early visit from deceased relatives—and, on the other, collective nervous symptoms of a sometimes grotesque and idiotic nature. Hence the name, Vailala Madness seems apt enough and at least conveys more meaning than any of the various alternatives. … Perhaps one of the most fundamental ideas was that of the ancestors, or more usually the deceased relatives, of the people were shortly to return to visit them. They were expected in a large steamer, which was to be loaded with cases of gifts—tobacco, calico, knives, axes, food stuffs, and the like.5 The cargo cults not only defined a meaning of cultures-in-contact, they also described a new and alternate meaning of religion in the modern world. As total orientation as religion these cults included political, social, and ontological dimensions. Most decisively they restored the meaning of matter and materiality as fundamental for any discussion of understanding of religion. The Enlightenment sciences had emphasized belief and rational meanings as the basis for religion, hardly if ever, making any reference to matter and materiality as having anything to do with religious belief. In the cargo cult, matter and materiality lie at the very heart of the cult. As a matter of fact, the cargo cultist makes it clear that from their perspective, it is the Westerners who sacralize and venerate matter, though they have attempted to hide this fact from those whom they dominate. Westerners tell them that their success in the world is due to their belief in God and in Jesus Christ but the cargo cultist sees that in their behavior they really worship matter in the form of material goods—the commodities which they have brought with them in the great ships. The Westerners have one story about the materiality of the things of the world; the cultures of Papua New Guinea have another story. The natives of New Guinea discern that the Westerners “hide the secret of the cargo” from them. They tell them that their salvation is dependent on their acceptance of a God, Jesus Christ, a god 420

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known through the written language of a book. While preaching this meaning to them, they simultaneously begin the domination of their culture. The natives further discern in this that the Westerners “hide the secret of the cargo” not only from them; they hide the secret of the cargo even from themselves! Cargo cults force us to come to terms in a very different manner with the relationships among and between human communities in the modern world. Rather than being relegated to that realm defined by some form of Hegelian or Darwinian cultural evolution, they point up the authentic situation of modernity and in so doing undercut the methodology of the anthropological and ethnological sciences that never developed an epistemology based upon knowledge and contacts between the “West and the rest.” And, the cargo cultist emphasis on the “cargo”—on the matter, materiality, and the commodification of matter is an indication that through their actions and thoughts the very notion of matter as a religious meaning is brought back into focus. Prior to the formation of the Atlantic world, it was a general assumption in the West that matter and all material things were aspects and dimensions of the world created by God. Thus, matter, like all creatures and things of the world possessed an inherent value because it was created by God. In the processes of the formation of the Atlantic world, the notion of the inherent meaning of matter and materiality was eliminated from this locus. This elimination of the inherent value of matter was a complex process with several sources feeding into its formulation. One must consider the philosophies stemming from Descartes that espoused the notion that thought establishes being and vice-versa, the material body and God existing only as modes of expression, on the one hand, and guarantor of propositions, on the other. There is also the influence of John Calvin’s non-sacramental theology especially as this theology defined the meaning of exchanges and the surplus meaning of exchanges between members of the human community. More recently, William Pietz has shown how it was through a discourse about religion itself in the Atlantic world that the inherent value of matter was nullified as a fundamental orientation in the formation of the Atlantic world. Pietz traces the history of the fetish as both practice and discourse to show how this notion paved the way for the loss of matter as a locus of creation as well as the basis for the debunking of an efficacious meaning of religion within the formative structures of the Atlantic world. Pietz places his discussion of the fetish within the triangular trade between Africa, Europe, and the Americas between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period crucial for the formation of the Atlantic world. Pietz has shown us that this term, if correctly understood, reveals a great deal about the interrelationship between the actual situation of contact and the reciprocities that were being forged in the new world of mercantilism and colonialism.6 The first characteristic to be identified in the notion of the fetish is its irreducible materiality. The truth of the fetish resides in its status as a material embodiment; its truth is not that of an idol, for the idol’s truth lies in its relation of iconic resemblance to some immaterial model or entity. This was the basis for the distinction between the feitiço and the idolo in medieval Portuguese. For Charles de Brosses, who coined the term fétichisme in 1757, the fetish was essentially a material and terrestrial entity. Fetishism was thus to be distinguished from the cults of celestial bodies (whose truth might be a sort of proto-deist intimation of the rational order of nature rather than the direct worship of natural bodies themselves). Second, and of equal importance, is the theme of singularity and repetition. The fetish has an ordering power derived from its status as the fixation or inscription of a unique originating event that has 421

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brought together previous “heterogeneous” elements into a novel entity. But the heterogeneous components appropriated into an identity by a fetish are not only material elements; they are equally desires and the beliefs and narrative structures establishing a practice that is fixed and fixated, whose power is precisely the power to repeat its originating act of forging an identity of articulated relations between otherwise heterogeneous things. There are two other themes related to the problem of the fetish in addition to its materiality, repetitive power, and singular fixation of heterogeneous elements; these are the themes of social value and personal individuality. The issue of the non-universality and the social value emerged in an intense manner at the beginning of the European voyages to sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, one of the Cadamostos, who sailed to Senegal under a Portuguese charter in the late 1400s, was moved to write of the natives of Gambia: “Gold is much prized among them, in my opinion, more than by us, for they regard it as very precious; nevertheless they traded it very cheaply, taking in exchange articles of little value in our eyes.”7 Now it is important to note the situation from which the accounts that led to the notion of fetishism are defined by trade, commerce, contact and the intercourse between communities on the coast of West Africa and Europeans. Pietz alludes in one section of his work that this geography at this time defines a situation of intense heterogeneity, even of anarchy. The inhabitants of these coastal regions were not simply members of African communities that were located on the coast. These coastal enclaves were inhabited by all sorts of persons— Christians, Muslims, Africans, Jews, and every admixture among and between them. We are reminded here of the same kinds of communities of brigands described by Fernand Braudel as inhabiting the islands along the northwest coast of the African Mediterranean. The problem of the fetish anticipates the meaning of the relationship of value to heterogeneity and the meaning of the constitution of human consciousness within the structures of heterogeneity. Pietz implies quite strongly that it is through the discourses surrounding the fetish that the possibility of a movement from the Christian and traditional meaning of materiality to the modern world-system meaning of materiality in terms of only its situational value within the structures of a fluid market came about. What did not occur, however, was the accompanying meaning of human consciousness in terms of its possible heterogeneity of “doubleness.” “Fetish” has always named the incomprehensible mystery of the power of material things to be collective social objects experienced by individuals as truly embodying determinate values of virtues, always as judged from a cross-cultural perspective of relative infinite degradation … Fetish discourse always posits this double consciousness of absorbed credulity and degraded or distanced incredulity. The site of the later disillusioned by its very nature seems to represent a power of ultimate degradation by implication, of the radical creation of value. Because of this it seems to hold an illusory attractive power of its own, that of seeming to be the Archimedean point of man at last no more open and cured of his obsessions, the impossible home of a man without fetishes.8

Conclusion Implied in my remarks is one of the methodological elements and styles that was the hallmark of the beginning of the human science disciplines in general and the study of religion in 422

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particular during the modern period. Instead of positing an ancient and unknown locus for the “origins,” I propose that we place the origins of the study of religion and its data in the same context of modernity from which its theoretical impetus arises—the modern period itself. If this is done, we are able to generate the data of contact as the primary data for the study of religion. From a certain perspective this resituating of the problem, data, and method reminds us of a sense of the nature of religion prior to its categorization by the Enlightenment sciences—it was often spoken of as “a way of life,” that is, a pervasive and generalized mode of knowing, acting, and feeling that was present in all the forms of a society. Since the rise and domination of the West, religion in most of the societies that were subjected in varying modes to Western domination have had to re-experience this same structural and pervasive meaning of the religious life; this time not as a throw back or recapitulation of their older traditions. They experience the generalized and pervasive sense of life as a crisis, not only as a crisis in their lives but a crisis in the life of the globe; it is only Western societies, still secure in their scientific and “rational” objectivity that live as if this crisis is not of a religious nature. They perceive it in this manner because, for the most part, they have never taken seriously the contact that they have had over the various cultures of the world over the last five centuries. Any concern with theory and method in the study of religion demands a kind of recursive style—a style in which the investigator must crawl backwards through the labyrinthine times and spaces created in the world over the last half century so that one can ask again in all seriousness, “from whence did the gods arise, and, what is the end of the human on the face of the earth? In my last plenary address in 1973, I ended by posing the issue of the cargo cultist and the American Academy of Religion: There are definite methodological implications for the American Academy of Religion when we look carefully at the phenomenon of cargo cults. I don‘t mean to imply that the American Academy of Religion is a cargo cult but there is something to be learned about ourselves from this kind of religious experience and expression. Just as the study of non-Western and especially the so-called primitives were supposed to give us not only an objective view of the life of others, at the same time, this so-called objective view told us something about the inner life and subjectivity of the investigator. … I think this is highly instructive for the Academy, for when we look at the history of this organization, it has, in a short period of time, moved from a small company of biblical instructors to the large amorphous milling groups in the halls and meeting rooms.9 I end this address thirty-five years later with a similar observation, but this time from another scholar who has confronted a similar situation. Dipesh Chakrabarty in several of his works has made this point in different ways. One of his clearest and most succinct statements of this point is as follows: European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought—which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects all—may be renewed from the margins.10

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It is thus not the intention of this new departure to substitute the opposite of colonialism as an alternative meaning of thought for what was the reigning content and style of the thought of the European colonizers. We should now raise issues from the kind of in-betweenness of time, space, and matter that took place between the colonizers of the West and those who were dominated and colonized—from the interstices of the contact situation itself. As I said above, this requires a subtle and astute form of scholarly discernment and I again repeat and offer the Duboisian style by blessing such scholars with the Duboisian sense of “Let Us Cheer the Weary Traveler.”

Notes 1. Robert A. Segal, Review of Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion by Charles H. Long, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 613–615. 2. Ian C. Jarvie, The Revolution in Anthropology (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969). 3. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettigrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 159. 4. Friedrich Max Müller, one of the greatest Sanskritist of his day, was once asked if he had ever visited India. His reply was, “Of course not, why should I wish to go there.” 5. Francis Edgar Williams, The Vailala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf District, Territory of Papua Anthropology Reports, 4 (Port Moresby: E. G. Baker, 1923), 1, 14–15. 6. All comments about the fetish are derived from William Pietz’s series of articles: “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17; “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987): 23–46; and “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of the Fetishism,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (Autumn 1988): 105–124. 7. Quoted in Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish, I,” 9. 8. Ibid., 15. 9. Charles Long, “Cargo Cults as Cultural Historical Phenomena,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42, no. 3 (September 1974): 403–414, at 414. 10. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 16.

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INDEX

Note: Page references with the letter “n” followed by locators denote note numbers. abolitionists 20, 263 Adams, Charles 93 Adams, Robert McCormick 158 Adler, Mortimer Jerome 90–91, 96–97 Africa continental configurations 248–250 cultural unity 250–254 fragmentation of traditions 262 gnosis 252–257 health and healing 265–266 meaning of 206, 235, 241–242, 247–248, 255, 266–267 Africa and the Disciplines (Bates, Mudimbe, and O’Barr) 248, 252–253, 254 Africa, Its Geography, People, and Products (Du Bois) 234 Africa—Its Place in Modern History (Du Bois) 234 African American religion and culture 5–6, 62, 190, 199–211, 213–223, 255–256, 282, 340–341. See also black religion; black theology and the Atlantic World 279–283 characterizations of 199–200 conjure 266–275 folklore 233, 266–267 ring shout 201, 266–269 study of 189–190, 200–207, 213–222 African diaspora 247–259, 340 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church 270 African religions 5, 9–10, 187–188, 215, 234, 236– 237, 242, 247, 252, 266–267, 309, 338–339, 349–358 African Religions of Brazil, The (Bastide) 219 Ahlstrom, Sydney 45–46, 48, 177 Albanese, Catherine 20, 26, 47, 142–143, 217 alchemy 124–126 Alimen, Marie-Henriette 352 Alles, Gregory 183 Alpha: The Myths of Creation (Long, Charles H.) 10, 64 Altizer, Tom 63 America, United States of civil religion in 19–21, 25–27, 35–37, 46, 132–133, 173, 204 founding and formation of 13–16, 17–21, 25–27, 35–36, 44–48, 143, 201, 216–217, 264 religion of the republic 20, 25–26, 45, 47, 133, 173, 201, 204 religious interpretations of 13–21 religious orientation of 14–16, 28, 46, 340

and the study of religion 4–5, 41–52, 55–59, 67–72, 75–86, 89–97, 99–114, 189–190, 200–207, 213–222 American Academy of Religion (AAR) xii, 1, 5, 42, 55–59, 67, 94–95, 296–297, 417, 423 American Adam, The (Lewis, R.W.B.) 50, 178 American Dilemma, An (Myrdal) 20, 176 American Dream 231, 311–312, 317, 404 American Lectures on the History of Religions 57, 70–71 “American People, The” (Mead) 19 American Revolution 20–21, 27–28, 264 Anales de Cuauhtitlan 384 ancestors 192, 266–267, 337–343, 351, 376, 407, 420 Ancient City, The (Fustel de Coulanges) 25, 141 Andrews, Stephen 232–233 Angelou, Maya 293 animism 349, 376, 378, 395 Annales school 141, 167 Anomie (Durkheim) 340 anthropology 41, 44, 49, 63, 64, 81, 82, 173, 253, 309, 310, 314, 326, 350, 375 of religion 131, 418 apocalypticism 230, 231 Appiah, Anthony 192 Arendt, Hannah 20–21, 35–36, 105 Aristotle 104–105, 111, 119, 313, 390 Art of Indian Asia, Its Mythology, and Transformations, The (Zimmer) 387 Ashby, Philip 93 Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (Jastrow, Jr.) 70 Assayer, The (Galileo) 7 Athenian Popular Religion (Mikalson) 133, 141 Atlanta University 226, 228, 234 Atlantic world 6, 13–14, 30, 31, 151–152, 174, 188, 205–209, 231, 233, 234, 254–255, 419, 421 and the origin of religion 13–16, 279–283 Aubrey, Edwin E. 77 Augustine (saint) 313, 388, 399 Australian aborigines 392 Australian Religion (Eliade) 80 “axial” age and traditions 345–347, 361–368 Aztec Image in Western Thought, The (Keen) 85 Aztecs 163, 383–385 Bacon, Nathaniel 19 Bahktin, Mikhail 137

Index Baldwin, James 295–296 Bambara peoples 9, 31, 36, 247 Bantu language 252 Baptist Union Theological Seminary 89 Baron, Salo 266 Barret, Leonard 218–219 Barth, Karl 72, 324 Barton, George Aaron 70, 71, 72 Bastide, Roger 219, 257 Bates, Robert H. 248 Baudet, Henri 15, 147, 253, 413–415 Baumann, Hermann 352–353, 357 Baumer, Franklin L. 413 Beaglehole, J. C. 383 Bell, Alexander Graham 332 Bell, Daniel 174 Bellah, Robert N. 19, 20, 25, 26, 47, 133, 143 Beloved (Morrison) 270–273, 274 Belville, Jean-Baptiste 29 Benedict, Ruth 78 Benveniste, Émile 398–399, 400 Benz, Ernst 91, 93 Berger, Peter 371, 372, 373 Berglund, Axel-Ivar 338 Berlin, Ira 18, 264, 275 Berwan people 339 Best, Wallace D. 189–190, 257 Bible 5, 56, 57–58, 64, 68, 131, 150, 230, 406 Biddick, Kathleen 150, 192, 193, 273–274, 275 Bidney, David 330 Birdsall, Richard D. 46, 47, 48 Birth and Rebirth (Eliade) 310 Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Levine) 217, 218 Black Experience in Religion, The (Lincoln, C. Eric) 215–216, 218–219 Black Folk Then and Now (Du Bois) 234, 237 Black Magic (Chireau) 269 Black Mountain College 107–108, 109 black music 200, 202, 217, 232–233. See also spirituals Black Muslims in America, The (Lincoln, C. Eric) 213, 215, 216 black power 167, 213–214 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois) 227, 242, 264 black religion 95, 189, 199–200, 203, 213–223, 313. See also African American religion and culture Black Religion (Washington, Joseph) 213 Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Wilmore) 215 black theology 176, 199–200, 204, 213–216, 219, 222, 255 Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979 (Wilmore and Cone) 216 Black Theology and Black Power (Cone) 199, 213, 214 Black Theology of Liberation, A (Cone) 214 Blake, William 387 Blassingame, John W. 202 Blight, David W. 227

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Bobo people 357 Boeckh, August 64 Bolle, Kees vii, 79, 87 n.11, 92 Bosman, Willem 151, 156 Bourdieu, Pierre 390 Bradford, William 17 Branch, Taylor 263 Brancusi, Constantin 9, 10 Braudel, Fernand 13–14, 27, 52, 85, 180, 249, 250, 280–281, 368, 415, 422 Brauer, Jerald C. 308 Breuil, Henri 332 Brinton, Daniel 57, 70 Bro, Harman 93 Brosses, Charles de 367, 421 Brown, H. (Herbert) “Rap” (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) 225 Brown, William Wells 217 Bruner, Marta 230–231 Bryn Mawr College 70 Buber, Martin 123, 334 Budde, Karl Ferdinand Reinhard 70 Buddhism 44, 57, 70, 93, 132, 133, 143, 173, 230, 310, 334, 387, 393–394, 400–401 Zen 317 Bultmann, Rudolf 64 Bunche, Ralph 226 Burke, Peter 129, 139, 143 Burnouf, Eugène 57, 79 Burridge, Kenelm 165, 188–189, 290 Cadamosto, Alvise da 367, 422 Cain, Seymour 63 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 388 Callois, Roger 397 Calvin, John 207, 367, 421 Calvinism and Calvinists 47, 188, 195 n.14, 204, 207, 340, 365 Campbell, Joseph 375, 377–380, 381, 387–401 Candomblé 219, 257 cargo cult 5, 55, 112–113, 151, 152, 165, 188–189, 290–291, 327–328, 366, 418–421, 423 Caribbean Discourses (Glissant) 153–154 Caribbean traditions 25, 31, 32, 35, 45, 215, 255, 340 Carnets (Lévy-Bruhl) 337 Carnival in Romans (Ladurie) 137, 141 Carrasco, Davíd ix, xi–xii, 61, 307–319, 383–385 Carrera, Magali 152 Cartesianism 207, 269, 283, 347, 365, 406. See also Descartes, René Case, Shirley Jackson 91 Cassirer, Ernst 49, 65, 372, 418 casta paintings 152 Catholicism and Catholics 2, 20, 26, 43, 58, 148, 176, 187, 205, 419 Cayce, Edgar 93 centeredness 157, 301, 362, 366 Cervantes, Fernando 153, 156

Index Chakrabarty, Dipesh 186, 192–194, 262, 423 “Challenging Liberal Justice: The Talented Tenth Revisited” (Stewart, Carole) 228–230, 231, 238, 272 Chantepie de la Saussaye, Pierre Daniël 57, 69, 76, 77 Charles III (king of Spain) 32 Charles IV (king of Spain) 33 Chatauqua movement 102 Cheese and the Worms, The (Ginzburg) 132, 142 Cherry, Conrad 97 Chesnutt, Charles 275 Cheyne, Thomas Kelly 70 Chicago 1–4, 63, 171–173, 175–176, 404. See also University of Chicago; World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago school 89–91, 96–97 of history of religions 75–88, 91–93, 94, 96, 287 of philosophy 89–90 of urban sociology 189–190, 195 n.19, 309 “Chicago School, The” (Adler) 90–91, 96–97 Chicago Theological Seminary 307–308 Chidester, David 228, 234, 236, 237, 242 Childe, V. Gordon 121, 158, 362, 363 Chips from a German’s Workshop (Müller) 1, 6 Chireau, Yvonne 233, 268–269 “Church, Sect, and Denomination” (Wach) 63 Cioran, Émile 55 civil religion 19–21, 25–27, 35–37, 46, 132–133, 173, 204 “Civil Religion in America” (Bellah) 20, 25 Civil Rights Movement 5, 6, 58, 94, 200, 213, 225, 226, 241, 254, 316, 407 Civil War (U.S.) 18, 20, 101, 171–172, 238, 263, 273, 404 Civilization and Capitalism (Braudel) 281 Clark, Jonas 102 Clark University 101, 102 Clay, Albert Tobias 71 Clebsch, William A. 5, 55, 73 Coartación 32 Code Noir 31, 32 Codex Vienna 384 cogito 207, 269, 283, 372 Cold War 237 Collège de France 68–69, 338 College of Human Service (CHS) 107–108, 109 colleges and universities. See also individual institutions American 43, 63, 94, 99–115, 266, 321, 326 Australian 41 graduate schools 72, 101, 102, 108, 109 public 42–43, 46, 94, 316 and the study of religion 41–43, 57, 63, 72, 94, 110–114, 307, 316–317 Colonial Encounters (Hulme) 150–151 colonialism 7–8, 84–85, 185–186, 189, 193, 221, 226, 228, 232, 235–236, 241, 262, 299–303, 305, 315, 327, 365, 366, 368, 373, 404, 405, 408–410, 415, 424 and religion ix, 5, 111, 203, 269, 289–291, 421

color-line 9, 205, 208–209, 222, 229, 241, 275, 407 Columbia University 55, 69, 70, 101 Columbus, Christopher 14, 45, 147, 150, 158, 159, 161, 162, 171, 174, 178, 205, 249–250, 253, 281, 305, 364, 404, 419 commodity fetishism 52, 186 Compagnie des Indes 30–31 Comparative Religion: A History (Sharpe) 85 Comparative Study of Religion, The (Wach) 79, 80 Comte, Auguste 76, 337 Cone, James 176, 199, 200, 204, 213–216 Confidence Man, The (Melville) 18 Confucianism 44, 131, 133, 173, 334 conjure 266–275 Constantine (Roman emperor) 148 Constitution (U.S.) 4, 18, 21, 25, 26, 36, 37, 47, 94, 111, 204, 205, 232, 238, 276 n.9, 373 Convention 263, 264, 276 n.19 Cornell, Ezra 101 Cornell University 70, 75, 101 Cortés, Hernán 165, 166, 385 Cosmic Egg (Brancusi) 9, 10 Cosmos and History (Eliade) 220 Creating Black Americans (Painter) 275 Creation of Eve, The (Michelangelo) 387 Creative Mythology (Campbell) 389 creator god(s) 9, 16, 120, 188, 349–350, 351, 352, 356, 357, 391 creole and creolization 28, 31, 32, 35, 152, 153–154, 181 n.12, 368 Crisis (journal) 226 “Crisis and Renewal in the History of Religions” (Eliade) 80 Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, The (Cruse) 216 Crozat, Antoine 29 Crummel, Alexander 205, 226, 229, 238, 272 Cruse, Harold 216 Cullen, Countee 241, 247, 248 “Cultural Fashions and the History of Religions” (Eliade) 81 Cumont, Franz Valéry Marie 70 Curiosity and Pilgrimage (Zacher) 146 Custer, George Armstrong 172 Daniel, Douglas 202 Daniel, Samuel 164 Danielou, Jean 91 Dante, Alighieri 392 Darmesteter, James 69 Darwinism 421 Dash, J. Michael 153–154, 156 Davids, William Rhys 57, 70 Davis, David Brion 206–207, 217, 242, 274, 283, 410–411 Death, Property, and the Ancestors (Goody) 338–339 DeBow’s Review (journal) 267 Decennial Volumes of the University of Chicago 89–90, 92

427

Index Declaration of Independence (U.S.) 4, 25, 26, 34, 36, 47, 171, 238 “Deep River” (spiritual) 233, 280 Defert, Daniel 148, 155, 177, 178, 256 Delitzsch, Friedrich 68 Deloria, Vine 217 Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 16, 19, 142, 161, 315, 339, 373 Derrida, Jacques 105–106, 110, 114 n.5, 114 n.7, 221 Descartes, René 14, 35, 184, 206, 207, 281, 288, 290, 367, 372, 409, 418, 421. See also Cartesianism Devil and Commodity Fetishism, The (Taussig) 86, 153, 156 Devil in the New World, The (Cervantes) 153, 156 Dewey, John 90, 313 Dialectics of the Concrete (Kosík) 122–123 Dialogue (Hume) 325 diasporas 255–256 African 247–257, 340 Dictionary of the Targumim…, A (Morris, Sr.) 68 Dieterlen, Germaine 352–353 Dilthey, Wilhelm 64, 228, 233–234, 239–240, 241 Dinka people 359 n.20 Disciples House 308 Do Komo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World (Leenhardt) 337 “Doctoring Freedom” (Long, Margaret Geneva) 267, 275 Dodson, Howard 219, 231 Dogon people 9, 10, 31, 36, 136, 247, 353 Doniger, Wendy 92 double consciousness xii, 167, 208, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 239, 289–291, 301, 368, 407–410, 415, 422 Douglass, Frederick 172 Drake, St. Clair 254 dreams/dreaming 387–401 Alcheringa 392 American 231, 311–312, 317, 404 myth- 165–168, 394, 397, 400 world- 390–393, 394–395, 399 Drew University 56 Drinnon, Richard 18 “Du Bois as Pioneer of African History” (Law) 234–235, 236 Du Bois, W.E.B. 99–100, 167, 202–204, 215, 218, 411 n.6 and the African-American situation 205, 228–234 birth 225, 407 and black music 230–231, 270–271 and the color-line 9, 205, 208–209, 229, 241, 275, 407 death 225, 226, 241, 242, 407 and double consciousness xii, 167, 208, 216, 217–218, 220, 221, 239, 289–291, 301, 407–410, 415 and hermeneutics 220, 227–228, 242 intellectual orientation 227–228 and Pan-Africanism 204, 234–237

428

philosophy of 99, 225, 231–232 public role 226 and religion 234–240 and religious experience 6, 239, 241, 280 and the talented tenth 228–229, 295 and the Veil 167, 206, 220, 233, 408, 409–410 Duchesne-Guillaume, Jacques 93 Dumézil, Georges 117, 396 Dunbar Junior College 1, 225 Durkheim, Émile 41, 80, 82, 111, 337, 339, 340, 377 Dutcher (Doggett), Olive 55 Dwight, Timothy 46 “Earliest Accounts of the New World, The” (Gerbi) 14 Edwards, Jonathan 48 Egerton, Douglas R. 203 eggs, religious significance of 9–10, 353 Einhorn, Robin 264 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 20 Elaine (Arkansas) Sharecroppers Riot 226 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life/Les formes élémentaire de la vie religieuse (Durkheim) 80, 377 Elements of the Science of Religion (Tiele) 69 Eliade, Mircea vii, viii, 5, 20, 55, 63, 79–83, 89, 91–96, 111, 117–126, 158, 219–220, 281, 299, 303–304, 307–311, 314–319, 321, 322, 331, 349–351, 353–356, 361, 377, 385, 395, 403 and hermeneutics 80–81, 82, 96, 123 and historical destinies 119, 121, 303–304 and the imagination of matter 117–126 and myth 118–121, 162, 331, 349, 350–351, 377, 395 and primitive ontology 363, 368 n.3 and primordiality 289–290 and religious experience 119, 126, 331, 354–356 and the terror of history 126, 220–221 Eliot, Charles W. 101 ellipsis 8–10 Ellis, Havelock 71 Ellison, Ralph 202, 261, 295–296, 301 Encyclopaedia of Ethics and Religion (Hastings) 77 Encyclopedia of Africa (Du Bois) 234, 235, 241 “End of the Protestant Era, The” (Tillich) 174, 222 Engerman, Stanley 217, 262–266 Enlightenment 25–26, 43–45, 46, 49, 84, 100, 113, 148, 184, 188, 273–274, 288–289, 302, 311, 340, 373, 395, 397, 418–419 arche 185–186, 288–289 conceptions of God 43, 324, 372, 418–419 and hermeneutics 183, 193, 397–401 and history 322–323, 330 humanism and the humanities 323, 325, 327, 365 rationality/reason 26, 49, 84, 113, 129, 185, 203, 230, 323–325, 331 science(s) 49, 84, 86, 175, 181 n.13, 183, 184, 185–186, 189, 193–194, 203, 248, 287, 288–289, 329–330, 419–420, 423

Index and the study of religion 47, 49, 84, 181 n.13, 185–186, 203, 287, 329–331, 418–419 and theodicy 371–373 understanding of religion 25–26, 43–45, 46, 47, 49, 203, 230, 330 worldview 324, 325, 330 epics 395–397 Episcopalianism 63 Errand into the Wilderness (Miller) 17 eschatology 218, 231, 339 Essai sur le don/The Gift (Mauss) 15, 112, 363 Euhemerus 230 Europe and European(s) and Africa(ns) 186–188, 247, 249–251, 253–257, 262, 280, 282, 290, 367–368, 414, 421, 422 and America 4, 13–19, 25–38, 48–49, 162–163, 177, 204, 208, 282, 305, 326–327, 421 eastern 300 hegemony 45, 51, 159, 178–180, 249–250, 257, 366 meaning and making of 253, 254, 366, 413–415 and the New World 4, 49–52, 150, 157–170, 171, 173–178, 179–180, 185, 305, 364, 413–414 and non-Europeans 31, 51, 52, 137, 147–154, 161–165, 175–180, 186–189, 262, 290, 364–368, 418–422 northern 34, 173, 326, 379 and pilgrimage 50, 146–148, 158–163, 177–178, 256 travel narratives 147–151 western 50–51, 177, 178, 179, 185, 288, 364–366 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 5 Evidence and Methods (Fogel and Engerman) 263 exchange 15, 112–113, 146, 149–152, 184, 186–189, 194, 268, 283, 288, 363, 419–422 Fabian, Johannes 186, 189, 252 Facing Mount Kenya (Kenyatta) 192 Facing West (Drinnon) 18 Faerie Queen (Spenser) 161–162 faith 230 fascism 318–319 Feierman, Steven 254, 262, 272 fetish/fetishism 5, 31, 52, 123, 151–152, 156, 186–188, 193, 236–237, 242, 273–274, 282–283, 291, 367–368, 421–422 commodity 52, 186 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 314 Fields, Karen 86, 153, 156, 190 Finality of Christianity, The (Foster) 91 Finnegan, Ruth 140, 252 Fischer, Steven 396 Fisher, Miles Mark 202, 213 Fisk University 205, 226, 227, 234, 411 n.6 Florentine Codex 384 Fogel, Robert 217, 262–266 folklore 93, 135, 139–141, 233, 266–267 Forge and the Crucible, The/Forgerons et alchimistes (Eliade) 123, 124–126

Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Les/Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim) 80, 377 Fortune, T. Thomas 217 Foster, George Burton 91 Foucault, Michel 44–45, 103, 175, 184, 288 Franco, Francisco 95, 319 Franklin, Benjamin 20, 276 n.19, 373 Franklin, John Hope 217 Frazer, James George 80, 117, 330, 375–377, 381, 393 Frazier, E. Franklin 213, 215, 309 French Revolution 20, 264, 311, 405 Freud, Sigmund 72, 80, 151, 207, 367, 399, 400, 410 Frey, Sylvia 201, 259 Frobenius, Leo 235 “From Comparative Religion to History of Religions” (Haydon) 75, 76 From Hegel to Nietzsche (Löwith) 149, 155 From Primitives to Zen (Eliade) 395 “frontier thesis” 19, 172–173, 403 Function of Reason, The (Whitehead) 345 functionalism 81, 380 fundamentalism 2, 257 Funk, Robert 94 Fussel, Jay 63, 310 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis 25, 141 Galileo Galilei 7 Gandhi, Mahatma 303 Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca 406–407 Garrett Theological Seminary 3 Garvey, Marcus 213, 241 Gaster, Theodor 250, 253, 257, 375–377 Gauguin, Paul 387 Geertz, Clifford 135, 140, 371, 372, 373 Gemeinschaft 130 Gennep, Arnold van 76 Genovese, Eugene 201, 217, 219, 263 George, Nelson 272 Gerbi, Antonelli 14, 49, 177 Gesellschaft 130 “Ghetto and Emancipation” (Baron) 266 Ghost dance 167, 290 Gift, The/Essai sur le don (Mauss) 15, 112, 363 Gilman, Daniel C. 102 Ginzburg, Carlo 132, 142 Glissant, Edouard 153–154, 156 globalization 13, 154, 206, 281, 419 Gluckman, Max 338 God 49, 120, 147, 153, 165, 167, 189, 190, 200, 208, 213, 255, 295, 299, 312, 332, 333, 357, 391, 393 of the American republic 26, 133 death of 333 Enlightenment conception of 43, 324, 372, 418–419 Western conceptions of 26, 151, 188–189, 207, 241, 242, 410, 418–419, 420–421 will of 294, 333 “God and the Deintegrates” (Gordon) 359 n.39 goddesses 379, 390

429

Index godlessness 207 gods 124, 132, 177, 187, 190, 205–206, 207, 230, 255, 256, 267, 279, 281, 282, 314–315, 329, 350, 357, 376, 379, 389, 393, 394, 398, 418–419, 423 creator 9, 16, 120, 188, 349–350, 351, 352, 356, 357, 391 high 5, 188, 237, 243 n.14, 349–358, 359 n.39 sky- 117, 119, 289, 349, 351–357, 359 n.20, 395 gold 125, 159, 161, 166, 187, 367, 422 Golden Bough, The (Frazer) 117, 375–377 Goldenweiser, Alexander 381 Goodenough, Erwin R. 387 Goodspeed, George Stephen 75, 91 Goody, Jack 338–339 Gordon, Rosemary 359 n.39 Gould, Joseph E. 102 Granet, Marcel 337 Grant, Gerald 107, 108 Great Awakenings 46, 48, 52, 219 Greek culture 34, 70, 126, 129, 132–133, 141, 185, 230, 321, 323, 327, 330, 372, 405, 407 Greek Folk Religion (Nilsson) 132–133 Greenberg, Joseph 252 Greenblatt, Stephen 160–162 Gregory of Nyssa 403, 405 Griaule, Marcel 83, 136 Grimm brothers 130, 139 Groot, Jan Jacob Marie de 70 Gutman, Herbert G. 265 Habermas, Jürgen 191 Haitian revolution 264 Hakluyt, Richard 16–17 Halévy, Joseph 68 Hardy, Julia M. 293–305 Harper, William Rainey 92, 95, 96, 97, 102 Harrelson, Walter 308 Harris, Joseph E. 254 Hart, Ray 55, 94 Hartmann, Klaus 72 Hartshorne, Charles 313 Harvard University 56, 69, 70, 75, 95, 96–97, 101, 172, 205, 226, 227, 234, 237, 239, 310, 313, 317, 411 n.6 Haskell Lectures 71, 79, 307, 309–310, 316 Hastings, James 77 Hawaiian culture 341, 342 Hawley, William Nelson 3 Haydon, Albert Eustace 75–82, 91, 96 health and healing in the black community 261–275 the black body 6, 261, 265, 268, 270–275, 406 conjure 266–275 effects of slavery on 261, 264–275 importance of family in 265 medical and mutual aid societies and associations 269–270 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 72, 76, 78, 149, 206–207, 220, 233, 240, 250, 253, 301, 361, 367, 373, 421

430

characterization of Africa 188, 235 master-slave dialectic/paradigm 84, 167–168, 217–218, 325, 410–411 philosophy 72, 76, 220, 233, 240, 250, 253 understanding of history 149, 191, 240, 250, 253, 361 Heiler, Freidrich 91 Heilige, Das/The Idea of the Holy (Otto) 47–48, 77, 117, 331 Helms, Mary 145–146, 155 Herberg, Will 20, 26, 27, 143, 204 Herder, Johann Gottfried 129–130, 139 hermeneutics 4, 7–8, 49, 59, 64, 72, 81–82, 105, 202, 417 Buddhist 401 and Campbell 397–398 and Du Bois 220, 227–228, 242 and Eliade 80–81, 82, 96, 123 and the New World 51–52, 175–180 and religion vii, 49, 64, 78, 80–82, 86, 88 n.20, 96, 183, 287, 330–331 and sociology 64 of suspicion xii, 8, 9, 193, 418 and Wach vii, 64, 78, 80, 81, 82, 96 Hero with a Thousand Faces, The (Campbell) 389 Heroes and Hero Worship (Carlyle) 230 Herskovits, Melville 280, 309 Higginbotham, A. Leon 217 high god(s) 5, 188, 237, 243 n.14, 349–358, 359 n.39 Hill, Robert 231 Hillman, James 300–301 Hinduism 44, 57, 132, 137, 143, 173, 192, 303, 311, 334 history anachronism and historicism 192–193 Braudel’s temporal rhythms of 13, 249, 280–281 in the Enlightenment 322–323, 330 Hegel’s understanding of 149, 191, 240, 250, 253, 361 historical destinies 119, 121, 303–304 longue durée 13, 51, 170, 249, 281 of mentalities (histoire des mentalités) 58–59 neolithic beginnings of 123–126, 145 philosophy of 130–131, 188, 235, 240, 250, 253 stadial theories of development 151, 187, 372 terror of 51, 126, 178, 220–221, 282, 333–334, 409 unhistorical temporalities 150, 192–193, 275 the writing of 46 history of religions 41, 62–64, 67–70, 131, 310, 329–332, 357. See also religion, study of; Religionswissenschaft Chicago school 75–86, 91–93, 94, 96, 287 faculty 89, 92, 93, 95, 97, 307, 309 method 64, 68, 75–86, 91, 287, 331–332 program 61–65, 72, 94, 247, 307, 310, 313–314 History of Religions (journal) 91 History of Religions Club (Sangha) 61, 79, 93, 313 History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, The (Eliade and Kitagawa) 79, 91

Index History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding, The (Kitagawa, Eliade, and Long) 89 “History of Religions in Retrospect: 1912–1962, The” (Eliade) 80–81 History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect, The (Kitagawa) 92 History of Religious Ideas, A (Eliade) 395 History of the Negro Church, The (Woodson) 213 Hitler, Adolf 311, 319 Hobbes, Thomas 160, 184, 205, 340 Hobsbawm, Eric J. 137 Hodgson, Marshall 85, 95, 415 Hollenweger, Walter J. 139 Holmer, Paul 216 Holocaust 311, 373 homo faber 121–122, 124 Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 377 homo oeconomicus 122–124 homo religiosus 47, 80, 83, 117, 120, 121–122, 124–126, 322, 331 Hopkins, Edward Washburn 69 Hopkins, Pauline 275 Hori, Ichirō 93, 141 Horne, Gerald 231 Horton, Robin 5, 350–351, 356, 357, 358 n.12 Howard University 273, 309 How Natives Think (Lévy-Bruhl) 337 Hubert, Henri 337 Hughes, Langston 233, 288, 296 Huizinga, Johan 377 Hulme, Peter 150–151, 155 humanities 41, 90, 95, 102, 176, 313, 321–328 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 65 Hume, David 325, 340 Hurrying Toward Zion (Cherry) 97 Husserl, Edmund 72 Hutchins, Robert Maynard 3, 91, 95, 96 Hutchison, Anne 209 “I Have A Dream” (King) 225, 407 Idea of a Town, The (Rykwert) 20, 25–26 Idea of the Holy, The/Das Heilige (Otto) 47–48, 117, 331 Illinois Institute of Technology 1–2, 3 Imperial Eyes (Pratt) 16, 145 In My Father’s House (Appiah) 192 “in-betweenness” 150, 186, 192, 274, 275, 282, 424 Ingersoll, Thomas N. 28, 32 Inikori, Joseph 231 Initiation (Eliade) 80 Institutes (Calvin) 367 “Intellectual and Pragmatic Legacy of Du Bois’s PanAfricanism in Contemporary Ghana, The” (Shipley and Pierre) 234, 235–236 International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) 95, 307 Invasion of America, The (Jennings) 17, 86, 217 Invention of America, The (O’Gorman) 14–15

Invisible Man (Ellison) 202 Is God a White Racist? (Jones, William) 215 Islam 13, 57, 68, 69, 76, 85, 93, 95, 133, 137, 173, 230, 249, 254, 281, 357, 363, 415 Jackson, Abraham Valentine Williams 69 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 337 Jacobsen, Thorkild 158, 362 James, E. O. 350–351 James, O’Connell 349 James, William 72, 75, 89–92, 96, 232–233, 239–241 and religious experience 87 n.11, 239, 241, 356 Jarvie, Ian 418 Jaspers, Karl x, 361, 362, 363, 364, 368 n.3 Jastrow, (Marcus) Morris, Sr. 67, 68–69 Jastrow, Morris, Jr. 5, 56–57, 58, 67–72 “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization” (Du Bois) 227 Jefferson, Thomas 4, 33, 34, 47, 409 Jeffersonians 44, 46, 50, 177–178, 339–340, 342 Jennings, Francis 17, 86, 178, 217, 221 Jerusalem (Mendelssohn) 273–274 Jerusalem, pilgrimage to 146, 159 Jesus and the Disinherited (Thurman) 214 Jesus Christ 2, 132, 150, 167, 189, 213–214, 230, 263, 393, 394, 420–421 Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (Goodenough) 387 Jewish tradition 26, 67, 70, 72, 93, 192, 214, 266, 273–274, 316, 334, 337, 339, 342, 407. See also Judaism Johns Hopkins University 67, 70, 101, 102 Johnson, Guy B. 103 Johnson, James Weldon 217, 274 Johnson, John Rosamond 274 Johnson, Rubellite 341, 342 Johnson, Walter 37 Jones, Carolyn M. 293–305 Jones, Lawrence 201, 273, 274 Jones, Major J. 215 Jones, William 215 Journal of Africana Religions 248 Journal of Bible and Religion 5, 56 Judaism 13, 56, 57, 68, 150, 155, 173, 193, 230, 249, 281, 357. See also Jewish tradition Reform 68 Zionism 68, 69 Jung, Carl 63, 80, 388, 400 Kadushin, Max 334 Kant, Immanuel 14, 35, 72, 76, 85, 184, 188, 191, 206, 220, 253, 273, 281, 288, 290, 314, 325, 340, 367, 409, 417, 418 Kantianism 65, 78, 82, 119, 417 Katrina (hurricane) 37 Keen, Benjamin 85 Keller, Mary 226 Kelly, John D. 153

431

Index Kennedy, John F. 20, 58 Kenyatta, Jomo 192 Kibbey, Ann 209 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 200, 225, 241, 303, 407 Kishimoto, Hideo 93, 307 Kitagawa, Joseph vii, 64, 81, 89, 91–95, 141, 183, 307, 309, 381 Knox, Raymond 55 Konkomba people 352 Kosambi, D. D. 192 Kosík, Karel 122–123 Kresge College (University of California, Santa Cruz) 107–108, 109 Kroeber, Alfred L. 333, 361, 380 Ku Klux Klan 226 Kupperman, Karen 163 Lach, Donald 415 Ladurie, E. Le Roy 137 Lafaye, Jacques 217 Lang, Andrew 80 language(s) 16, 18, 19, 31, 47, 48–51, 84, 103, 105, 130, 133, 147–152, 158–164, 174, 175, 180, 186, 201, 209, 221, 252, 266, 274, 297–298, 364, 395–401, 403–411 creole/pidgin 152, 368 of discovery 14–15, 147, 149–152, 163–164, 177–178, 208, 256 and memory 31–32 origins of 130, 186, 289 of pilgrimage (linguae peregrinae) 17, 50, 147–148, 163–164, 177–178, 256 Western 167, 174, 187, 237, 282, 298, 325–326, 366–367, 383, 417 written 84, 121, 165, 185, 248, 390, 395, 418–419 Lansing, J. Stephen 191 Lanternarria, Vittorio 221–222 Lasaulx, Peter Ernst von 361 Law, John 29–30, 36 Law, Robin 234–235, 236 Layard, Austen Henry 57, 68 Le Moyne, Pierre (Sieur d’Iberville) 28–29 Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion (Müller) 69 Lee, Carleton L. 213 Leenhardt, Maurice 338–339, 341, 366 Leeuw, Gerardus van der 14, 64, 77, 111, 241, 279–280, 281, 283, 355, 377 Lehrbuch (Chantepie de la Saussaye) 76 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 337, 371, 372 Leiden University 69, 71 Letters from an American Farmer (St. John de Crèvecoeur) 19, 373 Levi, Edward J. 96 Levine, Lawrence 217, 218, 219 Lévi-Strauss, Claude vii, 85, 167, 307, 327, 337–338, 342, 363, 368, 395 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 330, 337–338, 340, 341, 395 Lewis, David Levering 238, 240, 242

432

Lewis, Martin 254 Lewis, Peirce F. 28, 29, 36–37 Lewis, R.W.B. 50, 178 Lienhardt, R. Godfrey 5 Life Is a Dream/La vida es sueño (Calderón de la Barca) 388 “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (Johnson and Johnson) 274 Lincoln, Abraham 26, 92 Lincoln, Bruce 96 Lincoln, C. Eric 200, 203, 213–215, 218–219 Litwack, Leon 231 Lively Experiment, The (Mead) 19, 142 “Liver as the Seat of the Soul, The” (Jastrow, Jr.) 71 Livingston, Robert 34 Locke, John 52, 160, 180, 184, 205 Long, Charles H. autobiography 1–4 Carrasco interview 307–319 Jones and Hardy interview 293–305 Long, Margaret Geneva 267, 269–270, 275 Loomer, Bernard 309 Louis XIV (king of France) 29, 31 Louis XV (king of France) 29, 32 Louisiana Purchase 4, 27, 33–36 Lovell, John, Jr. 202, 217 Lowie, Robert 381 Löwith, Karl 149, 155 Luo Qing 137 Luther, Martin 207 Lutheranism 56, 63, 85 Macrobius 396 Magic and Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, The (Puckett) 217 Mahabharata 396 Mailer, Norman 237 Malay Magic (Skeat) 76 Malcolm X 200, 225 Malebranche, Nicolas 372 Malinowski, Bronislaw 63, 79, 192, 269, 310, 381, 389, 395 Mamiya, Lawrence 200 Man Makes Himself (Childe) 362 Manuel, Frank 139, 330 “Many Thousand Gone” (spiritual) 37 Many Thousands Gone (Berlin) 18 Maquet, Jacques 251–252 Marcel, Gabriel 63, 79 Märchen (Grimm brothers) 130 Marees, Pieter de 151 Marett, Robert Ranulph 63, 309, 330 Marlowe, Christopher 160, 162 Martyr, Peter 161 Martyrdom of Man, The (Reade) 235 Marx, Karl 14, 35, 122, 151, 186, 191, 206–207, 217, 281, 290, 410 Marxism 52, 122, 123, 153, 158, 191, 222, 236, 290, 302, 323, 327, 341, 347, 362, 363

Index Masks of God, The (Campbell) 375, 377–380, 388–389, 391 Maspero, Henri 93 Massignon, Louis 91 master-slave dialectic/paradigm 18–19, 84, 167–168, 217–218, 264, 325, 410–411 materialism and materiality 6, 35–36, 83, 100, 117–126, 186, 194, 205, 209, 217, 272, 273, 283, 290–291, 327, 342, 345–347, 366–368, 405, 406, 410, 420–422 and exchange 15, 112–113, 146, 149–152, 184, 186–189, 194, 253, 268, 283, 288, 363, 419–422 Mather, Cotton 46 Matory, J. L. 235 Matthews, Shailer 91 Matthiesen, F. O. 237 Mauss, Marcel 15, 112–113, 291, 337, 341, 363, 366 Mayflower (ship) 17 Mays, Benjamin 213 McNeill, William H. 51, 174–175, 178, 415 Mead, Sidney E. 19–20, 25, 26–27, 47, 50, 57, 94, 97, 133, 142, 178, 313 Meadville House 308 Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, The (Braudel) 13–14, 27, 85, 249, 415 Mediterranean world/oecumene 13, 27, 50, 51, 177, 205, 249, 255, 280–282, 311, 326, 364, 419 Meek, Ronald L. 122, 148–149, 155 Meinig, D. W. 14, 33 Meland, Bernard E. 75, 304 Mendelssohn, Moses 93, 273–274 mentalities of African slaves 51, 178, 266 colonial 300 European 159 history of (histoire des mentalités) 58–59 “pre-logical” 151, 363, 395 “primitive” 337, 340 mercantilism 21, 174, 184, 208, 227–228, 239, 251, 282, 288, 290, 325, 327, 362, 365, 367, 409, 421 Mesoamerican cultures 383–385 Messenger (journal) 226 messianism 138, 166, 188, 230, 231, 290 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 104–105 Metcalf, Peter 339 “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism” (Eliade) 79 Meyerowitz, Eva 353, 354 Michaelsen, Robert 94, 317 Middle Passage 178, 254–255, 280–283 Mikalson, Jon D. 133, 141 millenarianism 52, 138, 152, 190–191, 290, 420 Miller, Perry 4, 17 Mintz, Sidney 265 miscegenation 29, 36, 152–153, 179, 367–368, 407, 422 Mitchem, Stephanie Y. 261

modern world-system 45, 159, 167, 282, 364, 368, 375, 407 Modern World-System, The (Wallerstein) 281 modernity 9, 117, 207, 208, 269, 345–347, 366, 404, 406, 408–409 and ancestors 339–342 and the Atlantic world 233, 280–281, 283 citied/urban traditions of 157, 257 and the construction of Africa 247–257 crisis/critique of 167, 345–347 and memory 233, 337–343 origins of 192, 181 n.13, 205, 256, 281 political 186, 194 primordiality and 241, 281, 337–343 and religion 6, 117, 192, 195 n.14, 201, 219, 273, 291, 340–341, 419–423 secularization of 117, 192, 338 terror of 228, 375 and theodicy 371–374 Moltman, Jürgen 216 monotheism 26, 243 n.14, 355, 357–358 Montaigne, Michel de 160, 220 Moody Bible Institute 2–3 More, Thomas 160 Morgan, Philip D. 21 Morrison, Toni 202, 270–272 “Most Hopeless of Deaths … Is the Death of Faith, The” (Bruner) 230–231 Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin 165, 385 Mount Holyoke College 55 Moyers, Bill 293 Mudimbe, V. Y. 248, 252–253, 255, 257 Muhammad (prophet) 68, 230 Müller, Friedrich Max xi, 1, 6, 57, 69, 80, 111, 151, 310, 395, 418, 424 n.24 Murdock, George Peter 251, 352 Musophile (Daniel) 164 Myrdal, Gunnar 20, 176 mysterium tremendum/fascinosum 82, 111, 157, 331, 354–355, 389, 410 myth/mythology 57, 112, 122, 130, 134, 138, 162–168, 218, 240, 329, 355, 375–381 African 9, 252, 352–355, 357, 358 nn.12–13, 359 n.20 American 25–26, 47, 48, 57–58 and the Bible 57–58 and Campbell 377–380, 381, 387–401 of conquest 163 cosmogonic 9, 35, 334, 372 and Eliade 118–121, 162, 331, 349, 350–351, 377, 395 of founding 25–26, 47 Greek 213, 230, 330 Mesoamerican 383–385 ritualization of 47, 137 Roman 26, 330 “Myth, Culture, and History in West Africa” (Long, Charles H.) 247

433

Index Myth, Dreams, and Mysteries (Eliade) 94 Myth of the Eternal Return/Le mythe de l’eternel retour (Eliade) 94, 118, 307, 328 myth-dreams 165–168, 394, 397, 400 Mythic Image, The (Campbell) 387–401 “mythogenetic zones” 378–379, 381 Nandy, Ashis 9, 156, 202, 328, 408–409, 415 Napoléon (Bonaparte) 33, 34, 36 Nash, Roderick 17 “Nation with the Soul of a Church, The” (Mead) 25, 26 Nation with the Soul of a Church, The” (Mead) 20, 94 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 55, 226, 411 n.6 National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI) 5, 55–59 “Needed: A New Perspective on Black History” (Dodson) 219 Negro, The (Du Bois) 234, 236–237 Negro Church, The (Du Bois) 213 Negro Church in America, The (Frazier) 213 Negro Slave Songs in the United States (Fisher) 213 “Negro Speaks of Rivers, The” (Hughes) 233, 280 Negro’s Church, The (Mays and Nicholson) 213 Negro’s God, The (Mays) 213 Nelson, Benjamin 188 Nelson, Frank 313 neolithic revolution 121, 332, 362 Neurath, Otto 374 New Golden Bough, The (Frazer; ed. Gaster) 375–377 New Orleans and Africans 30–32 founding and civil religion 25–27, 35–37 French period (1699–1769, 1803–1811) 29–32, 33 historical geography 27–33 and the Louisiana Purchase 33–34 and Native Americans 30 as slave society 31–32 Spanish period (1769–1803) 32–33 as “wretched site” 28, 29, 36–37 New World 17, 179–180, 413–415 European discovery and settlement 4, 49–52, 150, 157–170, 171, 173–178, 179–180, 185, 305, 364, 414 meaning of 49, 51–52, 173, 177, 179, 282 religions 51–52, 179–180 Newman, James L. 251 Niagara Movement 226, 238 Nicholson, Joseph 213 Niebuhr, H. Richard 142, 380 Niebuhr, Reinhold 47, 93, 142, 380 Nietzsche, Friedrich 333 Nilsson, Martin P. 132–133, 141 Nirvana 398, 400 Nirvana (Welbon) 85 Nkrumah, Kwame 236 “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” (spiritual) 37 Norbeck, Edward 375, 380–381

434

Northrup, George 89 Northwestern University 3, 309 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson) 34 “Notes on White Supremacy” (Hillman) 300–301 O’Barr, Jean 248 Oberlin College 71 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 242 Observations on the Feeling of Beauty and the Sublime (Kant) 188 O’Connell, James 349–351, 354, 359 n.39 Odum, Howard 103 Oedipus Rex 332 Ogden, Schubert 313–314 O’Gorman, Edmundo 14–15, 162 On Revolution (Arendt) 20, 35–36 Oppert, Jules 68 oral traditions 75, 130, 131–132, 202, 252, 262 Oriental Despotism (Wittfogel) 191 Orientalism 84, 203, 288, 415, 418–419 Origen 61, 313 origins of language 130, 186, 289 of modernity 192, 181 n.13, 205, 256, 281 paradigm/problem of 186, 188, 289, 419 quest/search for 129, 186, 194 n.9, 289–290, 365 of religion 186–188, 279–283, 288–290, 292 n.9, 330, 422–423 Orosius, Paulus 46 Ortiz, Fernando 145, 154, 256 Otto, Rudolf 47–48, 49, 64, 65, 77–80, 82, 83, 111, 117, 157, 181 n.13, 185, 222, 324, 331, 354–355, 377 and ideograms 8, 222 and religious experience 47–48, 157, 185, 331, 354–355 Overbeck, Johann Friedrich 149 Overmyer, Daniel L. 137, 143 Owen, Chandler 226 Painter, Nell 265, 275 Pan-Africanism 204, 234–237 Paradise on Earth (Baudet) 15, 154, 413–415 Parry, John H. 162 Parsons, Talcott 65, 140 Parting the Waters (Branch) 263 Passionately Human, No Less Divine (Best) 189–190 Patterns in Comparative Religion/Traité d’histoire des religions (Eliade) 20, 79, 80, 117–124, 304, 316, 349, 395 Patterns of Leadership Among Negroes (Lee) 213 Pauck, Wilhelm 61, 313 Paul (apostle, saint) 61, 313 Paz, Octavio 167, 415 Peculiar Institution, The (Stampp) 217 Peirce, Charles Sanders 81, 106, 241, 313, 315 Penner, Hans 81 Pentecostalism 63, 190

Index Pentecostals, The (Hollenweger) 139 Peritz, Ismar J. 55–57 Perpetual Dream, The (Grant and Reisman) 107 Peters, John Punnett 69 Pettazzoni, Raffaele 80, 91, 349–350, 355, 358 phenomenology 64–65, 78, 289, 351, 355, 375, 380, 417 historical 86, 280 of religion 51, 62, 64–65, 78, 80–82, 86, 179–180, 181 n.13, 241, 279–280, 281, 315 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 301, 321 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois) 205, 228 Philippe II (duke of Orleans) 29–31 philosophy 6–7, 57, 65, 78, 105, 313, 321, 375 Chicago school of 89–90 Du Bois’s 99, 225, 231–232 Hegel’s 72, 76, 220, 233, 240, 250, 253 Herder’s 130 of history 130–131, 188, 235, 240, 250, 253 of knowledge 105, 252 modern 337–338 moral 85, 160 nineteenth-century German 85, 149 of religion 51, 62, 64, 69, 78, 180 Western 321–322 Philosophy of History (Hegel) 188, 235, 250, 253 Pierre, Jemima 234, 235–236 Pietz, William 31, 151–152, 156, 187, 193, 242, 282–283, 292 n.9, 367–368, 421–422 pilgrimage 17, 19, 48, 50, 51, 132, 137, 146–148, 155, 158–164 and Europeans 50, 146–148, 158–163, 177–178, 256 to Jerusalem 146, 159 language of (linguae peregrinae) 17, 50, 147–148, 163–164, 177–178, 256 meanings of 146–147 Pivot of the Four Quarters, The (Wheatley) 362 Plato 313, 387, 388, 399 Plessy v. Ferguson 37, 172 polytheism 243 n.14 Pope, Alexander 324 popular religion and culture 81, 129–143, 149, 155, 263, 269, 300, 367 bibliography 139–143 Posnock, Ross 233 Pragmatism 90, 233 Pratt, Mary Louise 16, 145, 154, 256 prayer 279 predestination 207 prestations 15, 289, 291 Preuss, Theodor 395 “primal” traditions 342, 345–347, 361–365 “primitive/civilized” 149, 221, 251, 291, 361–368, 373, 413 Primitive Mythology (Campbell) 375, 377–380, 391 Primitives and the Supernatural (Lévy-Bruhl) 337 Pritchett, James A. 254–255

Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, The (Davis) 217, 410–411 Prosser, Gabriel 203 Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Herberg) 20, 26, 143 Protestant Era, The (Tillich) 222 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber) 6, 140, 372–373 Protestantism and Protestant(s) 2, 25, 36, 45–47, 94, 204, 205–207, 222, 253, 258, 262, 272, 273, 372–373, 404 end of Era 174, 222 missionaries 148, 337, 366 Reformation 148, 201, 204, 205, 326, 372, 373, 405, 418 schools/seminaries 41, 43 (work) ethic 188, 229, 231, 234, 238, 372–373 psychology 44, 67, 78, 103, 110, 240, 314, 330–331, 375, 397, 405 of religion 62, 81, 179–180, 330–331, 350 Puckett, Newbell Niles 217 Purchas, Samuel 17 Puritanism and Puritans 26, 35, 44, 45, 49, 50, 147, 209, 419 Quetzalcoatl and Guadulupe (Lafaye) 217 Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire (Carrasco) 383–385 Quine, W.V.O. 374 Raboteau, Albert 201, 215, 268 race 20, 21, 36, 163, 179, 204–205, 209, 232, 234, 237, 238, 275, 300, 318–319, 405 miscegenation 29, 36, 152–153, 179, 367–368, 407, 422 racism 34, 215, 216, 294, 300, 305, 340 “three races” 15, 16–21 Radin, Paul 355, 357 Raleigh, Walter 161 Rampersad, Arnold 227 Randolph, A. Philip 226 Rastafarians 167 Rawlings, Jerry J. 236 Ray, Benjamin 183 Reade, William Winwood 235 Reconstruction (U.S.) 205, 225, 238, 273 “Rectificatory Justice and the Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois” (Roberts, Rodney C.) 231–232, 238 Redfield, James 95 Redfield, Robert 130, 132, 135, 143, 309, 380 Reform Judaism 68 Reformation 148, 159, 201, 204, 205, 326, 372, 373, 405, 418 Regeneration through Violence (Slotkin, Richard) 50, 178 Reisman, David 107, 108 “Relations of Anthropology to the Social Sciences and to the Humanities” (Kroeber) 380

435

Index religion. See also individual traditions, denominations, sects, cultures, and concepts of the American republic 20, 25–26, 45, 47, 133, 173, 201, 204 anthropology of 131, 418 civil 19–21, 25–27, 35–37, 46, 132–133, 143, 204 and colonialism ix, 5, 111, 203, 269, 289–291, 421 construction of 184, 287–288 departments and programs 41–43, 49, 52, 91 Enlightenment understanding of 25–26, 43–45, 46, 47, 49, 203, 230, 330 and hermeneutics vii, 49, 64, 78, 80–82, 86, 88 n.20, 96, 183, 287, 330–331 and modernity 6, 117, 192, 195 n.14, 201, 219, 273, 291, 340–341, 419–423 and the oppressed 167–168, 214, 218, 221–222, 269 as orientation 14, 159–160, 253, 270, 271, 420 origins of 186–188, 279–283, 288–290, 292 n.9, 330, 422–423 phenomenology of 51, 62, 64–65, 78, 80–82, 179–180, 181 n.13, 241, 279–280, 281, 315 philosophy of 51, 62, 64, 69, 78, 180 “primitive” 49, 57, 70, 119, 129–131, 203, 288, 310, 380 psychology of 62, 81, 179–180, 330–331, 350 from religare (to bind) xi, 57, 203, 271 sociology of 51, 62, 64–65, 77–78, 82, 140, 176, 215, 314, 380–381 study of 4–6, 7, 41–52, 67–72, 94, 96–97, 99–114, 148–149, 180, 181 n.13, 183–194, 200–207, 213–222, 287–291, 329–334, 337–338, 371–374, 417–424 (see also history of religions; Religionswissenschaft) sui generis nature of viii, 87 n.11, 331 Religion in Essence and Manifestation (Leeuw) 14, 279 Religion in Primitive Society (Norbeck) 375, 380–381 Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, The (Jastrow, Jr.) 70 Religione primitiva in Sardegna, La (Pettazzoni) 80 “Religions” (Tiele) 69 Religions of the Oppressed (Lanternarria) 221–222 Religionswissenschaft 44, 51, 52 n.1, 57, 58, 62, 64, 76, 78, 79, 86, 179, 181 n.13, 418. See also history of religions; religion, study of “Religious Animals, Refuge of the Gods, and the Spirit of Revolt” (Chidester) 228, 234, 236, 242 religious experience 52, 84, 91, 137, 157, 222, 279, 331, 354–358, 379, 423 African American and black 6, 213, 216, 280, 282, 309, 405 Du Bois and 6, 239, 241, 243, 280 Eliade and 119, 126, 331, 354–356 James and 87 n.11, 239, 241, 356 Leeuw and 241 Otto and 47–48, 157, 185, 331, 354–355 Wach and 61–62, 64, 78, 87 n.11, 157, 312–314, 331, 354, 356 West African 354, 357–358

436

Religious History of the American People, A (Ahlstrom) 45, 46, 177 Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions (Rothkrug) 85, 141, 155 religious studies. See history of religions; religion, study of; Religionswissenschaft Religious Thought in the Last Quarter-Century (Smith, Gerald Birney) 91 Renaissance 159–160, 165, 208, 329, 330, 418 Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Greenblatt) 160–161 Renan, Joseph Ernest 68 reparations 231–232, 238 Réville, Albert 68–69, 77 Réville, Jean 68, 77 Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Fields) 86, 153, 156 Revolution in Anthropology, The (Jarvie) 418 Rice, Condoleezza 272 Ricoeur, Paul xii, 9, 95, 179, 205, 207, 257 ring shout 201, 266–269 Ritschl, Albrecht 76 Roberts, Deotis 215 Roberts, Rodney C. 231–232, 238 Robinson, Cedric 230 Rockefeller, John D. 97 Rogel, Robert 217 Roll, Jordan, Roll (Genovese) 217, 263 “Roll, Jordan, Roll” (spiritual) 233, 280 Romanticism 47, 49, 82, 130 Rothkrug, Lionel 85 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 205, 220 Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru (Garcilaso de la Vega) 406–407 Rykwert, Joseph 20, 25–26 Sacred and the Profane, The (Eliade) 94 Sacred Books of the East 69 Sahlins, Marshall 363 Said, Edward 415 Sangha (History of Religions Club) 61, 79, 93, 313 Sartre, Jean-Paul 72, 327 Saussure, Ferdinand de 294 Savage Mind, The (Lévi-Strauss) 327 Savagism and Civility (Sheehan) 16–18, 217 Scheub, David 252 Schiller, F.S.C. 75 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 7, 49, 64, 76–77, 130 Schmidt, Wilhelm 80, 395 Schmoller, Gustav von 227, 233, 239 Schoenbrun, David L. 253–254, 261–262, 265–266, 272–273 Scholem, Gershon 93 Schopenhauer, Arthur 390, 394 Schultes, Robert Evans 317 Schulyer, George 226 Schumpeter, Joseph 239 Schwenfelder, Caspar 65 Scott, Mark 371–374

Index Scott, Nathan 309 “Second Great Awakening and the New England Social Order, The” (Birdsall) 46, 47, 48 Secret Societies (Webster) 76 Segal, Robert 8–9, 417–418 Selected Essays of James Darmesteter 69 “self-fashioning” 48, 160, 162, 167 Seven Books of History Against the Pagans (Orosius) 46 Shadow and Act (Ellison) 301 Shadrach Sinkala 190–191 Shakespeare, William 160, 388 Shamanism 318 Shamanism (Eliade) 80 Shango 237, 243 n.14 Shaping of America, The (Meinig) 14 Shapley, Harlow 237 Sharpe, Eric J. 85 Sheehan, Bernard 16–18, 217 Shipley, Jesse Weaver 234, 235–236 Significance of the Frontier in American History, The (Turner) 19 Significations (Long, Charles H.) ix, 8–9, 293–294, 296–297, 303–304 Singer, Milton 143, 309 1676: The End of American Independence (Webb) 19 Skeat, Walter William 76 Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, A (Campbell) 388 Skinner, Elliot P. 248, 254, 257 sky-gods 117, 119, 289, 349, 351–357, 359 n.20, 395 Slaughterhouse (court case) 37, 232 Slave Counterpoint (Morgan) 20–21 slave trade 31, 205, 208, 229, 231, 233, 235, 242, 251, 405 abolition of 176, 410 slavery 18–19, 21, 26, 30–32, 37, 46, 48, 206–210, 229, 238–239, 242, 261, 264–275, 280, 283, 294, 297, 373, 410–411 abolition of 264 chattel 26, 34, 152, 201, 208, 210, 267, 273, 283, 373, 405 economics of 18, 21, 263, 264 health effects of 261, 264–275 institution of 18, 21, 32, 34, 201–202, 232, 261, 264, 266–267 master-slave dialectic/paradigm 18–19, 84, 167–168, 217–218, 264, 325, 410–411 slave societies and societies with slaves 18–19, 31–32, 264 Slotkin, James Sydney 93 Slotkin, Ralph 18 Slotkin, Richard 48, 50, 178 Smith, Adam 14, 35, 122, 148–149, 206, 281 Smith, Gerald Birney 75, 77, 91 Smith, Henry Nash 47 Smith, Jonathan Z. 81, 83, 96, 184, 287–288, 366, 371 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 91 Smith College 55 Sobel, Mechal 201 Social Role of the Man of Knowledge, The (Znaniecki) 229

Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Meek) 122, 148–149, 155 Society for the Study of Black Religion (SSBR) xii, 95, 214 Society of Biblical Literatures (SBL) 55 sociology 65, 78, 82, 102, 110, 125, 179, 219, 257, 314 of knowledge 131 of religion 51, 62, 64–65, 77–78, 81, 140, 176, 215, 314, 380–381 Sociology of Religion (Wach) 64–65, 77–78, 81, 83, 94, 140, 176, 314, 381 Soderblom, Nathan 77, 79, 93 Song of Roland 396 Sons of the Fathers (Albanese) 20, 47, 217 Sorokin, Pitirim 333 Soto, Hernando de 29 soul 279–283 Soul of the Primitive, The (Lévy-Bruhl) 337 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois) 6, 205–206, 208–209, 216, 220, 227, 228–229, 232–233, 236, 238, 241, 272, 274–275, 280, 406–410 Southern, Eileen 217 Southern Planter (journal) 267 Soyinka, Wole 325–326, 415 Spanish Civil War 95, 319 Spencer, Herbert 76 Spengler, Oswald 333 Spenser, Edmund 160, 161–162 spirituality 346–347, 363, 366 spiritualization 362, 363 spirituals 37, 202, 229, 233, 272, 280, 282 St. John de Crèvecoeur, Hector 19, 373 St. John’s College 107–108 Stampp, Kenneth 217 Statesman (Plato) 387 Steindorff, Georg 70 Steiner, Franz Baermann 85 Stewart, Carole 228–230, 231, 238, 272 Stiles, Ezra 46 Stone Age Economics (Sahlins) 363 Strauss und Torney, Viktor von 361 Structure of Social Action, The (Parsons) 65 Stuckey, Sterling 201, 266–268 Study of Religion, The (Jastrow, Jr.) 5, 57, 67–72 suffering 215, 268, 333 Sundquist, Eric 233 Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America from 1683–1870, The (Du Bois) 205 Syracuse University 55, 56 Taboo (Steiner) 85 talented tenth 228–229, 295 Tambiah, Stanley J. 158, 383, 385 Tamburlaine (Marlowe) 162 Tanner, Henry Ossawa 217 Taussig, Michael 52, 86, 153, 156, 166 Taylor, Robert 316

437

Index temporalities and time 148–153, 186, 189–194, 250, 322–323 African 249, 253–255 Braudel’s temporal rhythms 13, 249, 280–281 black 59, 270–275 Christian 148–150, 189, 190, 192 fetishized 123 “in-betweenness” 150, 186, 192, 274, 275, 282, 424 modern 149, 190 mythic 137 New World 52, 180 non-Western 151, 191, 192–194, 419 primordial 392 secular 148–149, 150, 189 “timeknot” 192–193 unhistorical 150, 192–193, 275 urban 190 Western 148–149, 150, 151, 208–209 terror 202, 208, 209, 230, 231, 241, 265, 266, 361, 400, 410 of history 51, 126, 178, 220–221, 282, 333–334, 409 of modernity 228, 375 Thao, Tran Duc 122, 124 theodicy 215, 231, 371–374 theology 2, 43, 62, 64, 78, 81, 82, 89, 91, 93, 94, 159, 255, 313, 321, 377, 421 American 45, 47, 213, 214 black 176, 199–200, 204, 213–216, 219, 222, 255 Christian 72, 78, 82, 199, 200, 214, 346 of history 48 Jewish 72 of liberation 214, 216 Reformed 207 “Theorizing Theodicy in the Study of Religion” (Scott, Mark) 371–374 Thomas, Clarence 272 Thurman, Howard 213–214 Tiele, Cornelis P. 57, 69, 77 Tillich, Paul 93, 130, 174, 222, 371, 380 time. See temporalities and time Time and the Other (Fabian) 186 Time on the Cross (Fogel and Engerman) 217, 262–266, 271–272 Tocqueville, Alexis de 16, 19, 57, 63, 65, 134, 142, 161, 315–316, 339, 373 Toltecs 384–385 Tönnies, Ferdinand 129–130, 140 totalization 63, 84, 122–124 Totem und Tabu (Freud) 80 totemism 76, 349 Totemism (Lévi-Strauss) 85 Toulmin, Stephen 55, 287 Toussaint-Louverture 28, 33, 36 “Toward a Synaesthetics of Soul: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Teleology of Race” (Andrews) 232 Townes, Emilie 261, 417 Toy, Crawford Howell 69, 70, 71 Toynbee, Arnold J. 333, 361, 407

438

Tracy, David 371 Traité d’histoire des religions/Patterns in Comparative Religion (Eliade) 20, 79, 80, 117–124, 304, 316, 349, 395 transculturation 5, 145–156, 256–257 bibliography 154–156 Treatise on the Creation of Man (Gregory of Nyssa) 403 Tristan and Isolde 396 Troeltsch, Ernst 63, 140, 361 Trompf, Garry W. 156, 189 Tshombe, Moise 242 Turner, Frederick Jackson 19, 172–173, 178, 180, 403–404 Turner, Victor 123, 138, 147, 155 Turner, William McNeal 213 “Twenty-Five Years of History of Religions” (Haydon) 75, 76 Tylor, Edward B. 41, 192, 330, 377, 395, 399 Tyndale, William 160 Types of Religious Experience (Wach) 80 Typological Imaginary, The (Biddick) 150 Ulysses’ Sail (Helms) 145–146, 155 Und Afrika Spracht/The Voice of Africa (Frobenius) 235 Understanding and Believing (Wach) 80 Union Theological Seminary 70, 176, 221 United Nations 225–226, 237 United States. See America, United States of universities. See colleges and universities; and individual institutions University College (London) 57, 70 University of Berlin 227, 234, 411 n.6 University of California (Santa Barbara) 317 University of Cambridge 97, 192, 325–326 University of Chicago 1–5, 61–64, 72, 75, 79, 89–93, 95–97, 101, 102, 183, 189, 213, 247, 257, 287, 293, 307, 310, 316, 403, 417. See also Chicago school University of Colorado (Boulder) 41 University of Denver 308 University of Leipzig 68, 70 University of Minnesota 103 University of North Carolina 103 University of Oxford 70, 96–97, 309, 418 University of Pennsylvania 68, 69, 70, 226 University of Wisconsin 67, 103 upadhi 377–379 urban genesis 125, 158, 323, 361–364, 392 urban societies 130–131, 133, 136, 189–190, 257, 338 “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (Wirth) 103 Ursprung der Gottesidee, Der (Schmidt) 80 Utopianism 46, 231 Vailala madness 152, 155, 164–165, 167, 188, 420 Vailala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf Division, The (Williams) 152, 155, 188 Valeri, Valerio 191

Index Valéry, Paul 414 van der Leeuw, Gerardus. See Leeuw, Gerardus van der van Gennep, Arnold. See Gennep, Arnold van Venture of Islam, The (Hodgson) 85 Verstehen, Das (Scheiermacher) 7 Verstehen, Das (Wach) 64, 80 Vespucci, Amerigo 14 Vico, Giambattista (Giovanni Battista) 49, 84, 129, 130, 139, 388 Vida es sueño, La/Life Is a Dream (Calderón de la Barca) 388 violence 16–18, 31, 162, 202, 209, 262, 266, 275 Virgil 21 Virgin Land (Smith, Henry Nash) 47 Visible and Invisible Realms (Wiener) 153, 156 “visions of the vanquished” 164–168, 365–368 Voice of Africa, The/Und Afrika Spracht (Frobenius) 235 Wach, Joachim vii–viii, 1, 7, 61–65, 72, 75, 77–83, 87 n.11, 91–96, 140, 157, 307, 309–316, 317, 331, 354, 356, 381 and hermeneutics vii, 7, 64, 78, 81, 82, 96 and religious experience 61–62, 64, 78, 87 n.11, 157, 312–314, 331, 354, 356 Wachtel, Nathan 366 “Wade in the Water” (spiritual) 233, 280 Walker, Alice 295 Walker, Sheila 86 Wallerstein, Immanuel 45, 159, 281 Wandlungen (Jung) 80 Washington, Booker T. 99–100, 205, 226, 229, 238, 242, 272 Washington, George 20, 216 Washington, James 215 Washington, Joseph 213, 214 water, religious significance of 35, 118, 121, 206, 233, 280–281 Water from the Rock (Frye) 263 Watts, Alan 317 W.E.B. Du Bois (Lewis, David Levering) 238 Webb, Stephen Saunders 19 Weber, Eugen 141, 300 Weber, Max 6, 65, 140, 188, 207, 371–373, 381 Weber, Samuel 398 Webster, Nesta Helen 76 Wedemeyer, Christian 92 Welbon, Guy 85 Wells, Ida B. 172, 217 Wesleyans 204

West African religion 5, 9–10, 247, 252, 266–267, 309, 338–339, 349–358 Wheatley, Paul 158, 362, 383, 385 Whitehead, Alfred North vii, 96–97, 105, 313, 345, 346 Whitman, Sarah Wyman (Mrs. Henry) 90 Wiener, Margaret J. 153, 156 Wigen, Karen 254 Wilberforce University 226, 234 Wilderness and the American Mind (Nash) 17 Wilkie, Wendell 322 Williams, Francis Edgar 152, 165, 188, 420 Williams, Roger 26 Wills, David 200 Wilmore, Gayraud 215, 216 Wirth, Louis 103 “Withdrawal of the High God in West African Religion, The” (O’Connell) 349–351 Wittfogel, Karl August 191 Wood, Irving J. 55, 56 Woodson, Carter G. 213 World and Africa, The (Du Bois) 234, 237 World Parliament of Religions 173, 180, 307, 403, 404 world religions 95, 173, 281, 309, 310, 333 World War I 69, 72, 226 World War II 7, 42, 72, 93, 133, 226, 237, 327, 366 world-dreams 390–393, 394–395, 399 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago) 19, 171–176, 403–404 worldview 59, 324, 325, 330, 372, 374 Wright, Richard 295–296 Wyatt, Thomas 160 Xhosa people 252 Yale University 69, 70, 71, 75, 90 Yoga (Eliade) 80, 316, 403 Yoruba people 237, 247, 299 Zacher, Christian 146–147, 155 Zamir, Shamoon 233 Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe 254–255 Zen 317 Zend-Avesta, The (trans. Darmesteter) 69 Zheng He (admiral) 249 Zimmer, Heinrich 387 Zionism 68, 69 Znaniecki, Florian 229 Zoroastrianism 69, 93, 205, 281 Zulu people 338–339 Zurcher, Erik 93 Zwernemann, Jürgen 351, 352, 353

439