The Secular Sacred: Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion [1st ed.] 9783030380496, 9783030380502

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PALGRAVE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP

The Secular Sacred Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion Edited by Markus Balkenhol Ernst van den Hemel · Irene Stengs

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

Series Editors Varun Uberoi Brunel University London London, UK Nasar Meer University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK Tariq Modood University of Bristol Bristol, UK

The politics of identity and citizenship has assumed increasing importance as our polities have become significantly more culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse. Different types of scholars, including philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and historians make contributions to this field and this series showcases a variety of innovative contributions to it. Focusing on a range of different countries, and utilizing the insights of different disciplines, the series helps to illuminate an increasingly controversial area of research and titles in it will be of interest to a number of audiences including scholars, students and other interested individuals. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14670

Markus Balkenhol Ernst van den Hemel  •  Irene Stengs Editors

The Secular Sacred Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion

Editors Markus Balkenhol Meertens Institute Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Ernst van den Hemel Meertens Institute Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Irene Stengs Meertens Institute Amsterdam, The Netherlands Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series ISBN 978-3-030-38049-6    ISBN 978-3-030-38050-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Chapter 1 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Irene Stengs This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: Emotional Entanglements of Sacrality and Secularity—Engaging the Paradox  1 Markus Balkenhol, Ernst van den Hemel, and Irene Stengs Part I Culture  19 2 The Boomerang-Effect of Culturalized Religion: The Impact of the Populist Radical Right on Confessional Politics in the Netherlands 21 Ernst van den Hemel 3 ‘We’ and ‘The Others’ as Constituents of Symbolic Politics: On the Populist Exploitation of Long-lasting Nationalist Sentiments and Resentments Regarding Citizenship in Germany 43 Irene Götz

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Part II Public Space  67 4 Religion, Aesthetics, and Hurt Sentiment: On the Visibility and Erasure of a Muslim Minority in India 69 Stefan Binder 5 Spatial Piety: Shia Religious Processions and the Politics of Contestation of Public Space in Northern Nigeria 89 Murtala Ibrahim 6 Samba Struggles: Carnaval Parades, Race and Religious Nationalism in Brazil107 Martijn Oosterbaan and Adriano Santos Godoy Part III Tolerance 127 7 Homo Sanctus: Religious Contestations and the Sanctification of Heritage and Human Rights in Vietnam129 Oscar Salemink 8 Secularist Nativism: National Identity and the Religious Other in the Netherlands155 Josip Kešić and Jan Willem Duyvendak 9 Dutch Tolerance in Black and White: From Religious Pragmatism to Racialized Ideology173 Alex van Stipriaan

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Part IV Images 193 10 Colonial Heritage and the Sacred: Contesting the Statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen in the Netherlands195 Markus Balkenhol 11 Rooted in the Sacred? On Mark Rothko, Tears Flowing, and Enargeia217 Herman Roodenburg Part V Bodies 235 12 Disgust and Difference: Conflicting Sensations of the Sacred237 Jojada Verrips 13 United in Competitive Mourning: Commemorative Spectacle in Tribute to King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand263 Irene Stengs Afterword285 Birgit Meyer Index291

List of Contributors

Markus Balkenhol  Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Stefan Binder  University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany Jan  Willem  Duyvendak  University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Adriano Santos Godoy  University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil Irene Götz  Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany Ernst van den Hemel  Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Murtala Ibrahim  Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany Josip Kešić  University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Birgit Meyer  Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Martijn Oosterbaan  Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Herman Roodenburg  Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Oscar Salemink  University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

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Irene Stengs  Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Alex  van Stipriaan Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Jojada Verrips  University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 10.1

Cover of the German weekly Der Spiegel, No. 2, 1999/1/11: Wer darf Deutscher werden? Operation Doppelpass (Who is allowed to become German? Operation dual passport) Campaign of a local conservative party with German-Turks refusing the Social Democrats’ offer of a dual citizenship, Rheinland-Pfalz, March 1999; source: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1999/03/05, p. 5 Article Einbürgerungshemmnis Frau. In: die tageszeitung (taz): 13./14.2.1999, VII, picture by Birgitta Kowsky/ Buenos Dias Campaign of the German government promoting the new German Nationality Law: Einbürgerung: Fair. Gerecht. Tolerant (Naturalization: fair, just, tolerant.) (2000), photograph I.G., placard on a house wall, Berlin Preparing for a spirit medium possession ‘performance’ at the conference in Nam Đi.nh 2016 Spirit procession during Nam Đi.nh conference 2016 Spirit medium during procession ritual, Nam Đi.nh 2016 Spirit medium in front of the altar with sacrificial effigies, Nam Đi.nh 2016 Petition of spirit mediums to Vietnamese authorities Announcement of the unveiling of the statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, 1893

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62 140 142 144 145 147 200 xi

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List of Figures

Fig. 10.2 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2

Fig. 11.3 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 12.3 Fig. 12.4 Fig. 12.5 Fig. 12.6 Fig. 12.7 Fig. 12.8 Fig. 12.9 Fig. 12.10 Fig. 12.11 Fig. 12.12 Fig. 12.13 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2 Fig. 13.3 Fig. 13.4 Fig. 13.5 Fig. 13.6 Fig. 13.7

Empty pedestal of the Coen statue, 2011. © Vereniging Oud Hoorn 204 Rothko Chapel, 1970–1971. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, photograph by G.E. Kidder Smith 218 Aelbert Bouts, The Man of Sorrows (oil on oak, 37.9 × 26.5 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, The Kate, Maurice R. and Melvin R. Seiden Special Purchase Fund in honor of Seymour and Zoya Slive 225 Rembrandt van Rijn, Saint Bartholomew, 1657 (oil on canvas, 122.7 × 99.7 cm, detail). Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art 230 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 3 July 2016 238 Dominicusstr., Berlin, 3 July 2016 239 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 21 July 2016 240 Dominicusstr., Berlin, 21 July 2016 241 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 23 July 2016 242 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 29 July 2016 243 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 29 July 2016 244 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 29 July 2016 245 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 30 July 2016 246 Dominicusstr., Berlin, 30 July 2016 247 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 14 December 2016248 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 26 November 2017248 Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, December 2018249 Identification and dress code check point at the entrance of Sanam Luang, Bangkok July 2017 265 Billboard commemorating King Bhumibol, Bangkok 2018 266 Food counter with mourning stickers, Bangkok July 2017 266 Street art ‘we were born in the reign of King Rama 9’, Bangkok July 2017 272 Building-to-let-advertisement-cum-mourning board, Chiang May July 2017 273 Queuing mourners in the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Bangkok 7 July 2017 277 Screen shot of a figure 9 rituals compilation 280

1 Introduction: Emotional Entanglements of Sacrality and Secularity—Engaging the Paradox Markus Balkenhol, Ernst van den Hemel, and Irene Stengs

How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled? In exploring this theme, this book focuses on such diverse topics as the dynamic roles of Carnaval in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. What binds the chapters in this volume is the focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are

M. Balkenhol • E. van den Hemel Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] I. Stengs (*) Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_1

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wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. At this moment in time, it has become somewhat of a stale repetition to criticize the secular-religious divide. We are very much part and parcel of a world in which these boundaries overlap, are claimed, contested, reclaimed and re-contested in new and dynamic ways. If the debate on the postsecular has taught us anything, it is that the tools with which we work are implicated in these contestations. The notions ‘secular’, ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ are as much part of our conceptual toolbox as objects of investigation. In order to illustrate how we are always in the middle of things, and in order to see how we should, if we are to understand the entanglements of sacrality, religion and secularity, think our way up from praxis, we opt for a start in medias res. We therefore open this introduction in Bangkok, Thailand, 26 October 2017 to be precise, when the mourning rituals for the recently deceased king are about to reach their apex.

The Thai King as Secular and Sacred Again, thousands and thousands of people have come to the sacred heart of the ‘City of Angels’ (khrungthep) to get as close as possible to the place where King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand (r. 1946–2016) will be cremated. One day earlier, at 5 AM, the gate had opened briefly to allow several thousand people in, most of whom had been waiting for three days and nights, enduring burning sun and heavy rains, in the hope of being among the happy few to enter. The early morning television news interviews one of them, a young woman in tears, overwhelmed by exhaustion and gratefulness: she will show her love, respect and gratitude to ‘father’ in the closest proximity possible for an ordinary person. This Thursday, the day of the actual cremation, people have been queuing since the early morning at various replicas of the Royal Crematorium Stadium, to offer sandalwood funeral flowers in commemoration of the king. It would take people up to eight hours to reach the spaces in front of the cremation replicas to offer their flowers. At the Royal Plaza, the square with the most important replica in terms of size and centrality, the crowd has grown to such a size that even the streets leading to the actual beginning of the queue are completely congested. What makes people want to endure such hardships?

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One possible answer lies in the specific figure and reign of the king himself. The death of King Bhumibol on 13 October 2016 left many in the kingdom in grief and confusion. With his seventy years’ reign, only a few of his subjects had lived without him on the throne. In the general perception, the king, working hard and suffering difficult circumstances, had lived a life of self-sacrifice for the wellbeing of the nation and the people. In tribute, people would be very much willing to endure their one-day-only hardship. Another possible answer lies in a specific entanglement of religion and politics. The emotional mass pilgrimage to the mourning site and the eventual cremation for one part attests to the sacred status of the Thai king. This sacredness draws on Hindu-Buddhist notions of the ‘righteous ruler’ whose charismatic royal merit and virtue (bun barami) are supposed to protect and sustain the nation and its people. In this perception, the monarch is regarded as a beneficial power above politics. In the course of his long reign, King Bhumibol gained currency as ‘pillar of stability’ in a country where politics are characterized by a seemingly endless sequence of coups d’états, new constitutions and corruption scandals. The sacrality of the king seems obvious in this context, yet it would be wrong to suggest that people’s devotion to the king is owed exclusively to the religiosity of the Thai people, to a kind of inherent magical thinking. It is not uncommon for Western media outlets to present Thai royal rituals as somewhat outlandish expressions of extreme religiosity. As orientalist perceptions of Asian religiosity tend to do, such exoticism blinds our understanding of specific intricacies of religious–political entanglements. For instance, when highlighting the religious dimension, one obscures the fact that the Thai king is not only a religious figure, but also someone of political presence in a secular state, if only as the single most important national symbol. Within the legal framework of the Thai state, a nominally democratic regime of popular sovereignty upholding a religiously pluriform society, the king—the head of state—has no formal political authority, and his tasks are limited to specific ceremonial executive duties. The Thai state— whether governed by an elected government or by a military junta—follows a secular model. Yet, whatever the regime, the king is brought forward as the symbol of sovereignty of a democracy. Hence, devotion to the king implies devotion to the (secular) nation. This raises the issue

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how this formally secular nation relates to the equally uncontested sacredness of the king.1 In order to understand the political and religious implications of a shared mourning ritual such as that for the recently deceased Thai king, we would need to unpack carefully the ways in which religion, secularity, power and popular emotion are conjointly invested. Such questions how secular and sacred authority is enmeshed make up the central theme of this book. How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiments become entangled? The Thai example resonates in many ways with other spectacles of religious-­ secular belonging. Across the world religion and nationalism are re-­ articulated in new modes  that often challenge existing paradigms and approaches. From the Brazilian carnaval, with its roots in religious festivities, its development into secular celebration, which in turn is embraced by national politicians as hallmark of Brazilian national identity (see Oosterbaan and Godoy in this volume), to the ways in which religious diversity in Nigeria is performed and challenged by spatial practices such as the Ashura ritual procession, performed by Shia Muslims (see Ibrahim), from public transgressions and expressions of disgust through graffiti in the streets of Berlin (see Verrips), to the magical power of colonial statues in the Dutch national imagination (see Balkenhol), the role of religion and secularity, sacrality and profanation in demarcating communities increasingly demands our attention. Over the past decades, we have witnessed a spectacular rise of often polarizing sentiments concerning religion and national identification across Europe and the globe. In Europe, feelings of home, emotional appeals to community and even the ‘people’ (Volk) are entwined with and fueled by the increasing presence of religion in European public spheres, long considered to have been thoroughly secularized. For instance, new nationalists and the continent’s political and cultural elites frame the presence of Islam as a threat to the ‘secular’ character of the nation. At the same time, religious, for example, ‘Judeo-­ Christian’ roots of secular nations are increasingly mobilized (Hemel 2014). In short, contrary to the commonly held view that nationalism offers an alternative imagined community for the religious community  The political relevance of this question is demonstrated by a ruling of the constitutional court in August 2019, that the Thai king is above the constitution. 1

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(Cavanaugh 2011), this book is inspired both by recent developments in which religion, secularity and nationalism are interconnected in new ways, as well as by recent scholarly approaches that are sensitive to the interconnections of nationalism and religion. Generally, scholars have traditionally identified nationalism as religion, nationalism or religion, and nationalism and religion (Anderson 1983; Safran 2002). Instead of focusing on the creation of meta-categories, we argue that religion and secular nationalism can both partake in processes of sacralization and de-­ sacralization. This book focuses, not on the separation of categories, but on the interconnections and the new forms of sacrality that arise as a result of new connections (Meyer and de Witte 2013). As the mourning rituals for the Thai king demonstrate, the emotions involved are connected simultaneously with the secular Thai state, with the king as its religious figurehead, and with the modes of belonging that are produced by its interconnections (see Stengs, this volume). Secular nationalism and religious dimensions are connected in many ways and we need to unpack the many folds carefully and according to the context in which they arise. A focus on emotions, we propose, allows us to bring together practices, both religious and secular, that are often studied in isolation. We propose to approach the way in which emotions are implicated, performed and become legible by using a concept we call ‘the secular sacred’.

The Secular Sacred: A Praxeological Approach The Thai king, ‘Upholder of the Buddhist Religion, and Defender of the Faith’ and head of a religiously diverse secular state, but also the sanctification of tolerance as a ‘Judeo-Christian value’, and the human right of religious freedom, used as a global value to define and defend religious practices (see Salemink in this volume) are all examples of what we call a ‘secular sacred’: a person, object, image, representation or place in which secular and sacred ideas, feelings, emotions, motivations, experiences, perceptions, intertwine, conflate and conflict. We take the secular sacred to denote the intertwining processes of secularization and sacralization. This entanglement works both ways: sacred objects can take on new functions in secular imaginations, gazes and practices, thereby potentially

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losing or at least transforming their sacredness in the process. Inversely, secular practices and values can take on well-nigh sacred dimensions as they become the subject of worship or interdiction. All of these entanglements are objects of study in what we call the secular sacred. We deliberately use the articulation of ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ to distinguish the ‘secular’ from the ‘profane’. Whereas the profane, in the words of Roger Caillois (1959), the sphere of common usage, is opposed to the sacred (an ambiguous domain of fear and hope and characterized by danger), the secular is not. Following scholars like Talal Asad, we argue that the secular contains or even emerges through processes of sacralization. In Asad’s words, the secular: (…) is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred). (2003: 25)

Instead of the opposite of religion, Asad understands the secular to be an ordering principle that brings together certain ‘behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life’ (ibid: 24). Saba Mahmood goes a step further by pointing out that the notion of ‘the secular’ is far from a neutral separation of religion and state, but should be seen as an extension of an ideological view, secularism, in which a normative bias toward Christianity is palpable: As much of recent scholarship suggests, contrary to the ideological self-­ understanding of secularism (as the doctrinal separation of religion and state), secularism has historically entailed the regulation and reformation of religious beliefs, doctrines, and practices to yield a particular normative conception of religion (that is largely Protestant Christian in its contours). (2009: 87)

In Mahmood’s understanding, to portray secularism as opposed to religion is itself an operation of secularist ideology, in which the secular conceals its quintessentially Protestant foundations. These considerations are of importance to this book not because we want to repeat a critique

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of secularity. We want to take our cue from the insight that such critical investigations of secularity mean we have to start in medias res. This book understands these critiques of secularity as an impetus to work bottom up, all the time taking our own conceptual background and trajectories into consideration. Transcending the idea that ‘the secular’ and ‘the sacred’ are separate categories, we seek to find new and better ways to understand the current emotionally charged articulations of nationalism and religion that have come to define the beginning of the twenty-first century in many places across the globe. We propose to use the notion of the ‘secular sacred’ in order to analyze this worldwide phenomenon. The key innovation of this book is that it investigates this conjuncture by bringing together three focal points: emotions, nationalism and religion. We argue that this combination provides an important update to an understanding of the politics of binding, belonging and exclusion across the globe. The concept of the secular sacred allows us to focus on the processes of cultural production through which notions of the secular and the sacred emerge in specific ethnographic settings. Not seeking to define the secular or the religious, the book focuses on the boundary work through which both categories are being defined, contested and re-made in social and political practice. The ‘secular sacred’, then, in this book is crafted to approach new modalities of sacrality as well as the impact of secular paradigms on more classically religious registers of sacrality. The ‘secular sacred’ indicates a starting point in the middle of this entanglement in order to understand how public spaces, images and bodies are constituted and contested in new ways. Far from being an emphasis on the rational choices individuals might make, we focus on how the secular sacred unconsciously guides emotions and delineations of belonging. For instance, echoing Sara Ahmed’s work on emotions, we might not know how we feel nor why we feel the way we do. The person standing before a painting by Mark Rothko who feels the tears well up might not be conscious of the tradition of sacred tears and art, nor might it be a conscious continuation of a tradition, yet as Roodenburg outlines in his description of this phenomenon, the words used to describe these experiences, the way in which Rothko describes his

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artworks all directly draw from or resonate with explicit registers of sacrality. These shifting, coalescing, overlapping and contradicting qualities associated with secularism and religion call for a praxeological approach, paying particular attention to the involvement of the body, the emotions and the senses or, more specifically, to ‘embodied practices’, ‘sensational forms’ and sense perception (aisthesis) (Meyer 2006; Scheer 2012; Verrips 2005). Such an approach sheds light not only on how the secular and the sacred are mediated, but also on how they deeply take root in people becoming all the more persuasive. The secular sacred emphatically includes the study of objects, materials and images that would be excluded in a ‘mentalistic’ (Meyer 2012: 8) framework. The secular sacred is not inward and personal, but takes place precisely at the intersection of the public and the private, evoking and mediating emotions, mobilizing old and creating new publics. Taking the established notions of habitus, the body, senses, and emotions as a point of departure (Bourdieu 1977; Connerton 1989), then, may provide us with a more detailed understanding of how practices may both reproduce and (temporarily) subvert structures of power. Thus, our notion of the secular sacred implies a critical engagement with seemingly self-evident distinctions between religion and the secular inherent in Western modernity. In other words, the emergence of categories like ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ have to be understood in the context of European colonial expansion, and the confrontation with difference it entailed (Veer 1994).

Sections of this Book This book is structured around several ‘secular sacreds’ that unfold in various contexts worldwide. In particular, we present the following nodal points: culture, tolerance, public space, images and the body. Guiding principle in these sections is that the chapters take a bottom-up perspective by presenting ethnographic studies in which the nation, secular and religious dimensions entangle. Unpacking these entanglements provides us with an opportunity to revisit familiar approaches and hence formulate an updated understanding of our emotionally volatile times.

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Culture Culture has, in recent decades, become a sacrosanct concept in many places around the world. Whereas in mainstream secularization theory the spheres of the religious and the secular drift apart, we witness, in Europe and elsewhere, both academic and politically influential approaches that emphasize interconnections, fusions and more complex relations to cultural identity. Take for instance Samuel Huntington’s famous idea of a clash of civilizations, in which the fault lines of the next major conflicts were announced to be cultural (Huntington 1993). In his framework, cultural identity is defined as the most broad, far-reaching, basic identification humans are capable of. For Huntington, secularity is part and parcel of a Western, cultural framework in which religion plays a significant role. Note also how religion and secularity are part of this cultural clash: We are facing a need and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival [Islamic civilization] against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. (Bernard Lewis, as quoted in Huntington 1993: 32)

For Huntington, secularity is part and parcel of a Western, cultural framework in which religious heritage plays a significant role. In this sense, cultural identity is frequently opposed to and triggered by critical reflections on globalization. In the twenty-first century, religion and secularity are taken up in processes of culturalization and polarization in new and often profoundly disruptive ways. This is further complicated by the fact that culture is formulated in increasingly nativist terms (Duyvendak 2011; Balkenhol et  al. 2016). As Etienne Balibar argues, cultural identity can play the role nature once played, raising the question in what ways culture can function in structurally similar ways to race. Frequently what is at stake in invocations of culture is what Appadurai has called a ‘community of sentiment’ (Appadurai 1990: 93): ‘a group that begins to imagine and feel things together’. This can take the shape

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of rather vague or even deliberately empty signifiers that invite people to attach their feelings of discomfort. The chapters in this section deploy ethnographic analysis to map how invocations of cultural communities of sentiments take place. In his contribution, Ernst van den Hemel looks at the implications of current populist discourse on ‘religion’, which sets up new conflations of and juxtapositions between the secular and the religious. His analysis of a local debate by a Dutch orthodox Protestant political party shows that populist discursive practice can productively be characterized as a profoundly influential postsecular imagination. Irene Götz presents a case study on the repetitive debates on ‘dual citizenship’ in Germany, that has to be contextualized by a historic sketch on the ‘anthropologization’ of the ‘national’, which developed into a powerful emotional movement during the nineteenth century and started to attract the masses via cultural images and bodily practices.

Public Space The public sphere has long been a constitutive element of ‘the secular’. Presumed to be neutral, and its neutrality safeguarded by a secular state, the public sphere is, both in common parlance as well as in theory, an important site where citizens of the secular state can meet on equal footing regardless of religious outlook. Religion, concomitantly, is relegated to the private sphere (e.g. the conjugal home) where it can be practiced without interference. Such a clear distinction has become, as we have argued above, untenable considering the continued presence and newly emerging forms of public religion (Vries and Sullivan 2006), the increasingly apparent entanglements of the public sphere with religion in general and Protestantism in particular (Asad 2003; Mahmood 2009), as well as nascent questions concerning location of religion in connection to new media and globalizing currents (Knott 2005; Meyer and Moors 2006). These developments have led scholars to be wary of clear-cut distinctions between private and public spheres, and the presence or absence of religion. The spatial turn, marking a move away from place as neutral metric and toward space as constitutive, dynamic and complex, has inspired scholars of religion to ask not just what takes place in public

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places but also how space constitutes publics and vice versa how public performances constitutes public space. In a 2013 volume, for instance, Knott et al. highlight how media portrayals of religion and new media activities re-shape the role of religious and secular beliefs and values in public life. Moving beyond these critical reflections, we focus on material and spatial contestations in particular, taking place in public space. This focus on public space allows us to unpack the way in which divisions between public and private registers are far from stable but hinge upon perpetual performances and forms of public circulation. Moreover, notions of who belongs to the public sphere and the complex role of religious items, rituals and people therein, are themselves to an important degree, constituted by performances taking place in public space. From Hindu-nationalist public proclamations that public space should be dominated by a homogeneous shared culture, to the performance of public mourning as we have seen in Thailand, public space is the site of clashes and contestations in which emotions related to nationalism, religion and secularity run high. Ethnographic description and analysis of contestations in public space are ways of entry into understanding the complex forces that make up who will be seen, heard, felt and smelled and will take up a certain place in a community. Stefan Binder, in his contribution, highlights how organized atheism presents a particular challenge to the way in which religious nationalism increasingly aligns itself with Hinduism in India. Murtala Ibrahim presents an analysis of a variety of ‘pious spectacles’ in Northern Nigeria in which particularly the rituals of Shia Muslims highlight questions of visibility, contestations and presence of religious pluriformity. In their chapter, Martijn Oosterbaan and Adriano Godoy present an analysis of Brazilian carnaval, where the festive body is framed by overlapping layers of religion, popular culture and national identity.

Tolerance Originally a concept that arose in Western Europe to manage conflicts between Protestants, tolerance developed for many into a hallmark of Western modernity. Continuously, the notion served to regulate differences, but also to demarcate communities along moral lines. Tolerance

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has proven a tricky and at times paradoxical notion, however. Karl Popper has described the ‘paradox of tolerance’ as follows: ‘Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant’ (Popper 1945: 226). But how are the borders between tolerance and intolerance defined and policed? In recent decades, the nature and boundaries of tolerance have become a hotbed of debate, division and conflict. According to Wendy Brown, there has been something of a global renaissance in discourse on tolerance. Tolerance is now enumerated and promoted at the United Nations, in the context of human rights campaigns, as a tool of managing diverse societies, as a key to pacifying racially divided neighborhoods, or in the context of LGBTQ+ rights. Tolerance has become transpolitical as it is being mobilized by progressives, liberals, conservatives, fundamentalist Christians and atheists alike: tolerance knows no political party: it is what liberals and leftists reproach a religious, xenophobic, and homophobic right for lacking, but also what evangelical Christians claim that secular liberals refuse them and what conservative foreign policy ideologues claim America cherishes and ‘radical Islamicists’ abhor. (Brown 2009: 3)

What originated as a theological and philosophical debate about freedom and the state has in recent years turned into a sacrosanct essence through which various actors define themselves. The three articles in this section each take up this changing character of the notion of tolerance. Oscar Salemink describes how tolerance is central to human rights discourse, and the implications of the global use of tolerance. In particular, he explores how religious toleration in Vietnam is used by a variety of actors to claim (inter)national recognition. The case of spirit possessions in Vietnam provides a particularly poignant example of the disciplinary implications of global tolerance. Josip Kešić and Jan Willem Duyvendak argue that tolerance is mobilized from a quasi-­ historical perspective in which it incorrectly appears as a continuous history since the time of Spinoza. This selective history of the concept implies the ‘forgetting’ of many other periods in which the Dutch were

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conservative and intolerant. Alex van Stipriaan asks how this famed Dutch tolerance functions within a history of extreme asymmetrical relations between white and black in Dutch history from slavery up till today. Is tolerance a white privilege? If so, is there also black tolerance? And what does tolerance mean in the (coming?) age of reparations and reconciliation?

Images Images are often found at the heart of controversies around where to draw the line between the secular and the religious: at what point does an image lose or gain its sacredness, where does freedom of expression end, and blasphemy begin (Kruse et  al. 2018)? Cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed or the protests by Pussy Riot and Femen have become scandalous precisely because they test and redefine the limits of tolerance, free speech and transgression. In short, the boundaries of the secular and the sacred are not given, but emerge through an engagement with images. People not only embrace or reject certain images, but they show strong bodily and affective responses. Cases of blasphemy, for instance, can cause literal disgust or nausea, but images, both religious and profane, can also be held dear and caressed. All of these processes deeply involve the body, the senses and emotions. In the words of Hans Belting the significance of images ‘becomes accessible only when we take into account other, non-iconic determinants such as, in a most general sense, medium and body’ (Belting 2005: 302). The body may be both performing and perceiving, but Belting regards bodies as central to an understanding of the significance of images. This resonates with the idea of religion as an outward form that exerts influence beyond religious contexts as such, but intersects with politics and society at large. The contributions in this section engage with black Atlantic and Dutch settings. Markus Balkenhol looks at the international controversies about colonial statues through the lens of the Dutch case of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, widely seen as a maritime hero of the Dutch Golden Age, but also infamous for his brutal reign in the Dutch East Indian colonies. Balkenhol looks at how the magical power of statues is harnessed, disavowed and

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contested. At stake here is the modern subject whose supposed secularism is constantly undermined by magic. Herman Roodenburg analyzes the way in which the abstract art of Mark Rothko is the subject of processes of secular sacralization. Analyzing the tears viewers shed in front of his monochrome artworks, Roodenburg outlines the way in which registers of the sacred and profound bodily reactions to sacred images such as tears cross over into the domain of modern art.

Bodies In societies where issues of secular and sacred values are at stake, the body invariably becomes the object of fierce debate. Debates on the status of the body are a hallmark of secularizing society where secular autonomy has frequently clashed with more explicitly confessional oriented conceptualizations of the body. However, more important than re-hashing the struggle between liberal autonomy and confessional dependence, this book aims to highlight what binds approaches to the body. The sovereignty of the body as the ultimate locus of self-understanding, indisputable site of existential experience and embodied knowledge has attained a sacred value in many societies (Csordas 1994). This leads to all sorts of new clashes. For instance, the universal rights of personal freedom and integrity of the body often clash with the sovereign secular power of the nation-state, which aims to discipline human bodies by exercising rules and regulations, politics that often include violence. The body is thus also a visual marker of autochthony and belonging (Geschiere 2009). The immanent transcendental potential in bodies is often most palpable during emotional events that celebrate the nation-state or other communities, such as commemorative ceremonies, sport celebrations, election victories, entailing processes of sacralization in which bodies play a pivotal role (see Emile Durkheim’s (1915) and Victor Turner’s (2018) respective notions of effervescence and communitas). In our view, this shows that such communities are not simply ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1983), but that they take shape through emotional and visceral engagements (Meyer 2009).

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The essays in this section reflect these tensions: through his discussion of disgust as a deeply physical sentiment that is in close proximity to the sacred, Jojada Verrips analyzes how linguistic violence is part and parcel of both the religious as well as the secular sacred. Verrips focuses on vulgar graffiti on glass containers in Berlin, where a scatological debate on immigrants is waged. Verrips takes up this mundane occurrence in order to analyze how disgust informs both contemporary polarization as well as the reactions to contemporary political linguistic violence. Irene Stengs presents an ethnographic analysis of the vast movements and choreographic ritual arrangements of Thai mourning King Bhumibol in black-­ and-­white colored bodies. She demonstrates how the massive emotional ritual outpour for one part was grounded in a fierce and coercive royalist-­ nationalism, and for another part has been organized by and disseminated along the administrative state structure. The Thai secular administration, in other words, is pivotal in (re)producing the sacrality of the monarchy. The essays thus contribute to both a practical understanding of these individual contexts, as well as to an overarching conceptual debate. Taking our cue from Birgit Meyer, these contributions focus on ‘the network of relations that make the sacred a social reality (…) what bodies and things do, on the practices that put them to work, on the epistemological and aesthetic paradigms that organize the bodily experience of things (…)’ (Meyer et  al. 2010: 209). Paying attention to concrete embodied practices, as well as the lives of images and the performance in public space, enables us to understand in better detail how specific relations of power inform and transform people’s lives.

References Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso. Appadurai, A. (1990). Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India. In C.  Lutz & L.  Abu-Lughod (Eds.), Language and the Politics of Emotion (pp. 92–112). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Balkenhol, M., Mepschen, P., & Duyvendak, J. W. (2016). The Nativist Triangle. Race, Sexuality and Religion in the Netherlands. In J.  W. Duyvendak, P.  Geschiere, & E.  Tonkens (Eds.), The Culturalization of Citizenship. Belonging and Polarization in a Globalizing World (pp. 97–112). New York [etc]: Palgrave Macmillan. Belting, H. (2005). Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology. Critical Inquiry, 31(2), 302–319. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, W. (2009). Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Caillois, R. (1959). Man and the Sacred. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Cavanaugh, W. T. (2011). Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Connerton, P. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csordas, T.  J. (1994). Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (Vol. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Durkheim, É. (1915). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: George Allen and Unwin. Duyvendak, J.  W. (2011). The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Geschiere, P. (2009). The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. London and Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hemel, van den E. (2014). (Pro)claiming Tradition: The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Roots of Dutch Society and the Rise of Conservative Nationalism. In R. Braidotti, T. de Graauw, B. Blaagaard, & E. Midden (Eds.), Transformations of Religion and the Publics Sphere. Postsecular Publics (pp.  14–33). New  York [etc.]: Palgrave Macmillan. Huntington, S. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations. Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22–49. Knott, K. (2005). The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing.

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Knott, K., Poole, E., & Taira, T. (Eds.). (2013). Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred. Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate. Kruse, C., Meyer, B., & Korte, A. (Eds.). (2018). Taking Offense: Religion, Art, and Visual Culture in Plural Configurations. Leiden: Brill. Mahmood, S. (2009). Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide? In T. Asad, W. Brown, J. Butler, & S. Mahmood (Eds.), Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (pp. 58–94). Berkeley, CA: The Townsend Center for the Humanities. Meyer, B. (2006). Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit. Meyer, B. (2009). Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses. New York [etc.]: Palgrave Macmillan. Meyer, B. (2012). Mediation and the Genesis of Presence: Towards a Material Approach to Religion. Utrecht: Utrecht University. Meyer, B., & de Witte, M. (2013). Heritage and the Sacred: Introduction. Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 9(3), 274–280. Meyer, B., & Moors, A. (2006). Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Meyer, B., Morgan, D., Paine, C., & Brent Plate, S. (2010). The Origin and Mission of Material Religion. Religion, 40(3), 207–211. Popper, K. (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies (The Spell of Plato) (Vol. 1). London and New York: Routledge. Safran, W. (Ed.). (2002). The Secular and the Sacred: Nation, Religion and Politics. London: Routledge. Scheer, M. (2012). Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion. History and Theory, 51(2), 193–220. Turner, V. (2018). Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press. Veer, van der P. (1994). Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Verrips, J. (2005). Sensing  – Aisthesis & An-Aesthesia. Ethnologia Europaea: Revue Internationale d’ethnologie Européenne, 35(1/2), 29–36. Vries, de H., & Sullivan, L. E. (2006). Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Part I Culture

2 The Boomerang-Effect of Culturalized Religion: The Impact of the Populist Radical Right on Confessional Politics in the Netherlands Ernst van den Hemel

 etting the Scene: ‘Is Islam a Threat S to the Netherlands?’ The debate created quite a stir from the moment it was announced in spring 2017. The poster depicting a bomb about to explode, in combination with the main topic of the debate—‘is Islam a threat to the Netherlands?’—was associated with islamophobia as usually practiced by the populist radical right (provocative cartoons of the prophet Mohamed wearing a bomb as a turban or the well-known image of the suicide bomber). However, in this case it was not the populist radical right, but a confessional political party, the Reformed Party (the Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij [SGP]) who organized the debate. Was the Reformed Party now copying far-right populist discourse? The reactions suggest the organizers were at the least uncomfortable with the E. van den Hemel (*) Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_2

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public associations the poster created. Faced with nation-wide backlash, the organizers withdrew and re-designed the poster, replacing the bomb with a mosque. But questions remained: was it simply naïveté on the part of the organizers? Was it indicative of a shift to the right? Or, rather, is this apparent flirt by confessional political actors with populist imagery part of a more complex shift in the Dutch political landscape? By zooming in on this debate, I investigate the question of how religious players situate themselves in a political landscape that increasingly draws on ‘religion’ as a marker of identity.1 In this debate, a number of important issues come to the fore. As I will show, the discourse of the participants in this debate illustrates how significant yet unclear the impact of the populist radical right2 is in the Dutch political landscape. In particular, it shows that orthodox confessional politics, long an outsider in the Dutch political landscape, is in the process of resituating itself. As I will show, the rise of the populist radical right on the one hand offers a register that allows confessional politics to resituate itself in postsecular Dutch society, but this also brings along unforeseen consequences. In times in which religion is used to indicate a contrast between ‘Islam’ and ‘the Judeo-Christian West’, the question arises who belongs to Dutch Judeo-Christian culture? What is the place of orthodox Christianity in the clash of civilizations? In order to answer these questions, I propose to close-read the way in which participants of this debate fuse orthodox Protestant registers with discourse hailing from the populist radical right and how this constitutes a continuation or rupture with the register of Protestant orthodoxy. I will first set the scene by situating the Reformed Party in the Dutch political landscape. I will subsequently discuss how the rise of the populist radical right has impacted the status of religion in Dutch political discourse. I will then return to the debate and the discourse of its participants to show how the political relevance of religion has been given a new yet confusingly diverse lease on life in the twenty-first century. I conclude by reflecting on implications for the future of the Dutch political landscape.  I base myself here and in what follows on fieldwork at the event, conducted together with my colleague Pooyan Tamimi Arab. The responsibility for text, translation, and interpretation is mine. 2  In this article, I use Cas Mudde’s definition of right-wing political parties as characterized by ‘a core ideology that is a combination of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism’ (Mudde 2007: 26). 1

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 onfessional Politics: The SGP on the Outside C and Inside The Reformed Political Party was founded in 1918 as a result of discontent among orthodox Protestants in the Netherlands with two other Protestant political parties.3 The founders of the SGP accused the more mainstream confessional parties of having become too weak in translating religious conviction in political principles. In a time when suffragettes, electoral innovation and rising communism was seen as threatening the true Christian way of life, the SGP argued, a truly Christian political party needs to take a firm stand for true principles of faith. The resulting party, the SGP, developed into a firebrand theocratic party with unapologetic activism in favour of theocracy. Up until today, the party includes a paraphrase from the 1561 Belgic Confession (Nederlandse Geloofsbelijdenis) in its declaration of principles: ‘the government should ban atheist propaganda, false religions and anti-Christian ideologies from public life’.4 The exact portent of this phrase, known as ‘the 21 words’, is complex and changes over time. For instance, it was initially mainly oriented towards the persecution of Catholics, and was later used to counter atheism, and, presently, as we will see, Islam, but by and large it indicates that the role of the government is not to be a neutral arbiter of a religiously pluriform nation, but rather to be the protector of Christianity (Zwaag 2018). In short, the SGP was a firmly anti-secular party in origin. As the Netherlands transformed from one of the most religious countries in Europe to one of the most secularized ones, the party vehemently opposed the legalization of abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage. In particular, the SGP has had a long track record of protesting equality between men and women. Already in the first party programme of 1918, they had explicitly rejected voting rights for women, and when the right to vote was passed in 1922, in spite of fiery parliamentary objections by  I base myself here on the historical overview of the SGP published to commemorate its centenary (Vollaard and Voerman 2018). 4  For the most recent statement of principles of the SGP and all past editions, see the repository created by the University of Groningen: http://pubnpp.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/?Search=&SortBy=date_ issued&SearchIns[]=&Title=SGP%20beginselprogramma%27s&pQuery=Metadata_Party_program.party%20like%20%27SGP%25%27 3

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SGP parliamentarians, the party called upon its female constituents not to use their right to vote. This standpoint remained in effect until 1989. In 1993, the party explicitly affirmed that women were not allowed to become members of the SGP. After a long juridical trajectory, the party was forced in 2010 to allow women to be electable for the SGP.5 Although these positions place the party on the margins of the Dutch political landscape, the electoral appeal of the SGP has remained stable though limited. Its electoral appeal has been almost exclusively based on the religious communities it draws its inspiration from (orthodox reformed Dutch Protestantism). It remains stable because the SGP has a loyal electorate and, all reports of secularization notwithstanding, the religious population it draws its voters from remains stable due to relatively high procreation rates and diminished impact of dwindling church numbers. In order to further understand the position of the SGP, we need to highlight not just how the SGP is situated in the Dutch political landscape but also in the geographical landscape. The main constituencies of the SGP are located in the so-called Bible Belt.6 Running from the north of the Netherlands down to the South West, the Bible Belt encircles the most densely populated urban areas known as the Randstad. The Bible Belt is a region where church attendance, in particular that of the Orthodox Protestant Churches, remains high, and where the influence of religion on public and political life is strong. As a result, the SGP can count on solid electoral representation. This leads to the fact that although the party has a limited presence in parliament in terms of parliamentary seats, regionally they are a major player as they are included in many executive boards of municipalities and they provide numerous aldermen and mayors in the Bible Belt. In the Bible Belt, secularization plays out differently than in the cities, and hardliner confessional politics plays a bigger role in that region compared to the major cities. The Bible Belt thus also is a place that challenges all too easy understandings of the  Henk Post ‘Een gespannen relatie. De SGP en de vrouw’, 2019.  Fred van Lieburg has provided an important impetus in modernizing the study of the Bible Belt in the Netherlands (Lieburg 2010). Furthermore, see Hemel (2014) for an overview of how the Bible Belt does not sit comfortably in larger histories of Dutch society as the vanguard of secularization. 5 6

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Netherlands as one of the most secularized countries on earth. The image of Dutch secularity (both abroad and among the Dutch themselves) is often predicated upon a foregrounding of the urban regions of the Netherlands. This short expose serves as a backdrop that allows us to understand the shifts in understanding that occur when the political landscape changes. It allows us to understand how the rise of the populist radical right provokes a reconsideration of the way in which the SGP is framed. The SGP, which has historically been a self-conscious radical voice of orthodoxy from the margin which prides itself for countering the secular spirit of the times with theocratic hardlinership, is now confronted with a changed religious-political landscape in which religion is present in new ways. This challenges parties like the SGP to reformulate their own positions. In particular, I want to highlight how the tendency of the populist radical right to speak in terms of a dominant religious national culture (which needs to be protected from Islam and multiculturalists) resonates as well as clashes with the way in which SGP constituents conceive of the public role of religion. In order to explain this, I need to first outline how the rise of the populist radical right stimulated not just ardent islamophobia, but also a reappraisal of (Judeo-)Christianity.

 he Rise of the Populist Radical Right T and Religion: Dutch Culture Is Christian! As is becoming increasingly clear, the rise of the populist radical right changed the political agenda not only by including immigration and a criticism of Islam, but also by its willingness to revisit and reframe the role of religion and secularity in Western societies. In particular, the tendency to reposition Christianity as Leitkultur of Western nation states has led the populist radical right to a willingness to favour Christianity, defined in religious-cultural terms, over other religions, most notably, of course, Islam.7  Hemel (2017a).

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The perhaps most well-known example of this mode of thinking can be found in Samuel Huntington’s ‘A Clash of Civilizations?’ In this seminal text, the incommensurability of civilizations is proclaimed. These civilizations, that are unavoidably headed for conflict according to Huntington, are to an important degree characterized by religion. Take for instance the following quotation, in which Huntington cites Bernard Lewis and which was the inspiration for the title of this famous article. Huntington describes how in the near future we will see a clash between ‘Islam’ and ‘The West’, which he further specifies as follows: This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the world-wide expansion of both. (Huntington 1993: 32)

Culture, in Huntington’s mindset, is defined as the deepest identification that a human being is capable of. Note how in this quotation, ‘our secular present’ and ‘our Judeo-Christian heritage’ are conflated into ‘the world-wide expansion’ of Western culture. For Huntington, as for many others of the populist radical right, Judeo-Christian heritage and secularity together make up contemporary Western culture. In different contexts across Western Europe and North America, we see similar discourses take hold.8 Take, for instance, this citation from perhaps the first Dutch populist politician in the twenty-first century, Pim Fortuyn:9 Problems concentrate around all those fellow-citizens that originate from areas that are culturally very different from us. In general, we can say that Islamic cultures are very different from areas that are culturally speaking Judeo-Christian (…). Problems concerning integration and mutual acceptance are centred on the relation between the dominant Judeo-Christian humanistic culture on the one hand and Islamic culture on the other. I consciously speak in the broad terminology of culture rather than of  Duyvendak (2011), Duyvendak et al. (2016).  Pim Fortuyn (1948–2002) was a politician and founder of what has been called the first populist radical right party of the Netherlands in the twenty-first century. 8 9

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r­ eligion. One can leave a religion, as we can see happening massively in our country, a culture however, one cannot leave behind. (Fortuyn 2002: 83)

In this citation, drawn from Fortuyn’s 2002 book De verweesde samenleving: een religieus-sociologisch traktaat (‘The Orphaned Society: A Religious-Sociological Treatise’), religion functions in two ways. In the first, religion is associated with cultural identity and in the second, it is associated with a confession an individual can hold (or leave behind). These two can clash, or contradict each other. As Fortuyn outlines, it is one of the characteristics of Dutch Judeo-Christian-humanistic culture that people leave religion behind, thus connecting an aspect of secularization (dwindling church numbers) to Judeo-Christian culture. This association of secularization with a religious-cultural framework occurs more frequently in Dutch exponents of the populist radical right. Thierry Baudet, for instance, contemporary politician and self-expressed heir of Fortuyn, is known for his embrace of Christianity-as-culture. In a recent Tweet, he expresses a similar conflation of leaving religion and Christianity: ‘In fact, being atheist means being a Christian. Atheism is a subset of Christianity’.10 Although discursive manoeuvres like this have been ridiculed as contradictory, it is becoming more and more apparent that it resonates with religious and non-religious members of the Dutch electorate. In earlier publications, I have described how this discourse is increasingly effective in setting up alliances of odd bedfellows (Hemel 2017a, 2017b; Balkenhol and Hemel 2019). Secular (including explicitly atheist) and confessional actors can find themselves united around a cause, be it a protest against the construction of a mosque, alleged attacks on Easter by Muslims and ‘self-hating liberal elites’, or controversies concerning Christmas trees or the saying of ‘Merry Christmas’, in the name of fidelity to a shared, yet vaguely defined, notion of Judeo-Christian heritage. What is more, whereas at the beginning of the twenty-first century this discourse was largely limited to the populist radical right, it is now not uncommon to see more mainstream liberal and Christian democratic  Thierry Baudet (@thierrybaudet): ‘Atheïsme is in feite een vorm van christen zijn; een subcategorie van het Christendom.’ 10 September 2016, 12: 16. https://twitter.com/thierrybaudet/ status/774688057320738816 10

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parties echo similar sentiments. At the moment of writing, the three largest parties in parliament have referenced as their goal to protect the Judeo-Christian culture of the Netherlands. Thus, it can happen that a liberal prime minister of the Netherlands takes it upon himself to protect Easter Eggs against alleged attacks by self-hating elites and Muslims11 and that the leader of the Christian Democrats proclaimed the following rather free-wheeling interpretation of history when he was pressured to provide examples of the superior Christian values: ‘well, you know, things we’ve had here for thousands of years, like equality between men and women’. These examples show that the status of secularity is shifting in the Netherlands. The rise of the populist radical right heralded the advent of a discourse in which it is increasingly normalized to state that not all cultures are equal, that it befits a government to discriminate between native Judeo-Christian culture and the culture of newcomers, and that Islam should be curtailed in order to protect the secular, and therefore Judeo-Christian, culture of the Netherlands. The results of this are far-­ reaching. Not only does the rise of such discourse create crucial questions about the status of constitutional protection of the rights of Muslims in the Netherlands, but it is also far from clear what the fusion of secular and religious registers means for Christians themselves. When the populist radical right speaks of Judeo-Christianity to describe the accomplishments of secularity, where do Christians fit in? In particular, how do Christians whose orthodoxy puts them at odds with secular accomplishments fit in? Having formulated an understanding of the religious-secular discourse of the populist radical right, I will illustrate how this discourse resonates with SGP constituents. Its insistence on the importance of religion in national matters, its willingness to see the government as not only allowed to, but also obliged to discriminate between religions, and its vehement criticism of Islam resonate with the fighting spirit that has characterized  In 2017, a Dutch warehouse chain was accused of having changed the name of its assortment of Easter Eggs, which now appear in the spring catalogue as ‘hiding eggs’. This was first taken up by populist radical right politicians as an example of a ‘fatwa against Easter’ and it led prime minister Mark Rutte to declare on national radio that he sees it as his task as leader of the Netherlands, to make sure that ‘Easter remains Easter’. See Hemel (2017b) for further analysis. 11

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the SGP since its inception. Yet, on the other hand, the conflation of secular and religious registers also creates tensions for the constituents of the SGP which, historically, has not had much truck with secular accomplishments and the embrace of gay rights and feminisms as hallmarks of Western culture. As I will show, the populist radical right discourse is present explicitly and implicitly in the discourse of the participants of the debate, creating a particular set of tensions. To illustrate this, let us now return to the debate.

The ‘Islam Debate’ The Islam debate took place in Oldebroek, which is a municipality of 23,500 inhabitants in the province of Gelderland. This location is of particular interest, as it is one of the better-known communities in the Bible Belt. I described above how the Bible Belt is itself an anomaly in the mainstream narrative in which secular  Dutch society has shed its religious past. As I will show later on, the location of this debate is of importance in more ways than one. The venue was Molen de Hoop, an old repurposed windmill which now functions as a monument and a venue to be rented for events. We counted 80 people in attendance, of which 8 were female, and all were white. The room in which the debate was held contained rows of opposing benches and chairs. This set up was intentional, the moderator highlighted. The set-up of the room aimed to mirror that of Lagerhuis, a Dutch TV-programme in which proponents and opponents of a statement debated whilst sitting on opposing sides of the room. This programme, in turn, was named after the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, where the two parties are seated opposite each other. However, as the audience that was assembled in the old windmill was not divided according to political leanings, the moderator of the debate in Oldebroek asked the audience to ‘help out’ by taking up positions in favour or in opposition of the prepared statements. As the statements were read out, this format was quickly abandoned and what took place resembled more of a session in which SGP politicians and constituents reflected on a number

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of talking points that were direct citations from well-known populist radical right politicians and movements. The debate covered prepared statements such as ‘should Islam have the same rights as Christianity in the Netherlands?’, and ‘Does moderate Islam exist?’ and ‘We should no longer allow even a single Muslim to enter the Netherlands’. What binds the statements is a concern with Islam and the need to take measures to curtail its influence and presence. What is more, all of these statements are either direct citations from or paraphrases of a discourse championed by the populist radical right. For instance, populist radical right politician Geert Wilders has included in its programmes and publications sentences such as ‘there is no such thing as moderate Islam’ and ‘moderate Islam does not exist’.12 In general, the selection of statements communicated a clear goal for the evening: what should the SGP’s reaction be to arguments put forward by the populist radical right? As the debate unfolded, there was little disagreement about the statements themselves, nor was there a debate about the viability or desirability of constitutional changes necessary to effectuate the implementation of most of these statements. On the contrary, a majority of participants seemed to be in agreement with these statements. Most of the energy of the debate was directed towards providing argumentations why these statements should be supported. Let me provide some illustrations. When debating whether ‘Muslims should have the same rights as Christians’, most participants chimed in with arguments in favour of discriminating in favour of Christians. A participant mentioned that terrorism is a suitable reason for ‘keeping a closer eye on radical Islam’. Yet, a number of participants felt the need to push the point a bit further. Take for instance this contribution, provided by a man who introduced himself as a lifelong SGP supporter: We all agree that terrorism constitutes a danger for the Netherlands. But we should also say that Islam as a system is incompatible with our Western way of life, including the Christian way of life which has historically imprinted the West, and is present in the roots of Dutch society. We should  De Volkskrant, 8 August 2007. Genoeg is Genoeg: Verbied de Koran.

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therefore not be ashamed to publicly say that we should arm ourselves against this culture that is now entering the Netherlands. This means that we should dare to publicly support our culture, however you would want to define our culture, but it sure is not Islamic. We should be able to stop the construction of minarets like in Switzerland, because they are a threat to our culture. And because it just doesn’t fit in. We should be allowed to discriminate between cultures and we should not be forced to participate in the ideology of equality (gelijkheidsdenken) that Islam should have as much room in the Netherlands. We should discriminate. My appeal to van der Staaij (SGP chairman and member of parliament) is to take a firmer stance. I say, show them how it’s done!

The participant hints at his intimate knowledge of SGP political jargon in multiple ways. For instance, in using the term gelijkheidsdenken, the participant acknowledges a well-known notion in orthodox Protestant thought. Originally directed at the representatives of the (French) Revolution, gelijkheidsdenken decries that all modes of life are equal and therefore deserve equal treatment (Baalen et  al. 2018). Opposing this false ideology of equality, the Reformed Party’s standpoint is that religions are not equal, there is only one true religion. In the past, the word has been part of an outright theocratic argument and has transformed over the course of the twentieth century into a term more open to cultural and constitutional issues.13 In short, gelijkheidsdenken has been a battle cry of the orthodox Protestants since the foundation of the party. A second indication that this participant knows his orthodox reformed sources is his use of the phrase ‘the Christian way of life which has historically imprinted the West’ (door het christendom gestempeld). This phrase has appeared in SGP party programmes since, at least, 1994, where we can read: When minorities are given the opportunity to maintain their own cultural identity, this should not negatively impact the historically imprinted (gestempeld) character of the Dutch nation. Government should not contribute financially nor otherwise to the spread of anti-Christian views. Subsidizing mosques should be rejected. (SGP 1994, translation EvdH) 13

 Zwaag (2018), ‘Van theocractie naar godsdienstvrijheid: de SGP over religie en politie’.

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Since then, it has appeared frequently in SGP discourse. Most recently, it has appeared in publications of the scientific bureau of the SGP, where it is used to promote maintenance of the Christian way of life, even when it violates constitutional equality. The Netherlands is a country that has been imprinted by Christianity. The Christian conviction has influenced our state and mode of government. For instance, we do not have an officially recognized Islamic holiday. If we would use a strict ideology of equality (gelijkheidsdenken, EvdH), this should not be allowed, whereas from a Christian-historic perspective there is nothing wrong with this. (Schippers 2016: 248)

By using the terms ‘imprint’ (gestempeld) and ‘ideology of equality’ (gelijkheidsdenken) this participant shows that he is well-versed in orthodox Protestant political thought. Yet, it is important to indicate that there is a certain distance or change in emphasis in this contribution with regards to the way in which these terms are used. For instance, in contrast with the explicit embrace of orthodox Protestantism as the true religion, there is a certain vagueness with which the participant describes Dutch culture: ‘we should dare to publicly support our culture—however you would want to define ‘our culture’—but it sure is not Islamic’. Christianity is mentioned only as part of Western way of life. This leads to the concrete example that is given on how the historical imprint should be safeguarded: ban the building of ‘minarets’. This participant explicitly states that favouring Christianity over Islam is not only about protecting society from terrorism. The threat to Dutch society this participant is concerned about is formulated in terms of culture, not confession. What is more, Christianity here is spoken of as a vaguely outlined cultural way of life. Also, the participant states that the parliamentary faction of the SGP should, ‘more firmly’, protect Dutch culture. The participant addresses the SGP directly for not doing their job thoroughly enough. This was a recurrent tendency during the debate: the parliamentary faction of the SGP was addressed critically for not being firm enough on Islam. In short, from this intervention, we can glean tendencies that recurred more often during the debate: a discourse reminiscent of that of the populist radical right was used to critically

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revisit SGP positions. As the following example illustrates, a tendency during the debate was to conflate religious and secular categories in manners reminiscent of that of the populist radical right.

Short Skirts Against Islam? One participant, a man who described himself as having ‘considerable professional experience’ in the Middle East, described how: ‘In Islamic countries (moslimmeerderheidslanden) tolerance and freedom do not exist (…) all the short skirts in Afghanistan and Iran disappeared since the Islamists came to power’. The participant concluded that one should not be tolerant to a culture that does not allow for tolerance and that therefore the expansion of ‘Islam’ in the Netherlands can rightfully be curtailed. For anyone who has followed Western European (or Northern American) political discourse, this is a frequently heard argument: the reference to the freedom of women is a particularly frequently occurring trope in the clash of civilizations-style rhetoric which places the secular West over and against the Islamic East. However, the argument is a bit more surprising to hear for those with any knowledge of orthodox reformed Protestantism in the Netherlands. For those who, like me, grew up in a province where the orthodox reformed are numerically strong, it was and remains to this day a well-known phenomenon to see large groups of long-skirted schoolgirls cycle their way to the orthodox Protestant schools in the province. Long skirts were obligatory dress-­ codes at orthodox Protestant schools (dress codes are almost fully absent from the Dutch education system). In short, this particular strand of Protestantism was associated with wearing long skirts to such a degree that the long skirt was an icon of this form of orthodox Protestantism. It is surprising then, to hear a participant in the debate criticize Islam not as a false religion that needs to be rooted out, which would fit in with the classical SGP-line one could say, but as anathema to the cherished freedoms of Dutch society of which the short skirt has become one of the favourite symbols. The role of women was invoked more often during the debate. This exchange took place when the statement ‘We should not admit any more

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Muslims into the Netherlands’ was debated. A lull in the discussion was filled when one of the women in the audience stood up and stated ‘well, when the men fall silent the women should step up’. This remark was followed by cheering and applause. She continued: we should not forget that Dutch culture is starting to change … particularly in the cities. That is a sort of danger, when people with very different norms and values are taking up increasingly important positions in society and perhaps even in government. When that happens, a lot is going to change in the Netherlands. Perhaps especially for us Christians (….) to stop all Muslims from entering our country is perhaps practically impossible but you could make the argument that we should be careful not to admit too many Muslims.

We see in this short contribution a similar emphasis on cultural identity and norms and values. She also indicated a fear that Christianity, in a future where Muslims will become part of government, might be especially targeted by these changes in Dutch culture. Implicit in this intervention was the close proximity of ‘Dutch culture’ and ‘us Christians’. This symbiotic relation is now changing, according to this participant, particularly in the cities (implying that Dutchness and Christianity remain more intimately connected in the countryside). There was also a nod in the opening of the woman’s contribution to the debate. When she stated ‘when men are silent women should step up’ she seems to refer to the issue of the role of women in the SGP. Let me unpack this particular point in more detail. As I indicated above, the SGP has a long history of resisting gender equality and has included many references to the traditional family values. Since 2010, the SGP was forced to stop officially banning women from active functions. Since then, the first female members of the SGP have offered themselves for election. One case in point was a municipal election in Vlissingen in 2014, in the South-Western province of Zeeland (part of the Bible Belt, like Oldebroek). The woman who was on the roll to be elected offered the following argument: ‘when there are no suitable

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men to lead, women should be allowed to step up’.14 Importantly, according to both the politician herself and the leadership of the party, this was an exceptional situation. As far as the party was concerned, nothing drastically changed. The woman who stepped up to contribute to the debate with the words ‘when men are silent, women should step up’ referred to this incident of a couple of years earlier. The laughter and cheering by the audience seemed to me to indicate a sort of ironic recognition of this development and a celebration and encouragement of this development. Both in the content of the words of this contributor as well in the jovial reception of them, the image is conjured up of a Dutch culture which has solved the issue of feminism, which has been stamped by Christianity and whose accomplishments are now under threat from abroad. The more complex and decidedly more anti-feminist aspects of recent SGP history remained absent during the remainder of this evening. All in all, ‘culture’ was a more frequently used trope to outline the differences between Dutch national identity and ‘Islam’ during the debate. Religion arose most frequently as extension of, and inherent part of, a cultural identity. In order to illustrate how speaking of religion in terms of culture might create tensions with the register of religion as confession, let me provide another example from the debate. After culture and cultural identity were invoked in the discussion on whether any Muslims should be allowed in the Netherlands, a white middle-­aged participant intervened. He described himself as someone who ‘works with refugees’, and he described how he has set up a bible class for refugees, many of whom are from countries ‘with an Islamic background’. Listen. We teach in Arabic. Five weeks later they are baptized. This happens purely because we communicate in Arabic, because then these boys understand the love of Christ directly. They understand the word of God and that understanding for them happens in Arabic. When you address them in Arabic, they will feel at home a lot sooner in the Netherlands. If we were 14

 De Volkskrant 19 March 2014: ‘SGP-vrouw schrijft geschiedenis in Vlissingen’.

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to say to them ‘you are doing this wrong in Dutch, the Arab will say: “get lost!”’ (dan zegt de Arabiër: dikke lul drie bier).

This participant highlighted terms that resonate with a different register from that of cultural identity. This participant highlights conversion (something which in a culturalized framework is well-nigh impossible), the love of Christ and baptism. Concomitantly, because conversion is placed central, this participant is less inclined to worry about that which has become over the last two decades or the typical hallmark of successful or failing integration: speaking Dutch. The tension between cultural identity and conversion generated lively reactions from the room. Multiple people stood up wanting to react. A man stood up and interjected: This is a beautiful example. Indeed, you have to realize that a Muslim can become a Christian and therefore you should never write off a Muslim completely. Because a Muslim can become a Christian. But this debate is about Islam. Islam is the book [sic] that they read over there (het boek dat ze daar hebben) and what they get passed on: that is the biggest evil that you can find in the Netherlands. And then you shouldn’t be saying ‘well, Muslims are people too’.

Here, we see how the opposition of two registers. In one register religion is associated with the confession individuals hold (and might change), in the other religion is seen as a belief-system that can be judged independently from the individuals that adhere to it. This contribution mirrors the statement which was debated earlier, when it was discussed that ‘moderate Islam does not exist’. Participants during this section repeated the argument made by populist radical right politician Geert Wilders that although moderate Muslims may exist, there is no such thing as moderate Islam. It became apparent that there is a tension between seeing Muslims as individuals that can be converted or as believers of an intolerant way of life. As these registers played out during the evening, people highlighted the tensions between the two. If one is too strict on cultural identity and the persecution of Muslims, one risks giving up on potential converts and

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limiting the universal message of the Gospel to those who share the same cultural backdrop. On the other hand, in the experience of multiple participants in the debate, if one ‘imports’ too many intolerant people, Dutch society including Christianity is threatened. Another man stood up and offered the following thoughts: ‘I understand what you mean, the Christian love for thy neighbour, but if we import too many intolerant people, we could destroy ourselves’.15 As the evening drew to a close the tension between a culturalized register and a confessional register returned explicitly in the closing remarks offered by party leader Kees van der Staaij.

The Boomerang Effect of Invoking Leitkultur Fraction leader and long-time parliamentarian Kees  van der Staaij was present at the debate and was invited to provide concluding remarks. As he was frequently addressed by the participants in the debate, in particular by people pushing Van der Staaij and the parliamentarians of the SGP to take a firmer stance on Islam, he spent considerable time summarizing the debates. Yet, he also addressed the perils of invoking the populist radical right discourse with regards to dominant cultural values. Van der Staaij acknowledged his desire to curb the building of mosques and minarets. Yet he also warned for a ‘boomerang effect’ if national religious-­ cultural identity is left unexamined: Of course, I agree we should be able to be reluctant to allow these sort of expression [such as minarets and other visible signs of Islam in the Netherlands, EvdH]. But we should take into consideration that it makes a big difference whether we speak from the perspective of Oldebroek or from the Netherlands in general. It is easy to speak of Dutch culture and how Christianity has ‘imprinted’ (gestempeld) it from our position here in Oldebroek. But when you look at it from a national perspective, for most Dutch people Dutch culture means gay marriage, strict equality between men and women which has been a reason to sue the SGP, the abolishment of confessional schools (bijzonder onderwijs) and the limiting of religion in  ‘Ik begrijp heel goed wat je bedoelt, Christelijke naastenliefde, maar het kan tot zelfdestructie leiden door intolerante mensen te importeren die dat kapot maken.’ 15

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public life. That is Dutch culture and that is what most of my colleagues in parliament are proud of, and that is what they want to maximize with their legislation. It is always good to remind ourselves that we intend to do against Islam could return to us as a boomerang.

Van der Staaij reiterates the phrase ‘imprinted’ (gestempeld), embedding, as participants did before him, the debate in SGP terminology. He acknowledges the call from his constituents who desire an unequal treatment of Islam out of the name of cultural identity. Yet, he warns against presenting Dutch national identity in overarching terms. The topics he mentions, gay marriage, equality between men and women, and the limiting of religion in public life, are all topics for which the SGP has received critique from secular points of view. Van der Staaij also highlights that how national identity is defined might differ significantly from region to region. What shared national Christian culture means in the Bible Belt (‘here in Oldebroek’) is not the same as what it means in The Hague. Van der Staaij states that the enthusiasm with which participants in the debate have argued against Islam as being non-Dutch, non-tolerant and non-­ secular might be quite risky. The same arguments used to outlaw religious accommodation in the case of Islam provide jurisprudence to curtail other forms of orthodox religion. In other words: that which is thrown with the intention to hurt Islam, might return to hit the one who threw it in the back of the head. This shows how complex these discourses on secularity and religion can be. Van der Staaij, not known for his love of secular Dutch culture, nonetheless argues in favour of some core elements of secuarlity. He here warns against throwing away the protections constitutional equality offers to orthodox Protestant movements such as the SGP. Inversely, the participants in the debate who used an onstensibly more secular register to discriminate against Islam (it is not secular, anti-feminist, etc.) can actually be seen as aiming to replace a secular conceptualization of confessional politics, in which religion is safeguarded by separation of church and state, with a register in which the religious-cultural majority determines how rights with regards to religion are allotted.

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Concluding Remarks The poster initially used to advertise the debate was an indicator of what we have seen during the debate: the icon of the bomb and the association of Islam with violence against what is considered to be Dutch is a hot topic. The organizers and the participants were eager to situate themselves roughly along the lines of how the populist radical right has argued for discrimination of Islam: the argument of national culture, secular tolerance and feminism are used to argue for withholding constitutional protections from Islam. This embrace of a populist radical right framework also entails a reframing of the political meaning of Christianity. Used as a shorthand for both the historical roots of contemporary Dutch national culture and a characterization of its contemporary autochthonous population, Christianity and secularity are no longer seen as competing worldviews, nor as neatly separated categories in modern secular Dutch society, rather they are seen as two sides of the same nativist coin. By fusing these categories together, by allying the short skirt of secular feminism with the long skirts of orthodox Protestantism, so to speak, the religious-political landscape which is built on secular categories is replaced with a muddy new reality whose impact remains to be understood. Although for the time being, the register of parties such as the SGP and register used by the populist radical right both see (Judeo-)Christianity as the dominant culture in the Netherlands, it remains to be seen which way policy is going to go if this register remains dominant. It also remains to be seen which new tectonic plates are formed when the fault lines between religion and secularity shift. Orthodox Protestant politicians like Van der Staaij might, paradoxically, end up defending the accomplishments of secular values whilst those who proclaim to wish to protect secular Dutch society can be seen to engage in new forms of confessional politics. This new form of politics aims to abolish the constitutional equality of religions, but this time not in the name of a Church but rather in the name of culturalized religion. In understanding how different registers religion partake in redefining contemporary religious-cultural landscapes in the Netherlands, we need to place our ear on the ground to see what religion means for whom.

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References Baalen, C. van, Wielenga, F., & Wilp, M. (2018). Een versplinterd landschap: Bijdragen over geschiedenis en actualiteit van Nederlandse politieke partijen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Balkenhol, M., & Hemel, E. van den (2019). Odd Bedfellows, New Alliances: The Politics of Religion, Cultural Heritage and Identity in the Netherlands. Trajecta: Religion, Culture and Society in the Low Countries, 28(1), 117–141. Duyvendak, J. W. (2011). The Politics of Home. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Duyvendak, J. W., Geschiere, P., & Tonkens, E. (Eds.). (2016). The Culturalization of Citizenship. Belonging and Polarization in a Globalizing World. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fortuyn, P. (2002). De verweesde samenleving: een religieus-sociologisch traktaat. Uithoorn: Karakter. Hemel, E. van den (2014). Proclaiming Tradition: ‘Judeo-Christian Roots’ and the Rise of Conservative Nationalism in the Netherlands. In R.  Braidotti, T. de Graauw, B. Blaagaard, & E. Midden (Eds.), Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere. Postsecular Publics (pp. 53–76). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Hemel, E. van den (2017a). Hoezo Christelijke Waarden?’ Postseculier nationalisme & uitdagingen voor beleid en overheid. Tijdschrift voor Religie, Recht en Beleid, 8(2), 5–23. Hemel, E. van den (2017b). The Dutch War on Easter: Secular Passion for Religious Culture & National Rituals. Yearbook of Ritual and Liturgical Studies, 33, 1–19. Huntington, S.  P. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22–49. Lieburg, F. van (2010). De bijbelgordel in Nederland. In W. Bouwman, J. van Eijnatten, & F.  A. van Lieburg (Eds.), Geschiedenis van het christendom in Nederland (pp. 248–277). Zwolle: Waanders. Mudde, C. (2007). Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schippers, J. A. (2016). Gerechtigheid Verhoogt een Volk. Apeldoorn: De Banier. SGP. (1994). ‘Vast en Zeker’ Electoral Program. http://pubnpp.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/ root/verkiezingsprogramma/TK/sgp1994/

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Vollaard, H., & Voerman, G. (Eds.). (2018). Mannen van Gods Woord: De Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij 1918–2018 (pp. 69–92). Hilversum: Verloren. Zwaag, K. van der (2018). Van theocratie naar godsdienstvrijheid. De SGP over religie en politiek. In H. Vollaard & G. Voerman (Eds.), Mannen van Gods woord: de Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij 1918–2018 (pp.  69–92). Hilversum: Verloren.

3 ‘We’ and ‘The Others’ as Constituents of Symbolic Politics: On the Populist Exploitation of Long-lasting Nationalist Sentiments and Resentments Regarding Citizenship in Germany Irene Götz

For some years, right-wing politicians all over Europe have demanded: bar Muslims from entering the country; forbid the burka; defend pork dishes in kindergartens1 and rule out dual citizenship, particularly for Deutschtürken (Germans of Turkish descent). Pushed by the electoral success of the rightwing populist party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), sections of the German conservative parties have recently followed suit and have begun to employ a xenophobic rhetoric similar to that of right-­wing populists.  This debate only addressed ‘the Turks’ despite other religious prohibitions of pork existing for Hindus and Jews, among others. This focus on the German-Turks is not only due to their mere number and visibility in Germany compared to other non-Christian groups, but it is always ‘the Turks’ who are complained about in such calls for a Leitkultur (i.e. the predominant culture to which ‘the Muslims’ in particular are suspected not to be adjusted, see Pautz 2005a, b). 1

I. Götz (*) Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_3

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This chapter is about symbolic politics relying on such cultural arguments and recalling long-lasting nationalist sentiments and resentments. To illustrate how Symbolpolitik plays out in Germany in the public domain I will focus on the debate on dual citizenship that began in 1999. My main argument is that the reform of the citizenship law, suggested by the red–green government in 1999, triggered two opposite developments, in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform each other in regard to the legitimate conception of the nation state in times of an ongoing immigration. On the one hand, the reform was meant to serve as an important step towards a new culture-blind notion of citizenship in Germany, which should no longer merely be based on ‘blood’ and ‘descent’. On the other hand, this step towards opening Germanness to the notion of ‘demos’ led to a conservative counter-movement of re-­ sacralizing nationhood: here, particularly among right-wing politicians, being German has been valued as an exclusive privilege of native Germans; and deutsche Leitkultur (German leading culture) has once again been instrumentalized as a sacrosanct concept of belonging according to a nativist notion by those conservative politicians and ordinary people who are sceptical about sharing their social properties with ‘migrants’. The example of the debate on the dual citizenship will provide insights into this intersected process of opening and closing the nation, which has much to do with either re-sacralizing nationhood as it was the case in the times of the national movement in the nineteenth century, or de-­ sacralizing the notion of national belonging by regarding citizenship as nothing more than a matter of contract, so that newcomers could be affiliated under certain conditions. The case study will also make plausible in how far we need a more differentiated understanding of how contemporary modes of nation-building and definitions of nationhood are based upon both secular and sacred conceptions of ‘we’ and ‘the others’. Thus, the ongoing debate on dual citizenship in Germany serves as one striking and momentous example of such symbolic politics in which ‘our’ culture, Christian tradition and Volk (the people as an ethnic group), are once again merged and promoted as the exclusive ‘property’ of the nation endangered by far-reaching processes of transformation. Before I go deeper into the ethnographic case study and show how the traditional concept of the ethnic nation has once again been treated as a

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sacred and homogenous entity in this context, I will—in a first paragraph—reflect on the character of symbolic politics, which employs and fuels such notions of a traditional cultural repertoire of the national. I make the argument that it is pivotal to reflect on the historical base on which the long-lasting national patterns have been built and enforced. In so doing, we learn about the durable repertoire of the national that—as a powerful sacred belief system—can be easily recalled and put on the political stage to attract people longing for a safety net in times where they are expected to share their social privileges with ‘foreigners’ and newcomers. Ever since the first debates on the new citizenship law in 1999/2000 the German passport has time and again been elevated to a precious and exclusive entrance ticket to social rights by right-wing politicians; nationhood is seen as something sacred in this framework. The idea of the ‘holy nation’ of the nineteenth century can easily be recalled for this purpose; it is deeply rooted in people’s collective memories and language, as I state in the last paragraph of this chapter.

 ymbolic Politics as a Simplifier S and Constructor of a Belief System In symbolic politics, as conceptualized by, amongst others, Sears (1993), complicated and severe problems, such as integrating labour migrants and refugees, reflecting the hybridization of identity in times of globalization, fighting terrorism and obtaining public security and welfare, are promised to be ‘solved’ by simplistic solutions.2 Symbolic politics simplifies both such societal problems of transformation and the possible solutions by reduction and condensation, and in doing so, it relies on cultural arguments: cultural markers, such as the burka or the pork dishes, serve as icons in which a wide range of strong connotations condense into simple reductions: ‘The Christian Occident’ is endangered, ‘Islam’ as aggressor to be fought. Employing and promoting such icons and  See the instructive and basic article on symbolic politics in the very sense by Sears (1993). See also Kaschuba (1995), who employs a historical perspective on symbolic politics in the context of nationalism, resp. the construction of a ‘homogenous national body’. 2

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symbols—for instance, the dual citizenship—has turned out to be a powerful ingredient of political debate in Germany and beyond. The case of the revision of the citizenship law in Germany in 2000 was one battlefield of such symbolic fights (or fights relying on cultural symbols), in which both old concepts of the nation, differentiating between a ‘we’ and ‘they’ in the line of ‘ethnos’ and religion, and a new notion of citizenship, more open for newcomers, were disseminated. This symbolic politics of defending cultural traditions (including the Christian religion as a symbolic marker) and the liberal value fundament of the secular country of a ‘Christian origin’ obviously recalls national sentiments—for instance, nostalgia and concern for the country that has to be protected against newcomers. In so doing, the logics and semantics of social inclusion and exclusion are based on cultural arguments, for instance, Muslims’ traditions of clothing and food are—in the sense of a homogenous entity—deemed incompatible with and a threat to secular life in a modern state. National sentiments and resentments are easily available as fluid patterns of a national repertoire deeply rooted in the collective memory3 of the modern nation state since the era of the national movements in the nineteenth century. Thus, a historical perspective is pivotal, considering the principles and mechanisms of nation-building and forming national identities through a constant training, it allows one to conceive why the rediscovery and revitalization of national concepts of Volk in the sense of ‘ethnos’ and the idea of a culturally bound nation state could again have been so successful throughout Europe in the last few decades (see Götz 2011, 2016; Götz et  al. 2017). After the Second World War, national feelings were supposed to have lost their legitimacy, particularly in Germany, and after the fall of the socialist block, the old nation state was expected to lose its importance in a new Europe of regions dawning in a ‘post-national’ era (Habermas 1998; Münch 1995). It is in the wake of mass immigration, EU crises and the retrenchments of the social states4 that the national notion is yet successfully being  This term refers to the concept of Aleida Assmann (1999) and Jan Assmann (1988).  In how far the social state is retrenched in Germany in the wake of the Hartz IV-reforms is brilliantly explained by Lessenich (2008). 3 4

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r­ ediscovered, serving to legitimize the exclusion of groups of citizens. The increasing gap between the few rich and the many living in precarious conditions has often been stated in public debate as a main reason for the flourishing of national resentment in Europe and abroad during the last two decades, and can be easily exploited and fuelled by the rising right-­ wing populists all over Europe.

Illoyal and Privileged: Holders of Two Passports and Other Suspects The debate on dual citizenship in Germany, which started almost 20 years ago, is an important case that sheds light on the revival of nationalist sentiments and resentment triggered by populist activities not only in Germany but across Europe.5 As a milestone in this process of the de-­ tabooing of national rhetoric and symbolic politics, it is well suited to serve as an ethnographic setting where one can explore how nationhood and citizenship have once again been culturalized to limit social rights to ‘the community’ of ethnic Germans. This ‘culturalization of citizenship’ (Duyvendak et al. 2016) is both underpinned and nourished by a traditional notion of ‘we’ and ‘they’; national semantics, such as the term Volk, are deployed; a ‘cultural identity’ must be protected, whereas the Muslims are, most of all, addressed as potential troublemakers. As I show below, it was in the context of a new citizenship law in 1999 when the heated debate emerged for the first time. The new red–green German government—the first coalition between the Social Democrats and the Green Party—suggested this new law permitting dual citizenship in Germany under certain conditions. This new law finally revised the one from 1913, which had based German citizenship merely on ‘blood’ and descent. The revision, which aimed at simplifying naturalization, should reflect mass immigration to Germany in the 1980s and early 1990s. Afterwards, the debate came up every now and then in the context of elections and was fuelled particularly by the latest arrival of refugees  For the case of East Grmany see Shoshan (2016) and for Eastern Europe see Götz, Spiritova, Roth (Eds.) (2017). 5

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and recent terror attacks across Europe—two contexts that have been irrationally intertwined and emotionally debated. Facing many ‘concerned citizens’ in these contexts, the German politicians have displayed strength and decisiveness, as the beginning of this chapter has shown. After the media had reported on some German Turks having organized a demonstration in favour of Erdogan in July 2016, questions arose in the public media, such as: what about the loyalty of German Turks to our democratic state when they stand up for an authoritarian Turkish leader? Once more, ‘they’ were treated as the homogenous group of ‘unintegrated Turks’. The suggestion of depriving these German nationals of their German passports was an emotional reflex of some conservatives. They insinuated that this would be a good means of “healing” the presumed anti-democratic attitude of ‘the Turks’ in Germany. This populist attack obviously fostered the resentments of the many who fear that holders of two passports are privileged compared to ‘real’ Germans owning only one such document. According to this argument, one writer of an e-mail commented on an article I wrote—as an anthropologist’s critical intervention—for the weekly Spiegel Online which had defended dual citizenship as an achievement and step towards a modern immigration politics in Germany. The commentator, whose opinion can stand for many others, related an example which supposedly proved why this view disadvantages native Germans. He reported on a friend of his who had emigrated to New Zealand and naturalized. Of course, he agreed, there she had to give up her German passport.6 The writer could hardly believe that she, although German-born, had to apply for a visa for her home country when she wanted to visit it for 3 months! It had not come into the writer’s mind that these bureaucratic obstacles to a mobile life would be an argument in favour of dual citizenship. By contrast, the writer of this e-mail deduced that this case was an argument against dual citizenship. His logics implied that if a ‘real German’, one of ‘us’, is not allowed to have two passports, why should ‘we’ permit migrants to gain this ‘privilege’? According to his  Here the writer was wrong: New Zealand nationals are allowed to hold a passport from another country if the other country allows it (see https://www.govt.nz/browse/nz-passports-and-­ citizenship/getting-nz-citizenship/dual-citizenship/?OpenDocument and http://nomadcapitalist. com/2014/04/25/countries-allow-dual-citizenship/). 6

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interpretation, a “real” German woman was disadvantaged compared to ‘migrants’—who are still seen as migrants, no matter how long they have lived in Germany—and who, on top of that, hold two passports! They are deemed richer and privileged, even superior. In this story, nationality is still linked to descent and, therefore, to a primordial—ethnic—identity. Although he accepts the possibility of naturalizing in the host country, a new passport never changes your ‘natural’ inherited cultural identity; this is considered stable and exclusive; in other words, it is nothing hybrid; it cannot be mixed with other identifications. Many other comments to this article could be added proving that being really German had something to do with birth, origin, language and culture. Newcomers were suspected of not leaving behind their ‘inherited’ culture, which is proven by the instance that they were not willing to give back their passport from their home country. Again, the writers of the comments mixed up cultural identity and citizenship. The latter, the (social) rights and duties of a state’s citizen, should be bound to an adequate cultural identity. The ethnocultural notion of nationhood as an exclusive good is prevalent in most comments. The idea of dual citizenship as something rational, supporting transnational mobility as a given fact of globalization and reflecting the needs of immigration countries and their citizens to participate as equal and full citizens, was seldom part of the writers’ thinking. On the contrary, holders of two passports were blamed for using the German passport only for strategic purposes without feeling ‘true love’ for Germany and being stuck in a ‘foreign’ culture. To love one’s country is a notion which is part of the traditional emotional repertoire of nationalism; such strong emotions are expected from national citizens as a proof of their loyalty to ‘their’ one and only national state. This logic follows a nativist, racist argumentation:7 native Germans are, in any case, superior to those coming from a  ‘migration’ background’ regarding citizen’s rights and any other privileges as Germans. They deserve them due to their origin in terms of ‘blood’ (ius sanguinis) and  See Balibar/Wallerstein (1991), who were one of the first in academia dealing with the relation between class struggles, immigration and a new nationalism, whereas xenophobia and racism are related to contemporary capitalism and the division of labor in the national state. 7

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‘authentic’ feelings, such as love and pride. This idea is still part of the sustainable common-sense knowledge of many Germans and is grounded in the German citizenship law (Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz) dating back to 1913 and not reformed before 2000 (see Gosewinkel 2001).

 he Struggle for a New Citizenship T Law in 1999 In the spring of 1999, the new red–green coalition in Germany attempted to transform the old citizenship law from a ius sanguinis into a ius soli in order to facilitate assimilation and integration for immigrants and to catch up with other European nation states such as France (ius soli means that the place of birth counts regarding citizenship rights and nationhood). The aim of this reform was to consider that cultural homogeneity after the Second World War, one backbone of German identity reflected in this old citizenship law as well as in a widely spread public notion, cannot be kept up in a country with such high immigration rates as Germany. Therefore, Otto Schily, Minister of the Interior, and his staff presented the concept of a law to parliament which would allow foreigners to become German after having lived in Germany for at least  eight  years (instead of fifteen years as was the case at the time) and—which was then much criticized by political opponents—the ‘foreigners’ (die Ausländer) should be generally allowed to keep their old passports so that they could keep up their old loyalties. Another frequent point of criticism was that children of foreigners born in Germany should get the German passport automatically regardless of having another passport from the state of their mother or father. The CDU/CSU (at that time the non-ruling conservative party) immediately started a very successful public campaign to collect signatures in the streets and public assemblies against dual citizenship (Doppelpaß).8 The campaign was soon taken over by almost all local  It should be mentioned that the plebiscite protest was initially started in the Bundesland Hessen just before the regional elections took place and that these elections were won by the Conservatives as a result of the successful populist campaign.

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branches of CDU/CSU, and Doppelpaß became the most discussed topic in public and everyday life for weeks (see Götz 2000, 2011). Suddenly, the debate was no longer concentrating on parliament or the political pages of the newspapers but reached the arts section and the letters to the editor. It reached ordinary people on their way to work or shopping, where they could not avoid noticing the little red and white tables of the local conservative parties asking them to give their signature to what they called in a slogan: ‘Yes to integration—no to dual citizenship’. The conservatives argued that by granting the Doppelpaß in an uncontrolled way, integration would be hindered or delayed and not, as the left-wing parties believed, facilitated. Many ‘ordinary’ German-born citizens were involved in the highly emotional debates around the little street tables organized by the CDU or in the opposing left-wing parties and groups which struggled to occupy central public sites and busy street corners with their competing information tables close to those of the CDU. In a competition for public space and opinion, various demonstrators stood up against the ‘racist’ politics of the Conservatives, as they put it. The debate was also reflected in jokes, satirical magazines, flyers, postcards and election posters and in Karneval. The debate was soon removed from the legal problems concerning the reform of citizenship and from the pragmatic question of how to manage and facilitate integration. One could very often suddenly read or observe romantic nationalism and ethnic constructions of identity which now seemed to be activated or legalized by the political campaign of the Conservatives and their supporters (Diez Poza 2000). Under the protection of a serious and large political party, which claims to represent the centre of society as a Volkspartei, it seemed to be no longer a taboo to say something against foreigners in public or to announce that being German is something ‘very special’, even something ‘superior’, ‘sacrosanct’, something of ‘high value’ to be protected against ‘those foreigners’ who were supposedly criminal, chronically unemployed or not willing to share the same duties as the Germans (but to profit from the social rights provided). Stories about being the last ‘Germans in the district’, suppressed by ‘aliens’ and ‘foreign languages’ and ‘strange customs’, circulated among supporters of the campaign standing around CDU tables.

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They debated fiercely with the passers-by who blamed the CDU for ‘being racist’. In these debates objects and symbols played a crucial role: on the one hand, there was the national anthem on CDs, which the passers-by were given as a present by the members of the CDU, and the national colours of their scarfs; on the other hand, the Palestinian scarf of the anti-Fascists assembling and fiercely protesting in front of the CDU tables. So the fierce debate in the streets relied on polarizing objects and symbols associated with complex belief systems: the idea of the nation as a homogenous entity of well-integrated, respectively assimilated citizens on the one hand and the reference to Nazi past by the anti-Fascists who ‘waved’ with the symbols of left-wing fights for ‘internationalism’. Left-wing politicians held up dual passports made of cardboard, opposing the CDU’s flyers, which demanded only one passport as the legitimate basis for integration. This form of symbolic politics reduced complicated issues, such as integration, citizenship, belonging and identity, to catchy slogans—‘Yes to integration and no to the dual citizenship!’ (Ja zu Integration, nein zu doppelter Staatsangehörigkeit!)9—and opposing commitments. The local context in the neighbourhoods was connected to and informed by the debate on the macro level of the media (Fig. 3.1). The newspapers, also the liberal ones (see below), contributed to this process of othering and exoticizing by reporting on the ‘poor’ and ‘homesick’ and so far unintegrated ‘foreigners in our cities’, who would wear strange clothes and eat strange meals and—one very serious reason to blame them—would very often not regard the German passport as a necessary aim for which it was worth giving up old loyalties (see Vonderau 2000). Thus, this event turned out to be an ideal ethnographic laboratory10 to observe how traditional national self-images about being German and stereotypes and beliefs about ‘the strangers’, especially about ‘the Islamists’ (Islamisten), became a topic of everyday discussion and ritualized cultural performances. Rapid dissemination of different—also of new, post-modern—national semantics and symbols into a variety  This slogan of the CDU’s campaign could be read on their flyers and posters.  The ethnographic material presented in this paragraph was collected in situ in a research project at HU Berlin, to which master students, such as Diez Poza (2000) and Vonderau (2000), contributed and published under my supervision, see Götz (Ed.) (2000), also Götz (2011, 2016). 9

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Fig. 3.1  Cover of the German weekly Der Spiegel, No. 2, 1999/1/11: Wer darf Deutscher werden? Operation Doppelpass (Who is allowed to become German? Operation dual passport)

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of contexts could be described by means of participant observation and discourse analysis of newspaper articles.11 This was particularly true of ‘letters to the editor’ and special stories (about underprivileged foreigners striving to become German or not) reflecting crucial aspects of Germans’ national consciousness. The results of this eruptive de-tabooization of the national notion after the anti-nationalist stance can still be observed today. The wide range of events at the beginning of 1999 reveals a characteristic spectrum of cultural forms and practices, national symbols and anti-­symbols, icons and counter-icons. For example, the woman with the headscarf symbolizing the unintegrated traditional Islamist in newspapers (examples in Diez Poza 2000) was challenged by the culturally integrated modern and athletic Turkish-German businesswoman in the CDU’s election posters (see pictures below). The following example stems from a discourse analysis which I undertook in my habilitation project on the ‘rediscovery of the national’ after 1989 (Götz 2011). In the context of the contested citizenship law reform, pictures and articles were disseminated that aimed at proving in how far citizens of a ‘migration background’ were still stuck in their ‘foreign culture’. The following sketch indicates that a broader programme of ethnographic study and particularly cultural analysis could be of importance to scrutinize more thoroughly how such political and juridical attempts of de-nationalizing citizenship, such as the reform of 2000, entail counter-developments and promote the re-­nationalization of citizenship and culturalization of belonging. The newspaper article shown in Fig. 3.2 reports on a smart German-­ Turk speaking against dual citizenship and campaigning for the CDU in the local elections of the German state Rheinland-Pfalz. The woman’s  See Götz (Ed.) (2000). The sources of the students’ and my fieldwork were threefold: First, our research was based on field diaries and minutes taken between January and April 1999. They contain observations on the discussions around the tables of CDU in the streets of Berlin (Wedding, Neukölln, Kreuzberg) as well as short interviews with opposing participants of these discussions. Second, we collected letters to the editor and articles in different newspapers, such as the Berlin dailies, the Berliner Zeitung and the Tagesspiegel, additionally the Süddeutsche Zeitung, die tageszeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as in weeklies, such as Die Zeit, Spiegel and Fokus. Third, the following analysis is drawn from flyers, posters and advertisement of the political parties. 11

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Fig. 3.2  Campaign of a local conservative party with German-Turks refusing the Social Democrats’ offer of a dual citizenship, Rheinland-Pfalz, March 1999; source: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1999/03/05, p. 5

outer appearance, her open smile and hair, symbolize the assimilation into a secular Germany. This personification of the good German-Turk as a sporty team player, who stresses her unconditional and smooth integration into the local politician’s team, once again reveals that nation-­ building has always been a cultural project which has had a lot to do not only with the adequate outfit and practices, but also with being active as a citizen. This icon was addressed directly against the ‘traditional’ woman

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covered with the hijab and staying in the house—her sticking to a ‘suppressing religion’ is supposed to be the obstacle against becoming ‘German’. Naturalization should be both the incentive and reward for a ‘good’ integration, which initially necessitates abstaining from (Muslim) religious symbols (Fig. 3.3). As discourse analysis has shown (Diez Poza 2000; Götz 2011), the woman with the headscarf often served as a counter-icon to the ‘open and modern’ well-integrated woman. Her unintegrated counterpart was for instance portrayed in a stereotypical way by the German tageszeitung.12 In an article on the Einbürgerungshemmnis Frau the headscarf once again symbolizes the obstacle for naturalization. The article points at Islamic women being suppressed by their husbands. Here this type of unintegrated woman is portrayed by the side-face of a covered woman bent forward instead of looking ‘openly’ out of the picture. Her headscarf is decorated by traditional rural ornaments. The caption stylizes the dual passport to a magic formula which would abolish the missing cultural assimilation automatically: ‘Owning the dual passport would make the

Fig. 3.3  Article Einbürgerungshemmnis Frau. In: die tageszeitung (taz): 13./14.2.1999, VII, picture by Birgitta Kowsky/Buenos Dias  Die tageszeitung: ‘Einbürgerungshemmnis Frau’ (1999/02/13, VII).

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difference’ (Mit Doppelpaß sähe das anders aus). This fight of opposing icons in the media as part of the symbolic politics again reduces complexity: on the one hand the well-integrated open woman without a headscarf and on the other hand, the unintegrated woman with her head covered. The multifaceted issues fostering and/or hindering integration are condensed in simplistic cultural symbols and connotations of being ‘a foreigner’ culturally and regarding the religion. It is important to mention that religion and culture are so far treated as ‘interchangeable concepts’. As Monique Scheer has recently put it, the ‘terms culture and religion’ are ‘essentialised’ and ‘it is the job of ethnography and discourse analysis to track how they are being used by whom and to what end’ (Scheer 2017: 179). The case study on how the headscarf is being instrumentalized by members of the conservative parties as well as the media serves as an instructive example of this ongoing conflation of religion and culture into one homogeneous entity. Here the notion of the secular nation state is addressed—it is considered to be endangered by Islamic symbols shown in public. However, in doing so, on the other hand, the freedom of religion as one fundament of the secular state is paradoxically ignored; the Muslim woman is not granted this civil right on any account. Her religious display is seen as an obstacle for becoming a full member of the nation.

Diffusion of Old and New National Rhetoric The following paragraph summarizes the most popular traditional national semantics that again circulated in those days (as well as before and later) in newspaper articles, politicians’ speeches and ordinary people’s comments when they faced the CDU tables and signature lists (see also Götz 2011). The following are some of the phrases heard and read: citizenship was regarded as a special ‘gift’ which should not be given as a present to everybody. In this argument, exclusivity of citizenship is emphasized. People referred to the duties which were regarded as a premise for becoming a citizen of Germany. Citizenship was treated as a ‘privilege’, and one could detect the fear of being disadvantaged when having only

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one (a German) passport. Germans with only one passport were afraid of becoming ‘minor’ citizens. ‘Second-class citizen’ became a popular term. Another argument produced various metaphors: ‘You have to decide’, ‘You can’t be married to two women at the same time’, ‘You can’t serve two masters’. Older theories about the typical German authoritarian character are worth mentioning here, for in the last phrase, citizenship is associated with Untertanentum (that is, behaving as an inferior subject of the state which is respected as a master whom you must obey uncritically). German identity was seen in terms of Schicksalsgemeinschaft, as a community held together by a destiny from which its members cannot escape and in which foreigners cannot really share. In this context, the nation is constructed as innate, almost metaphysical, it serves as an anthropological root metaphor which reaches back to an archaic origin. In these comments, stereotypes and phrases, nation actually designates the ethnic and cultural community, and often especially the imagined Christian community. This is, historically, not surprising. As a result of the longue durée of the national ideology, which has sublimely survived in anti-national periods such as the post-war era in Europe, it is very easy for populists to rediscover and recall the notion of the national. They manage to trigger a certain repertoire of attitudes, feelings and associations very easily. When the national card is played, it seems to be a kind of reflex—like a key-­ locker principle—to react with the notion of superiority/inferiority, differentiating between a ‘we’ and ‘the others’. Religion plays an important role in this process. As European Ethnologist Wolfgang Kaschuba explained (Kaschuba 1998): the astounding success of these national patterns, which were created and distributed in the national movements of the nineteenth century and beyond, was primarily a matter of aesthetic and cultural conception. Implementing national feelings and identities was the task of organized rituals and practices, such as singing ‘ancient’ folksongs, doing gymnastics (Turnvater Jahn, see Goltermann 1998) or wearing traditional costumes, such as the members of shooting or marksmen’s clubs (Schützenvereine). By employing cultural forms and through a constant national education, the national movement replaced the power of religion with a new

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metaphysical ideology, such as nationalism. The national duties and rituals became almost a religious service. German historian Michael Stürmer (1993: 91) pointed at the role of religious processions that—in the nineteenth century—turned into national parades with participants waving flags and singing chorally. Ever since this cultural repertoire was invented, all its components have been employed to create a ‘mythical commonness’, excluding ‘the others’. In sum, European Ethnologist Wolfgang Kaschuba (1998) is right when he concludes that the idea of having a national identity became—as a common-sense knowledge—something innate, taken for granted as a precondition of human existence. As he puts it: it is one of the most astounding acts of training that the national anthem or flag can trigger ‘authentic’ feelings in such a reliable pattern and predicable way even today. After having been exploited in Nazi times and subsequently treated with ambivalence in post-war times (see Fullbrook 1999; Miller-Idriss and Rothenberg 2012), German identity appeared to have again acquired a positive value after German reunification and in the context of immigration: during the debate on the dual citizenship the phrase ‘proud to be German’ could be heard again in everyday speech. Expressions such as ‘real German’ or ‘German mentality’, which, for example, an Italian, as one letter to the editor argued, would never be able to feel or to adopt, proved how emotional the national discourses had once again become. A very romantic language was employed: deutsche Denkungs- und Wesensart—an idiom which could be translated as the typical German way of thinking according to a specific ‘national character’. National romantic feelings transformed everyday life and infused its language, metaphors and phrases. Therefore, the ‘real Germans’ were to be distinguished  from the ‘half Germans’ or ‘hybrid Germans’ who own another, second passport. New derogatory  terms and idioms, such as ‘part-time Germans’ and ‘children’s citizenship’ (Kinderstaatsbürgerschaft) were dissimenated through mass media and were popular at least for a period of time. These terms are due to the planned and then ratified compromise to give the German passport to children born in Germany despite having another citizenship through their parents. However, they should decide on one citizenship when they reach the age of 23, as the Liberals, the FDP, suggested successfully. (In 2014 another

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act lifted this limitation and dual citizenship for German-born children became generally accepted.) This diffusion of old and new categories also concerned ‘the others’ or ‘foreigners’. The act of othering was no longer taboo but a widely accepted practice in everyday debates around the CDU tables. The following are some of the traditional phrases which became very popular in those days: ‘strangers’ were designated as ‘guests’—in the tradition of the euphemistic term ‘guest workers’ who were brought to Germany from Southern Europe between the 1950s and 1970s (but have actually chosen to stay in Germany permanently—a fact which German politicians neglected for a long time). No distinction was usually made between different groups of non-Germans. These ‘guests’ should not generally stay too long, nor should they be allowed to utter “demands”, for example, claim the right to vote. Due to the concentration of Turks, the prototype of the foreigner was ‘the Islamist’. Most of the supporters of the CDU campaign vowed to sign against the Muslim who supposedly builds mosques and oppresses his wife. One of the most popular topics of communication was the so-called criminal and dirty Ausländer. For some Germans whom I interviewed after they had signed the CDU lists (see Götz 2011), the fear of losing their job was one reason for their support of the CDU campaign. They said that they were afraid of being disadvantaged. Thus, social problems, such as the unwillingness or fear of having to share social privileges or jobs on a restricted labour market with “newcomers”, and economic as well as cultural differences were explained in terms of simplistic ethnic categories and closely linked to questions of political membership. The case study illustrates how national semantics and symbols are produced or reactivated and instrumentalized to gain political power on a local or even nationwide level. It explores how cultural anthropology can contribute to a critical understanding of the processes of developing political culture in the face of the challenges of redefining the nation and national identity in the global world. It also shows how a seemingly secular context—the redefinition of citizenship by a new law accounting for the post-migrant society—can lead to the

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re-sacralization of a traditional concept, such as the nation state, that had been  deemed outdated in times of post-national connectedness and global movements. The re-­sacralization of the national repertoire that was expected to expire in the post-war era came with a surprise and has not been studied sufficiently (see also Shoshan 2016). The national idea is, on the one hand, linked to secularism: the woman with the headscarf is a danger to this secularist stance; on the other hand, the national culture itself is sometimes upgraded to a somehow quasi-­ religious and sacrosanct heritage to be protected. The national notion certainly also entails the conception of demos; however, the rights as equal and free citizens are often treated as an exclusive property or as something that is deserved only in cases of assimilation to the secular order. The questions of loyalty that were encountered in the debates in Germany are part of this notion of citizenship that has turned out to be a highly contested issue. However, new models and images were also disseminated as a reaction to this conservative process. As a result of the reform of the citizenship law, the ‘red-green’ ruling party launched other campaigns in 2000 and later: posters, postcards and virtual advertising actions on the Internet showed ‘new Germans’, they gave Germany new faces (Fig. 3.4). Such campaigns were intended to acquaint the German majority with ‘black-haired’ or ‘dark’ people who should be recognized as ‘typical Germans’, as the texts of the posters with German-Turkish immigrants implies: ‘German Turk—thinks German, speaks German’. Symbols and practices, cultural forms and a national language have had an effect on individual concepts of belonging and form a collective national consciousness. They create it, as the patterns in question are available in the collective memory. New images may also help to change this notion of belonging. However, it is an open question whether and how post-national icons, ‘new Germans’ and open ideas will be able to modify the traditional pictures of being a German citizen. The traditional ethnic notion and the nationalist sentiments and resentments seem to be taken for granted as unchangeable realities by many people to the present day.

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Fig. 3.4  Campaign of the German government promoting the new German Nationality Law: Einbürgerung: Fair. Gerecht. Tolerant (Naturalization: fair, just, tolerant.) (2000), photograph I.G., placard on a house wall, Berlin

Outlook In sum, the debate on dual citizenship coming up mostly in times of elections finally proves how long-lasting the effects of this nationalist training are and how difficult it is to deconstruct the old notion of the nation and its very sentiments and resentments of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the line of ‘ethnos’ and an inherited culture. The recent success of right-wing groups and parties throughout Europe is worrying. A new populist stance can be observed in politics everywhere, from Europe to the US, from Russia to Turkey. I am sceptical whether a kind of post-national consciousness or a new sense of cosmopolitanism besides the circles of some intellectuals in academia will ever develop. It is all about long-lasting sentiments and resentments which are easy to recall, and this makes me pessimistic, as the acceptance of societal changes is something that needs a deeper understanding and willingness to support long-lasting and complicated

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procedures of a nation rebuilding in accordance with immigration. The new old nationalist populism seems to be much easier to follow; it is much catchier than the rationale of a post-national idea of citizenship separated from the idea of ethnos, and promises a lot. Most of all, it leaves its followers with the wonderful feeling of serving the good old nation as a great communion, to fight the newcomers, as well as incompetent and no longer trustworthy politicians and a European Union that seems to be another scapegoat: it can—according to the logics of populist persuaders—simply be blamed for the decline of the welfare state, for the debt crises and weakness of the Euro, and for the transformation of everyday life-worlds. Thus, finally, the notion of national identity is nourished by the quasi-religious desire for salvation that is still or again being transformed into the secular shape of the national state, which can be purified from all problems and scapegoats easily, a communion and paradise on earth.

References Assmann, J. (1988). Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität. In J.  Assmann & T.  Hölscher (Eds.), Kultur und Gedächtnis (pp.  9–19). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Assmann, A. (1999). Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: CH Beck. Balibar, E., & Wallerstein, I. (1991). Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities. London, New York: Verso. Diez Poza, E. (2000). Die Konstruktion des Eigenen und des Fremden. Positionen zur nationalen Identität. In I.  Götz (Ed.), Zündstoff Doppelte Staatsbürgerschaft. Zur Veralltäglichung des Nationalen (pp. 9–21). Münster, Hamburg, London: LIT. Duyvendak, J. W., Geschiere, P., & Tonkens, E. (Eds.). (2016). Culturalization of Citizenship in the Netherlands. London and New York: Palgrave. Fullbrook, M. (1999). German National Identity After the Holocaust. Malden: Polity Press. Goltermann, S. (1998). Körper der Nation. Habitusformierung und die Politik des Turnens 1860–1890. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.

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Gosewinkel, D. (2001). Einbürgern und Ausschließen. Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Götz, I. (Ed.). (2000). Zündstoff Doppelte Staatsbürgerschaft. Zur Veralltäglichung des Nationalen. Münster, Hamburg, London: LIT. Götz, I. (2011). Deutsche Identitäten. Die Wiederentdeckung des Nationalen nach 1989. Köln, Wien: Böhlau. Götz, I. (2016). The Rediscovery of “the National” in the 1990s – Contexts, New Cultural Forms and Practices in Reunified Germany. Nations and Nationalism, 22(4), 803–823. Götz, I., Spiritova, M., & Roth, K. (Eds.). (2017). Neuer Nationalismus im östlichen Europa. Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Bielefeld: Transcript. Habermas, J. (1998). Die postnationale Konstellation. Politische Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Kaschuba, W. (1995). Die Nation als Körper. Zur symbolischen Konstruktion nationaler Alltagswelt. In E. François, H. Siegrist, & J. Vogel (Eds.), Nation und Emotion (pp. 291–299). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Kaschuba, W. (1998). Nation und Emotion. Europäische Befindlichkeiten. Ethnologia Europaea, 28, 101–110. Lessenich, S. (2008). Die Neuerfindung des Sozialen. Der Sozialstaat im flexiblen Kapitalismus. Bielefeld: Transcript. Miller-Idriss, C., & Rothenberg, B. (2012). Ambivalence, Pride and Shame: Conceptualizations of German Nationhood. Nations and Nationalism, 18(1), 132–155. Münch, R. (1995). Das Projekt Europa. Zwischen Nationalstaat, regionaler Autonomie und Weltgesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Pautz, H. (2005a). Die deutsche Leitkultur. Eine Identitätsdebatte. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag. Pautz, H. (2005b). The Politics of Identity in Germany: The Leitkultur Debate. Race & Class, 46(4), 39–52. Scheer, M. (2017). Kultur und Religion. Eine Unschärferelation mit Folgen. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde. Beiträge zur Kulturforschung, 113(2), 179–200. Sears, D.  O. (1993). Symbolic Politics. A Socio-Psychological Theory. In S.  Iyengar & W.  J. McGuire (Eds.), Explorations in Political Psychology (pp. 113–149). Durham/New York: Duke University Press. Shoshan, N. (2016). The Management of Hate Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right-Wing Extremism in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Stürmer, M. (1993). Kein Eigentum der Deutschen: die deutsche Frage. In W.  Weidenfeld (Ed.), Deutschland. Eine Nation  – doppelte Geschichte. Materialien zum deutschen Selbstverständnis (pp. 83–101). Köln: Wissenschaft und Politik. Vonderau, A. (2000). ‘State and Nation Seeking to Cannibalize One Another’. Die Zeitungsdebatte über die doppelte Staatsangehörigkeit. In I. Götz (Ed.), Zündstoff Doppelte Staatsbürgerschaft. Zur Veralltäglichung des Nationalen (pp. 21–38). Münster, Hamburg, London: LIT.

Part II Public Space

4 Religion, Aesthetics, and Hurt Sentiment: On the Visibility and Erasure of a Muslim Minority in India Stefan Binder

One of the Hindi words for secularism is sarva dharma sambhāva. It is often translated as ‘all religions are true’ and is taken to express the distinct and distinctly religious character of Indian secularism. The notion of a ‘secular sacred’ in the sense of an intricate entwinement of religion and secularism as well as religious and national belonging are largely considered  common sense in India. At the same time, however, current understandings of nationalism, democracy, and culture in India are increasingly marked by aggressive assertions of Hindu majoritarianism, within which all religions may be equally true but not, therefore, equally Indian. Within such a Hindu nationalist framework, the secular-sacred as a modern formation of religious, communal, and national belonging becomes paradoxical and precarious for religious minorities. In this contribution, I focus on public rituals of Shia1  I follow the colloquial use prevalent among my interlocutors in Hyderabad who, when speaking in English, use the word ‘Shia’—rather than Arabic derivations like ‘Shi‘ī,’ ‘Shi‘ite’ or ‘Shi‘ism’—as both an adjective and noun to refer to themselves and their community. 1

S. Binder (*) University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_4

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Muslims in the South Indian city of Hyderabad in order to explore how certain kinds of aesthetic visibility may entail forms of erasure for the sacredsecular identity of a religious minority within a majoritarian representational regime. After a brief introduction of dominant understandings of Indian secularism as a historically specific formation of the sacred-secular in the first section, I present a vignette from the movie set of a recently released Telugu blockbuster, whose cinematic use of Shia religious ritual offended the sentiments of that community. Focusing on the unstable affective dimensions of Shia public religion in Hyderabad, the third section locates the cause of the movie’s offence in a ‘perverted’ commodification of Shia aesthetics that disregards and erodes the secular-sacred formation of Shia identity.

 eligious Communalism and the Secular R Sacred in India Scholars and public intellectuals have stressed time and again that, in India, the secular is not the opposite of religion but of so-called communalism: a politicized form of collective identity grounded in religious belonging (or caste), which is supposed to be a distinctive feature of Indian society and its colonial history (Pandey 1992; Veer 1994; Tejani 2008). Moreover, secularism has been defined not only negatively as the opposite of communalism but also positively as a tolerant, peaceful, and celebratory form of religious diversity and co-existence. The reality of this ideal has come under serious doubt, especially since the political rise of the Hindutva movement and an increasingly chauvinist and violent assertion of Hindu nationalism since the 1980s (Needham and Rajan 2007). Debates about secularism and the role of religion in Indian society usually hinge on a unanimous rejection of communalism, which designates a social formation based on a more or less calculated and harmful blurring of the boundaries between religion, politics, and culture—regardless of where and how exactly those boundaries are drawn. While earlier analyses tended to attribute such blurring to the supposedly derivative nature or flawed realization of secularism—and modernity more generally—in

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colonial and postcolonial India, current scholarship on secularism suggests that the production of collective identities based on religious belonging as well as discourses of majoritarianism and (religious) minoritization are intrinsic to liberal democracies and nation-­states in all modern societies (Asad 2003; Mahmood 2016). Precisely to the extent that modern secularism has sought to depoliticize religion by relegating it to the private sphere and the domain of culture, it has ended up emphasizing and, in some ways, creating religious difference and inequality as a fundamental and naturalized (because apolitical) aspect of civil society. The logic of majoritarianism underlying the working of secular nation-­ states was further reinforced in the colonial setting of British India, where access to formal politics was severely restricted for colonial subjects. Since the policy of “religious neutrality” after the rebellion of 1857 entailed the colonial state’s commitment to non-interference in religious matters, public religion became the primary idiom for legitimate assertions of individual and collective identities and their political interests (Freitag 1989; Pandey 1992). Thomas Blom Hansen states that the emergence of the political field in colonial India was ‘marked by mobilization around a communal antagonism so deep that one may argue that the majority of Indians who came to know themselves as political subjects did so through categories, knowledge, and stereotypes that, one way or the other and not always explicitly, were woven around communitarian symbols and related to this communal antagonism’ (1999: 209). The concept of the secular sacred as proposed by this edited volume is an apt analytical lens to describe this historical configuration, where neat distinctions between religion, politics, and culture break down, insofar as their entanglement constitutes the very ground on which subjectivities and forms of personhood are constituted. In this context, questions of affect and emotion are central to the workings of Indian secularism. The depoliticization of religion in British India assumed that religion had to be not only separated but also protected from politics, as recurring eruptions of communal riots (or anticolonial rebellion) would prove that it is the font of primordial and potentially violent ‘sentiments,’ which cannot be controlled rationally or politically (Viswanath 2010). As a consequence, the protection of

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so-­called hurt sentiment has not only become part of the political rationality of Indian secularism; it has also been structured by Hindu nationalism’s majoritarian logic, to the effect that the extent to which particular sentiments are in fact protected varies with the social, political, and economic dominance of those to whom they are ‘sacred’ (Viswanath 2016; see also Jaffrelot 2008). In other words, communal belonging is ‘sacred,’ and therefore deemed capable of inspiring potentially violent reactions to real or perceived transgressions, not primarily for being couched in religious symbols, but for constituting a sense of belonging that conflates the boundaries between religion and nation, self and community, secular state and religious society, political rights and personhood. This does not imply, however, that communal identities or imaginaries of the nation were simply given. The supposed homogeneity of religious communities as building blocks of a pluralist nation are precarious achievements, which are in need of being continuously policed and enforced (Veer 1994; Jalal 2000). Especially in view of the ‘constructedness’ of communal identities—which does in no way lessen their ‘forcefulness’ or ‘reality’—it is important to note that within majoritarian understandings of democracy and nationalism, different communities face different kinds of constraints and possibilities not only for constructing their secular-sacred identities but also for positioning them in relation to the nation. An important aspect of the reformulation of Hindu nationalism since the 1980s into a form of ‘public culture’ (Hansen 1999: 4), rather than merely a religious or political movement, pertains to the production of what Arvind Rajagopal calls ‘Retail Hindutva’ (2001: 66). This refers to a process whereby transforming media environments allowed for Hindu visual culture and aesthetics to be severed from socially restricted ritual contexts and to be made available for public consumption across caste and sectarian divides. The commodification of religious culture enabled hitherto excluded or segregated social groups to participate in an overarching and, therefore, majoritarian Hindu culture and identity, which could be redefined as the nation and thus become a form of political participation as well. While this was intimately tied to the transformed

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political economy and social setup of post-liberalization India (Dasgupta 2006), Retail Hindutva could thrive on a much longer history of Hindu hegemony within anticolonial and postcolonial projects of nation building (see e.g. Uberoi 2002; Ramaswamy 2010). Especially Muslim and Christian minorities have become not only hyper-visible, when compared to the more or less unmarked and naturalized Hinduness of the nation, but also paradoxical: due to their ‘foreign’ origins and global networks, the principle of their belonging, that is, their religious tradition, is simultaneously the principle of their otherness and their potentially suspect national loyalties (Jalal 2000; Sherman 2015). After 1857, and especially in the wake of Partition, Muslims were therefore thrown back onto an ‘abject citizenship’ (Sherman 2015: 12), since an explicitly political mobilization as a Muslim community would risk undercutting its legitimacy by raising the specter of extraterritorial loyalties towards either Pakistan or the Middle East, as well as the specter of communalism as an illegitimate form of the secular sacred. To a large extent, public debates on communalism and majoritarianism focus on the question of Hindu–Muslim relations. While other religious minorities (Christians, Sikhs, Jains, etc.) may be conspicuous by their absence, the case of Shia Islam is ambivalent because it is often hidden in plain sight within the category of Muslim minority. In fact, Shia Muslims2 have consolidated their sense of identity as a distinct community primarily in relation to the intra-religious majority of Sunni Muslims, rather than in contradistinction to Hinduism (Jones 2012). The following ethnographic vignette is intended to provide an entry point to the contemporary dynamics of sentiment that structure Shia identity in its specific location as a ‘double minority’ in Hyderabad.

 The category of ‘Shia’ is, of course, by no means internally homogeneous and is itself structured by majoritarian configurations. By speaking simply of ‘Shias,’ my own contribution engages in a process of sectarian subsumption, where the specificities of various groups of Ismailis, for example, are occluded by the dominance of a majority of Twelver-Shias in Hyderabad. This also demonstrates the fractal nature of majoritarianism, and the Twelver-community is itself fragmented in different sectarian—and unequally ‘large’—factions of ūsūlī and akhbārī (further subdivisions could be retraced at ever more granular levels of ethnographic specificity). 2

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 he Precarity of Shia Visibility: Between T Hurting Oneself and Being Hurt ‘Ok! Now, very serious; I don’t want to see any smiles! Lots of grief and pain. Three, two, one, action … Cut!’ yelled the director for the 136th time, and the slightest sigh of frustration flowed through the plywood set of Hyderabad’s Old City erected on an open field around thirty kilometers outside of the city. We were in the midst of an action scene for a major Telugu blockbuster movie. Each take lasted only a couple of seconds and showed the film’s hero, famous ‘mega power star’ Ram Charan Teja, thrashing a villainous antagonist against the dramatic backdrop of a Shia Muharram procession, the most important event in the ritual calendar of Shias in Hyderabad. Hero and villain were flanked by a cordon of bare-chested Shia mourners (mātamdār) engaged in zanjīr mātam, a spectacular and highly contested form of ritual self-flagellation with scourges made of blades attached to a metal chain, while the whole shot was framed by a colorful cinematic imagination of ‘Muslim’ onlookers. Squeezed under a small arcade of a fake storefront in order to escape the midday sun, I was watching the scene together with a group of around twenty youngsters from the main Shia neighborhood in Hyderabad’s Old City. Dressed as Shia mourners, we were waiting for our scene; we were, it would turn out, waiting in vain. The previous day, my friend Ali3 had asked me if I wanted to come along to an educational event. He and some other youths from the neighborhood had been invited to perform a Shia mourning ritual for a group of students—or visitors, nobody knew exactly—in order to teach them about Shia religion. When we met the following day, rumor had it that we would be part of a documentary about different ritual practices of various religious communities in India. As more and more youngsters were gathering, however, it transpired that instead of a documentary, the two coaches provided for us would be taking us to a movie shoot of a commercial Telugu film. The shoot was already in full swing when the two crammed buses arrived at the bustling movie set. On entering the  Name changed.

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premises, we were earnestly warned against making any form of recording or photo, which would cost us the 500 rupees we had been promised as pay. A woman in charge of casting began splitting us into two groups by selecting the twenty tallest and most ‘light-skinned’ ones among us (me included) as the main group of mourners, while the rest was allocated to some or the other group of extras. After dressing up—or rather undressing—as ‘typical’ mātamdār with bare chest, white cotton pants splattered with fake blood, a black shawl wrapped around the waist, and thick surma (kohl) under our eyes, we began waiting. During the ten hours we spent at the set, we were led three times into plywood Hyderabad, only to be told after some time to continue waiting outside, as the current scene was taking more takes than expected. At around six o’clock in the evening, it had become apparent that our scene would not be shot that day. Despite being invited to return the next day, nobody was willing to do so. In fact, after the initial excitement of being part of a cinema  movie had died down, the group of ‘Old City boys’ became not only increasingly bored but also irritated and finally angry while wasting away the day. Initially, it only seemed a bit absurd to have two bus-loads of Shias from one of the most important centers of Shia culture in India transported to a movie set in order to have them observe one of their most sacred ritual practices being simulated by a number of ‘actors from Chennai,’ as my friends from the Old City sarcastically referred to the Telugu extras performing zanjīr mātam. The director’s repeated instructions to make serious faces and look grieved seemed to jar uneasily with the deep and distinctly visible scars that actual blades had left on the chests and backs of the Shia youths watching, half-naked and uncomfortable, from the sidelines. ‘Look how they stare at us,’ commented Ali during one of the times we were led onto the set, ‘it’s because we are the real Shias.’ By the end of the day, the mood had turned sour and the group of young Shias were outraged and offended; it had become evident that in a fight scene, the hero slashes his enemy to death with one of the blades used during zanjīr mātam. This, Ali explained, was entirely inappropriate, as these blades are not at all weapons and are never wielded against other people, least of all as murder instruments; they are objects used exclusively on one’s own body in a ritual context meant to commemorate,

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grieve, and participate in the acts of martyrdom through which Imam Hussain and his followers and family sacrificed themselves for the sake of Islam and a just society in the battle of Karbala in 680 CE. The young men felt offended by this misappropriation and were deeply worried about what the audience of Telugu cinema and ‘other religions’ would think about Shia religion when seeing that scene. After all, Shia religion is already famous—or rather infamous—for its spectacular rituals of public self-mortification that appear extreme and unsettling to many outsiders (including the majority of Sunni Muslims) and are subject to controversial debate regarding their Islamic legality among Twelver-Shias themselves (more on this below). I had initially interpreted the anger and outrage of my Shia interlocutors as a matter of authenticity and as a question of who had the right— or the knowledge, ability, and skill—to ‘correctly’ represent Shia religion in a popular mass medium, yet it seemed to point to a more fundamental problem of visibility. In fact, Ali and many others who refused to return the following day to the set were relieved that they were not given the ‘chance’ to represent themselves, as their inclusion in the scene would have made things worse. A contorted depiction of their ritual instrument in a Telugu movie was bad enough; but if the elders of their community ever saw them in such a film scene, they would be scandalized by the fact that their own youngsters were part of such nonsense, condoning and authenticating it, as it were, through the presence and visibility of their bodies. ‘They would kill us!’ Ali exclaimed. Feeling already humiliated and neglected throughout the day (‘They didn’t even provide tea for us,’ someone remarked bitterly, pointing out the felt lack of minimal signs of appreciation and courtesy), we were furthermore made to wait another two hours after we had gotten onto the buses that would take us home to the city. Apparently, someone had taken a selfie and we could not leave before all legal matters had been sorted out. The men who had organized our trip started scolding us, urging us to immediately delete any and all pictures we might have taken. They were disappointed at such reckless and embarrassing behavior, which would reflect very badly on the whole community; it took indeed a few days of negotiations to have the money we had been promised as pay finally reach the Old City.

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It is important to note that the hurt sentiments of the young Shia men were caused by a perceived mishandling of an artefact used in a ritual practice that has come to be iconic for but also contested among Shias, rather than any actual or explicit representation of the ritual as such; at the time of the shoot, we had known nothing about the film’s plot and its actual representation of Shia religion (the film’s title, Vinaya Vidheya Rama, and teaser were released only two  months later). What elicited anger was rather a perceived carelessness and insensitivity about what the ritual blades mean to Shias and what kind of image about Shia religion their misuse in a deadly fight scene could, potentially, evoke. In an inquiry into the concept of offensive pictures, Christoph Baumgartner (2018) follows philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in arguing that pictures that offend do so because they are perceived to violate an image about which people have come to ‘care’ in a way that incorporates those pictures into their very identity and sense of personhood (see also Mahmood 2009). Such cared-for images are not just pictures to which people relate as external objects, but which have become part of how people relate to themselves and their world; their power to offend is therefore not only a cognitive process but ‘touches’ the embodied self in a material and sensorial sense (Verrips 2018). In the case at hand, the careless cinematic use of ritual blades for self-flagellation as a casual murder weapon wielded against another gains its offensive touch precisely by transgressing and, in fact, inverting, a crucial limitation regarding the kinds of bodies those blades  may legitimately touch. In order to fully grasp the offensive implications of this inversion—and its casualness—it is necessary to place the practice of zanjīr mātam in its larger ritual, historical, and representational context in contemporary Hyderabad.

 hedding Blood: Pious Embodiment S and Precarious Representation The Hyderabadi Twelver-Shia annually commemorates the martyrium of Imam Hussain and his followers during a mourning period (‘azādārī) of 68  days, starting on the first day of the Islamic month of Muharram.

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Mātam is a central part of mourning practices and refers to public or private recitations of dirges accompanied by ritual crying and forms of self-mortification, ranging from rather soft rhythmic claps on the chest, to choreographed styles of intense two-handed chest-beating (sīnah-zanī) performed by male mourning associations (anjumān), to spectacular forms of “bloody” (khūnī) mātam with different kinds of knives and blades (Pinault 1992; Howarth 2005). The arguably most important and well-known ritual event in the Shia calendar is Ashura, the day of Imam Hussain’s martyrdom on 10th of Muharram, when a large procession attended by thousands of people, including Hindus and Sunnis, is organized through the streets of the main Shia quarters in Hyderabad’s historic Old City. This procession, which traditionally includes forms of zanjīr mātam, was re-enacted during the movie shoot. While the clerical establishment in post-revolutionary Iran has explicitly condemned and prohibited khūnī mātam as heterodox innovation (bid’ah), Shia authorities in Iraq and especially in South Asia tend to at least tolerate it as an expression of popular devotion with varying degrees of legal or scriptural legitimacy. Besides religious doctrines regarding the integrity of the body and the impurity of blood, a major argument raised against khūnī mātam concerns its potential to make Shia religion appear archaic, uncivilized, or fanatical to external observers, who may be unfamiliar with its theological, devotional, or historical foundations (see Pinault 2001: 29–56). These concerns are not entirely unfounded, as many of my (non-Shia) interlocutors in Hyderabad talk with a sort of recoiling fascination about ‘azādārī as that quite unfathomable thing that Shias do; however, many people know rather little about what is actually going on, besides the fact that, on the Day of Ashura, blood and tears will flow in the streets of the Old City for the sake of Imam Hussain. ‘Azādārī and especially khūnī mātam on Ashura have become emblematic for the social and temporal (‘archaic’) otherness of the Shias as a distinct community, yet they also constitute the most important trope for integrating them into the time-space of the nation. The striking aesthetics of Shia ritual provide the grounds for making Shias a maybe problematic but nonetheless distinctly recognizable—or rather displayable—part of India’s religious pluralism. Their specific history in South Asia furthermore locates them firmly within the discourse of India’s ‘composite culture’ as

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the historical foundation for the nation’s secular unity in diversity (Jones 2012). Especially in popular histories of Hyderabad, the ‘catholic’ nature of Muharram commemorations and the continuous patronage they have received by a diverse range of Shia, Sunni, and secular, that is, post-­ independence, governments are widely considered to be hallmarks of the City’s contribution to the supposedly intrinsic tolerance and secularism of India’s Indo-Persian composite culture. In academic research, as well as everyday discourse, communalist perceptions of ‘azādārī as an exclusively Shia event are often understood as a historical departure from its erstwhile cross-communal nature and appeal (Hyder 2006; Freitag 2007; Jones 2012). Among Shias, this registers in a pervasive temporal regime of nostalgia, which maps narratives of religious decadence onto the community’s socio-economic decline and minoritization in post-Partition India, as well as the material deterioration and ghettoization of the Old City, as the historical center of Shia social and ritual life (Mirza 2017). Many of my Shia interlocutors emphasize and indeed welcome the continuing participation of other religious communities in Ashura commemorations, which they perceive as testimony to the universal scope of the ethical model and spiritual power of the Imams and the Prophet’s family (ahl-e bait). Popular narratives around the battle of Karbala and Imam Husain’s martyrdom revolve around a moral paradigm of ‘ḥusaini ethics’ or ḥusainiyyat (Ruffle 2011: 5; see also Deeb 2009), whose gender and age-specific ideals of moral conduct encode values of sacrifice and steadfastness in the face of injustice and adversity. Precisely because the moral paradigm encoded by the battle of Karbala has been open to both revolutionary and quietist interpretations, it has been a powerful conceptual and moral resource for negotiating different forms of political behavior and, especially in South Asia, national belonging. In the context of Indian communalism, quietist interpretations of ḥusaini symbols of martyrdom as a form of self-sacrifice for the sake of community (rather than an incitement to revolt) have provided an apt aesthetic idiom for a depoliticized and inward-facing secular-sacred identity of Shia and Sunni Muslims alike (Freitag 2007). As one of the most spectacular and affectively charged forms of ‘azādārī, zanjīr mātam has become an overdetermined and unstable symbol, which

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conjoins diverging temporalities and indices of locality, as it negotiates a Shia minority identity that oscillates between otherness and belonging. Zanjīr mātam may be subject to anachronizing devaluations as irrational ‘archaism,’ which locates it in a religious and ritual time outside the ambit of modernity and nationalism. However, it can also be anchored in the historicity of the nation, insofar as it indexes the nostalgic past and precarious present of India’s composite culture. The localness of that culture, however, can be challenged within a Hindu nationalist framework, where its Indo-Persian origins evoke notions of foreignness and the specter of Muslims’ extraterritorial loyalties. This is further complicated by reformers within the Shia community, who orient themselves toward religious authorities in the Middle East, especially Iran, and oppose quietist interpretations of ḥusaini ethics as self-sacrifice. These reformers tend to align themselves with a larger (Sunni) reformist discourse and historicist notions of a ‘pure,’ original Islam (Mirza 2014). They contest the legitimacy of zanjīr mātam by interpreting it not as a sign of the archaism of Shia Islam but as a symptom of its syncretic contamination by an idolatrous and superstitious Hindu environment. Zanjīr mātam clearly demonstrates the precarity of the secular-sacred as a form of identity and citizenship for the Shia minority: as a spectacular sign of extraordinary pious commitment, which literally inscribes itself as scars into the surface of the body, it is a powerful way to embody a Shia identity that hovers uneasily between national belonging and otherness. The majority of Shias, ‘traditional’ as well as ‘reformist,’ are acutely aware of this precarity, which manifests most forcefully in a sort of anxiety around media representations of ‘azādārī in general and zanjīr mātam in particular. Most of my Shia interlocutors not only tolerated me as an outsider at their rituals but actively encouraged my participation and welcomed my interest in their community. At the same time, many a conversation started with a request to tell what, if anything, I actually knew about Shia religion, followed usually by an inquiry about what ‘gain’ (fā’idah) I, and more importantly my superiors and those who funded my research, hoped to get out of this project; ‘academic knowledge’ often seemed to be a not entirely satisfying or credible answer. Regardless, my insistence on wanting to learn and understand was favorably contrasted with a superficial curiosity in the sensational appearance

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of their rituals, which was often illustrated by stories about outsiders, especially documentary filmmakers, who simply come, record, and leave. There was, however, no general objection or sense of censure with regard to witnessing or making recordings of religious events. Even though it was made plain that it would take a lot of time and effort for me to even begin penetrating the spiritual and philosophical depths of Shia religion, it was nonetheless expected that I would be recording videos and taking photographs. My reluctance and perceived tardiness in doing so seemed curious to many people. Again, my answer that, in terms of technical quality, there was already plenty of well-produced documentation available—especially on the internet—seemed unsatisfactory. Despite the aforementioned discourse of nostalgia and religious decadence among Shias, my interlocutors also tend to report a drastic increase in ritual activity since at least the 2000s. This has been accompanied by continuously expanding private as well as commercial practices of visual and audiovisual mediations through local TV channels and especially social media. All large, public ‘azādārī events can be watched through multiple live streams on Youtube and Facebook, but also many organizers of smaller, private mourning gatherings hire people to record and document their rituals. Such media practices can be understood in reference to the important role of public ritual for collective self-assertions within the secular-sacred framework of Indian communalism but also with regard to an economy of spiritual merit and social prestige characteristic of a ritual life that depends largely on private patronage. However, I want to focus here on the fact that the simultaneous desirability and anxiety surrounding mediated representations of controversial ritual practices like zanjīr mātam turn out to be linked less to actual processes of consumption than to the larger social circumstances and conditions of production within a secular-­ sacred public. The images commissioned and produced by the Shia community are hardly distinguishable from those made by outsiders as far as their ‘content’ is concerned. More importantly, their open accessibility leaves them always vulnerable to being ‘de-contextualized’ and ‘re-­ contextualized’ (see Bauman and Briggs 1990) in uncontrollable, potentially adverse ways, once they circulate on the internet and in other media environments (like journalistic or anthropological texts). As Ali told me

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during the movie shoot: ‘Our religion is very famous… but, unfortunately, not in a good way.’ In the conclusion, I want to return to the shoot of Vinaya Vidheya Rama and further unpack what I mean by social conditions of production and how they regulate the affective impact of media images in relation to issues of agency and power.

Conclusion I argue that the outrage and hurt sentiment experienced by my Shia interlocutors during the movie shoot, as well as the more general anxiety surrounding mediations of ‘azādārī and zanjīr mātam, are tethered less to explicit messages and media texts than the current conditions of their production. Rajagopal’s concept of ‘Retail Hindutva’ (2001: 66) captures an important aspect of those conditions, namely the possibility of national belonging and political participation via the consumption of a commercialized aesthetics of Hindu religion refigured as the cultural foundation of the nation. At a fundamental level, this process of refiguring the nation has a gendered dimension, insofar as Hindu nationalist discourse has premised the wellbeing and ascendency of the nation on the ‘recuperation’ of Hindu masculinity, which in turn required an ‘expunging’ of a threatening Muslim Other through both actual and symbolic acts of violence (Hansen 1996: 138). Next to print media, television and cinema have been the foremost vehicles for the nationalist aestheticizing of a majoritarian Hindu identity by either marginalizing, excluding, or vilifying Muslim men in representations of the nation (for an overview of Muslim themes in Hindi cinema see Dwyer 2006a: 97–131). While film scholar Rachel Dwyer (2006b) cautions against conflating the predominance of Hindu practices in Hindi film with Hindutva ideology, especially in the absence of explicitly anti-Muslim texts, it is important to also pay attention to how Retail Hindutva’s ideological and affective force operates beyond the level of explicit media texts. Indian cinema’s relative resistance to overtly Hindu nationalist and anti-Muslim messages is often explained by a confluence of state censorship, the uncertain commercial viability of radical stances for a risky and capital-intensive enterprise like cinema, and the disproportionately large

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number of Muslims working in the film industry. However, the example of Vinaya Vidheya Rama suggests that Hindu majoritarianism does not necessarily operate by vilifying a Muslim Other; rather, it may ‘expunge’ his potentially threatening presence by reducing it to a ‘merely’ aesthetic background in the service of Hindu masculine power. Vinaya Vidheya Rama opened in cinemas in January 2019 during Sankranti, one of the most important Hindu festivals and holidays in Andhra Pradesh and thus a prime season for film releases. The film received overall crushing reviews, especially in the English press, for a weak and unimaginative story relishing in toxic masculinity: the plot revolves around a Hindu hero, Rama (Ram Charan), who single-handedly kills hordes of criminal goondas in extravagantly violent feats of martial prowess in order to protect his family from a terrifying Bihari crime lord, who has come in conflict with Rama’s eldest brother, an upright election commissioner. While the fight scene against the backdrop of Shia ritual made it into the trailer and constitutes a climactic moment just before the movie’s intermission, the Shia ritual itself is merely a backdrop and has no narrative significance whatsoever: it functions as an aesthetic device to heighten the dramatic impact of the over-the-top action sequence. Neither the main character wielding the ritual blades nor the, as far as narrative goes, expendable bodies on which they are put to use are marked in any perceptible sense as Shia. In the cinematic universe, Shia characters were not implicated in the ‘perversion’ of self-sacrifice into killing spree; they were arbitrarily introduced for the sole purpose, it seems, of providing a dramatic ambience and a “sensible” reason for a spectacular murder weapon to be at hand. It matters little that we did not know the plot at the time of the shoot because, as I suggested above, the hurt sentiment of the Shia youths was not caused by any explicit misrepresentation of their ritual but by the apparent carelessness with which the choreography of the fight scene tapped into the unstable, ambivalent, and controversial symbolism and affective force of zanjīr mātam. Ultimately, not only the ‘real’ Shias watching from the sidelines of the set but also their ‘fake’ cinematic avatars (‘actors from Chennai’) in ‘plywood Hyderabad’ were dispossessed of any form of representational agency—whether positive or negative— as they were reduced to a dramatic aesthetic surface in the service of a narrative agenda unconcerned with the predicaments of secular-sacred

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Shia identity. I argue that the main cause for offence was not really the evocation of a ‘bad image’ of Shia religion but a sort of ‘non-image.’ The fight scene evokes an almost ostentatious disregard and disinterested carelessness for Shia matters, as it decontextualizes, harnesses, and expropriates the aesthetics of a spectacular and precarious ritual performance of Shia masculinity as a dramatic ambience that enhances the virility and virtuous anger of the film’s Hindu hero (for the cinematic trope of virtuous anger in its relation to Hindutva ideology, see Rajamani 2016). This process of sovereign expropriation was condensed most pithily in the perversion of ritual blades into murder weapons. It was also mirrored in a diffuse sense of denigration and expendability, which the group of young Shias experienced throughout their stay at the movie set. The young men may have set out from the Old City with a sense that they were being invited because of their expertise and authenticity to perform mātam, but upon arriving on set, they were demoted rather abruptly from teaching others about Shia religion to being a mere background—something of which anybody who was ‘tall’ and ‘fair’ enough, including a white foreigner like myself, was apparently considered capable. When some of the youth started complaining about the problematic fight scene, they were told that they were free to leave any time (which would have been rather difficult, given that there was no public transport to and from the set). It became clear that their time, presence, and expertise—valued at 500 rupees per head—was expendable and, indeed, not that valuable after all; at the end of the day, it was made plain to us that the potential leak of one selfie of the set was worth more than all our time combined. What did have value, though, was the aesthetic effect of Shia symbolism—to the extent that it was included in the movie’s trailer and promotional material. The concept of the secular sacred captures a socio-political configuration where public and communal forms of religious identity become not only compatible with but foundational for belonging—or having value— in modern, secular nation-states. However, the seeming ‘compatibility’ of the secular and the sacred is undercut by the logic of majoritarian nationalism, which requires religious minorities to embody a religious identity that simultaneously becomes the principle of their exclusion from the nation. In this contribution, I approached this constitutive precarity in

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the context of a popular Telugu ‘mass film,’ where the visibility of a religious minority identity engenders its simultaneous erasure. In its phantasmal cinematic rendering, zanjīr mātam was divested from its core function as a symbol for the precarious, secular-sacred identity of Shia Muslims; it was consumed, as it were, by Retail Hindutva.

References Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bauman, R., & Briggs, C.  L. (1990). Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 59–88. Baumgartner, C. (2018). Is There Such a Thing as an ‘Offensive Picture’? In B.  Meyer, C.  Kruse, & A.  Korte (Eds.), Taking Offense: Religion, Art, and Visual Culture in Plural Configurations (pp.  317–339). Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Dasgupta, S. (2006). Gods in the Sacred Marketplace: Hindu Nationalism and the Return of the Aura in the Public Sphere. In B. Meyer & A. Moors (Eds.), Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (pp.  251–272). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Deeb, L. (2009). Emulating and/or Embodying the Ideal: The Gendering of Temporal Frameworks and Islamic Role Models in Shi’i Lebanon. American Ethnologist, 36(2), 242–257. Dwyer, R. (2006a). Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. London: Routledge. Dwyer, R. (2006b). The Saffron Screen? Hindu Nationalism and the Hindi Film. In B. Meyer & A. Moors (Eds.), Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (pp. 273–289). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Freitag, S. B. (1989). Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Freitag, S. B. (2007). South Asian Ways of Seeing, Muslim Ways of Knowing: The Indian Muslim Niche Market in Posters. Indian Economic and Social History Review, 44(3), 297–331.

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Hansen, T. B. (1996). Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Violence and the Exorcism of the Muslim ‘Other’. Critique of Anthropology, 16(2), 137–172. Hansen, T. B. (1999). The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Howarth, T. M. (2005). The Twelver Shî’a as a Muslim Minority in India: Pulpit of Tears. London, New York: Routledge. Hyder, S.  A. (2006). Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaffrelot, C. (2008). Hindu Nationalism and the (Not So Easy) art of Being Outraged: The Ram Setu Controversy. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2. https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.1372. Jalal, A. (2000). Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850. London, New York: Routledge. Jones, J. (2012). Shiʿa Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mahmood, S. (2009). Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide? In T.  Asad, J.  Butler, & S.  Mahmood (Eds.), Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (pp.  64–100). Berkeley, CA: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. Mahmood, S. (2016). Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mirza, S. (2014). Travelling Leaders and Connecting Print Cultures: Two Conceptions of Twelver Shi’i Reformism in the Indian Ocean. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 24(3), 455–475. Mirza, S. (2017). Lost Worlds: Perspectives of Decline among Shias of Hyderabad Old City. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 51(2), 221–248. Needham, A. D., & Rajan, R. S. (Eds.). (2007). The Crisis of Secularism in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pandey, G. (1992). The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pinault, D. (1992). The Shiites: Ritual and Popular Piety in a Muslim Community. London: Tauris. Pinault, D. (2001). Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rajagopal, A. (2001). Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Rajamani, I. (2016). Angry Young Men: Masculinity, Citizenship and Virtuous Emotions in Indian Cinema. PhD Thesis, Free University Berlin, Berlin. Ramaswamy, S. (2010). The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ruffle, K.  G. (2011). Gender, Sainthood, & Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Sherman, T. C. (2015). Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tejani, S. (2008). Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History 1890–1950. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Uberoi, P. (2002). ‘Unity in Diversity?’ Dilemmas of Nationhood in Indian Calendar Art. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 36(1/2), 191–232. Veer, P. T. van der. (1994). Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Verrips, J. (2018). A Brief Anatomy of Offensive Imagery. In B. Meyer, C. Kruse, & A. Korte (Eds.), Taking Offense: Religion, Art, and Visual Culture in Plural Configurations (pp. 284–316). Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Viswanath, R. (2010). Spiritual Slavery, Material Malaise: ‘Untouchables’ and Religious Neutrality in Colonial South India. Historical Research, 83(219), 124–145. Viswanath, R. (2016). Economies of Offense: Hatred, Speech, and Violence in India. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 84(2), 352–363.

5 Spatial Piety: Shia Religious Processions and the Politics of Contestation of Public Space in Northern Nigeria Murtala Ibrahim

Introduction A large throng of Shia men and women converged at Hussainiyyah site, a multipurpose sacred building, housing a mosque and a library, in the morning of 12 December 2015 in Zaria, Northern Nigeria. The purpose of the gathering was to perform the ritual of lowering the flag of Imam Hussein from the dome of Hussainiyyah and to raise the flag of Prophet Muhammad. As usual, before the ritual would commence, Shia guard volunteers (khurras) blocked the main road adjacent to the Hussainiyyah building. Somewhat later, the chief of army staff Lieutenant General Tukur Yusuf Burutai and his entourage stumbled on the roadblock on their way to attend a graduation ceremony of military recruits in the nearby military school. Some of the Lieutenant’s guard soldiers came out

This research is supported by the Dahlem Research School, Freie Universitaet Berlin.

M. Ibrahim (*) Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_5

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of their vehicles and asked the Shia khurras to open the road. When the khurras adamantly refused, the incident turned into a serious altercation that eventually escalated into a deadly two-day clash between the military and the gathered Shia. When the conflict ended, hundreds of Shia were killed, Hussainiyyah demolished, and Sheikh Zakzaky, the Nigerian leader of the Shia, wounded and incarcerated. According to the Premium Times, 11 April 2016, the Kaduna government declared that the 347 Shias killed by Nigerian troops had been given a secret mass burial. The flag of Imam Hussein originally had been flown on top of the shrine of Imam Hussein in the city of Karbala in Iraq. When the flag was brought down it was given to Sheikh Zakzaky by Shia clerics in Karbala in the early 2000s to be hoisted on the Hussainiyyah dome to sacralize the building. Every Muharram, the first month of the Islamic year, and the month in which Imam Hussein was killed, Zarian Shias hoist the flag on the Hussainiyyah after an elaborate ritual that includes parade and prayers. Each first month of Rabiul Awwalin, in which Prophet Muhammad was born, the flag of Imam Hussein will be replaced by the green flag of Prophet Muhammad. The 12 December 2015 clash occurred on the eve of the ritual of raising the flag of Prophet Muhammad. The excessive use of force by the military on the unarmed Shia that day and the refusal of the federal government to acknowledge the extra-­ judicial killing revealed the longstanding tension between the Shia community and the government in Nigeria. Moreover, despite the magnitude of the 12 December incident in terms of loss of lives, hardly any major Sunni leaders in the north condemned the massacre. The silence of Sunni majority on this event indicates the friction and hostility that exist between Sunni and Shia in the north. The bloodshed of that day is not an isolated incident but is an extreme example of the conflict and contestation that define Shia public practices in northern Nigeria and is indicative of the complicated Shia/Sunni/State public space contestations in the whole of Nigeria. Over the last decades, Shia public practices have become highly controversial, generating anxiety and sometimes elicit hostile backlashes from both the dominant Sunni public and state security forces. This chapter looks at Shia public practices, the so-called Ashura processions in particular. These sacred practices, performed in public space, provide the starting point of the problematic encounters between the Shias, the secular authorities, and the wider Muslim public. The conflicts

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surrounding the processions foreground, as I will argue, the relationship between the secular and the sacred. Moreover, the chapter examines how the Shia processions inscribe their presence in the urban environment and make their visibility threatening to what the Sunni consider to be the normal spatial order of northern Nigeria’s urban centers. A considerable body of literature has been published on the Sunni– Shia conflicts presently raging in the Middle East and South Asia. These studies (Allison 2007; Mashal 2014; Rabil 2014; Yusri 2010) document the historical, political, theological, and social flashpoints and trajectories that have placed Sunni and Shia on a collision course. However, remarkably few studies exist on the Shia in northern Nigeria. Most current studies tend to situate the Shia within the context of Islamic resurgence and political Islam in Nigeria and Africa (Amara 2014; Falola 1998; McCormack 2010). These studies, however, largely ignore the practices through which Shia religiosity takes shape in public space, not asking why these practices generate such strong controversies. This chapter is based on my long-term observations of Shia religious processions, as well as a number of qualitative studies conducted among Shia and Sunni leaders and lay followers in the city of Jos, northern Nigeria.1 I start by briefly presenting the historical background of the Shia faith and the development of the Ashura procession in northern Nigeria. Then I discuss how Ashura processions became the battleground between the Shia and the state authorities. Finally, I discuss how Ashura processions challenge the dominant Sunni majority in the region and the resulting politics and contestations of public space.

F rom Student Activist to Islamic Political Activist In the 1970s, Nigerian campuses were dominated by two movements: advocates of communism (the so-called comrades) and active members of the Muslim Students Society of Nigeria (MSSN). These two powerful groups competed with one another on the campuses, vying for the loyalty  The names of the interlocutors in this chapter are not their true names. I have used pseudonyms for confidentiality. 1

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of the students. During the height of students’ activism, the earlier mentioned Sheikh Zakzaky became an active member of the MSSN and steadily rose to the top leadership of the organization, with an appointment as Vice President (International Affairs) of the National Body of the MSSN in 1979.2 In the same year, the Iranian Islamic Revolution occurred, which saw the monarchy overthrown and replaced with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini. Zakzaky was deeply fascinated by this event and decided to initiate a struggle to replicate a similar Islamic revolution in Nigeria. Introducing Islamic political activism into the MSSN brought him into conflict with the university authorities, which ultimately resulted in the retraction of his degree after graduation. Zakzaky established the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) (or Muslim Brothers) in the early 1980s in order to coordinate the spreading of his revolutionary ideology. The IMN succeeded in attracting a considerable number of followers, particularly among urban young men and women. Reputedly, Zakzaky covertly converted to Shia Islam and gradually and incrementally inculcated Shia elements into the IMN.3 By 1994, the movement had completely metamorphosed into the Shia branch of Islam. Presently, Shia membership comprises a substantial number of youths, students, civil servants, and other lay followers. The national headquarters of the movement is located in Zaria city and the center of their activities is called Hussainiyyah, a sacred building, serving as a space for lectures, studying Shia sacred scriptures, seminars, pedagogy, pilgrimage, and parade training. Even though conversion of members of the IMN to Shia occurred within the domain of Islam itself, it still entails a radical change in religious affiliation, identity, and worldview, and a rupture from the past. What made this remarkable transformation of the religious identity of such a large number of people possible was the fact that Zakzaky gradually shaped the IMN structure in accordance with a Shia socio-­ religious orientation. Since the early 1980s, Zakzaky has introduced many Shia religious forms and practices, such as an emphasis on  Biography of Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky. 2011. https://www.islamicmovement.org/  His conversion to Shi’ism is shrouded in secrecy and there is no consensus as to the exact date of his transition from Sunni to Shia Islam. 2 3

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muzahara (processions or demonstrations) in public space, celebrating the birthdays of Ahlulbayt (members of the Prophet’s family through the descendants of Ali and Fatima), an emphasis on martyrdom, and orienting the IMN’s outlook toward Iran and seeing its system of government as the only legitimate form of Islamic state in the Muslim world. One of the central motifs in Zakzaky’s preachings is the issues of economic injustice and inequality in the country. This motif has played a significant role in rallying potential converts toward the cause of the IMN in the country.

Shia Public Processions (muzahara) One dimension that distinguishes Shia from other Muslims in northern Nigeria is their plethora of public spatial practices. These practices include processions and demonstrations in the urban centers, as well as a variety of religious activities in public space. The most important of the Shia public spatial rituals, processions and protests are the already-mentioned Ashura ritual procession, the day of commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein; the Arba’een procession, a religious observance that occurs fourty days after the day of Ashura; and the Quds Day demonstration, an annual event to express support for the Palestinians and oppose Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem. In addition, Shia perform public activities to mark the days of birth and death of all their twelve imams as well as that of Prophet Muhammad and his daughter Fatima. The most visible of these public activities take place five times per annum. These rituals/ processions/demonstrations account altogether for a tremendous presence in the public sphere because of their combination of frequency, spectacle, and blockade. The most important of Shia public spatial practices is the Ashura procession. The Ashura is the public procession ritual performed by Shia Muslims all over the world to commemorate the death of Hussein Ibn Ali, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, in Karbala on the tenth day of the Islamic month of Muharram.4 The Ashura procession in Nigeria is a  The antecedent to the battle of Karbala was the refusal of Hussein to give an oath of allegiance to Yazid bn Mu’awiya, the new caliph of the Umayyad dynasty. Hussein perceived Yazid as unrigh4

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recent religious spectacle that started not more than two decades ago. The origin of the procession in the country can be traced back to the Ashura preaching rallies, which used to be organized by Zakzaky in Zaria before the IMN metamorphosed into Shia Islam. These preaching rallies were part of Zakzaky’s strategy to gradually include Shia elements into IMN activities. According to one of my interlocutors, in the 1980s and early 1990s, every tenth of Muharram IMN followers from all over the country would travel to Zaria for the Ashura preaching rally, listening to the Sheikh preaching about injustice in the country and the need for resistance and sacrifice. My interlocutor told me that at that time they had no idea about Shia or Ashura rituals. When the IMN fully converted to Shia, the Ashura procession was introduced in Zaria as a national event. Shia members from all over the country converged in Zaria to participate. As time went by, other elements were introduced to the procession, such as the display of flags, a passion play, a parade, chest beating and songs. As the Shia population continued to grow in Northern Nigeria through both natural growth and proselytization, the processions became decentralized and are, at present, organized in various cities in the north. Ashura processions involve men, women, and children marching in the streets in long rows, clad in black attire. Shia khurras, dressed in khaki uniforms, are at the front, playing drums and holding black and red flags of Imam Hussein, leading the procession in a military-style parade. The procession is accompanied by loud chanting and the singing of highly emotional songs lamenting the tragedy of Karbala. Some participants carry oversized pictures of Ibrahim Zakzaky, Imam Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, as well as images of Imam Hussein. The images of Imam Hussein play a vital role in shaping, cultivating and directing the teous, immoral and, therefore, unfit to serve as the leader of the Muslim umma (society). The people of Kufa summoned Hussein and promised to support him against Yazid. However, Yazid instructed the governor of Kufa to use force to thwart Hussein’s rebellion and compel him to pledge allegiance to him. Hussein, his companions and other Ahlulbayt headed toward Kufa, but they were intercepted by the forces of Yazid in Karbala, in present day Iraq. Despite the courage and gallantry of Hussein and his companions in a battle that lasted throughout the day of Muharram 10, 61 AH, they were ultimately overwhelmed. Hussein was killed along with the majority of his companions. As the Shia community evolved and expanded, public rituals commemorating the death of Hussein developed and taking place in several Muslim countries.

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emotions of grief, focusing the attention of participants on the figure of the Imam, who is the center of worship of the Ashura ritual. Contrary to the strict Sunni aniconism observed in Northern Nigeria, which proscribes the use of images of the natural and supernatural world, and the interdiction of figurative representation, in Shia Islam images, and images of Hussein in particular, are the constitutive elements of piety. The Ashura procession is accompanied by an outpouring of emotion, lamentation and street drama (ta’aziya) reenacting the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in the battle of Karbala. The emotion generated in Ashura processions is not nationalistic but is rather conflated with sub-national and supra-national sentiments that link those taking part in the procession to the global Shia community. In other words, this emotion reinforces a distinct sense of both local and global Shia religious identity. I suggest to understand this reinforcement of a sense of communal identity in terms of an aesthetic formation, understood as ‘the convergence of processes of forming subjects and the making of communities—as social formations’ (Meyer 2009: 6). This perspective will help to see how some aspects of the Ashura performances such as special dress, the deployment of various images, emotional songs, and dramatic performance molds religious subjects and forges a sense of a distinctive community of believers and solidarity of belief. The simultaneity and synchronicity of the practices with other practitioners in different parts of the world help to generate a sense of being part of a global Shia community. My interlocutors regularly pointed out to me that the Ashura is not a local phenomenon but rather a global practice performed with other fellow Muslims all over the world.

The Secular-Sacred Encounter in Public Space Taking the cue from Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, the editors of this book question the idea that ‘the secular’ and ‘the sacred’ are separate categories, and instead adopt the notion of the ‘secular sacred’, which among other things focuses on the boundary work through which both categories are defined, contested, and re-made and reconnected in social and political practice. The editors also argue against the perception of the

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public sphere as a site where citizens of the secular state can meet on equal footing, regardless of their religious outlook. This ideal rests on a sharp bifurcation that consigns religion to the private sphere while the public sphere is assumed to be secular and neutral, and protected by the secular state. The authors argue that this assumption is untenable because religion continues to be present in the public sphere. According to Marian Burchardt (2015: 158), the public sphere is typically construed as discursive, disembodied, and abstract, while public space concerns the materiality of spaces and embodied forms of uses and practices that constitute and validate spaces as public. However, despite its accessibility, the right to use public space is often a contentious issue that presents opportunities for conflict between those who claim the space for their own use and those who feel they have been unjustly excluded (Neal 2010: 13–16). The Nigerian state officially promotes the notion of a secular public sphere which is neutral enough to accommodate a variety of social and religious expressions. The federal constitution guarantees freedom of assembly in public space.5 It is clear that the freedom to engage in public space on an equal footing is restricted to what the state and larger society accept as normal. Shia religious processions (sacred activities) in northern Nigeria are performed in public space, which is controlled by the secular authorities, a situation that results in the entanglement or overlapping of the secular and the sacred, which often degenerates into a conflict. State authorities insist that before any group conducts processions in public space, they must obtain permission from the police, who will assess the potential risk of the event. Shia Muslims, however, do not want to subject their sacred rituals to the approval of secular authorities which they regard as profane power. When I asked Muhammad Kabir (53 years old), a Shia leader in the city of Jos about the Shia’s refusal to seek permission from the police before their public performances, he responded as follows: ‘The Ashura procession is one of the most important Shia religious practices. Imagine  Section 38, subsection 1 of the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria stipulates: ‘Every person shall be entitled to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom (either alone or in community with others, and in public or private) to manifest and propagate his religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance’. 5

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we seek permission from the government and they said no, you are not permitted. What shall we do? Shall we forfeit one of our religious fundamentals?’ (Interview, 12 June 2018). The Shia’s refusal to request government permission hinges on their lack of recognition of the Nigerian secular government. The Nigerian Shia population has a strong political ideology that aims to transform the country into an Islamic theocracy. In the view of Shia leadership, as outlined in their teachings and preaching, politics is an integral part of the Islamic religion. Islam as a religion is incomplete without an Islamic state that will ensure the optimum implementation of shari’ah law, as well as ensuring pious and egalitarian socio-political order. According to this view, Islam cannot be restricted to the private sphere, since it is itself a comprehensive legal system that covers public life. Shia leadership frequently criticizes modern democracy, secularism, and unregulated capitalism. Zakzaky is nevertheless opposed to the introduction of shari’ah law in Northern Nigeria, arguing that shari’ah cannot function within the overarching framework of a secular constitution (Amara 2014). Zakzaky thus rallies his followers with the goal of achieving a total overhaul of the Nigerian political system, a system which the Shia perceive as unjust, corrupt, oppressive, and un-Islamic. The Ashura procession embodies this revolutionary political ideology of struggling against an oppressive political order. Thus, the procession has an underlying political undertone embedded in the binary notion of struggle between good and evil, oppressors and the oppressed. Imam Hussein’s martyrdom is seen as a sacrifice for the restoration of the true Islamic faith, righteousness, and authentic Islamic leadership. The procession certainly serves as a vehicle for harnessing revolutionary sentiments among the Shia, making the ritual both a religious and political activity. Shia leadership thereby symbolically associates the Nigerian leaders with Yazid bn Mu’awiya, the murderer of Imam Hussein. As 48-year-­ old businessman Habib Sule stated: This country is built on oppression and extortion of the masses. Imam Khomeini says ‘every day is Ashura and every land is Karbala.’ If someone challenges the oppressive regime, the Yazidawa [the rulers who follow the path of Yazid] will persecute them. The Hussein of West Africa is Sheikh

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Zakzaky, because he is the only person who is struggling to liberate the poor in this country and establish an Islamic government (Interview 2 June 2018).

In this vein, the Ashura is practiced as a commemoration of the death of Imam Hussein and a demonstration of struggle against the secular and oppressive regime. As Cornell and Kamran maintain on Ashura rituals in general, ‘the core of the symbolism of Ashura is the moral dichotomy between worldly injustice and corruption on the one hand and God-­ centred justice on the other’ (2007: 111–112). Thus, the Ashura and other processions are political statements, directed to the Nigerian government, and as a result, the Nigerian government perceives Shia public processions as a form of rebellion against the state. This revolutionary clamor has put the Shia at loggerheads with state authorities.

 onspicuous Visibility of Shia Processions C and Hostile Backlash from the Sunni Majority While on the one hand the Ashura procession challenges the secularity and authority of the state, on the other it challenges the position of the hegemonic Sunni majority by entrenching Shia visibility in public space. Shia processions contain configurations of visually stimulating elements designed to express inner sorrow as well as to appeal to the spectators. The spectators in this case are Sunni Muslims drawn to the Ashura by its elements of theatricality. One of the important features of Shia public processions is the blockades of the public roads which add to their visibility and lengthen their presence in public space. One of my Sunni interlocutors stated as follows: One day in September 2017, I was driving to go to my shop in Laranto market when I found myself trapped in a long traffic jam at Bauchi Road, Jos. I immediately realized that the cause of the traffic jam was a gigantic crowd of Shia performing Ashura mourning ceremony. An endless row of men, women and children in black dress blocked the right side of the road forcing all the motorists to use one side of the road, which resulted in

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g­ ridlock. I was so exasperated because I was in a hurry but at the same time, I could not take my eyes off the fascinating performance of the events (Interview 11 June 2018).

Often motorists and pedestrians are forced to become spectators when they are caught in the traffic jams or blockages of public roads due to the sheer size of the processions. Furthermore, people often become enthralled by the performance, while at the same time judging it to be a wrong expression of religiosity. People also express anger and frustration about Shia blockading public roads, causing traffic jams and interrupting daily activities with their public processions. Despite the fact that the large size of the participants of Shia processions might naturally cause disruption to the free flow of traffic and people, Shia also have another strategy of creating opportunities to preach to Sunni and inform them about their doctrines. One of my Shia interlocutors stated, ‘We distribute pamphlets about the significance of Ashura and sacrifice of Imam Hussein to the Sunnis during processions and talk to people who ask questions regarding our activities’. In this vein road blockage is a means of da’wa or propagating Shia ideology. Many Sunni perceive Shia processions in this light and one of the Salafi leaders told me that, ‘Ashura and other Shia processions are a clever ploy to attract and convert Sunni to the Shia form of Islam’. Moreover, blockade of public roads enhances the performative element of the processions especially because Ashura involves street drama re-enacting the historical circumstances that led to the battle of Karbala. Shia public processions are embodied religious performances organizing human bodies for collective public ritual. Increasingly, scholars examine embodied religious practices through a performative lens (Hollywood 2002), which means taking lived religious practices seriously. Also, Chambers et al. propose a performative, rather than normative, conception of religion. They affirm that religion ‘is not (just) a set of ethical, ontological or theological assertions, but a dynamic, lived, and fluidly embodied set of actions, practices, gestures and speech acts at specific points in time and space’ (2013: 1–2). A performative approach with regard to Shia public processions highlights a situation where religious doctrines and norms become enmeshed in spatial ritual. The

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performative aspects of the processions generally center on their spectacular nature with its elements of theatricality. The regular and conspicuous Shia public processions, coupled with the Sunni perception of the Shia as a heretic sect, make their public visibility threatening to the perceived normalized spatial configuration of the urban environment. The established spatial order in Northern Nigeria is to some extent tolerated and accepted by Sunni Muslims, despite the fact that it is characterized by what Doreen Massey (2005) has described as a multiplicity and simultaneity of space, which implies the coexistence of diversity (including Christians) in the environment. Nevertheless, the craving for spatial homogeneity is captured by the comment of the Emir of Kano, Sunusi Lamido Sunusi, in the aftermath of the earlier mentioned clash between the Shia and the army on 12 December 2015: ‘Northern Nigeria is a Sunni territory; therefore, Shia have no place in it’.6 In the same period the Kaduna state governor also declared a ban on Shia Muslims in the state and prohibited their public activities.7 A 67-year-old Sunni imam of a small mosque in Jos remarked: Shia is a great threat facing the Muslims of this country. They are very deceptive and they are against peace. The performance of the Ashura is pure propaganda and a strategy to attract the attention of Ahlul Sunna in order to convert them to Shia under the pretext of sympathizing with Hussein (Interview 11 June 2018).

In discussing similar practices of blocking public space during crusades by Pentecostals and during Friday prayers by Muslims in Nigeria, Brian Larkin argues: ‘By taking over space one asserts presence and thus, potentially, engages in a hostile act of power. But at the same time this acts as spectacle, a mode of publicity designed to attract new adherents’ (2016: 24). Sabrina Mervin corroborates this, stating that ‘More than ever, these rituals enable the Shia to reaffirm their presence and their identity, not always without a clash’ (2014: 507). Shia public processions can certainly  This comment of the Emir was recorded and circulated via WhatsApp messenger and other social media platforms throughout Northern Nigeria. 7  ‘Kaduna bans Nigeria’s foremost Shiite group, IMN.’ Premium Times, 7 October 2016, Mohammed Lere. 6

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be placed in the context of presence making and the asserting of power and publicity in public space. Sunni criticism and hostility toward the Shia resist the latter’s presence in their midst. This politics of contestation of space attempts to exclude the Shia from the public domain in order to minimize their visibility, hence their presence. Conversely, the Shia challenge these stands by continually staging public performances, proclaiming that the space belongs to God and therefore they have a right to engage in public processions. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the conspicuous visibility of Shia processions in urban centers places them continuously in the limelight. As a result, the Shia attract constant attention, particularly from Islamic reformists such as the Salafis and Izala, who attacks the Shia preachings and accuses them of heresy. Anger and anxiety toward the Shia reached boiling point and exploded into violence during the Ashura of 2016, when Sunni mobs attacked Shias throughout the north. In Jos, the governor of Plateau State had in fact declared a ban on Shia processions. On 11 October 2016, the day of the Ashura, Shia leaders nevertheless decided to defy the ban and gathered en mass at their markaz (center) in the Unguwar Rogo area to commence the procession. State security forces invaded the center in order to disperse them. The event escalated when Sunni youths joined the security forces and violently attacked Shia members. My Shia interlocutor Lawal Ibrahim, a 45-year-old businessman, narrated his experience to me: I was at the Katako area when my wife called me that she was under attack. I quickly headed home. I saw a mob destroying our markaz, which is close to my house, under the watch of soldiers and police. As I was knocking at the door, calling my wife and children in order to take them to safety, I overheard somebody from the mob saying gawani dan Shi’a nan [here is another Shia]. Then a large number of people rushed toward me. That was all I could remember. Next, I woke up in a police cell with bruises and blood all over my body. I saw a number of other brothers [Shia members] in the cell. That was how our ordeal began and we spent three months in prison for the so-called crime of illegal assembly (Interview 11 December 2017).

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Similar incidents occurred in Kaduna, Sokoto, Katsina, Bauchi, and several other cities, where Sunni youths assaulted Shias during processions, razed their mosques and desecrated sacred objects such as flags. Since the violent encounter between the Shia and the military on 12 December 2015, the Shia continue to experience intensified discrimination in the wider society and persecution from the state. The Shia have remained steadfast and perceive the suffering and persecution as phenomena that shape their religious experience and identity. Whenever I asked my interlocutors about the issue of suffering, their immediate response was that the path of Shia is one of suffering, and anyone who chooses this path must be prepared to endure persecution. They highlighted the fact that most of their twelve imams have been persecuted and martyred by the governments of their time. The Shia are of the view that they are the bearers of the true light of Islam and that their persecutors are motivated to quench this light. Notwithstanding this Shia coping mechanism for dealing with suffering through the logic of their religious worldview, they have nevertheless begun to claim their rights through the modern legal system, such as by taking their case to court, documenting and publicizing their plight through human rights organizations, and engaging in peaceful public protests. The Shia clashes with the security forces during public processions raise the issue of human rights in the Nigerian polity. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and vocal activists such as Femi Falana seize every moment of every clash between the Shia and the police to advance the debate and discourse concerning human rights violations carried out by the Nigerian state. These groups also criticize the Nigerian government for continuing to detain Zakzaky in defiance of the court order to release him.8 While the Shia challenge the state authorities through legal means concerning their infringed rights, they also question the hegemonic claims of the Sunni majority in the public sphere. Moreover, these new developments have reshaped the group’s outlook and changed their  On 2 December 2016, the Federal High Court in Abuja ruled that El Zakzaky and Malama Zeenah Ibraheem should be released within 45 days. The court described their detention, which began in December 2015, as illegal and unconstitutional (Amnesty International 16 January 2017). 8

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attitude toward some secular institutions such as the Nigerian legal system, from outright rejection to some form of accommodation. The Shia view accommodation of some secular institutions as dharura. In the Islamic law dharura is the juridical concept of ‘necessity’ that allows the Muslim, under the compulsion of necessity, to do things which would otherwise be prohibited (haram) until that condition of necessity is relieved.

Conclusion This study deals with how Shia religious minorities exteriorize some religious activities beyond the confine of their places of worship into the public realm. The resistance of the Sunni majority to Shia processions and the Nigerian government’s attempts to ban these from public space indicate that certain forms of religious visibility are privileged over others. Indeed, Sunni mosques and churches are present in almost every corner of public space and emanate a constant audible and visual presence. Different religious groups in pluralistic urban centers present their manifold worldviews and inscribe their presence in public space. The Sunni Muslim and Christian domination of Nigerian public space, flourishing under the banner of the neutrality of the public sphere raise questions concerning the place of religious minorities. The presence of religious minority groups in public space adds to the plurality of urban centers, transforming these into a contested ground where diverging forms of religious expression conflate, conflict and accommodate one another. Contested public space has indeed become a site where the political sphere relates to the religious sphere and vice versa, which results in these spheres becoming either explicitly or implicitly entangled. This entanglement has repercussions on the issue of secularism, the notion of secular public space, and even on national politics. Moreover, the Ashura procession is an affective practice because it is a mourning ritual that is saturated with an outpouring of emotion. It can be argued that Ashura processions temporarily take over public space and thus force non-Shia or secular others to participate in these affective religious practices, in turn evoking highly emotional responses. These

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interventions in public space can be at loggerheads with the secular. In other words, they contest the boundaries between the secular and the religious on which the modern Nigerian state is based. These entanglements corroborate the editorial of this book, where the authors interrogate the framing of the public sphere as secular, a perception which sharply bifurcates between the public and the religious realm, relegating the latter to the private sphere. It is apparent that the notion of the secular public sphere hardly stands the increasing public visibility of religion such as exemplified the Shia public processions. The issue of public visibility of religion, particularly that of religious minorities, often raises thorny debates and controversies in the national politics of many countries around the globe. Depending on the local context, the notion of secularism is called upon to either oppose the public visibility of religious minority or to tolerate it. However, in the case of Nigeria, the controversies associated with the visibility of the Shia minority often degenerate into violent conflicts, which put the nation at peril.

References Allison, B.  H. (2007). A New Layer to a Complex Problem. SAIS Review of International Affairs, 27(1), 181–184. Amara, B. R. (2014). We Introduced Shari’ah: The Izala Movement in Nigeria. In J. A. Chesworth & F. Kogelmann (Eds.), Shari’ah in Africa Today: Reactions and Responses (pp. 213–215). Leiden: Brill. Burchardt, M. (2015). Should Public Space be Secular? In S. Sinn (Ed.), Religious Plurality and the Public Space Joint Christian–Muslim Theological Reflections (pp. 155–167). Leipzig: German National Library. Chambers, C.  M., du Toit, S.  W., & Edelman, J. (2013). Introduction: The Public Problem of Religious Doings. In J.  Edelman, C.  M. Chambers, & S. W. du Toit (Eds.), Performing Religion in Public (pp. 1–24). Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cornell, V. J., & Aghaie, K. S. (2007). The Passion of Ashura in Shi’ite Islam. In V. J. Cornell (Ed.), Voices of Islam: Voices of the Spirit (Vol. II, pp. 111–124). Westport, CT: Praeger. Falola, T. (1998). Violence in Nigeria: The Crises of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

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Hollywood, A. (2002). Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization. History of Religions, 42(2), 93–115. Larkin, B. (2016). Entangled Religions: Response to J.D.Y.  Peel. Africa, 86(4), 1–7. Mashal, S. (2014). Notes from the Margins: Shi’a Political Theology in Contemporary Pakistan. Journal of Shi’a Islamic Studies, 7(1), 65–97. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage Publications. McCormack, D. (2010). Nigeria. In B.  M. Rubin (Ed.), Guide to Islamist Movements II (pp. 5–21). New York: M.E Sharpe Inc.. Mervin, S. (2014). Ashūrāʾ Rituals, Identity and Politics: A Comparative Approach (Lebanon and India). In F. Daftary & G. Miskinzoda (Eds.), The Study of Shi’i Islam (pp. 9–26). London: I.B. Tauris Publishers. Meyer, B. (2009). Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms and Styles of Binding. In B.  Meyer (Ed.), Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses (pp. 1–30). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Neal, P. Z. (2010). Locating Public Space. In A. M. Orum & P. Z. Neal (Eds.), Common Ground? Readings and Reflections on Public Space. London, New York: Routledge. Rabil, R.  G. (2014). Salafism in Lebanon: From Apoliticism to Transnational Jihadism. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Yusri, H. (2010). The Rise of Politicized Shi’ite Religiosity and the Territorial State in Iraq and Lebanon. The Middle East Journal, 64(4), 521–541.

6 Samba Struggles: Carnaval Parades, Race and Religious Nationalism in Brazil Martijn Oosterbaan and Adriano Santos Godoy

Introduction In 2015, the creative director of the samba school (Escola de Samba) Unidos de Vila Maria in São Paulo, Brazil, approached Adriano Godoy, one of the two authors of this chapter. The director briefly explained that Unidos da Vila Maria had just received the approval from the Catholic Church in Brazil to develop a televised carnaval parade dedicated entirely to Brazil’s national Catholic patron saint Our Lady Aparecida, and now he was looking for anthropological literature that could help him to develop the parade, which was scheduled to take place in 2017. He had found Godoy’s master’s thesis (2015) on the devotion of Our Lady

M. Oosterbaan (*) Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] A. S. Godoy University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_6

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Aparecida and therefore was hoping to meet him in person to reflect on the ways in which the Catholic devotion to Virgin Mary is constituted in Brazil. While extremely honored, Adriano was also very surprised as this was the first time in Brazilian history that the Roman Catholic Church of Brazil sanctioned a carnaval parade of a major samba school. What to make of this collaboration and why was it occurring now? As we will argue in this chapter, the parade dedicated to Our Lady Aparecida should be seen as one in a row of remarkable carnaval parades held in the past ten years in Brazil. In these years, different carnaval organizations throughout Brazil organized carnaval parades that explicitly foregrounded a particular religious tradition—Catholic and evangelical—and explicitly identified it as connected to a religious institution and practice. The foregrounding of a particular religious tradition in carnaval parades is remarkable because it signals a break with a long-lasting custom to produce carnaval parades that syncretically fuse Catholic and Afro-Brazilian elements as national heritage and as popular culture, while downplaying the explicit role of religious institutions, practices and doctrines and leaving intact the image that Brazil is by and large a Catholic country. This religious-national configuration, expressed amongst others in carnaval parades, has come under attack by different parties in the last decades, not in the least by the evangelical and born-again Christian movements that have grown substantially in Brazil in the past thirty years. In this period, Christian evangelical movements have progressively become part of the political landscape of the country (Almeida and Barbosa 2019). In neighborhoods across the land, evangelical pastors have risen as community leaders and during the last three democratic elections of Brazil many evangelical candidates were elected as representatives in municipal, state and federal governments. Brazilian evangelical churches have become very visible in the public domain. Especially the globally operating Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD)1 stands out as an example of the evangelical churches that have become very visible in Brazil. In the past decades, the IURD has built many huge ‘cathedrals’ throughout Brazil and its leader owns one of the six national public  In English speaking countries known as ‘Universal Church of the Kingdom of God’.

1

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television broadcast networks, Rede Record that serves as an important channel of evangelical communication. Public discussions regarding the relation between politics, national culture and religion have intensified as evangelical groups implicitly and explicitly critique historical connections between national culture, Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian religions. An influential moment was the public desecration of Our Lady Aparecida in 1995 when an IURD pastor willfully damaged a plaster statue of Aparecida during a television broadcast. Several authors have argued that this ‘kicking of the saint’ incident was an attack on the cultural hegemony of Catholicism in Brazil (Almeida 2007; Birman and Lehmann 1999). Besides the particular conflicts between the IURD and the Catholic Church, a number of evangelical organizations throughout Brazil have openly criticized particular national traditions, such as the music genre samba, the popular festivities related to carnaval and a host of Afro-Brazilian religious representations and practices that are considered typical of Brazilian society. Instead of portraying these practices and representations as the essence of ‘Brazilianness’ (Brasilidade), prominent evangelical organizations have re-identified them as spiritually malevolent and they have openly attacked Afro-­ Brazilian religious groups. Meanwhile, evangelical groups throughout the country have started to incorporate certain typical Brazilian practices by ridding them of their Afro-Brazilian and/or Catholic elements making them fit for evangelical consumption (see also Reinhardt 2018). For example, while historically many evangelical groups turned their back on the carnaval festivities altogether, in the past decades evangelical groups have started to celebrate carnaval gospel during the national carnaval celebrations. In this chapter, we argue that the evangelical carnaval parades we describe display the desire of evangelical organizations to reform carnaval parades so that evangelical groups can also partake in carnaval traditions and inscribe themselves in representations of the nation, and we argue that the selected samba school parades we describe demonstrate the aspiration of Roman Catholic and Afro-Brazilian organizations to push back the evangelical encroachment and defend their identity as privileged partners of the nation. Our overarching argument is that while Brazilians generally consider carnaval a ‘secular sacred’ national heritage, several religious organizations strive to re-religionize carnaval.

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To elucidate our argument, we will first briefly analyze the historical religious-national configuration and explain that the concepts religion, customs and laicidade were important in framing carnaval as a syncretic, hybrid phenomenon, while still pushing the image that Brazil is essentially a Catholic country. Then we will explain the overlaps and differences between televised parades that take place in special arenas (sambódromos) and street carnaval parades (blocos). After that we will give several examples of carnaval parades—evangelical, Catholic and Afro-­ Brazilian—to show how religion is currently foregrounded and what kind of struggles result from these efforts. Our analysis of these parades shows that the recent interests of religious institutions in popular carnaval traditions lead to new controversies about things and practices that should be denoted as culture and as religion.

Carnaval, Religion and the Nation-State Even though many Brazilians consider the constitutional separations between state and religious institutions rightful, it would be wrong to depict the Brazilian public sphere as inherently secular. Many of the common public manifestations and practices in Brazil present religious elements, yet many of these have become labeled as (national) culture instead of religion. Distinctions between these categories had and still have governmental reasons and effects. Eminent Brazilian scholars such as Paula Montero (2015), Patricia Birman (2003), Joanildo Burity (2011) and Emerson Giumbelli (2014) have shown how the categories religião (religion) and laicidade (secularity) played decisive roles in the restructuring of the governmental roles of the state and the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil. At the birth of the Brazilian republic in 1889, when the political separation of church and state was introduced, the Brazilian Catholic Church strategically conformed with the demands of the Brazilian state-­ in-­transformation so that it could define itself as a flexible partner in several of the governmental projects. Around the same time, Candomblé and other Afro-Brazilian religious practices were presented as backward ‘customs’ instead of ‘religious’ practices, which barred the legal protection of such practices according to the new legislation. Furthermore, despite

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the liberal constitution of the late nineteenth century—which granted non-Catholic religions more freedom—dominant identifications of Afro-­ Brazilian practices as fetiçaria (sorcery) also denied these practices the protection the law otherwise would have granted them (Giumbelli 2014). For a long time, Brazil was considered one of the most Catholic countries in the world (Birman and Leite 2000). During the republican, dictatorial and democratic periods in Brazil history, Roman Catholicism was tightly connected to national projects in such a way that its symbols and rites marked much of public life (Montes 1998; Sanchis 2001). Many other religious practices could be encountered in Brazil but, on the whole, Roman Catholicism acted as the leading frame in which these religions appeared (Berkenbrock 1998). In contrast to the disguised appearances of Afro-Brazilian deities, Catholic icons, statues and practices were firmly present in many of Rio de Janeiro’s public spaces (Giumbelli 2014). Governmental changes at the turn of the twentieth century enforced the description of ‘customs’ of urban, black populations as typical of Brazilian national culture (Fry 1982; Montes 1998; Oliven 1984; Sansi 2007; Vianna 1999). As a result, carnaval parades and samba-enredo are commonly represented as defining cultural practices of Brazil (Cavalcanti 2015; Damatta 1991; Pravaz 2008; Sheriff 1999; Menezes and Bártolo 2019). Such representations were and are characterized by racial politics and class struggles. As Robin Sheriff (1999: 14) has put it: ‘It was particularly during and after the 1930s that samba and the carioca carnaval [sic] became simultaneously identified both with images of an authenticating “blackness” (or even “Africanness”) and with those of the uniquely hybrid, “mixed” national culture of Brazil.’ As a result of this constellation, samba-enredo—the music of carnaval parades—is part of an embodied and discursive field of collective identifications in a country that struggles with social inequalities intertwined with class and racial categories. Samba music is important for people’s sense of history, ancestry and collectivity and popular accounts of samba are regularly infused with religious tropes and experiences.2  We unfortunately do not have the space to discuss the historical cross-fertilizations between religious traditions, popular festivities and imaginations of the nation but many people have described eloquently the complex articulations between popular and elite cultures in particular periods of the nation building project (Vianna 1999; Cavalcanti 2015; Schwarcz and Starling 2018). 2

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Samba music is a genre with many sub-styles and in relation to carnaval, we are specifically writing about samba-enredo, a style of samba that is defined by collective singing, accompanied by the sound of a cavaquinho (string instrument) and a large percussion band (bateria) that can be considered the motor of many parades in Brazil. While the majority of samba-enredo parades displays musical and performative commonalities, the context of the parades may vary significantly. Several Brazilian cities have so-called sambódromos; large samba arenas where samba schools compete. During the competitions, each samba school presents its own parade, organized around a specific theme. In general, the parades of the large samba schools in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are broadcast live by the highly popular television channel TV Globo, while they are evaluated by an appointed commission of experts who judge the performances. Simultaneously, journalists, public figures and specialists comment on the parades, stating their opinions on television. Besides the sambódromo parades, there are also many carnaval street parades (blocos) throughout the country. These parades generally do not enter in formal competition but attract crowds that watch the parades or dance along with them as they move through the streets. While blocos are generally not broadcast on national television, new (social) media nowadays make possible the widespread divulgation of street carnaval parades.

Evangelical Parades For a long time, evangelical groups in Brazil portrayed carnaval as dangerous and immoral. Generally, evangelical churches organize(d) so-­ called retiros: camps that take place outside the city, far removed from the street parades and sambódromo competitions. Besides their conviction that carnaval festivities enhance adultery, substance abuse and violence, many evangelical communities also believe that carnaval traditions reproduce Afro-Brazilian religious ideas and practices that are considered demonic. For example, according to many Pentecostal and born-again Christians in Brazil, samba-enredo music is inherently polluted because the rhythms of samba-enredo stem from the rhythms of the candomblé rituals, performed in terreiros (Afro-Brazilian temples).

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Nevertheless, in the past decades, several evangelical groups and churches in the country have started to produce Christian samba (samba gospel) and carnaval gospel. In this chapter, we will highlight two churches that have become very active: the Projeto Vida Nova from Rio de Janeiro and the Bola de Neve Church from São Paulo.3 Bola de Neve Church is a relatively young neo-Pentecostal church that has grown substantially in the past decade and attracts young middle-class Brazilians. Their pulpits generally have the form of a surfboard and their style of worship aims to connect with mainstream youth culture in Brazil. Bola de Neve Church has increased their evangelical carnaval performances substantially in the past years. Since 2017, the church calls its carnaval street parade: Batucada Abençoada (Blessed Beats). This street parade can best be described as a translocal phenomenon since branches of the church located in different cities practice the same samba rhythms and lyrics independently throughout Brazil so they can perform collectively in one particular place. During the carnaval of 2018, for example, the Batucada Abençoada brought together seven hundred percussionists in Rio de Janeiro to perform at the beach and in the favela Rocinha. Bola de Neve makes ample use of social media and records and shares carnaval rehearsals and performances on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.4 Though the size of the Bola de Neve Church parade was exceptional in comparison to other evangelical parades, such parades had been organized in Rio de Janeiro before. Projeto Vida Nova, a neo-Pentecostal church, has been organizing carnaval parades yearly since the end of the 1980s. Each year, the parades of Projeto Vida Nova draw together members from different congregations in the city to perform and to witness the parade, to hear and to sing the samba-enredo, and to evangelize while the parade takes places. One of the recurring wings of the parade consists of costumed members who theatrically perform the battle between the devil and God’s angels who eventually liberate the captives that immersed themselves in the carnaval (Oosterbaan 2017).  Other churches that produce carnaval gospel can be found in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia (Oosterbaan, forthcoming). 4   See, for example, a YouTube clip of the 2018 parade: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=J8MRBrl4RuA 3

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Neither Projeto Vida Nova nor the Bola de Neve Church organizes parades at a sambódromo but their street parades do show striking resemblances with the parades at the sambódromo. As common in so-called worldly parades, the parades of the two evangelical churches also have a percussion section (bateria) that produces a thunderous and joyful atmosphere. In contrast to the convictions of members of several other evangelical churches in Brazil, these two churches believe that the samba-enredo music is not inherently connected to Afro-Brazilian religious practice and power. According to Projeto Vida Nova and the Bola de Neve Church, all music originally belonged to God, but the devil stole particular music styles and rhythms and made them available for hazardous spiritual traditions and entities. According to the churches, it is not the rhythm that makes a song demonic but the lyrics. The rhythms can thus be employed by Christians as long as the lyrics are godly (see Oosterbaan 2017). Besides the samba-enredo music, there are also other commonalities between these two evangelical parades and their worldly counterparts. As in worldly parades, the evangelical parades are symbolically led by a mestre-­sala and a porta-bandeira. These figures form a couple dressed in gala costumes that dance in front of the percussion section of a parade. One generally encounters such a couple at carnaval parades throughout Brazil and its presence is one of the markers of an ‘authentic’ carnaval parade. The last commonality we want to mention concerns the clothing that is visible at carnaval parades in Brazil. Many of the performers of the Batucada Abençoada were clothed in so-called abadás. An abadá is a sleeveless shirt with a Yoruba origin. Nonetheless, in contrast with the worldly version, Bola de Neve Church calls these shirts aba Deus. In Portuguese, aba could be translated as a piece of clothing that covers and protects, an apron of sorts, and Deus means God. We regard the evangelical appropriation of samba-enredo music and carnaval clothing as attempts to uncouple Afro-Brazilian religious traditions from Brazil’s carnaval. Removing Afro-Brazilian religious connotations from popular carnaval styles in Brazil not only allows evangelical groups to partake in street carnaval and evangelize in the city during the carnaval period, it also allows these churches to breach a popular

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socio-cultural constellation in which national Brazilian practices such as carnaval are described as having Afro-Brazilian religious roots. This stands in striking contrast to the efforts of other groups that struggle to emphasize the African religious elements of Brazilian carnaval (see also Armstrong 2010), yet displays commonalities with the parade sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil.

A Roman Catholic Parade The collaboration between the Roman Catholic Church and the samba school Unidos de Vila Maria in São Paulo in 2017—which we described briefly in our introduction—should be seen as historic. During the live broadcast, when the parade was about to enter the sambódromo, a TV Globo commentator covering the parades exclaimed that he was surprised by the reactions they received from the audience. Two priests, two Catholic dioceses communities and Franciscan monks had written TV Globo to express that they were very excited to watch the parade. A second commentator explained why they had received these unusual messages from the Roman Catholic clergy: ‘We are about to see a parade without bikinis or religious syncretism. The Catholic Church has supervised this specific samba school and demanded specific modifications to this parade.’ Never before had the church formally worked together with a samba school or given its formal blessing to a carnaval parade. The unique chance to do so for the first time was possible because 2017 marked the 300-year anniversary of the miraculous appearance of Our Lady Aparecida, the Catholic patroness saint of Brazil. Aparecida is a small statue of Virgin Mary that was found in the Paraiba River in 1717 by three poor fishermen from the state of São Paulo. They had been on the water for a long time, without catching any fish but after they found the miraculous statue, their fishing expedition turned into an astonishing success, which later was considered the first of Our Lady’s many miracles.

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The Catholic Church5 considers Our Lady Aparecida a black Virgin Mary due to the dark color of her terracotta statue, but for a considerable period she was represented as having white skin. According to the historian Lourival dos Santos (2013), she started to be represented as black in the late nineteenth century at the end of the Brazilian Empire and the beginning of the first Republic. In response to the secularization of the Brazilian state, the Catholic Church made much efforts to transform Our Lady Aparecida into the prime symbol of the nation, emphasizing her blackness and giving her titles such as ‘patroness of the Brazilian republic’ in 1931. In her honor, the Brazilian state installed an annual national holiday that takes place on 12 October. We can safely say that Our Lady Aparecida is a constitutive part of the Brazilian religious and national landscape. After her transformation into patroness of the nation, she remained highly popular as a national and Catholic religious figure. For example, her shrine was visited by 13 million people in 2017 and replicas of the original statue located at the national shrine can be found in many public and private places throughout the country (Godoy 2015, 2017; Rickli 2016). Given the statue’s capacity to represent the unity between Roman Catholicism and the Brazilian nation, it is not very surprising that the church used her anniversary as the ideal moment to collaborate with a samba school. It was however not without controversy or struggle and involved compromises from both parties. One of the most important demands of the church was that participants in the parade could not display nudity or obscenity and that saintly images would be represented appropriately as Catholic and not as syncretic. To make sure that the samba school complied with these demands, supervision occurred by means of two Catholic institutions: the directorate of the National Shrine of Our Lady Aparecida and the Archdioceses of São Paulo. The pressure to supervise closely the appearance of the Unidos de Vila Maria parade is related to the Brazilian tradition to broadcast the parades of the big, prestigious samba schools live on Brazilian  Whereas we hold that the Catholic Church should be considered a complex entanglement of organizations and not as a monolithic institution, we nevertheless in this chapter refer to this entanglement as ‘the Church’. 5

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television and the public discussions about samba school performances that usually follow. The idea to dedicate the 2017 parade entirely to the anniversary of Our Lady Aparecida initially came from the samba school. To avoid possible future conflicts, the samba school approached the church and asked permission. Even though the Catholic Church officially approved the collaboration, some Catholics were unhappy about that partnership. Months before the carnaval, at least three different groups protested against the parade under the allegation that ‘an unprecedented desecration will happen with the approval of the Holy Roman Catholic Church’.6 In response to this allegation, the Cardinal and Archbishop of São Paulo published a letter in the local newspaper to justify the organization: ‘The intention is good and the form as well. Would the place be unfit to honor the purest Virgin Mary? But wouldn’t Mary want to be there where her presence is necessary?’7 The church’s newfound collaboration with the samba school and Mary’s official debut at the sambódromo altered popular representations of the religious character of the nation, however. Our Lady Aparecida has historically also appeared in southern Brazil as a syncretic figure representing Oxum, the orixá of the rivers. Nevertheless, as we describe below, while Aparecida’s black embodiment of the nation was celebrated during the parade, her Afro-Brazilian religious identity was erased in favor of her Catholic identity. The Catholic Church tried hard to purify the religious character of Our Lady Aparecida while preserving connotations to Afro-­ Brazilian culture and heritage. The attempt to negate her syncretic character yet preserve her racial identity is supported by the so-called ‘myth of the three races’: an ideological position that maintains that Brazilian colonization was characterized by a harmonious coming together of Europeans, Africans and Indigenous people that resulted in a culturally mixed country where race is no longer a relevant category to power and hierarchy. While academics have generally identified this position as a ‘myth’ (Schwarcz and Starling   See, for example, https://www.change.org/p/curia-metropolitana-de-são-paulo-dom-odilo-­ contra-­a-profanação-da-virgem-maria-no-carnaval-de-2017 or https://ipco.org.br/51644-2/#. XEGfVMHPzIU 7  http://arquisp.org.br/arcebispo/artigos-e-pronunciamentos/nossa-senhora-aparecida-no-carnaval 6

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2018), it is still often presented as a fact in politics, tourism and religious institutions. The Catholic Church generally employs this myth to present Catholicism as the powerful ingredient of this mixture of peoples and cultures. In such a presentation, there is no room for other religious traditions and black and indigenous people are simultaneously presented as Brazilians and as Catholics. Ultimately, this Catholic nation is incompatible with Afro-Brazilian religions and with Pentecostalism, according to the church, the national religion is Catholicism and Our Lady Aparecida is the most powerful symbol of that constellation. This was clearly visible in the design of the 2017 Unidos de Vila Maria parade. As in many carnaval parades in Brazil, the parades that perform at the sambódromo are made up of different alas (wings) and every wing is categorized by a specific theme. The Unidos de Vila Maria parade consisted of twenty-three alas showing Aparecida’s devotional history but here we focus on three that showed clearly the particular entanglement between national culture and religion. The first wing was the ala das Baianas (the Bahian Women wing) a specific wing dedicated to the veteran women of a samba school. Traditionally, these women wear long dresses and turbans, clothing inspired by the ritual garments of Candomblé. Strikingly, in this parade the baianas were dressed to resemble representations of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception, wearing ostentatious blue and golden mantles and huge golden crowns instead of turbans. The dresses also featured an embroidered (white) image of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception to leave no doubt that this costume represented a non-syncretic Catholic figure. Maria Aparecida was one of the baianas who took part in the parade and after the parade she declared: ‘I was born a devotee. I am very moved because my family is Catholic practitioner’. Questioned about the 45 kg costume she was wearing, replied: ‘the dedication and responsibility to honor our patroness are much heavier than the clothes.’ The second wing was the Ala Milagre do Negro Zacarias (Wing of the Miracle of Black Zacarias), a wing dedicated to one of Aparecida’s miracles: when a black fugitive named Zacarias was captured, he was allowed to pray to the statue of Our Lady Aparecida before being brought back to the farm where he was enslaved. When he did, the chains that held him captive miraculously fell from his neck and wrists, making him a free

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man thanks to Aparecida’s intervention. In the section, dedicated to this miracle, bare-breasted black men costumed to resemble the enslaved Zacarias, were  followed by black and white men and women, wearing luxurious costumes with plumages and stamps with African patterns. This wing exemplified the acknowledgment of the history of enslavement of African people and their shipment to Brazil, but projected Aparecida as a liberator. The third wing was the Ala Símbolo da Identidade Nacional (Wing of the Symbol of National Identity). The dancing participants of this wing were all dressed in green and yellow, the colors of the Brazilian flag and they were accompanied by parrots, bananas, jaguars and other references to the flora and fauna of Brazil. The tail of the ala featured a sambista dancing, on a huge map of Brazil, in front of a gigantic yellow and green crucifix similar to the one at the national shrine. These three wings demonstrated that the partnership between the Catholic Church and the samba school Unidos de Vila Maria produced a particular configuration of culture, religion and nationalism. In this configuration, Afro-Brazilian heritage is celebrated and presented as thoroughly Brazilian but Afro-Brazilian religious symbols and icons are substituted by Catholic ones. The parade exemplifies the Catholic Church’s new approach to carnaval and shows that it actively produces and polices Catholic representations in popular culture, yet in doing so the church attempts to purify and de-syncretize these symbols and icons. As declared by one of the directors of Unidos de Vila Maria: ‘this year our samba-enredo became a prayer.’

Afro-Brazilian Parades In response to the increase of evangelical attacks on Afro-Brazilian religion and the Catholic Church’s purification of religious figures, samba schools throughout the country have sought to re-affirm the historical connections between Brazilian society and African traditions and they have often done so by emphasizing the presence and importance of Afro-­ Brazilian deities. Several of the parades of these samba schools have been researched by a team of anthropologists from the Federal University of

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Rio de Janeiro based in the Museu Nacional and their recent work gives us great insight in the dynamics we explore in this chapter. In their deep analysis of the parades of Mangueira and Renascer de Jacarepaguá, Menezes and Bártolo (2019) defend the carnaval as a privileged ethnographic place to understand the disputes over religion and national culture. For the anthropologists, the carnaval parades in Rio de Janeiro provide a dual classification in which religious practices can be transformed into cultural manifestations to dispute what is the true nationalism. The first parade we would like to discuss took place in 2016, when the samba school Renascer de Jacarepaguá, based in Rio de Janeiro, organized a parade entitled ‘Ibejís in children’s play: the orixás who became saints in Brazil’. Annually in Rio de Janeiro, there is a very popular feast dedicated to Cosmas and Damian, twin brothers and Catholic saints, who are also known as syncretic manifestations of Ibejis, Afro-Brazilian orixá twins. The most prominent ritual activity of this feast is the distribution of ‘candy bags’ (Menezes 2016) to groups of children who go door-to-door in the neighborhood (not unlike Saint Martin’s day traditions common in Europe). Both as saints and as orixás the twins are seen as protectors of the youth. Lucas Bártolo (2018), who researched the samba school Renascer de Jacarepaguá has convincingly argued that their parade marked a striking deviation from the hegemonic representation of Brazil’s religious traditions. Instead of focusing on Catholic representations and leaving room for Afro-Brazilian religious incursions and interpretations, the parade inverted this syncretic constellation and focused on the Afro-Brazilian religious and cultural traditions, while Catholic representations featured much less prominently. The Orixás who became Saints wing was the most representative of the inversion of the hegemonic syncretic relation, however. This wing featured two children dressed as the twin orixás Ibejis. While during the parade, the duo momentarily appeared as the Catholic saints Cosmas and Damian, quickly after they reappeared as the orixá twins. As noted by Bártolo (2018), the succession of appearances in this section deviates from the common representations of orixás and saints, in which Catholic saints generally take the leading role and are presented as most important religious icons. For the anthropologist, who compared the

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samba-enredos from 1991 to 2017: ‘the saints are activated by the samba schools to dispute the senses of the carnaval party and to discuss the place of culture and religiosity in the city’ (Bártolo 2018: 16). In 2017, samba school Mangueira performed a parade entitled Only with the Help of the Saint. In the Brazilian context, santo (saint) is a hybrid word that can denote both Catholic saints and Afro-Brazilian orixás. As noted by Menezes and Bártolo (2019), Mangueira’s reason to use this word appears to be their wish to propagate a syncretic approach to religious devotion. In Mangueira’s parade, men and women dressed as religious figures from Catholic and Afro-Brazilian traditions performed dances side-by-side like Saint John, Iemanjá, Our Lady Aparecida, Saint Anthony, Zé Pilantra, Saint Benedict, Ogum and many others, danced though the sambódromo collectively. One specific incident laid bare the forces we aim to excavate in this chapter. Besides the appearances of religious figures from different traditions, Mangueira also fabricated a statute that syncretized Jesus Christ and the orixá Oxalá in the same figure, one side showing Oxalá, the other side Jesus. When Mangueira publicly announced the theme of the parade, months before the carnaval, members of the Catholic Archdioceses of Rio de Janeiro asked permission to inspect the costumes in Mangueira’s headquarters to evaluate if the parade was not offensive to the Catholic Church. Mangueira agreed and after the inspection, the samba school was told that the church commission did not find anything offensive. Nevertheless, when Mangueira performed their parade at the sambódromo during the formal competition and the Cristo-Oxalá figure appeared prominently, the Archdioceses stated that at the time of the inspection they did not see that figure and would not have approved if they did. Following the parade, the church asked Mangueira to withdraw the figure from the ‘champions parade’, which traditionally takes place on the first Saturday after the carnaval. The request quickly instigated public controversy, replicated by mainstream media. Newspaper headlines screamed out: ‘Under pressure of the Church, Cristo-Oxalá figure did not parade’8 and ‘Church pressure  https://extra.globo.com/noticias/carnaval/tripe-de-cristo-oxala-da-mangueira-nao-desfila-por-­ pressao-da-igreja-21011634.html

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makes Mangueira take Cristo-Oxalá off the avenue.’9 Mangueira complied with the church’s request but one of the samba school directors responded: ‘I deeply regret that there is still a lot of “shadow” in the attitudes of those who talk about “light”. Mangueira’s parade, among other things, raised the necessary flag of communion and the fight against intolerance. Doesn’t intolerance emerge in attitudes? I will quote the words of the “man” who will not attend the parade today: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’.10

Conclusion The last-mentioned conflict highlights the asymmetrical relation between the Catholic Church and representatives of Afro-Brazilian religious traditions in Brazil and points to the present predicament of Afro-Brazilian religious movements. Historical processes that transformed the Brazilian carnaval into an amalgam of religious and popular cultural traditions allowed Afro-Brazilian religions to be celebrated as part of Brazil’s public life and to be represented as part of the nation. Nevertheless, this happened predominantly within a Catholic frame. Afro-Brazilian religion could only appear publicly as a culture within a landscape dominated by Catholicism when it would downplay explicit Afro-Brazilian religious representations. As a result of the growth of evangelical movements in the past decades, Afro-Brazilian religious movements generally find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one side, they are battling evangelical born-­ again Christian movements that tend to define Afro-Brazilian religious practices as demonic and that attempt to redefine the religious character of the nation by way of their own carnaval parades, which take up and translate Afro-Brazilian cultural representations while foregrounding Pentecostal ideas and practices. On the other side, they are battling the Catholic Church that also appears to be threatened by the evangelical  https://veja.abril.com.br/entretenimento/pressao-da-igreja-faz-mangueira-tirar-cristo-oxalada-avenida/ 10  https://odia.ig.com.br/_conteudo/diversao/carnaval/2017-03-04/mangueira-cristo-oxala-forado-­desfile-das-campeas-apos-pedido-da-igreja.html 9

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growth and, in response, collaborates with a samba school for the first time in Brazilian history. Instead of affirming and defending the syncretic nature of popular religious icons, the Roman Catholic Church—not unlike the evangelical groups that partake in carnaval—tends to acknowledge the African cultural background of Brazil’s popular traditions, yet erases the Afro-Brazilian religious components in favor of their own theology and position within representations of the nation. Afro-Brazilian religious groups that strive hard to become visible by means of the carnaval parades and samba schools that battle to present Afro-Brazilian religious practices as constitutive parts of the Brazilian nation should thus not count too much on the Catholic Church to help them in their struggles against evangelical demonization. When presenting Afro-Brazilian religious figures explicitly in syncretic fashion, they are met by the highly institutionalized Catholic Church that aims to control tightly the appearance of Christian symbols in public. All in all, the controversies we described demonstrate that different religious groups attempt to foreground that Brazilian carnaval—itself conceivable as a secular sacred amalgam of traditions—fits their particular religious tradition best.

References Almeida, R. (2007). Dez Anos do ‘Chute na Santa’: A Intolerância com a Diferença. In V.  G. da Silva (Ed.), Intolerância Religiosa: Impactos do Neopentecostalismo no Campo Religioso Afro-Brasileiro (pp.  171–189). São Paulo: EdUSP. Almeida, R., & Barbosa, R. (2019). Religious Transition in Brazil. In M. Arretche (Ed.), Path of Inequality in Brazil: A Half-century of Changes (pp. 257–284). Cham: Springer. Armstrong, P. (2010). Bahian Carnival and Social Carnivalesque in Trans-­ Atlantic Context. Social Identities, 16(4), 447–469. Bártolo, L. (2018). Cosme e Damião: o enredo de uma cidade. Ponto Urbe, 23, 1–21. Berkenbrock, V.  J. A. (1998). Experiência dos Orixás: Um Estudo Sobre a Experiência Religiosa no Candomblé. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Vozes. Birman, P. (2003). Religião e Espaço Público. São Paulo: CNPq/Pronex.

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Birman, P., & Lehmann, D. (1999). Religion and the Media in a Battle for Ideological Hegemony: The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and TV Globo in Brazil. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 18(2), 145–164. Birman, P., & Leite, M. d. S. P. (2000). Whatever Happened to What Used to be the Largest Catholic Country in the World? Daedalus, 129(2), 271–290. Burity, J.  A. (2011). Religião e Cidadania: Alguns Problemas de Mudança Sociocultural e de Intervenção Política. In P.  Andrade & J.  Burity (Eds.), Religião e Cidadania (pp. 113–144). São Cristovão: Editora UFS. Cavalcanti, M. L. (2015). Carnaval, Ritual e Arte. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras. DaMatta, R. (1991). Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Fry, P. H. (1982). Para Inglês Ver: identidade e cultura na sociedade brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Giumbelli, E. (2014). Recomposing the Nation: Conceptions and Effects of Heritage Preservation in Religious Universes. Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 11(2), 442–469. Godoy, A. (2015). Aparecida: imagens, espaços e sentidos. Dissertação (Mestrado em Antropologia Social). Programa de Pós-graduação em Antropologia Social, UNICAMP, Campinas. Godoy, A. (2017). Aparecidas no cotidiano. R@U: revista de antropologia da UFSCAR, 9, 107–121. Menezes, R. (2016). Doces santos: sobre os Saquinhos de Cosme e Damião. In E. Gomes & P. Lins (Eds.), Patrimônio Religioso no estado do Rio de Janeiro (pp. 1–23). Rio de Janeiro: Coleção Trama de Ideias. Menezes, R., & Bártolo, L. (2019). Quando devoção e carnaval se encontram. PROA: revista de antropologia e arte, 9(1), 96–121. Montero, P. (2015). Religiões e Controvérsias Públicas: Experiências, Práticas Sociais e Discursos. São Paulo: Terceiro Nome. Montes, M. L. (1998). As Figuras do Sagrado: Entre o Público e o Privado. In L. Schwarz (Ed.), História da vida privada no Brasil (Vol. 4, pp. 63–171). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Oliven, R.  G. (1984). A malandragem na música popular brasileira. Latin America Music Review, 5, 66–96. Oosterbaan, M. (2017). Transposing Brazilian Carnival: Religion, Cultural Heritage, and Secularism in Rio de Janeiro. American Anthropologist, 119(4), 697–709. Pravaz, N. (2008). Where is the Carnivalesque in Rio’s Carnaval? Samba, Mulatas and Modernity. Visual Anthropology, 21(2), 95–111.

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Reinhardt, B. (2018). Intangible Heritage, Tangible Controversies: The Baiana and the Acarajé as Boundary Objects in Contemporary Brazil. In B. Meyer & M. van de Port (Eds.), Sense and Essence: Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real (pp. 75–108). London: Berghahn. Rickli, J. (2016). Narratives, Movements, Objects: Aesthetics and Power in Catholic Devotion to Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil. In M.  Svasek & B.  Meyer (Eds.), Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe. New York: Berghahn Books. Sanchis, P. (2001). Religiões, Religião… Alguns Problemas do Sincretismo no Campo Religioso Brasileiro. In P. Sanchis & B. T. F. de Medeiros (Eds.), Fiéis & Cidadãos: Percursos de Sincretismo no Brasil (pp.  9–57). Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ. Sansi, R. (2007). Fetishes & Monuments. In Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Santos, L. (2013). O enegrecimento da Padroeira do Brasil: religião, racismo e identidade (1854–2004). Salvador: Editora Pontocom. Schwarcz, L., & Starling, H. (2018). Brazil: A Biography. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sheriff, R.  E. (1999). The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Cultural Anthropology, 14(1), 3–28. Vianna, L. W. (1999). A judicialização da política e das relações sociais no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Revan.

Part III Tolerance

7 Homo Sanctus: Religious Contestations and the Sanctification of Heritage and Human Rights in Vietnam Oscar Salemink

Introduction Drawing on over 30 years of research on religious practices in Vietnam, in this chapter I will focus on spirit possession as a religious practice and as cultural heritage against the backdrop of human rights claims. In quite a number of cases, religious experts and their followers had or have difficult relations with the Vietnamese state because of the restrictions that the Communist Party-State in Vietnam imposes on religious practice, sometimes erupting into overt conflict. Both inside and outside of Vietnam such conflicts are usually understood in terms of human rights, which assume a sacrosanct aura in the discourses of the various parties. While the nature of these conflicts is different in each case (see Salemink 2006), the appeal to human rights creates a volatile arena of localized and transnational contestations between diverging religious and secular

O. Salemink (*) University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_7

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positions that both seek to legitimize their actions with reference to the sacrosanct status of human rights. Even authoritarian states ‘subscribe to them with a good deal of hypocrisy and reservation’ without questioning their basic assumptions (Hastrup 2001: 9). In this chapter, I shall argue that the discursive incorporation of debates around religion into the transnational human rights arena re-frames the relations of such practices with the state and re-defines notions of what is seen as proper religion in the direction of the exclusivist; belief-centered and confessional; and membership-based religions, historically dominating in the West and its paradigmatic monotheistic ‘others’—Judaism and Islam. This ‘human rights encounter’ operates similar to the imperial encounter which was instrumental in the emergence of vernacular notions of religion and the secular in Asian languages, corresponding with the emergence of discourses and institutions predicated on these concepts (Veer 2001; Masuzawa 2005; DuBois 2009). Along similar lines, in this chapter, I argue that the contemporary human rights encounter has a transformative effect on religious practices and subjectivities. In the next sections I shall discuss the connection between human rights, religion and secularism. After that I shall offer a brief case study concerning contestations over spirit mediumship, as a religious practice that requires some relationship with the Vietnamese state. I will briefly outline the various social science and political debates over the interweaving questions of religion and superstition, religion and heritage, and religion and human rights, with a focus on Vietnam. I then move on to a conference in January 2016 in Nam Đi.nh, northern Vietnam, which functioned as a stepping stone toward UNESCO recognition of Mother Goddess worship expressed through ritualized spirit possession as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). I pay particular attention to contestations during that conference and the unexpected aftermath of the UNESCO inscription. In the conclusion, I shall zoom in on the use of sanctified cultural heritage and human rights discourses by local and transnational organizations in such contestations between the Vietnamese State and religious communities.

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Human Rights, Religion and Secularism In a variety of contexts, human rights as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1947) have been called a ‘secular religion’— or sometimes civil religion, political religion, or political theology. In his Modernity and self-identity (1991), Labour’s ‘New Way’ sociologist Anthony Giddens simultaneously underwrote and modified Weber’s secularization and disenchantment thesis by suggesting that a number of new social movements, like the global human rights movement, displayed the character of new, secular religions. This idea of human rights as secular religion was broadcast widely by a person with impeccable human rights credentials, namely Elie Wiesel.1 Michael Ignatieff, in his 2001 book Human Rights as politics and idolatry, approaches human rights as a sacrosanct subject that must be rescued from political and social tendencies in both East Asia, the Middle East and the West that undermine the liberal, individualist foundations of human rights. Despite the attribution of sacrosanct status to human rights by these authors, they seem to have a strong conviction that human rights are rooted in secularism. This is in line with the interpretation by Talal Asad (2003) in his Formations of the Secular that the emergence of human rights discourse is an instance of secular modernity, related to the dominance of individualistic, liberal ideologies. This view is echoed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in his If God were a human rights activist (2015) and by several contributors to the volume Politics of Religious Freedom (Sullivan et al. 2015).2 What these scholars have in common is that they describe the emergence of an immanent, secular frame which arrogates inalienable rights to humanity, and thus shifts the sacrality of the Gods to humans, conceptualized as autonomous and equal individuals before the sovereign authority of the state. Nevertheless, there remain challenges against the universality of human rights, namely as predicated on Western, liberal and individualistic notions. Already in 1947, the Executive Board of the American  See http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/resources/millennium.html (accessed 20 May 2019).  But in his reply to Asad’s critique of his Public Religion, José Casanova (2008: 115–118) sketches an alternative genealogy of Human Rights, namely as supported by the Catholic Church. 1 2

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Anthropological Association protested against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and more recent histories of human rights make similar points that Human Rights are rooted in Western notions of the individual (Moyn 2010; Santos 2015). In the global political arena, such challenges are expressed by certain religious groupings—most prominently Islamic groups as well as ‘Asian values’ protagonists in East and Southeast Asia. After all, in contrast with Weberian prophesies concerning rationalization, secularization and disenchantment there is a growing awareness that the world is embracing a plurality of modernities that are often experienced as religious rather than secular (Veer 1996; Hefner 1998; Eisenstadt 2000). Globally, this is evidenced by the growing social visibility of religious beliefs and practices in the public sphere (Casanova 1994; Turner 2006a) and—within Europe—by enhanced religious plurality as a result of migration and religious experimentation (Katzenstein and Byrnes 2006; Turner 2006b). Many human rights scholars, like Santos (2015), Sullivan et al. (2015) and Hurd (2015), follow Talal Asad (2003) in situating the emergence of the notion of the individual endowed with ‘inalienable rights’ in the early modern Protestant Reformation in Europe, thereby elevating the notion of religious freedom as the mother of the formulation of individual human rights.3 This genealogy is predicated on an assumption of religion and secularity as discrete spheres of human practice and thinking. In spite of Asad’s (1993, 2003) analysis of religious and secular categories as genealogically and historically connected, Eurocentric assumptions of religion as a discrete category denoting a separate domain of social and cultural practice still dominate scholarly and public debate. Thus, conceptual dichotomies between the religious domain and this-worldly, secular domains of political and economic practice are kept in place. This is in line with the first definition in José Casanova’s reformulation of the secularization thesis as ‘differentiation of the secular sphere from religious beliefs and norms, … as a decline of religious beliefs and practices, and … as marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere’ (2008: 107).  The main exception to this widely shared view is Samuel Moyn (2010) who emphasizes the genealogical contingency and the historical recentness of the idea of Human Rights as opposed to earlier Enlightenment formulations of ‘Natural Rights’ or the ‘Rights of Man’. 3

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As secularization in Europe is historically connected with the separation between church and state, one could question whether Western categories of religion and the secular make sense in other parts of the world (Kipnis 2001; Turner 2006a), for example, with reference to ‘worldly’ religions as Confucianism and Daoism (Casanova 2008: 113). Raymond Lee asserts that secularization in Asia assumes the form of individualization of religious choice and a concomitant competition for local religious ‘consumers’ in a globalized religious market that is both local and simultaneously integrated into national spheres and transnational networks (Lee 1993; see also Turner 2004; Masuzawa 2005; Ashiwa and Wank 2009). Also in post-reform Vietnam a religious arena emerged characterized by the individualization of religious choice and competition between religious doctrines, practices and organizations. One rapidly expanding practice since 1990 is spirit mediumship, connected with Mother Goddess worship, as I shall describe in the next section.

Spirit Possession in Vietnam Mother Goddess worship is part of a much wider, cosmological landscape between the Daoist poles of this Dư ơ ng (or Yang) world and the other Âm (or Yin) world, opening up a liminal space in between these two poles. The beings inhabiting this liminal space—which is the cosmological niche for spirit possession—are, first, the almost endless assortment of local spirits linked to particular places and sites. A second category concerns the souls of ancestors [tổ tiên], that is kinsfolk within the own (patri)lineage who make the journey to the other world after a proper death, funeral and rituals (Jellema 2007). Thirdly, the category of ghosts [ma] refers to those souls outside one’s own kin, usually of those dead who suffered an unfortunate death or who died childless, and keep on wandering between the two worlds (Kwon 2008). A fourth category concerns deified spirits—that is former souls (of ancestors or wandering ghosts) who honed their efficacy through good deeds in this world, thereby acquiring moral merit and moving up in the hierarchy toward the other world. These deified spirits are then incorporated into the

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political theology of Confucianism and were in the past validated by the emperor as a supreme medium between worlds (cf. Salemink 2007; for China see Feuchtwang 2001; Palmer 2006; and Zito 1997). Mother Goddesses belong to the latter category, but constitute an alternative— more empathetic and efficacious—ritual channel mediating between this world and the other world primarily populated by stern male, Mandarin-­ like officials (Thien Do 2003), thus fulfilling a role similar to the bodhisattva Guan-Yin, Mother Mary, or the many other female Catholic saints. Northern-style lên đồng [lit. ‘riding the medium’] is largely organized around individual master mediums and her or his assistants. Historically a largely rural phenomenon, the phenomenon has partly migrated to cities, with charismatic mediums building networks of clients and traveling to temples to perform at temple festivals, or performing in their ‘home’ temple. A typical spirit possession session may take a couple of hours and begins with the collection of the wishes (written as prayers [cầu] in Chinese characters by a ritual specialist) and the preparation of the sacrificial gifts and of the altar. Helped by her/his assistants and accompanied by a chầu văn music band, the medium dons the clothes of the deity in the Mother Goddess pantheon that s/he seeks to incarnate. After a series of kowtows the medium sits down, veils the head, and touches the sacrificial gifts (fruit, cans of drinks, edibles, fabrics, money) destined for that particular deity. Then the medium stands up and, dressed in clothes and handling props that recognizably refer to that deity, performs ritually prescribed dance moves to songs that praise the deity. The scripted nature of the ritual, however, leaves sufficient space for improvisation for the medium to show the elegance of the performance; the aesthetics of dress, dance, music and movement entrance spirits and people alike: seducing the spirit to ride the body of the mediums while convincing the audience of the ritual efficacy of the performance. After concluding the dance the medium sits down, the sacrificial gifts are distributed among the musicians and assistants, the audience and the larger part to the sponsor, and a new incarnation begins. These incarnations of deities of both genders in the pantheon can number up to 18 and each time the medium puts on new clothes symbolizing the identity of the deity. In other parts of Vietnam, traditions differ, as does the identity of the Mother Goddess. The most popular Mother Goddess in northern

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Vietnam is Princess Liêũ Hạnh (Dror 2006), but in the central part Thiên Y A Na, a ‘Viet-ization’ of the Cham goddess Pô Nagar, is widely revered. In many rural areas, the worship of Thiên Y A Na is a secretive, exclusively male affair, but in the former imperial capital Huế hầu vui [merry dancing] on the river involves groups of women (Nguyêñ Hữ u Thông 2001; Salemink 2007). In the South, a variety of more localized goddesses such as Bà Chứ a Xứ [Lady of the Realm] in An Giang (Taylor 2004), or Bà Đen [Black Lady] in Tây Ninh are possessive agents. The corresponding ritual practices are highly diverse across Vietnam, even if one limits these to Mother Goddess worship. But in an article on spirit possession in central Vietnam, I noticed how Ngô Đứ c Thi.nh’s 1996 collection of lyrics of ritual chầu văn music was used by the medium and musicians in the ritual performance to please the deities. The musicians claimed that it enriched their repertoire by incorporating songs and lyrics from various parts of Vietnam, but it standardized the music and lyrics (Salemink 2007: 573), as also happened with traditional religions in Africa (Hacket 2015: 96). In precolonial Vietnam, mediumship practices were often frowned upon or forbidden by Confucian elites (Nguyêñ Hữ u Thông 2001).4 Historically, lên đồng was considered a heterodox practice in the neo-­ Confucian sense of not formally condoned by the Emperor who with his mandate from Heaven mediates between Heaven and Earth (Feuchtwang 2001: Salemink 2007; Zito 1997).5 French colonial scholars often wrote dismissively of mediums as sorciers/sorcières [sorcerers] (Giran 1912; Durand 1959; Cadière 1992). The Communist authorities of postcolonial Vietnam followed in the footsteps of the former Emperors and the French colonial authorities and initially attempted to proactively suppress mediumship as deviant from (legitimate) religion in Vietnam, and hence considered superstitious (Kendall 2008: 105; Salemink 2008). In the mid-1980s the regime began to loosen its reign economically, socially and culturally, and in the 1990s the practice came out into the open through an active ‘fence-breaking and networking’ campaign waged  For China, see Sutton (2000).  The Vietnamese term mê tín dị đoan has the combined connotation of superstition and heterodoxy.

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by a coalition of practitioners, clients, scholars and artists (Vasavakul 2003; Ngô Đứ c Thi.nh 1999, 2004, 2010; Norton 2009). So after decades of suppression, Mother Goddess worship and all sorts of spirit possession practices started to flourish, and the political authorities did not quite know what to do with this, the response varying per province and location. Counterintuitively for many foreigners, the practices were allowed especially in the north of Vietnam, quietly nudged on or actively supported by the authorities, which stood to benefit culturally and financially from popular and successful temples in their territories. In other parts of the country, authorities were often uncomfortable with ‘superstitious’ practices in temples and continued to suppress them. While spirit possession practices were mushrooming in Vietnam, this was from the 2000s studied by a copious amount of research, by both Vietnamese and international scholars. Especially in the north, spirit possession temples, sessions and pilgrimages were so visible that they led to a veritable scholarly industry, with dozens of Vietnamese and foreign scholars studying spirit possession and Mother Goddess worship, albeit almost exclusively on the North.6 Research on spirit possession in the central and southern parts of the country and in the uplands was far and in between.7 In practice, this meant that the northern form of spirit possession [lên đồng] and Mother Goddess worship [Đạo Maˆ˜u] became the iconic types in the literature, and was seen by (northern) Vietnamese and foreign scholars alike as representative for the country.

Superstition, Religion or Heritage? In October 2010 I was asked to give a presentation on Mê tín dị đoan, tôn giáo và khoa học [Superstition, religion and science] at a meeting of religious and heritage experts in Hanoi, who were debating whether lên đồng should be admissible in temples and other sacred spaces that were  For a long but incomplete list, see Dror (2006); Endres (2008, 2012); Fjelstadt and Nguyen Thi Hien (2006, 2011); Kendall (2008, 2011); Ngô Đứ c Thi.nh (1996, 1999, 2004, 2010); Nguyen Thi Hien (2002); Norton (2009); Pham Quynh Phuong (2009); Thaveeporn Vasavakul (2003). 7  For southern Vietnam, see Gustafsson (2009); Kwon (2008) Nguyêñ Hữu Thông (2001). For the highlands, see Vargyas (1993). 6

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simultaneously listed as official state heritage.8 The occasion for the meeting was a recent circular by the Ministry of Culture to ban spirit possession rituals from listed heritage sites. Many—but not all—of the experts present disagreed with the Ministry’s circular, and sought to allow possession rituals on temple grounds, and some claimed that it constitutes Intangible Cultural Heritage according to UNESCO ideas. Others— mostly prominent mediums and their followers—claimed that lên đồng constitutes an authentic Vietnamese religion and should be recognized as such.9 My host (correctly) expected me to question the categorical distinction between religion and superstition, thus supporting their activism against its proscription in listed temples. According to Michael Lambek, spirit possession undermines our ‘modern’ comfort zones by violating ‘our own cultural distinctions and deeply held assumptions concerning the “natural” differences between such pairs of opposites as self and others, seriousness and comedy, reality and illusion, and perhaps most critically, art and life’ (Lambek 1989: 52–53). But the question whether spirit possession is a religion is also politically important in a country where a Party-State governing according to Leninist principles follows in the footsteps of the erstwhile Emperor and decides what constitutes a legitimate and admissible religion. It is equally important in a situation where the stigma of superstition—and its association with quackery and unscientific magical tricks—invites the suspicion that possession is fake and that mediums are frauds. With Vietnam’s 1998 embarkation on a path toward culturalization of its policies and politics with Nghị Quyết V [Resolution V of the Central Committee on ‘building a progressive culture imbued with national identity’], open campaigning for recognition of spirit mediumship had become possible. Some mediums aimed for official recognition of Đạo Maˆ˜u [Mother Goddess worship] as legitimate religion to be recognized by the Bureau of Religious Affairs of the Communist Party. However,

 Mê tín di. đoan, tôn giáo và khoa học [Superstition, religion and science], keynote speech for Tọa đàm khoa học ‘Mê tín di. đoan, từ quan niệm học thuật đến ứ ng xử trong đờ i sống’ [Scientific meeting on ‘Superstition, from scholarly concept to its application in life’], Hanoi, Center for Cultural Heritage Research & Promotion, in the Women’s Museum, 23 October 2010. 9  This section is loosely based on Salemink (2015). 8

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many Vietnamese politicians and scholars still hold that spirit possession is not a religion because it is not formally institutionalized, does not have a formal doctrine, and does not have a priestly hierarchy. Another movement led by scholars like Ngô Đứ c Thi.nh (1999, 2010) sought recognition for Đạo Maˆ˜u as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), via the Ministry of Culture and, ultimately, UNESCO. This scholarly interest in recognizing Mother Goddess worship as Intangible Cultural Heritage was fueled by a ‘heritage boom’ (cf. Lowenthal 1998, Berliner 2005) in Vietnam’s culture-scape, which was partly preceded by, and partly coincided with, the religious boom since the economic reforms (from 1986). Some mediums wanted to seek official recognition from the Bureau of Religious Affairs qua religion, which in the Vietnamese context of Leninist governmentality would necessarily result in a liturgical homogenization and organizational hierarchization of the ritual community and practice (cf. Endres 2012; Norton 2009; Vasavakul 2003; Salemink 2015). In Communist-ruled Vietnam, official state recognition qua religion would have the consequence of following the model of world religions and hence unifying these extremely diverse practices by creating one singular liturgy and a centralized hierarchical clergy, thereby creating ritual uniformity in a literal sense. But Vietnam’s Bureau of Religious Affairs of the Party and the Ministry of Public Security were reluctant to go down that road (as I know from conversations with some representatives). After all, it would invite human rights scrutiny in terms of freedom of religion, compelling the state to create a semblance of official respect for the sovereignty of the religious constituency. That avenue turned out to be a dead-end street. When the avenue of official recognition as a religion was ruled out, the preferred avenue became recognition as cultural heritage, with some scholars campaigning for official recognition of spirit possession practices as Intangible Cultural Heritage, preferably by UNESCO. While cultural heritage and heritagization are still fairly new concepts with reference to the Vietnamese situation, their political pedigrees are much older. Following Regina Bendix (2009), Kirsten Endres used the term heritagization in her book on spirit mediumship [lên đồng], when she described how both scholars and spirit mediums attempted to gain official acceptance for the practice by labeling it ‘heritage’ rather than ‘religion’ or— worse—‘superstition’ (Endres 2012: 182). The alternating—and

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sometimes contradicting—trends of secularization, religious suppression, and heritage validation were a well-known pattern in post-independence Vietnam, as Edyta Roszko (2010, 2012) shows in her study of the decrees on religion and heritage in the Công Báo [Official Gazette of Vietnam] from 1953 onward. For both Endres and Roszko, heritage validation of religious sites, objects and practices work as political validation of such sites and practices amidst Vietnam’s past and present secularist policies. Both paths toward official state recognition—as religion or as cultural heritage—refer to the same set of spirit possession practices, but invoke diametrically opposed perceptions, different types of disciplinary expertise, and very different state politics, predicated on the ‘modern’ distinction between the religious and the secular. This question of official recognition of Mother Goddess worship was resolved in favor of the UNESCO Avenue, which carries more national and international prestige and fewer political risks for Vietnam’s Leninist Party-State. In spite of such labels as superstition and fraud, UNESCO recognition would prevent the State from suppressing it, as it would bring prestige in the global arena to the practice itself and to Vietnam as a whole. These scholars reasoned that with UNESCO recognition, the State would have a mandate to preserve and to protect the practice. However, they did not consider that with preservation and protection comes management and intervention which, in spite of UNESCO professions about the primacy of the ‘culture carriers’, privileges outside cultural experts and inevitably disenfranchises the ritual constituencies. In other words, this avenue toward official government recognition of lên đồng as Intangible Cultural Heritage was predicated on a standard description of one version which would be held up as a model. As much as the road toward official recognition qua religion, recognition as cultural heritage would standardize the practices at the expense of the local communities and practitioners.

Spirit Possession, Heritage and Human Rights Given my frequent earlier involvement, I was invited to present a paper at a conference in Nam Đi ̣nh in northern Vietnam, co-organized by the Vietnam Institute of Culture and Arts Studies (VICAS) under the

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Ministry of Culture, which was usually in charge of ICH submissions, and by the provincial authorities. In the north of Vietnam, the temple complex of Phủ Dầy dedicated to the pantheon of the supreme Mother Goddess Princess Liêũ Hạnh is considered the center of the practice for the whole country. In order to promote their agenda, scholars sympathetic to lên đồng regularly sought to enlist the support of foreign scholars, including myself, to that effect. The ‘international conference’ in Nam Đi.nh was an example of such an effort: rather than a forum for international scholarly exchange, it was a Debordian spectacle (cf. Debord 1994) performed for a domestic audience and for UNESCO, packaging participation by international scholars like myself as support for the campaign to recognition (Fig. 7.1). Before the conference I asked a befriended organizer whether the purpose of the meeting was to shore up a dossier for UNESCO to inscribe Mother Goddess worship on the Intangible Cultural Heritage list, and my

Fig. 7.1  Preparing for a spirit medium possession ‘performance’ at the conference in Nam Đi.nh 2016

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intuition proved correct. The dossier submitted in 2015 had been rejected by UNESCO, but this ‘international’ conference was part of an attempt to resubmit which, VICAS assumed, should be successful in 2016. This turned out to be a correct assessment, as the ‘Practices related to the Viet beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms’ were inscribed in December 2016.10 I feared that UNESCO recognition would standardize lên đôǹ g, as suggested by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: World heritage lists arise from operations that convert selected aspects of localized descent heritage into a translocal consent heritage—the heritage of humanity. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006: 170)

My deliberately provocative presentation in Nam Đi.nh surmised that UNESCO recognition as ICH would turn the ritual performance into a performative spectacle, emptying it of any religious content to do with possession and communication with spirits. Instead, I argued, it would create uniformity, as scholars and officials of the Ministry and of the provincial and district Departments of Culture would be in charge of policing the performance. They would be tempted to sanitize the practice by suppressing any ‘superstitious’ acts while simultaneously seeking to valorize the sites and practices economically by turning them into a tourist spectacle (because that is what heritage does in the world’s largest economic sector—tourism). In my presentation I sketched the trajectory in Vietnam from superstition [mê tín dị đoan] via—legitimate—religious beliefs [tín ngư ỡng] and culture [văn hóa] to, finally, heritage [di sản], and argued that historically, from outright suppression and banning to secular labeling, the state itself is the main threat to mediumship in Vietnam. I reminded the audience that the main Government agency behind the Nam Đi.nh conference, the Ministry of Culture, had sought to ban the ‘superstitious practice’ of Đạo Mâ˜u [Mother Goddess worship] from heritage sites only a few years earlier. Yet, now this ‘superstitious practice’ itself would be elevated to the status of ICH.  On one hand, this made sense, as spirit possession in  See https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/practices-related-to-the-viet-beliefs-in-the-mother-goddessesof-­three-realms-01064 (accessed 31 May 2017). 10

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Vietnam is a performative ritual practice related to various religious traditions, and as a ritual performance requires an audience not only of people but also of spirits. On the other hand, reducing the performance to spectacle performed by ‘folk artists’ empties it of its ritual content of communicating with beings in the other world (Fig. 7.2). Therefore, I argued that heritage recognition would not protect, but instead empty the practice of religious content and disenfranchise the ritual constituencies, at a time that Đạo Maˆ˜u is more popular, thriving

Fig. 7.2  Spirit procession during Nam Đi.nh conference 2016

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and vibrant than ever. In other words, heritagization risks to empty Đạo Mâ˜u of its ritual and religious core, thus depriving the ritual constituency of its freedom to practice it as religion as their ‘human right’. The day before the conference participants had visited the nearby ‘main heavenly palace’ [Phủ Chính Tiên Hư ơ ng] in Phủ Dầy, where we were treated with a spirit possession performance by the main medium of the temple, who happened to be the daughter of the octogenarian temple mistress, Bà Trần Thị Duyên (see Fig. 7.1). This elderly lady had lived through decades of outright suppression of superstition and was now witnessing its recent elevation to the status of heritage. She took the stage at the end of her daughter’s performance to make a speech, and literally said on 5 January 2016: Tôi mong rằng cuộc hội thảo này sẽ đem lại tu. ̛ do tín ngư ỡng [I wish that this conference will bring religious freedom (lit. freedom of religious beliefs)]

My evocation of the words spoken by the temple mistress, namely that she wanted religious freedom rather than heritage preservation, created confusion at the conference, because the words of the temple mistress had been witnessed by others and could not be denied. Moreover, they carried weight because the conference was supposed to support her work. Some Vietnamese officials sought to dismiss the relevance of these words, but a similar problem arose when later during the conference some practitioners were invited to speak, including the daughter of the temple mistress. As an accomplished medium who had performed for the conference participants before, she used the very same words—freedom of religious beliefs—to describe the aspirations of herself, her colleagues, and her followers, namely to be free from state interference (Figs. 7.3 and 7.4). Another embarrassment at the conference was the glaringly obvious disjuncture between the academically and politically clever metropolitan scholars and officials from Hanoi on one hand, and the local officials and researchers from the provinces whose presentations were steeped in the language of decades of Leninist ‘newspeak’ on the other hand. Officials and researchers from province down to district levels formulated their contributions according to the format of ‘selective preservation’ which highlighted ‘beautiful and representative’ elements in cultural practices

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Fig. 7.3  Spirit medium during procession ritual, Nam Đi.nh 2016

while combating ‘primitive, backward, unhygienic, superstitious’ along with ‘social evils’ and culturally ‘alien’ elements (cf. Salemink 2003). Oblivious to the discursive implications of their interventions, they happily reported how they would now preserve and manage lên đòng as an authentic Vietnamese cultural practice while getting rid of superstitious elements to do with spirits and possession. Thus as a political performance, the conference did not quite work in the intended way, because the inevitable ‘local voices’ adopted a language with rather chilling

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Fig. 7.4  Spirit medium in front of the altar with sacrificial effigies, Nam Đi.nh 2016

Leninist connotations of earlier cultural policies that construed ‘New Socialist Man’. They unwittingly negated the professed aim of the conference, namely proposing Đạo Maˆ˜u as an authentic Vietnamese cultural practice worthy of global recognition by UNESCO. Whatever the concerns over the attitudes of the officials who in the end would implement the cultural preservation policies on behalf of the Vietnamese state, all conference participants knew that these were just

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minor bumps in the road as the wheels of UNESCO inscription had already been set in motion. As with the 12 other Vietnamese ‘elements’ inscribed since 2008, the Vietnamese Government proved adept at playing the UNESCO game. Lynn Meskell (2015) showed that UNESCO inscription is a political game of gifts and transactions rather than based on a ‘scientific’ evaluation of cultural and other merits. Vietnam knows how to play this game well, so there was never any question that UNESCO would be willing to accept and condone this new inscription on it global ICH list during the 11th session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in November– December 2016 in Addis Ababa. Yet, in spite of the new-found cultural heritage status of spirit possession, talk about human rights—and in particular religious freedom—emerged around it in Vietnam. In June 2017 a video of a sermon by the popular Buddhist monk Thích Trí Chơ n in Ho Chi Minh City was uploaded on Facebook.11 In the sermon, the monk attacked Đạo Maˆ˜u, and other forms of lên đòng and spirit possession, as ‘superstition’, using the vocabulary of the Leninist state. In the past, Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhism was open to include other forms of worship in its rituals and on its premises, but more recently a more Theravada-oriented Buddhism has emerged in southern Vietnam which—much like the monotheistic religions governed by a ‘jealous God’—seeks to purify Buddhism of ‘alien’ elements (Roszko 2019). In response, the octogenarian Phủ Dầy temple mistress Bà Trần Thị Duyên wrote an open petition to the Bureau of Religious Affairs and a number of other Party, Government and media organizations in Vietnam (Fig. 7.5). The three-page petition dated 7 June 2017 was also uploaded on Facebook but has since been removed. In the petition, Ms. Trần Thị Duyên claims to represent nearly 8000 temples around the country and offers a brief history of state relations with and recognition of Đạo Maˆ˜u in Vietnam. She highlights in particular the UNESCO recognition of the religious beliefs of thờ Maˆ˜u [Mother Goddess worship12] in December 2016 and demands a clarification of the Buddhist Association of Vietnam  See https://www.facebook.com/tranviethieu.tran.3/videos/1430838216977847/, accessed 20 May 2019. 12  Denoting the same practice, Đạo Maˆ˜u has the connotation of a creed with a formal doctrine, while Thờ Mâ˜u highlights the practical ritual aspects of the worship. 11

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Fig. 7.5  Petition of spirit mediums to Vietnamese authorities

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about the authority of Thích Trí Chơ n to speak for Vietnam’s Buddhists; a clarification about its stance regarding the ‘religious beliefs’ of Mother Goddess worship; and an apology by the Venerable Trí Chơ n. The Government eagerly sought to suppress this inter-religious dispute and calmed down the emotions. In other words, Ms. Trần Thi. Duyên, claiming to speak on behalf of thousands of other spirit mediums and their followers, invoked international recognition UNESCO as cultural heritage and the prestige afforded to Vietnam, in order to validate the ritualized practice of spirit possession as a legitimate religion [tín ngư ỡng], against the historical backdrop of its labeling and hence suppression as superstition. Such a claim to the status of religion became the basis for a supposedly UNESCO-authorized appeal to the Vietnamese authorities to protect its status as a religion and thereby honor its obligation under international law to uphold freedom of religion [tu. ̛ do tín ngư ỡng]. Tellingly, whereas cultural heritage status was governed via Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Ms. Trần Thi. Duyên’s appeal for Đạo Maˆ˜u to be respected and protected qua religion was directed to Vietnam’s religious authorities, Buddhist associations and media.

Rights, Heritage and the Human Subject Paradoxically, UNESCO inscription as ICH turned the highly diverse, ritualized practices of Mother Goddess worship and other forms of spirit possession into a religion with its headquarters at the Phủ Dầy temple and headed by its temple mistress, Ms. Trần Thị Duyên. Spirit possession practices in Vietnam were and are usually intermingled with elements of other religious traditions—Buddhism, Daoism, ancestor worship—which did not require exclusive adherence, belief, or devotion. We could understand these ritual practices as religious, but the practitioners and their followers did not constitute an official religion. Yet, in her petition, Ms. Trần Thi. Duyên referenced religious freedom, which is logically predicated on individual choice and hence an individualization in terms of confessional interiorization. This individualization of religious

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choice inevitably relegates religious beliefs to an inner, private realm, as theorized by José Casanova (1994) and Charles Taylor (2007), and therefore constitutes a secularist proposition, in which religion is defined and circumscribed as a field of action and thinking limited to individual belief or collective religious action in the private realm. Yet, Ms. Trần Thị Duyên Duyên demands recognition and respect for it in the public sphere, in the name of both UNESCO-mandated cultural heritage and UN-mandated human rights. Both cultural heritage and human rights regimes imply an immanent frame. The cultural heritage label is often affixed to religious sites, objects and practices, but the criteria for such recognition are predicated on non-­ transcendental criteria that buttress the uniqueness of the phenomenon in terms of ‘outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science’.13 Thus, the cultural value of the phenomenon should be universal and encompassing all of humanity, beyond any specific religious constituency. Regardless of whether the phenomenon is considered or experienced as religious, its recognition as world cultural heritage hence implies a secular gaze in the sense that its referent subject is ‘humanity’. Similarly, the referent subject of human rights is humanity and, as Asad (2003) cogently argued, its immanent focus is the absence of suffering in a this-worldly life rather than a transcendentally mandated acceptance of suffering in expectation of an afterlife. An explicit connection between the immanent conception of both cultural heritage and human rights is made explicitly in the 2003 ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage’ which, in Article 2, states that ‘For the purposes of this Convention, consideration will be given solely to such intangible cultural heritage as is compatible with existing international human rights instruments.’14 As the emergence and global proliferation of human rights and cultural heritage regimes can be understood in terms of secularization, their intersection with religious phenomena—including freedom of religion— incorporates sites, objects, beliefs and practices that are experienced as  Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, article 1 (see https://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/). 14  See https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention. 13

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transcendental by their religious constituencies into an immanent frame. But paradoxically, human rights as well as cultural heritage discourses simultaneously sanctify their objects as beyond critique or reproach: both human rights and cultural heritage in the form of both World Heritage and ICH are construed as sacrosanct, thereby sacralizing their referent human subject: homo sanctus.

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Kendall, L. (2011). Gods, Gifts, Markets, and Superstition: Spirited Consumption from Korea to Vietnam. In K.  Endres & A.  Lauser (Eds.), Engaging the Spirit World. Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia (pp. 103–120). New York & Oxford: Berghahn. Kipnis, A. (2001). The Flourishing of Religion in post-Mao China and the Anthropological Category of Religion. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 12(1), 32–46. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2006). World Heritage and Cultural Economics. In I. Karp, C. A. Kratz, L. Szwaja, & T. Ybarra-Frausto (Eds.), Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (pp. 161–202). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kwon, H. (2008). Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, M. (1989). From Disease to Discourse: Remarks on the Conceptualization of Trance and Spirit Possession. In C. Ward (Ed.), Altered States of Consciousness and Mental Health: A Cross-cultural Perspective (pp. 36–61). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Lee, R. (1993). The Globalization of Religious Markets: International Innovations, Malaysian Consumption. Sojourn, 8(1), 35–61. Lowenthal, D. (1998) [1996]. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Masuzawa, T. (2005). The Invention of World Religions. Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meskell, L. (2015). Transacting UNESCO World Heritage: Gifts and Exchanges on a Global Stage. Social Anthropology, 23(1), 3–21. Moyn, S. (2010). The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ngô Đứ c Thịnh. (1996). Đạo Maˆ˜u ơ ̉ Việt Nam [Mother Goddess Worship in Vietnam]. Hanoi: NXB Văn hóa Thông tin. Ngô Đứ c Thịnh. (1999). Hầu bóng as Viewed from the Angle of the Performing Arts. Vietnamese Studies, 131, 56–60. Ngô Đứ c Thịnh. (Ed.). (2004). Đạo Maˆ˜u và các hình thứ c shaman trong các tộc ngư ờ i ơ ̉ ̉ Việt Nam và Châu Á [Mother goddess worship and shamanistic forms among ethnic people in Vietnam and Asia]. Hanoi: NXB Khoa học Xã hội. Ngô Đứ c Thịnh. (2010). Đâọ Maˆ˜u Việt Nam [Vietnamese Mother Goddess Worship]. Hanoi: NXB Tôn Giáo. Nguyêñ Hữu Thông. (Ed.). (2001). Tín Ngưõ,ng Thờ Maˆ˜u ơ ̉ mieˋ˄n trung Việt Nam [Mother worship beliefs in central Vietnam]. Huế: NXB Thuận Hóa.

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Nguyen Thi Hien. (2002). The Religion of the Four Palaces: Mediumship and Therapy in Viet Culture. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN Norton, B. (2009). Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Palmer, D. (2006). Body Cultivation in Contemporary China. In J.  Miller (Ed.), Chinese Religion in Contemporary Societies (pp.  147–174). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Phuong, P.  Q. (2009). Hero and Deity: Tran Hung Dao and the Resurgence of Popular Religion in Vietnam. Chiang Mai: Mekong Press. Roszko, E. (2010). Negotiation Over Religious Space in Vietnam. IIAS Newsletter, 54, 28–29. Roszko, E. (2012). From Spiritual Homes to National Shrines: Religious Tradition and Nation-building in Vietnam. East Asia: An International Quarterly, 29, 25–41. Roszko, E. (2019). A Triad of Confrontation: State Discipline, Buddhist Purification, and Indiscipline as a Local Strategy in Central Vietnam. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 48(2), 183–208. Salemink, O. (2003). The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1990. London: RoutledgeCurzon/ Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press [Anthropology of Asia Series]. Salemink, O. (2006). Changing Rights and Wrongs: The Transnational Construction of Indigenous and Human Rights among Vietnam’s Central Highlanders. Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, 47(2006), 32–47. Salemink, O. (2007). The Emperor’s New Clothes: Re-fashioning Ritual in the Huế Festival. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38(3), 559–582. Salemink, O. (2008). Embodying the Nation: Mediumship, Ritual, and the National Imagination. Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 3(3), 257–290. Salemink, O. (2015). Spirit Worship and Possession in Vietnam and Beyond. In B. S. Turner & O. Salemink (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia (pp. 231–246). London and New York: Routledge. Santos, B. de Sousa. (2015). If God were a Human Rights Activist. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sullivan, W. F., Hurd, E. S., Mahmood, S., & Danchin, P. (Eds.). (2015). Politics of Religious Freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sutton, D. (2000). From Credulity to Scorn: Confucians Confront the Spirit Mediums in Late Imperial China. Late Imperial China, 21(2), 1–39. Taylor, P. (2004). Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

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Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thaveeporn Vasavakul. (2003). From Fence-breaking to Networking: Interests, Popular Organizations and Policy Influences in Post-socialist Vietnam. In B.  Kerkvliet, R.  Heng, & D.  Koh (Eds.), Getting Organized in Vietnam: Moving in and around the Socialist State (pp. 25–61). ISEAS: Singapore. Thien Do. (2003). Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region. London & New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Turner, B.  S. (2004). Fundamentalism, Spiritual Markets and Modernity. Sociology, 38(1), 195–202. Turner, B.  S. (2006a). Religion and Politics: Nationalism, Globalisation and Empire. Asian Journal of Social Sciences, 34(2), 209–224. Turner, B. S. (2006b). Religion. Theory, Culture and Society, 23(2–3), 437–455. Vargyas, G. (1993). The structure of Bru Shamanic Ceremonies. In M. Hoppal, K.D.  Howard (Eds.), Sahamans and Cultures (pp.  120–127). Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest/International Society for Trans-Oceanic Research, Los Angeles. Veer, P. van der (1996). Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. London: Routledge. Veer, P. van der (2001). Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zito, A. (1997). Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth-century China. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

8 Secularist Nativism: National Identity and the Religious Other in the Netherlands Josip Kešić and Jan Willem Duyvendak

Introduction If immigration continues, Islamic culture in the Netherlands will keep growing—which I do not want—and we will end up living in country that has not one million but many, many more Muslims adhering to an ideology that directly opposes ours. Then Dutch identity will be lost… I want to safeguard our identity, and this is why I want to put a stop to immigration.1

This statement made by the Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders is illustrative of a discourse that has gained prominence in many European countries across the whole political spectrum. Such discourses problematizing Islam and Muslims have often been analysed through the  Geert Wilders, 2008, Parliamentary Debate about the internet film Fitna, available at https:// zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/h-tk-20072008-4880-4921.pdf, accessed 27 November, 2014.

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J. Kešić (*) • J. W. Duyvendak University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_8

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conceptual lenses of ‘secularism’, ‘Islamophobia’, ‘populism’ and ‘nationalism’, to name just a few. Whereas we acknowledge the relevance of these concepts, we approach such discourses from a closely related yet different conceptual angle. In our perspective, what is primarily at stake is not so much the conflict with or between religions as such but the role of religion and secularism in constructions of the nation’s cultural identity. More specifically, we regard the problematization of Islam first and foremost as a manifestation of a phenomenon that exceeds the debates on secularism or Islam: nativisn, an “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign connections” (Higham 2011 [1955], p.  3). As a subcategory of nationalism, nativism constructs various minorities as a threat to the nation, for example, native elites (populist nativism), black minorities (racial nativism) or welfare state profiteers (socio-economic nativism).2 At least in Europe, Muslim minorities are the main targets of this nativist logic. To capture conceptually this dynamic between national self-understandings and enemy images when revolving around religion and secularism, we propose to call this secularist nativism: an intense opposition to an internal minority that is seen as a threat to the ‘secular’ nation on the ground of its foreignness.3 Geert  Wilders is secular nativism’s most recognizable mouthpiece nationwide, if not internationally. However, his narrative, with slight variations, has been perpetuated by many other Dutch politicians since the early 1990s, including Pim Fortuyn, Frits Bolkestein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Rita Verdonk. Public opinion-makers and intellectuals have also helped produce this nativist twist on ‘the clash of civilizations’ narrative’, including the late Theo van Gogh, Afshin Ellian and Paul Cliteur, to name just the most prominent among the Dutch. The idea that Dutch national identity and Islam are not only different but also incompatible, antagonistic cultural entities has been used time and again by right-wing politicians, most recently by Thierry Baudet. His party, the Forum voor  Each of these subtypes of nativism will be addressed separately and in depth in the book we are currently working on with the working title The Return of the Native. Understanding Progressive Nativism in the West. For the shorter version of nativism’s subtypes and the main argument, see Kešić & Duyvendak (2019). 3  For a similar analysis yet with different concepts and more connected to debates on religion and secularism, see van den Hemel’s ‘post-secular nationalism’ (Hemel 2018). 2

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Democratie (from now, FvD), was founded in 2016, and obtained two seats in the 2017 national elections and became the largest party in the 2019 provincial (and Senate) elections. Hence, secularist nativism is a prevalent political phenomenon in the Netherlands that we urgently have to understand better. In the following, we first analyse the two main pillars of secularist nativism, followed by an in-depth analysis of the role history plays in the discourses by secularists nativists. In the conclusion, we discuss the political impact of secularist nativism.

 wo Pillars of Secularist Nativism: Gender/ T Sexuality and Cultural Christianity In the context of Dutch nativism, one of the main ways in which processes of secularization and nativism are intertwined is through rendering progressive gender and sexuality as the defining essence of the secular nation (Balkenhol et al. 2016; Uitermark et al. 2014). The nativist thematization of issues related to gender and sexuality, especially concerning gender equality and homosexuality should be interpreted as secular notions taking on sacred dimensions. In countless discussions on the Koran, honour killings, female circumcisions, genital mutilation, forced marriages and domestic violence, Islam is disqualified by its oppression of non-emancipated women and juxtaposed with the gender equality and sexual freedom that is considered quintessentially Dutch. While the position of women is central in debates about Islam in many European contexts, nowhere is the role of homosexuality more prevalent in nativist imageries than in the Netherlands (Fassin 2010; Mepschen et al. 2010; Schinkel 2017). The openly gay, anti-Islam populist Fortuyn contributed to the reputation of the Dutch as being ‘pro-gay’. Enjoying success in the early 2000s, Fortuyn capitalized on the deeply ingrained national self-­ image of ‘tolerance’ by contrasting it with Islam, characterized as homophobic. These depictions of Dutchness and Islam are just a recent manifestation of the older, broader opposition between progressive modernity and backwards tradition (Scott 2009; Schinkel 2017).

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Gender and sexuality function in secularist nativism according to the logic of the ‘typicality effect’ (Leerssen 1997), whereby one salient element is presented as characteristic for the whole group or culture. Secularist nativism employs gender and sexuality to emphasize differences between Dutch society and its Muslim minority, which are privileged over possible similarities between the two, and over internal differences within each entity. Therefore, this discursively constructed image of Dutchness glosses over not only the past century’s long, hard struggle for gender and sexual equality (a struggle unrelated to any Muslim presence or absence), but also the sexism and homophobia that persists in present-day Netherlands. Along progressive sexuality and gender relations, a specific notion of Christianity—we call Cultural Christianity—is another central pillar in the discourse of secularist nativism. Here, Christianity should not be regarded as a ‘substantive Christianity… not understood as a religion, but as a civilization, as co-extensive with “the West”’ and deemed characteristic for its constitutive nations by people and parties who are often not religious themselves (Brubaker 2017). This de-substantialization means that “references to a shared theological unity or to confessional identity remain largely absent. Personal faith, or religious experiences are usually fully absent from these discussions” (Hemel 2014 : 59). FvD’s political discourse is a recent reiteration of this European wide trope of Cultural Christianity. In a 2017 pre-election speech, for example, its leader Baudet said that: ‘One does not have to subscribe to Christianity’s metaphysical assumptions to still appreciate the idea of the resurrection as the guiding motif of our civilization.’4 Such general notions of nationhood are translated into more specific policy issues. FvD’s online petition to ‘save’ Christmas is illustrative: Christmas belongs in the Netherlands. But the NPO [Dutch public broadcaster] wants to banish the term from TVs—and various schools have announced that, in the name of diversity and inclusion, they will not celebrate Christmas. Our culture is under attack and our oikophobic, self-­  Westen lijdt aan een auto-immuunziekte. Speech at party conference on 15 January 2017. Available on the FvD website at https://forumvoordemocratie.nl/actueel/toespraakthierry-baudet-alvfvd-2017 (accessed February 1, 2017). 4

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hating elites are enthusiastically participating in its degradation and erosion. Forum for Democracy maintains that Christmas is something that must be saved. This degradation of our traditions and our way of life must stop. Our elites’ self-hatred—the oikophobia—must stop.5

Through his notion of oikophobia (the fear/hate of one’s home), Baudet has repeatedly claimed that there is an ‘identity crisis of the West’: ‘Many problems we face today have to do with our inability to formulate our identity vis-à-vis this great adversary that arrived here, the fact that we do not know who we are.6 To solve the problem of ‘uprootedness’, he proposes to ‘reinvent ourselves’ by re-embracing Christianity, which not only embodies typical ‘Western values’ (such as freedom of speech), but can also fulfil the fundamental need ‘of the Dutch people’ for cohesion and meaning. More concretely, he advocates that Christianity should be taught at all primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands. Asked whether he himself is Christian, Baudet replied that he is an ‘agnostic cultural Christian’.7 Cultural Christianity de-substantialises Christianity also by discursively associating it with other religions (Judaism) and secular categories (humanism and Enlightenment). A Geert Wilders’s (PVV) 2017 speech is one example of innumerable instances. Here he warns that the alleged EU policies to host Muslim migrants will ‘undermine the Judeo-Christian and humanistic identity of our nations’ which are essentially ‘free and civilised’.8 That even those who do foreground religious Christianity embrace Cultural Christianity illustrates the latter’s hegemonic status. The established centrist Christian Democrats (CDA) also emphasize that “we are grounded in a tradition of Judeo-Christian values”: ‘Whether we  Stop de zelfhaat! Behoud het Kerstfeest. Available on the FvD website at https://forumvoordemocratie.nl/petities/kerstmis, accessed 4 June 2018. 6  De Evangelische Omroep. De Tafel van Tijs, February 14, 2017. Available at https://portal.eo.nl/ programmas/tv/de-tafel-van-tijs/gemist/2017/02/14-de-tafelvan-tijs, accessed 17 July, 2017. 7  De Evangelische Omroep. De Tafel van Tijs, February 14, 2017. Available at https://portal.eo.nl/ programmas/tv/de-tafel-van-tijs/gemist/2017/02/14-de-tafel-vantijs, accessed 17 July 2017. 8  Geert Wilders, 2017, Speech at the MENF Congress in Prague. https://www.pvv.nl/36-fj-related/ geertwilders/9674-speech-geert-wildersinpraag-16-12-2017-menf-congres.html’, accessed 3 June, 2020. 5

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want it or not, whether we believe [in God] or not, whether we attend the church or not: The Netherlands is still in its philosophical foundation a Christian country’.9 Another clear aspect of the de-substantialization Christianity in the employment of Cultural Christianity is the entanglement between the two pillars of secularist nativism. When Wilders is put under pressure in a debate in Dutch parliament to concretely explain what he means by ‘Judeo-Christian-humanist culture’, he replied by contrasting it to what he views as typical for the Islam: ‘It is a culture that does not kill homosexuals’ and infidels, that ‘allows apostasy, and treats men and women equally, and esteems the separation of church and state.’10 Thus, the historically incorrect equation of Christianity with both Judaism and humanism entails a triple conflation. First, it conflates religious traditions which have often  had an antagonistic relationship. Second, it conflates Christianity with predominantly secular movements (humanism and the Enlightenment) and ‘values traditionally associated with secularism, such as the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, gay rights, and feminism’ (Hemel 2014: 55) and individualism. Thirdly, it conflates national identity with broader, transnational categories of ‘the West’ and ‘Europe’.

Sacralization Through Historization The nativist narrative not only portrays the national culture being under threat by an enemy called Islam, but is also sacralises it, and therefore can be seen as one of the “secular practices and values that can take on sacred dimensions as the subject of worship”  (Balkenhol, Hemel and Stengs, this volume, p. 6). This sacral status of national identity can be inferred from not only its thematic centrality in public and political debates—at the expense of other major political concerns—but also from the deep emotional investment in this topic. One of the main ways through which the secularist self-image has discursively obtained its sacred status in nativist discourses is through the historization of national identity. Below  Sybrand Buma: Verwarde tijden die om richting vragen. HJ Schoolezing, 4 September 2017, see Elsevier Weekblad, 5 September 2017. 10  Parliamentary Debate, ‘Dynamiek in islamitisch activisme’, September 6, 2007. See https://zoek. officielebekendmakingen.nl/h-tk-20062007-5260-5319.pdf, accessed 3 June, 2020. 9

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we dissect  this sacralization through historization by distinguising between various emplotments of the nation’s temporal trajectories which invoke either historical continuity or discontinuity.

The Narrative of Secular Emergence The conflation as mentioned above between religions and between religious and predominantly secular categories relies to a large degree on its historization. Frits Bolkestein, the leader of the Dutch liberal party (VVD) and one of the earliest voices articulating secularist nativism in the Netherlands, wrote: ‘Rationalism, humanism and Christianity have, after a long history that includes many black pages, brought forth a number of fundamentally important political principles, like the separation of Church and State,11 freedom of speech, tolerance and non-discrimination.’ In 2008, the same VVD included in its foundational document that ‘the Dutch society’s origin is the Judeo-Christian tradition, humanism and the Enlightenment. These civilizational foundations […] are the basis for our national identity.’12 Similarly, Geert Wilders of the populist right-wing PVV also repeatedly historicizes the ‘Judeo-Christian and humanistic identity of our nation’ against the religious enemy: ‘Together we must resist Islamic totalitarianism. Because our civilization is not Islamic. It is rooted in the heritage of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome!’13 Explicitly following Huntington, the Christian Democrat Buma (CDA) argues that, not only are ‘we’ rooted in a ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ in which equality and freedom have always been an intrinsic part of, but also that ‘modernity’ (democracy, humanism, Enlightenment) ‘is not at odds with Christian ethics, but a result of it’ (Buma 2017, p. 36).14  Parliamentary Debate, ‘Dynamiek in islamitisch activisme’, September 6, 2007. See https://zoek. officielebekendmakingen.nl/h-tk-20062007-5260-5319.pdf, accessed 3 June, 2020. 12  VVD, 2008. Beginselverklaring. See https://www.vvd.nl/content/uploads/2016/12/beginselverklaring.pdf, accessed 18 April, 2018. 13  Geert Wilders, Speech at the MENF Congress in Prague, December 16, 2017. See https://www. pvv.nl/36-fj-related/geert-wilders/9674-speech-geert-wildersin-praag-16-12-2017-menf-congres. html, accessed 3 June, 2020. 14  Sybrand Buma: Verwarde tijden die om richting vragen. HJ Schoolezing, 4 September 2017, see Elsevier Weekblad, 5 September 2017. 11

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In this narrative, which far-right wing to centrist parties alike subscribe to, Dutch national identity (defined by liberal values embodied by first and foremost progressive sexuality and gender relations, and Cultural Christianity) is a secular identity yet historically linked to its Christian past. However, Christianity does not merely precede secular national identity on the historical timeline, it gives birth to it: the latter emerges from the former. Their historical relationship is not temporal, but genealogical. The narrative of genealogical emergence—that is secularism’s historical and spiritual indebtedness to Christianity—portrays national history as a dynamic process in which different cultural dimensions are intertwined. Yet, the implied harmony of this historically dynamic entanglement of multiple traditions invokes a rather static homogeneity of the nation’s cultural identity because it foregrounds continuity and sameness and downplays discontinuity and difference, all in function to enhance the contrast with what nativists deem the enemy, Islam. The continuity of national identity is partly invoked through Christianity appearing in various forms on the nation’s historical timeline, first as the genealogical source, later as its de-substantialised remnant functioning as a symbol of cultural rather than confessional identity. The narrative of emergence produces an irony: the invocation of Cultural Christianity defines the Netherlands as a secular country, erasing its ‘real’ Christian practices in both the recent past and present.

The Narrative of Perpetual Tolerance Where in the narrative of emergence, Christianity is followed by secularism (associated with liberal values), there is another narrative that also invokes liberal values as the essence of Dutchness yet through other means: religious diversity. The discourse on and in Amsterdam, functioning as a synecdoche for Dutchness, provides the clearest illustration of this type. In innumerable speeches, mayors and aldermen of the Dutch capital emphasize that the city has been a refuge for dissidents, particularly religious dissidents, from its earliest days. Former mayor Schelto Patijn spoke of the ‘Old age Amsterdam traditions of freedom and

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liberty’, just as former mayor Job Cohen claimed that ‘anybody who is aware of the history of Amsterdam knows that migration to our city is of all times, creating a prosperous city.’ An official leaflet welcoming new residents to the city reads: During the 17th century, Amsterdam continued to be a safe haven. Thousands of immigrants flocked to Amsterdam from the South, fleeing war and religious persecution or just seeking jobs and higher pay […] Their new neighbours dressed more flamboyantly, spoke foreign languages, and practiced different religions. But Amsterdam may never have become a world power in the 17th century without immigrants—and it wouldn’t be the city it is today.

It is no surprise that Russell Shorto’s book Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City—which posits an almost teleological history of tolerance leading up to today’s liberal city—has been embraced by Amsterdam’s political class and by Dutch nativists more generally. Nevertheless, Shorto’s suggestion of a causal relationship between the seventeenth century and today’s liberal city is highly questionable. Instead of erasing or downplaying religion (as in the narrative of secular emergence or in the notion of Cultural Christianity), the narrative of perpetual tolerance relies not only on one religion but on multiple religions. Emphasizing the presence of religions serves to prove the point that their harmonious co-existence reveals a liberal attitude deemed a Dutch essence. Where the narrative of secular emergence erases religion as such, this variation erases the antagonism among religions. For example, it glosses over the period that Roman-Catholics were second-rate citizens, not allowed to publicly show their religiosity or occupy government positions. This erasure takes place by avoiding interreligious conflicts within the included historical periods, and by excluding inimical periods, such as the twentieth century pillarization when the Netherlands was a deeply divided country along confessional lines. The narrative of perpetual tolerance invokes a continuity between a distant past and the present by excluding the relatively recent past.

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The Narrative of Accomplished Progress Where the narratives of secular emergence and perpetual tolerance depict national history positively through the invocation of harmonious (trans) historical continuity, the third narrative does so through representing the nation’s past in terms of antagonistic discontinuity. An illustration of this type of historization of the national past in the context of secularist nativism is the often quoted interview with Pim Fortuyn, the flamboyant leader of the far-right Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), murdered in 2002 and voted the ‘Greatest Dutchman of all time’ in 2004. Referring to Islam, he said: I do not feel like repeating the emancipation of women and homosexuals […] I don’t hate Islam. I consider it a backward culture. I have travelled much. And wherever Islam rules, it’s just terrible. All the hypocrisy. It’s a bit like those old reformed Protestants. The Reformed lie all the time. And why is that? Because they have standards and values that are so high that you can’t humanly maintain them. You also see that in that Muslim culture. Then look at the Netherlands. In what country could an electoral leader of such a large movement as mine be openly homosexual? How wonderful that that’s possible. That’s something that one can be proud of. And I’d like to keep it that way, thank you very much.15

When future politician Diederik Boomsma was pursuing his PhD degree in the same institutional and intellectual environment as FvD’s Thierry Baudet and Paul Cliteur (i.e. Leiden’s Faculty of Law, the cradle of highbrow secularist nativism in the Netherlands), he wrote that ‘Emancipation is not out of fashion. Emancipation is accomplished’ (Boomsma and Price 2014).16 Several years later in the capacity of a member of the Amsterdam local council for the Christian Democrats (CDA), he  would indirectly  condone  that the Dutch are superior  to  De Volkskrant February 9, 2002. Pim Fortuyn op herhaling: De islam is een achterlijke cultuur. See https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/pim-fortuyn-op-herhaling-de-islam-is-eenachterlijke-cultuur~bee400ca/, accessed January 6, 2019. 16  Diederik Boomsma and Jonathan Price, NRC, 18 January 2014, Het keerpunt is bereikt: de emancipatie is niet uit, maar gewoon af. See https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2014/01/18/het-keerpunt-isbereikt-de-emancipatie-is-niet-uit-maar-simpelweg-af-a1427928, accessed 3 June 2020. 15

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others ‘nothing wrong to think that way.’17 As the progressive self-image is supported by the entire political spectrum, it should not come as a surprise that this idea of ‘national progress’ can be encountered among leftwing politicians as well. Illustrative is an essay by the former chairman of the Green-­Left Party, Herman Meijer ‘Progressive patriotism’ (2011).18 For him, not the Muslims are regarded as a threat but right-wing nativists who have the potential to poison the country’s liberal essence. To combat this danger, the progressive-left should re-appropriate Dutch national identity based on the national history’s leitmotif: ‘moral progress’, defined as self-­determination and emancipation and embodied in the nation’s liberal values mainly around issues of gender, sexuality and religion (Kešić and Duyvendak 2016). Meijer: The twentieth century started with the emancipation of Catholics, Calvinists, and the working class, and it ended with the emancipation of women and gays. […] The progressive policy and legislation on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, soft drugs, and homosexuality can be attributed to the struggle of minorities. However, they have been accepted now almost across the entire political spectrum […].19

Where others avoid conflict within and differences between periods of national history, the narrative of ‘accomplished progress’ is predicated on acknowledging the nation’s historical struggles. It views them not only as a central part of the nation’s past, but it infers a rather self-congratulatory self-image out of it, regarding both the historical process and its end result. What makes the Dutch superior is not only their liberal, progressive present, but also their capacity throughout the centuries to overcome problems and to continually move into the right moral direction. More than other narratives it regards national history as a discontinuous process with conflicts, yet this serves to invoke a trans-historical essence that finds its full realization in the present. Without idealizing the past (as it includes many negative aspects one would deem un-Dutch), the  Diederik Boomsma, February 24, 2018, Twitter. https://twitter.com/DiederikBoomsma/status/967404626181021697, accessed 3 June, 2020. 18  Herman Meijer, 2011, Verlicht nationalisme. Tijdschrift de Helling 24(3), 55–65. 19  Herman Meijer, 2011, Verlicht nationalisme. Tijdschrift de Helling 24(3), 55–65. 17

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narrative of accomplished progress depicts a positive historical process culminating in the ideal state of completion in the present.

The Narrative of Rebirth The most explicit and politically relevant example of the Rebirth trope is the far right-wing party FvD. Thiery Baudet’s victory speech after becoming the biggest party in the provincial (and, indirectly, senate) elections in the Netherlands (March 20, 2019) is a case in point as it invokes an ideal past, a negative recent past/present and a rebirth (present-future). He argues that the national past is part and parcel of the ‘greatest and most beautiful civilisation the world has ever known’, referring to colonial expansion and the ‘most beautiful’ arts of the past. However, this past of cultural superiority is ‘almost gone’ due to its continual destruction in the recent past by the leftist elites through the media, education, and immigration and ecological policies: ‘[…] as all these other countries of our boreal [white, JK&JWD] world, we are being destroyed by those very people who should have protected us.’ Despite the enemy’s efforts to undermine it, this historically grown superiority, the ‘greatest civilisation’, remains ‘inside of us and therefore cannot be taken away.’ In order to ‘restore’ this unalienable national essence with ‘its traditions’, to ‘make our country ours again’, Baudet programmatically proclaims his future-­ orientated political aspirations, which again includes Cultural Christianity: Today we have chosen to combat again. As FvD members we know that you don’t have to subscribe to the metaphysical foundations of Christianity to nevertheless accept the idea of resurrection as the guiding motif for the Western civilisation. The idea that something that was dead, can flourish again, is our ground rule. Because we are the party of the rebirth […] we are going to achieve a renaissance where our confidence [and pride] are restored.20

 Thierry Baudet, 2019, Victory Speech Senate Elections. https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/spreektekstthierrybaudet-verkiezingsavond-20-maart-2019~be2a1539/, accessed 20 March, 2019. 20

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Where in the other narratives the national past is presented rather positively, here it is pushed even further to the point of glorified superiority. Moreover, this national superiority does not so much emerge from historical development but is perceived as a trans-historical essence of a static past: Western civilisation. If the narrative of accomplished progress depicts the present as the pinnacle of cultural progress, the narrative of rebirth diagnoses the present, due to its decease in the recent past, as the nadir up to the point of near death. The future appears in two guises in this narrative. First as an apocalypse, echoing Spencerian notions of inter-­ ethnic competition and decadent degeneration: the coalition of the nation’s two enemies (the leftists elites and Muslims) destroys Dutch culture and by extension the Western civilisation. But, second, the future is also presented as a realizable utopia: the desire for and promise of a future when the past’s superiority will rise again and the idyllic purity of native homogeneity will be reinstalled.

 onclusion: The Political Impact C of Secularist Nativism As a fundamentally relational concept, nativism  does not only entail notions of self, but also entail notions of the antagonistic other, in the present case the Muslim minority. How the nativist view exactly affects the minority position is ambiguous: Muslims must adapt because they are a cultural minority; at the same time, despite being a minority, Muslims are perceived as a serious threat to the nation, if not to Western civilization as a whole. Predicated on the belief in the fiction of a homogenous national community and fuelled by fears of threat and cannibalization of their nation by Muslims, some secularist nativists propose forced assimilation as the solution. For example, there is the idea that Dutch Muslims must ‘become Dutch’, implying that such individuals are not Dutch, despite being born in the Netherlands and possessing Dutch citizenship. Government and social-scientific surveys often use variables such as levels of secularism, inter-ethnic contacts and spouse choice to measure migrants’ assimilation into the Dutch national community, just

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as the acceptance of gender equality and homosexuality is regarded as proof of successful assimilation (Schinkel 2017). Muslim migrants are told to rid themselves of loyalties to their countries of origin in order to fully participate in and identify with Dutch society (Duyvendak 2011, 2017). Their histories are not so much trivialized or obscured but problematized, particularly concerning immigrants (originally) coming from Muslim-majority countries are told to emancipate from the burdening culture of their country of origin to become a part of ‘modern society’. An example: Dutch parliament has decided to discourage dual citizenship since it is seen as proof of lacklustre integration and loyalty, as being stuck in a past that must be transcended. This framing of cultural difference—our ‘modern’ culture versus their ‘backward’ culture/religion—not only suggests incompatibility but a clear hierarchy as well (cf. Butler 2008). Cultural difference is understood in terms of temporal difference. The Orientalist assumption at work is not only that Islam’s position on the evolutionary time scale ‘lags behind’ the ‘modern’ West, but also that this Islamic past (which informs if not dictates Muslims’ present) is a static, timeless past where Middle Ages and the present are exchangeable. Where the idea of assimilation prompts the Dutch natives to re-historicise national culture Muslims ought to assimilate in, for the latter assimilation entails a de-historization. However, where nativism demands assimilation and promises acceptance into the national community, it simultaneously defers the successful fulfilment of its solution. No matter how well Muslims (or secularists from Muslim-majority countries) integrate—from accepting homosexuality to openly claiming and embracing Dutch national identity—their assimilation is never considered complete. When, for example, the Dutch public intellectual and ex-politician of Turkish descent, Zihni Özdil, explicitly identifies as Dutch and embraces Dutch symbols and history, he is ridiculed and/or distrusted. Sociologist Willem Schinkel observes that ‘[t]he problem of “passing,” [....] applies only to “non-natives” in the nonliteral sense. This… means that to “pass” as “Dutch” or as “European” is only up for continuous testing to those a priori considered as “different”’ (2017: 3). Nativists often assume that underneath the surface-level signs of assimilation, Muslims’ still adhere more deeply to their own culture, beliefs and loyalties. This recalls the suspicion Protestants once showed

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towards Roman-Catholics in the Netherlands because they were assumed to be secretly more loyal to the Pope than to the Dutch nation. The consequence of the disbelief in the attainability of successful assimilation of Muslims is an idea that has been often promoted by right-­ wing nativists: territorial displacement to the lands of ‘origin’. Territorial displacement as a geographic solution to a cultural problem is often suggested in discussions on various (local) events (sexual harassment or petty crime, often framed in terms of clashes between civilisations or religions) or visible religious symbols (head scarves or mosques). Dutch citizens who are framed as Muslims, are urged to ‘go back’ to where ‘they’ ‘belong’ or ‘came from’. Although it has not reached the status of official government policy yet, the idea of territorial displacement has indeed become more acceptable and normalized, evinced by the fact that the liberal-­ conservative prime minister Mark Rutte (VVD) invokes it. Commenting on a political demonstration in 2016  during which Dutch citizens of Turkish descent waved Turkish flags, Rutte said that demonstrators should ‘piss off’ (pleur op!) and instrumentalized this notion in the subsequent electoral campaign. The FvD took it a step further, promoting territorial displacement physical exclusion as a way to deal with cultural otherness. The party’s official website stated: Our immigration policy should be oriented towards those we need here and those whom we can receive (on the basis of cultural background included). When integration fails, remigration is the best solution… there must be a mandate for remigration as an alternative penalty… The Netherlands wants to decide for itself whom to absorb. Immigrants with extreme political ideas that are not in line with our Western civilization should immediately be deported to their country of origin… [We] encourage remigration when integration (assimilation) fails.21

This is the radical consequence of secularist nativism. As we showed, one of the main ways the secularist self-image has discursively obtained a sacred status in nativist discourses is through the historization of national identity. Whether presenting the national past in terms of continuity or  Forum voor Democratie, 2018, Immigratie en remigratie. https://forumvoordemocratie.nl/standpunten/immigratie-remigratie, accessed 4 February, 2018. 21

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discontinuity, all the historicizing narratives invoke a sacred core of superior Dutchness represented by liberated sexuality/equal gender relations and Cultural Christianity. Narratives such as the teleological extrapolation of seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s liberalism to our days are not only historically inaccurate. If we scratch below the surface, they don’t always produce a very welcoming climate for immigrants either. By laying claim to a kind of perpetual liberalism, the Dutch are portrayed as homogeneously progressive and secular (whitewashing the history of empire and religious conservatism), while immigrants are depicted as ‘backwards’ and out of place in the ultra-liberal city and country. As it turns out, the self-congratulatory embrace of progressiveness does not necessarily include openness towards others, but is close to becoming a mind-set that excludes Muslim immigrants and refugees who come to disturb ‘our’ liberal enclave. In the discourse of far-right parties, liberal values indeed play this exclusionary role, as also shown elsewhere (Mepschen et al. 2010; Duyvendak 2011; Duyvendak et al. 2016). The irony of secularist nativism is that it increasingly resembles what it regards as its opposite.

References Balkenhol, M., Mepschen, P., & Duyvendak, J. W. (2016). The Nativist Triangle: Sexuality, Race and Religion in the Netherlands. In J.  W. Duyvendak, P.  Geschiere, & E.  Tonkens (Eds.), The Culturalization of Citizenship: Belonging and Polarization in a Globalising World (Vol. 105). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Brubaker, R. (2017). Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist Moment in Comparative Perspective. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(8), 1191–1226. Butler, J. (2008). Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time. British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 1–23. Duyvendak, J.  W. (2011). The Politics of Home: Nostalgia and Belonging in Western Europe and the United States. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Duyvendak, J. W., Geschiere, P., & Tonkens, E. (Eds.). (2016). The Culturalization of Citizenship. Belonging and Polarization in a Globalizing World. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

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Duyvendak, J. W. (2017). Thuis: Het drama van een sentimentele samenleving. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fassin, E. (2010). National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual Democracy and the Politics of Immigration in Europe. Public Culture, 22(3), 507–529. Hemel, E. van den (2014). (Pro)claiming Tradition: The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Roots of Dutch Society and the Rise of Conservative Nationalism. In R. Braidotti, B. Blaagaard, T. de Graauw, & E. Midden (Eds.), Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hemel, E. van den (2018). Post-Secular Nationalism: The Dutch Turn to the Right & Cultural-Religious Reframing of Secularity. In H. Alma (Ed.), Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (pp. 249–263). Berlin: Guido Vanheeswijck, de Gruyter. Higham, J. (2011 [1955]). Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kešić, J., & Duyvendak, J.  W. (2016). Anti-nationalist Nationalism: The Paradox of Dutch National Identity. Nations and Nationalism, 22(3), 581–597. Leerssen, J. (1997). L’effet de typique. In A. Montandon (Ed.), Moeurs et Images: etudes d’imagologie européenne (pp. 129–134). Clermont-Ferrand: Université Biaise Pascal. Mepschen, P., Duyvendak, J.  W., & Tonkens, E. (2010). Sexual Politics, Orientalism, and Multicultural of Citizenship in the Netherlands. Sociology, 44(5), 962–979. Scott, J. (2009). ‘Sexularism’, Ursula Hirschmann Annual Lecture on Gender and Europe. Presented at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy. Schinkel, W. (2017). Imagined Societies: A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Uitermark, J., Mepschen, P., & Duyvendak, J.  W. (2014). Populism, Sexual Politics, and the Exclusion of Muslims in the Netherlands. In J.  Bowen, C. Bertossi, J. W. Duyvendak, & M. L. Krook (Eds.), European States and Their Muslim Citizens (pp. 235–255). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9 Dutch Tolerance in Black and White: From Religious Pragmatism to Racialized Ideology Alex van Stipriaan

Early 2017, during the months leading up to local elections in the Netherlands, the party of the reigning prime minister Rutte, the People’s Party for Liberty and Democracy (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie, VVD), orchestrated their ‘intolerant of intolerance’ Amsterdam campaign. In January of that same year Prime Minister Mark Rutte published an open letter in the national newspapers stating among other things: We feel a growing inconvenience when people abuse our freedom to mess up things here, whereas they have come to our country particularly because of that freedom. People who do not want to adapt, who run down our habits and reject our values. Who bully gays, who boo at women in short skirts, or who call ordinary Dutch people racists. I understand very well that people think: if you fundamentally reject our country, I prefer you to leave. I share that feeling. Act normally or go away.1  https://www.vvd.nl/nieuws/lees-hier-de-brief-van-mark/ (accessed 20-12-2017).

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Adapt to our tolerance, because we don’t tolerate intolerance. Don’t touch our values of freedom, don’t touch our women or our gays, and— without mentioning him, but in the light of heated national debates on this figure, there is no doubt it is him: don’t touch our national blackface Zwarte Piet because we are not racist. That was the message of the nation’s political leader. Now, the fascinating and at the same time complicating thing here is, of course, that tolerance in a multicultural society like the Netherlands is simultaneously perceived as the ultimate tool of a very liberal multiculturalism, as well as the ultimate tool of imposed integration by assimilation.2 This chapter will show how the phenomenon of Dutch tolerance has shifted from a term primarily related to the religious sphere, which has only recently been secularized, to one related to the cultural sphere. In particular, this chapter argues that a shift has taken place in which tolerance has transformed from a discourse employed by those in power to something that is to be expected from ‘others’. In particular this chapter focusses on how this development has been related to issues concerning race. What, in the changing roles tolerance has played in Dutch history, has been the impact on issues related to skin colour? The recent heated national debate around the Dutch blackface figure of Zwarte Piet is a case in point. This article sees the debates around this polarizing blackface tradition in light of the changing modalities of Dutch tolerance. But first, this chapter sketches how tolerance has moved from a regulation of Christian diversity to a hallmark of Dutch national cultural identity.

The Tolerance Shift Probably even  more so  than windmills, tulips and wooden shoes the Dutch are internationally known for their tolerance. This is also the shared concept in which the majority of the Dutch population defines itself. It is  Duyvendak and Scholten (2011: 331) stress this typical paradox of Dutch multicultural society when they state that ‘researchers and policy makers have in the Netherlands been joined in several discourse coalitions’. Indeed, one of these discourse coalitions supported an integration paradigm with multicultural elements, but at least two other types of discourses can be identified in the Netherlands, one of more liberal–egalitarian nature and one more assimilationist. In spite of the persistent image of the Netherlands as a representative of the multicultural model, it is in fact this multiplicity of discourses that characterizes the Dutch case. 2

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generally perceived as part of a national culture existing at least since the seventeenth century, Holland’s so-called Golden Age.3 A 2004 survey among Dutch showed that they characterize their own individual identity as primarily tolerant. This idea of the Dutch self has a long tradition, and actually they think that the rest of Europe should adopt this as a core value as well (Hoving 2017: 191–192). It is not surprising therefore, that yet another, European, survey found that notions such as tolerance, acceptance, respect, recognition and citizenship receive much attention in Dutch schools and, therefore, the Netherlands is among the European countries which most explicitly reserve room for tolerance in education.4 Anthropologist Martijn de Koning calls Dutch tolerance a myth ‘in the sense of being one of the holy grand narratives showing the genesis of Dutch society and why it is such as it is’.5 His colleague anthropologist Oskar Verkaaik adds that although the Dutch myth of freedom and tolerance contains ‘a certain degree of self-assurance’ it is not completely untrue. However, it is only part of a reality, which he describes as ‘ritual citizenship’ (Verkaaik 2009: 86). And cultural historian Willem Frijhoff called the myth of tolerance part of the Dutch culture-nation, that is, the emotional part of the nation state which contains a nation’s self-image. It is part of the norms and behaviours and forms of agency which the Dutch have symbolically appropriated as constitutive of their common identity. However, another survey had shown that although two-thirds of the Dutch held tolerance the most important core value of the Netherlands, this was now declining rapidly and instead intolerance was increasing massively, particularly directed towards foreigners and foreign influences.6 The question becomes how this shared myth of tolerance became simultaneously inclusive and exclusive, integrating and segregating. In  Survey by NBTC, 2013 [https://www.communicatieonline.nl/nieuws/imago-onderzoek-nbtctoeristen-vinden-ons-tolerant-en-open] (accessed 20-09-2016). 4  The EU research project Accept Pluralism; Tolerance, Pluralism and Social Cohesion: Responding to the Challenges of the 21st Century in Europe (2012) by the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, for which the Dutch part of the survey was done by Marcel Maussers, Thijs Bogers and Inge Versteegt [http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/23514/ACCEPT_ WP5_2012-28_Country-synthesis-report_Netherlands.pdf;sequence=1] (accessed 18-09-2016). 5  My translation [https://www.nieuwwij.nl/opinie/de-beleefde-tolerantie/] (accessed 18-09-2016). 6  2012 SIRE, the Association of Idealistic Advertising, started a campaign ‘Tolerance; thát will improve the Netherlands’. 3

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order to understand this double bind in our present, we need to shortly revisit the history of tolerance in the Netherlands. Historian Anton van der Lem states that the concept of tolerance started to rise in the Netherlands since the mid-sixteenth century. Actually, it was even a little before that when the revolution of the Protestant Reformation was on the verge of breaking out. In between Martin Luther’s radicalism and the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, Desiderius Erasmus pleaded for tolerance, holding a sort of middle position (Lem 2006; Kennedy 2017: 96–97). This tolerance, which he also defined as syncretism, stressed unity instead of differences. It was a strategy to avoid conflict and stimulate dialogue in order to reconcile antagonistic positions (Veer 1995: 70–71). However, Erasmus’ tolerance included only Christians. Referring to Jews, for example, he stated that hating Jews is a characteristic of being a true Christian.7 So, tolerance started as an endeavour of reconciling opposing interpretations within one religion, Christianity. Since the end of the sixteenth century, when the Reformed church had become dominant in the northern Netherlands and hundreds of thousands of migrants with different Christian backgrounds as well as Jewish refugees started to settle there, the notion of tolerance broadened. It came to resemble more or less the typical contemporary Dutch concept of gedogen, tolerating what is actually not allowed, or looking away from things one actually does not like, such as necessary evils like drugs or prostitution. Tolerance meant to put up with—or allow something or someone against your wish, for the good of society. It had not yet much to do with really accepting or respecting, let alone celebrating difference (Lem 2006: 27–39). The historical development, therefore, of this rather fundamental shift in the meaning of tolerance, from a pragmatic strategy or arrangement in the socio-religious realm to a secular socio-political ideology, seems to be worthwhile exploring a little further. Tolerance is intrinsically related to a-symmetrical power relations, because, generally it involves the inequality of a tolerating and a tolerated party. This led historian Ernst Kossmann to conclude that in the strict  https://www.digibron.nl/search/detail/fd6c9551f6b2a6ca703babbd5579bf2a/tolerantmaar-niet-voor-joden (accessed 17-12-2017).

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sense of the word tolerance is discriminatory and anti-constitutional (Kossmann 1987: 41). And that is not the only paradox. If tolerance is allowing things or people which or whom one does not like or does not agree with, you also have to tolerate those who don’t tolerate you. This paradox was expressed in the seventeenth century by the French philosopher and refugee living in the Netherlands, Pierre Bayle who stated that ‘Il faut tolérer tout le monde, sauf les intolérants’/we should tolerate everyone, except for the intolerant (see Galenkamp 2012). So paradoxically again, tolerance will always be limited: not too much, nor too little, in order to satisfy as many people as possible to make society run smoothly. Therefore, tolerance, which is based on a-symmetry, has a built-in dimension of relative exclusion and segregation. If a dominant group cannot bear any more tolerance, segregation and exclusion seem to increase. There are two dimensions to this pragmatic tolerance as a kind of policy. One is positive or what Dienke Hondius termed ‘passive tolerance’, which is a conscious strategy aiming at promoting the welfare and the socio-political status quo. The other is more negative, without a strategy, almost aimlessly based on indifference, as long as the status quo is not threatened. Hondius defined this as ‘passive intolerance’.8 Both, however, have dimensions of exclusion and segregation. The first seems to have prevailed during the times of the Dutch Republic, until the end of the eighteenth century. Although calvinist Reformed Protestantism was the official faith, albeit without being a state church, there was a free choice of religion and no one could be prosecuted in this respect (Lem 2006: 32). However, not all religions were equal by law. For instance Catholics and Jews were excluded from public offices and guilds, and not always could they experience their faith publicly. So, religious pluriformity was allowed, as a condition or even an incentive for peace, order, prosperity and social well-being. The limits showed when some people with obviously too disturbing convictions were physically excluded from society and banned or even killed. The more negative or indifferent kind of toleration was based on the adagium ‘I won’t bother you, as long as you don’t bother me’. Accepting  As opposed to active tolerance (acceptance after active argumentation) and active intolerance (exclusion, elimination). See Hoving (2017: 196). 8

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diversity as an—uneasy—given, without a strategy for the good of everyone. It is actually evading the other. This is, according to political scientist Paul Scheffer, what happened to late twentieth-century multiculturalism. In a famous essay of 2000,9 he actually defined it as a ‘multicultural tragedy’, because of almost total indifference for the new ‘other’ by the established native society. This indifference, by the way, concerned orthodox Christians too, with their refusal to accept homosexuality, women’s rights and other ‘exotic’ new norms in their rapidly secularizing society. A mix of these two, again paradoxical, dimensions of tolerance can be observed in the period in between the tolerance of early modern religious pluriformity and the late twentieth-century secular multiculturalism. In this period all religions were now recognized by law as equal, and new ideologies, such as socialism, set in motion a process of secularization. The socio-religious and political arrangement on which this was based came to be known as the pillarization system. In this system, every religious or ideologically based group retreated to his own, a more or less autonomous domain in society as much as possible, and avoided the other. Only the political-cultural elites, who emphasized and institutionalized the differences, functionally worked together, to make society work. This system of ideological segregation became completely institutionalized in social, cultural, political and to a lesser extent, economic life. Toleration by segregation during this phase, obviously, was not an answer to massive immigration such as during the Golden Age, or like today. It was an answer to new ideological arrangements as well as to the onset of secularization. The famous Dutch sociologist Van Doorn once called the pillarization system ‘the most monumental embodiment of a culture of segregation’, typified by the Dutch expression ‘a good fence, makes a good neighbour’ (cited in Hooven 2003: 11). Importantly, this system was also the foundation for sustaining the status quo in the colonies, as will be shown hereafter. From the 1960s to the 1980s the Netherlands secularized fast and became associated with total openness, relativism and extreme tolerance, or so it seemed. The age of Aquarius, however, soon turned into punk’s ‘No Future’ and the gradual rise of right-wing liberalism and political  This essay was published in the quality paper NRC Handelsblad on January 29, 2000.

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extremism as a response to massive post-colonial and labour immigration. A politics of multiculturalism, characterized by the policy of ‘integrating, while retaining one’s own culture’, was a late echo of that tolerant episode, however, that was gradually limited in the 1990s and certainly beyond the turn of the century. Since then Dutch tolerance has shifted from something which is granted by the dominant culture or by those in power, to something which is demanded from ‘the other’. Telling in this respect is the popularity of policies which are proudly described as Zero Tolerance. Tolerance now is the non-negotiable, imposed acceptance, particularly by newcomers, of a number of core values, among which is paradoxically again, tolerance. You are obliged to be tolerant! The result is that every deviation of that norm of what is politically correct, is considered intolerant and is refused. Historian James Kennedy (2001: 253) warns that ‘when a majority culture turns tolerance into an ideology, forbearance starts to stagger’. And Kennedy leaves no misunderstanding about the content of this majority culture which has come into being since the 1990s in the Netherlands: it is white, liberal and secular. This implies that Dutch tolerance has a particular colour to it, or in today’s terminology, the question should be whether tolerance is a white privilege. To answer that a step back in time is needed.

The Colour of Tolerance When the first Dutch Constitution was composed in the revolutionary years10 of 1796–1798, an overall majority of the representatives in the National Assembly—as well as many writers and other intellectuals of those days—was of the opinion that slave trade and slavery were not just, and contrary to the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and the universal  In 1794/95 a revolution of so-called Patriots, who inspired by the democratic ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, overthrew the government of the old elite led by stadtholder prince William of Orange. The Patriots were helped by an invading French army which occupied the Netherlands. Until 1813 the Netherlands formed part of Napoleon’s empire, where after much of the revolutionary ideas were done away with, or stored and a kingdom under a monarch of Orange-Nassau was installed. 10

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rights of man. Eventually, however, not a word was dedicated to slavery in the final text of the constitution. Slavery was considered too important to the colonial and to the Dutch position in international competition, to do away with, even in the future (Paasman 1984: 215). The universality of freedom, equality and fraternity of all men did not include the colonies,11 nor women for that matter (Paasman 1984: 215). After the revolutionary period the new constitution of 1815 guaranteed again a large number of freedoms among which freedom of conscience (religion). Afro-religions, however, such as winti in Suriname, brua on the island of Curaçao, or obeah as it is called more generally in the Caribbean, were forbidden and remained legally punishable until as late as the early 1970s!12 The 1815 constitution also contained a rule of nationality, which held that everyone born within the Dutch empire was a Dutch citizen. However, again, the enslaved were excluded, because by colonial law they were movable goods, legally not human beings. This changed in 1827 when they were finally recognized by colonial law as immature human beings, but still with hardly any rights whatsoever. And though their treatment improved a little bit, it was still a far cry from anything remotely resembling tolerance. Even after the abolition of slavery in 1863 the formerly enslaved in the Dutch American colonies remained second rate citizens. A new, liberal, constitution in 1848 had already ruled that all native populations in the colonies were exempted from any political rights associated with Dutch citizenship. So much for enlightened tolerance and equality. In Dutch law, nationality defined as place of birth has been gradually replaced with nationality by blood, or rather ancestry, meaning that only a third-generation immigrant could become a full rights citizen of the Netherlands. A hybrid construction was created in 1892 when a new Dutch nationality law was enacted, and from then on only children with a Dutch father as well as natural children of a Dutch mother were Dutch nationals (Staatsblad 1892: 268). At the same time the population of the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia, was divided into two ethnic  This concerned enslaved in Dutch Asia as well, however, in the following I will focus on enslaved Africans in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean. 12  Particularly in Suriname; in the Dutch Caribbean the juridical prohibition on dancing tambu lasted until the 1950s. 11

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categories: Europeans, including Indo-Europeans of mixed descent who had been legally recognized by their European father, and the overall majority of so-called Natives. Later a third category was created, the socalled Foreign Orientals, consisting mainly of Chinese and Arabs. Only the first category had full Dutch nationality with all citizenship rights, the others were ‘Dutch subjects without being Dutch’, meaning without such rights (Jones 2007: 59–60). This categorization was not introduced in Suriname and the Caribbean islands, where a large part of the population for a complex of reasons held no nationality at all, or another nationality and the rest, particularly the formerly enslaved and their descendants, were considered to assimilate as fast as possible into one single Dutch linguistic and cultural community, of course, ruled by political professionals from the Netherlands (Jones 2012: 31). The Dutch national anthem of those days had as its first two lines: ‘For those who have Dutch blood flowing through their veins, free of foreign stains…’ So, from the very beginning of Dutch constitutional law the phenomenon of tolerance based on segregation, by not including every citizen in the same juridical system, was reproduced again, in order to protect the economic and political status quo. And if they were legally more or less equal, they were supposed to stay in the colonies. In 1954, almost a decade after Indonesia had declared its independence, the Dutch colonies in the Americas, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles, were upgraded to the status of internally—mainly—autonomous parts of the Dutch Kingdom, and everyone within that kingdom now had the same nationality rights: ‘equal citizenship for all citizens’ (see Jones 2012: 40).13 Meanwhile, however, a new challenge to Dutch tolerance of inclusion had occurred when, with Indonesian independence (1945–1949),14 hundreds of thousands of Indo-Europeans and Indonesians decided to migrate to the country of which they had been subjects. A process started which showed that the pragmatic tolerance of before was in its secular cultural-ethnic form more related to outright exclusion  Albeit the Netherlands remained responsible for a number of things such as foreign affairs, military defense and guaranteeing financial and juridical order. This was laid out in the so-called Statute of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. 14  Indonesian nationalists declared independence right after World War II in 1945, the Dutch recognized this only after 4 years of war and negotiations, in 1949. 13

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and segregation than ever before. Sociologist Guno Jones (2012: 30) formulated the process as follows: In this process (which had symbolic, legal and policy dimensions), the idea of the ‘Dutch citizen’ became increasingly ethnically connoted; […], Dutch politicians held essentialist views on ethnic identities and were not keen initially to accept Dutch citizens from the overseas territories on Dutch territory. Contrary to accepted understandings of citizenship, these political discourses on post-colonial citizens primarily illustrate the ‘alienage of citizens’.

Racially intolerant policies towards post-colonial immigrants started with attempts to keep the numbers coming from Indonesia as low and as white as possible. The Dutch government instructed their civil servants in Indonesia to judge who was ‘suitable’ for residence in the Netherlands. ‘Pure’ Europeans, so-called totoks were not under discussion. IndoEuropeans, however, were something else completely. The Minister of Overseas Union Affairs and Overseas Territories, in accordance with the views of Dutch Parliament, stated in 1951 that it was: ‘in the best interest of the strongly Indonesia-oriented Indo-Dutch to accept Indonesian nationality’ (Jones 2012: 30). In 1952 the head of the National Bureau of Social Affairs, P.H.M.  Werner, was sent to Indonesia to report on this question and he made a division between ‘socially wanted and unwanted Indo-Europeans’. To the second category belonged those immigrants who were considered to be more Asian (‘Oriental’) than Dutch. Werner and his committee were convinced that the latter would not make it in the Netherlands and that would also apply to their children even after training. Because, as the committee put it: They will stay children from a tropical country with its inherent low work pace and other specific Oriental characteristics and behavior, which in the context of the Netherlands will not be economically applicable. There, [in Indonesia] these characteristics and behavior are applicable indeed, because there the nature of work and the work rhythm are conform their capabilities! (Schuster 1999: 101–102).

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The vice minister of Social Affairs Blom subscribed to Werners conclusions and both were presented to social-democrat prime minister Drees (Schuster 1999: 101–102). Eventually, however, Drees did not take over the recommendations and gave orders to regulate the immigration of the Indo-Dutch as good as possible, whether they are ‘tolerated’ or unwanted (Schuster 1999: 109–111). Still this did not prevent government officials to select, for instance in the case of those who applied for a special loan to pay for their travel costs. In 1954 the minister of Social Affairs stated: The government holds the view, that there needs to be a close scrutiny of whether it is in the right interests of the persons concerned to come to the Netherlands. In the majority of these cases, the answer to this question is negative, so that the requested loan will not be granted (cited in Jones 2012: 36–37).

In the end, about 300,000 people from Indonesia settled in the Netherlands and a massive policy was set in motion to assimilate them as quickly as possible to Dutch society. One of the institutions used to this end was the Central Committee Ecclesiastical and Private Initiative for social care for the repatriated as they were called, although the majority had never been in patria. One of their regulations was, for example, that an Indo-Dutch family was only entitled to a house, instead of the commercial guest houses they were first living in, when the social worker reported that they had learned to behave as much as possible ‘like a typically neat Dutch family’, including no longer eating rice every day.15 Exactly the same discourse on exclusion and segregation or integration by total assimilation started all over again a couple of years later, in the mid-1960s. And it did not stop until the 1990s when ‘Islam’ became the new indicator for Dutch tolerance. Again massive (post-)colonial immigration was the motivation, this time from Suriname and the Caribbean. Formerly, most of the so-called West Indian immigrants had predominantly been representatives of the colonial upper classes, lightly coloured students, coming to the Netherlands to study who assimilated well and 15  [https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/1990/02/07/tentoonstelling-over-opvang-oosterse-nederlanders6923027-a953207] (accessed 18-12-2017).

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were not considered a problem. However, when members of other social layers in Caribbean societies, often much darker, also settled in the Netherlands, and did not, after a while, ‘return to their own country’, hospitality showed to be less taken for granted and the limits of tolerance were easily reached. Despite a positive, though mainly paternalistic exotistic gaze of the white cultural avant garde towards black people during the first half of the twentieth century, the latter did not find a job easily. And hardly anyone protested when for another example, the mayor of Amsterdam in 1937 closed down jazz clubs who hired black personnel because he considered their behaviour and music a threat to decent young white citizens, particularly women. It was unthinkable in those days that a black person could make a career in the army, the government, or private enterprise other than on the lowest layers, nor did the few black shop keepers of those days succeed  to hire white personnel.16 Both would implicate a black person giving orders to whites. Except if he or she could pass for white and had had a decent Dutch upbringing, in other words, was completely assimilated, then anything was possible. So from the early 1960s on, when Surinamese and Dutch Caribbean workers, particularly those of Afro-background started to settle in the Netherlands in increasing numbers—in 1963 there were around 13,000 and the yearly influx was 800–1000—government officials and members of parliament started to express their concerns about the work ethics and social ethics of these immigrants and started to investigate the ‘problem of mixed relationships’ (Jones 2012: 41). Until then mixed relations solely referred to marriages between Protestants and Catholics, now it was also used for black–white marital relations. The Surinamese-Dutch and the Antillean-Dutch became distinguishable non-Dutch minority groups, despite having had full Dutch citizenship for generations and having been subject to a Dutch colonial education system even longer. They became so-called ethnic or cultural minorities, like any other nonwestern migrant group. Culture became the instrument to differentiate, including those born in the overseas parts of the Kingdom, however,  See for the history of these early Caribbean migrants in the Netherlands Oostindie  et al. and Kagie 2006. 16

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colour (or ‘race’) was never far off. The tolerance of hosting citizens of the former Dutch colonial empire was mixed up again with the segregating policies of differentiating between a dominant cultural majority and a number of cultural minorities by defining them under the same denominator as other non-western immigrants. During the 1970s and early 1980s, minorities, in general, were entitled by law to have and retain and sustain a culture of their own (Jones 2012: 39). This was meant to be relativist and tolerant, but it resulted in a very essentialist discourse of: this is who you are, and this is who we are. For the first time, and very gradually, this was in reversal returned by a black discourse, stimulated among other things by American black power discourse, which had the same kind of essentialist notions of this is who we are, and you are like that. This cultural essentialist discourse has become instrumental in drawing boundaries of the Dutch nation, and it seems to have become instrumental in the black counter-discourse as well (Jones 2012: 39). The short-lived cultural relativism has turned into rather essentialist identity politics, both white and black.17 Black Pete: Blackface and/or Tolerance?  In the Netherlands Sinterklaas/ Saint Nicholas is celebrated on the fifth of December. It is a national feast, immensely popular, and one of the most important Dutch calendar feasts. In the period leading up to the fifth of December, men dress up as Saint Nicholas, with his typical red mantle, Bishop’s hat and staff, and a long white beard. Sinterklaas visits public events and parades, and television shows are dedicated to him. He also appears at tens of thousands of private celebrations across the country. Saint Nicholas is accompanied by a number of ‘Black Petes’, helpers dressed in an attire that is inspired on a seventeenth-century page outfit. This figure is highly racialized: he is played by white actors in blackface, with exaggerated red lips. They wear ‘Afro’ hairpieces, feathered hats, and often golden so-called slave earrings. They display clownesque behaviour and act like the typical buffoons known from  This was convincingly analysed by anthropologist Gloria Wekker in her recent White innocence; Paradoxes of colonialism and race (2016). 17

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the minstrel tradition. This figure has been under continuous critique throughout the twentieth century, but since a young generation of black antiracists has delivered a highly compelling critique the controversy about whether or not the figure is racist has escalated.18 The underlying, more fundamental question, of course, is whether the predominantly white society is willing to become inclusive towards non-white compatriots and is willing to mutually integrate together with post-colonial newcomers into new post-colonial socio-economic and cultural arrangements. On the other hand, there also may be a question of black tolerance at stake here, that is, how much room, or actually mainly time, do Afro-Dutch grant their white compatriots to change, and are they willing to change themselves as well? Even though it hurts, and even though Afro-Dutch in a subaltern position already have to live up to white demands all the time, and even though they are often considered not even real compatriots at all. A, mainly white, digital petition in 2014 not to change blackface Pete at all was signed over 2 million times. An often-heard statement is, Black Pete is not and cannot be racist, because we are not racist. This has always been a tolerant nation and Pete never was meant to be racist. The opponents of blackface, obviously, perceive this as: the racists are deciding whether something or someone is racist or not. One in three of all Dutch citizens of any colour is now in favour of, or has no objections to changing Pete.19 And that figure is still increasing, although only slowly and gradually.20 Hard-core, mainly black opponents of Black Pete state time and again that racism cannot be abolished

 For an introduction into the history of this tradition, the current debate and a variety of solutions: PIET, handboek voor een moderne sinterklaasviering (with summaries in English). Rotterdam: Noturban, 2015. 19  https://eenvandaag.avrotros.nl/panels/opiniepanel/alle-uitslagen/item/draagvlak-voor-traditionele-zwarte-piet-loopt-terug/ (accessed 20-12-2017). 20  Idem. In 2013, 89% was not in favour of change, in 2015 this had dropped to 80%, to 68 in 2017. Coming from something like 97% before 2010, the growth of the pro-change view in such a long and immensely popular tradition might also be called substantial. 18

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gradually.21 It is like being pregnant they say, either you are or you are not racist. And they often add that even if Black Pete is abolished that does not mean the fight is over. How about for instance reparations for the harms done by slavery and its contemporary legacies. Their hard-core, mainly white opponents state that they draw a line and will not tolerate that ‘they’—which is everything and everyone from the ‘elites’ to Muslims and migrants—will take away everything that is dear to ‘us’. Politicians sow in this fertile land, and certainly not only populist politicians on the extreme right. In 2008 a former minister of the ruling liberal party VVD, Rita Verdonk started a new party which she named Trots op Nederland (Proud of The Netherlands). In her founding speech, she stated that there is an away-with-us stream who, for years now, wants us to believe that our culture does not exist, that our norms and values are inferior to other cultures. They even question the Sinterklaas feast, and they want to have monuments commemorating slavery everywhere in order to portray us as bad as possible.22

Many politicians have since repeated this point of view, including the prime minister, as shown above.23 This is not the pragmatic and limited tolerance of the early modern period anymore when the dominant religion allowed others to do their thing by paternalistically looking away, all the while hardly changing themselves. Neither is this the tolerance of the pillarized society, in which elites paternalistically ruled a segregated  For instance Stop Blackface/Kick Out Zwarte Piet, Stichting Nederland wordt beter, Zwarte Piet Is Racisme, Nationaal Instituut Nederlands Slavernijverleden en Erfenis (NiNsee). 22  Een ‘weg-met-ons’ stroming die ons al jaren wil doen geloven dat onze cultuur niet bestaat en die onze waarden en normen zelfs minderwaardig vindt ten opzichte van andere culturen. Ze stellen zelfs het sinterklaasfeest ter discussie en willen overal slavernijmonumenten om ons als slecht af te schilderen. http://www.refdag.nl/media/2008/20080404_Speech_Rita_Verdonk.pdf ] (accessed 20-12-2017). 23  It does not seem to stop. Recently the present vice minister of Interbal Affairs member of the Christian Democrat party CDA stated in the largest daily paper, De Telegraaf (03-03-2018, p. 6) that he is fed up with attacks on Zwarte Piet and other Dutch traditions, he observes ‘a sort of segregation on this theme. It does not contribute anything positive. If people in Amsterdam say that in their neigbourhood Zwarte Piet should not be black, I will not make a problem on that. However, in my village it does not happen. And do not say then that therefore we are discriminating’. 21

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country based on different ideologies, in which everyone retreated as much as possible among his own sort. Neither is this the paternalistic tolerance of segregation of late colonialism when the Dutch colonial elites knew what was best for the colonized within the kingdom. Neither is it the sex, drugs and rock & roll tolerance of the 1960s and 1970s; nor is this the multicultural tolerance of the 1980s when ‘cultural minorities’ were stimulated to retain and practise ‘their own culture’, which would empower them to integrate in Dutch society from a position of equality. Yet the idea of and self-identification with Dutch tolerance is stronger than ever. But what kind of tolerance is this and how does it build upon or change the history of tolerance sketched above? In order to understand this, this chapter has shown how being tolerant has become an obligation imposed by a dominant majority on minorities in a diverse—and confused—post-colonial society. Tolerance has become an ideological, secular norm which differentiates between self and other. If the other wants to integrate, meaning assimilate, s/he has to show that s/he is as tolerant as the dominant group is. Tolerance is no longer putting up with deviations from what is considered the norm. On the contrary, tolerance is the norm, and it is the minorities who have to put up with that (Verkaaik 2009: 146–147; see Kennedy 2006). Secondly, this chapter has shown that Dutch tolerance was always disciplinary and contained elements of exclusion and regulation. These have morphed into the domain of culture and ethnicity.

Conclusion The meaning and colour of Dutch tolerance has changed enormously over the centuries. During the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, it was at the core of a pragmatic top-down policy. The ‘others’ were religiously different from and inferior to the self-image of the dominant group, however, for the sake of socio-economic prosperity the latter put up with those. There were conflicts, of course, but there was no missionary urge to convince the other of one’s own religious superiority. Tolerance was a future-oriented pragmatic arrangement supporting socio-economic progress and welfare. During the pillarized nineteenth and twentieth centuries

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tolerance meant predominantly avoiding the other. Dutch society was rather rigidly segregated between differing but equal religions as well as contesting non-religious ideologies (liberalism, socialism), which kept society balanced. Pillars were more missionary than in earlier centuries and progress and future were defined often more in metaphysical terms (heaven, labourers paradise, freedom) than in the pragmatic progress of the Golden Age. Tolerance today has actually become a conservative antireligious ideology of almost fearfully protecting the emancipations that have socio-economically and culturally been conquered or developed since the Second World War. Tolerance now is the white, secularizing dominant group telling the others to become like them—including the celebration of the ideology of tolerance—or leave the country. Today’s Dutch tolerance is the final settlement with the religious pillarization of the past. Anti-religiosity seems to be at the core of Dutch modernity, secularism has become sacred. The massive influx of a new religion, Islam, is therefore experienced as anti-modern and a threat to what has only recently been conquered: freedom from religion.24 Dutch fear of Islam is the fear of their own religious past, says anthropologist Verkaaik (2009: 35). Religion is now considered as suppressing and limiting, whereas tolerance, reason, emancipation are at the core of this idealized secular selfimage of Dutch modernity (Verkaaik 2009: 115). This is a convincing analysis of what is at stake in the Dutch Islam debate. However, Verkaaik (2009: 120) is overdoing it when he states that the present confusion, or what he so rightfully calls ‘the contemporary national bad mood’ is caused by a frustrated pursuit for a secular society and not the pursuit of a ‘cream white Netherlands’ (Verkaaik 2009: 35–36). It is not one or the other, it is both. It is not for nothing that Dutch schools with a majority of Muslim children are defined in a way similar to schools with a majority of children of colour, namely black schools, as opposed to white schools. And although the multiculturalism and diversity issue has been dominated for  This fear is among other things expressed in massive voting for anti-Islam political parties, but also in a distorted image of the number of Muslims. A survey by Ipsos Mori in 40 European countries in 2016 showed an enormous gap between the experienced numbers of Muslims and the reality in these countries. In the Netherlands respondents thought that almost one in five (19%) of the population is Muslim, and that by 2020 this will have increased to 26%. The real percentages are six and almost seven respectively. [https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nederland/er-zijn-veel-mindermoslims-in-nederland-dan-we-denken] (accessed 25-02-2018). 24

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almost two decades by the Islam debate, race was never far off. And now they both stand centre stage. The fight over a sometimes almost sacralized Zwarte Piet is a case in point. Actually the race issue has been a steady and ever-present emotion since post-colonial immigration started after the Second World War (Cf. Wekker 2016). It is part of what I would call a mental heritage from colonial times, based on inverse tolerance: I don’t take you as you are, I make you into what I want you to be.

References Duyvendak, J. W., & Scholten, P. W. A. (2011). Beyond the Dutch “Multicultural Model” The Coproduction of Integration Policy Frames in The Netherlands. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 12, 331–348. Galenkamp, M. (2012). Locke and Bayle on Religious Toleration. Erasmus Law Review, 5(1), 79–92. Hooven, M. ten (2003). Op zoek naar een nieuwe inhoud voor verdraagzaamheid. In M. ten Hooven (Ed.), De lege tolerantie; over vrijheid en vrijblijvendheid in Nederland (pp. 11–36). Amsterdam: Boom. Hoving, I. (2017). Writing the Earth, Darkly: Globalization, Ecocriticism, and Desire. Lanham: Lexington Books. Jones, G. (2007). Tussen onderdanen, rijksgenoten en Nederlanders. Amsterdam: Rozenberg. Jones, G. (2012). Dutch Politicians, the Dutch Nation and the Dynamics of Post-colonial Citizenship. In U. Bosma (Ed.), Post-colonial Immigrants and Identity Formations in the Netherlands (pp. 27–47). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Kagie, R. (2006). De eerste neger. Amsterdam: Mets & Schilt. Kennedy, J. (2001). Oude en nieuwe vormen van tolerantie in Nederland en Amerika. In M. ten Hooven (Ed.), De lege tolerantie; over vrijheid en vrijblijvendheid in Nederland (pp. 244–255). Amsterdam: Boom. Kennedy, J. (2006). Nederland als het meest progressieve land ter wereld. In W. van Noort & R.  Wiche (Eds.), Nederland als voorbeeldige natie (pp. 105–118). Hilversum: Verloren. Kennedy, J. (2017). Een beknopte geschiedenis van Nederland. Amsterdam: Prometheus. Kossmann, E.  H. (1987). Politieke theorie en geschiedenis. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.

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Lem, A. van der (2006). Tolerantie: Het gedoogbeleid in de zestiende eeuw. In W. van Noort & R. Wiche (Eds.), Nederland als voorbeeldige natie (pp. 27–39). Hilversum: Verloren. Oostindie, G., Maduro, G. and Maduro, E. (1986). In het land van de overheerser, Deel II, Antillianen en Surinamers in Nederland, 1634/1667–1954. Dordrecht: Foris. Paasman, A. N. (1984). Reinhart: Nederlandse literatuur en slavernij ten tijde van de Verlichting. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Schuster, J. (1999). Poortwachters over immigranten; het debat over immigratie in het naoorlogse Groot-Brittannië en Nederland. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Veer, P. van der (1995). Modern oriëntalisme. Essays over de westerse beschavingsdrang. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Verkaaik, O. (2009). Ritueel burgerschap; een essay over nationalisme en secularisme in Nederland. Amsterdam: Aksant. Wekker, G. (2016). White Innocence; Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press.

Part IV Images

10 Colonial Heritage and the Sacred: Contesting the Statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen in the Netherlands Markus Balkenhol

In 2012 the West Frisian Museum in Hoorn, in the Dutch province of Noord-Holland, organized a public trial. The defendant was Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587–1689), an employee of the Dutch East India Company and the first governor of Batavia. The charge: Coen is not worthy of a statue because on his order nearly all of the 15,000 inhabitants of the Banda islands had been killed in 1621. During the trial, witnesses were heard and evidence in the form of objects, images, and audio fragments was presented. The popular historian and ‘judge’, Maarten van Rossum, presided over the trial, and 9651 museum visitors were the ‘jury’, casting 3012 votes, of which 63.9% were in favour of a statue, and 34.7 against. At the time of his trial, Jan Pieterszoon Coen had been dead for over 300 years, which raises the question whether the trial was about Coen (the person) or Coen (the statue). What, for instance, to think about the statement in the exhibition’s trailer that: ‘He [Coen] is still looking out M. Balkenhol (*) Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_10

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on the square’? And what to make of the museum’s publicity stunt, a mobile phone number on which one could ‘give Coen a phone call’? On the answering machine, ‘Coen’ said: ‘Hi, this is Coen. I’m glad you called. I can’t talk to you right now, but do leave a message after the beep.’1 The curators, the historian-cum-judge, the actors, the host and the audience were probably well aware that this was a game, much like a magician’s audience knows that it’s ‘just a trick’. The question I want to ask, however, is why toying with magic was so fascinating. If the past is so clearly secular, why even entertain the possibility that it might have a more supernatural presence? Coen/the statue escaped punishment, but others were not so lucky. At the University of Cape Town in 2015, the politics student Chumani Maxwele punished the towering statue of Cecil Rhodes by smearing it with human faeces he had collected in the Black township of Khayelitsha. With his action, Maxwele wanted to draw attention to the poor living conditions in Khayelitsha, as well as to the over-representation of white South Africans among the university staff. On 14 August 2017, protesters punished the statue of a confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina by tearing it from its pedestal. As it lay on the ground, mangled from the fall, the protesters spat at it, showed it their middle fingers, and kicked it. Punishing things is nothing new. In ancient Greece, for instance, things were held accountable for injuring or killing people and punished accordingly. Plato states that: if any lifeless thing deprives a man of life, except in the case of a thunderbolt or other fatal dart sent from the gods – whether a man is killed by lifeless objects falling upon him, or his falling upon them, the nearest of kin shall appoint the nearest neighbor to be a judge and thereby acquit himself and the whole family of guilt. And he shall cast forth the guilty thing beyond the border (as quoted in Hyde 1915: 700).

The possibility of putting on trial and punishing things also implied that if for instance a murderer could not be found, the murder weapon could  Coen seems to have cancelled his subscription: when I tried to call him in August 2019 I was told that this number is no longer in service. 1

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be punished instead. The punishment was typically to cast the thing ‘beyond the border’, so as to remove the pollution caused by the crime it had committed, and thus restore the purity of the realm (Hyde 1915: 700). In the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon to excommunicate non-­ humans, although there was a theological debate about whether humans could excommunicate parts of God’s Creation (ibid.). The pistol used by Balthasar Gerards to kill Stadholder Prince William of Orange in the Dutch city of Delft in 1584 was executed on the scaffold (Stengs 2018a). But the idea that things have a moral sense and agency is not only ancient or medieval; it is part and parcel of ‘us moderns’, too (Latour 1993; Latour et al. 2010). Look, for instance at the way one famous murder weapon has been treated very recently in the Netherlands: the car that was used in an attack on the Dutch Queen Beatrix in 2009, killing seven and seriously injuring ten people, was considered so dangerous and powerful that it could not be included in a museum collection (Stengs 2018a). Historical knowledge is not straightforwardly secular. As Stephan Palmié shows in his path-breaking book on Afro-Cuban modernity and tradition, historical knowledge in the broadest sense ‘involves propositions about the role of the dead in the world of the living’ (Palmié 2002: 3). The term ‘proposition’ indicates that historical knowledge is ‘not at all captured by objectivist conceptions of historical representations as mere retrieval or correspondence theories of historical truth’ (ibid.). Whether in the form of codified, institutionalized history or vernacular, embodied memory, historical knowledge must be plausible so that particular claims about the past are judged believable and accepted as truthful (Palmié 2002: 3). Of course, ghostly presences are regularly dismissed as figments of the imagination; indeed, ‘nothing brings out positivism more quickly’ (Palmié 2002: 3). But as the vignette above shows, there is also a simultaneous fascination with, and even plausibility of presences not captured by positivist demands for historical ‘facts’. Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University and observer of the international controversies about colonial statues, recently2 expressed a common complaint when it comes to  In a podcast for the Guardian newspaper, https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2018/ dec/04/bias-in-britain-the-truth-about-modern-racism 2

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s­tatues: ‘It’s always an emotional debate. It’s never a rational, reasoned, measured debate. … You can’t have this discussion in a reasoned way.’ Andrews rightly argues that this is because statues are often entangled with people’s identity. To paraphrase Stuart Hall (2005), statues act as mirrors in which people want to recognize themselves. But not all statues achieve this ‘mirror-stage’, which raises the question why certain statues do manage to evoke such strong emotions. In this chapter, I argue that looking at how processes of secularization and sacralization become entangled in conflicts about statues can provide a better understanding of how and why some statues act in such a polarizing way.

Negotiating the Monstrous Hero Already during his lifetime Jan Pieterszoon Coen was a controversial figure. The board of the East India Company, the Heren XVII, accepted his uncompromising rule of Batavia as governor (1617–1629), but also deemed it ruthless. The public whipping of his niece Sara Specx and the execution of her forbidden lover Pieter Cortenhoeff was seen as excessive. As a consequence, Coen’s memory, too, became contested. The twentieth-­ century historians Annie and Jan Romein argued that because of these brutalities Coen could not become a hero in a straightforward way: ‘the popular imagination did not get a hold of this difficult figure’ (Romein and Romein-Verschoor 1941:  256). However, this did not pre-empt attempts at heroification, some more successful than others. Until halfway the nineteenth century, Coen’s image was that of a man of great achievements. In the second half of the nineteenth century, 250  years after Coen’s death, the relatively young Dutch nation was looking for collective symbols that might foster a sense of community, and Coen seemed like a welcome figure that could embody the greatness of the Dutch nation.3

 This process of nation-building coincided with the competitive ambitions of European nations to build and expand vast overseas empires. The figure of Coen thus perfectly expressed the combination of national and imperial ambitions at the time. 3

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In the city of Hoorn, Coen’s place of birth, physically and symbolically in the shadow of Amsterdam, politicians and influential citizens began to lobby for a Coen statue in the 1880s. This would not only enhance the status of Hoorn, they argued, but also provide a symbol of national pride that would boost the process of nation-building. The Nieuwe Hoornsche Courant wrote in 1884: The birth day of Coen should be turned into a national day of commemoration. By this we mean the following: the entire country [Vaderland] must display their reverence of the memory of this man, who, as fourth governor-­ general of Dutch East India has won the city and the kingdom of Jacatra with the sword.4

Later that year, the Courant reiterates that the significance of a statue is not limited to Hoorn, but that it would be a national symbol. [We desire] not only, not even in the first place, a statue in Coen’s birth place (Hoorn); although this is certainly desirable. No, that day of commemoration must be a national one, in the sense that the entire people participates in it.5

Their call was widely received, and even Members of Parliament supported the initiative. The annual commemorations enjoyed great popularity, and the highest representatives of the state (except the Queen, which led to raised eyebrows in Hoorn) attended the unveiling of the statue in 1893, complete with tableaux vivants, horse races, an ‘illuminated gondola ride’, and fireworks (Fig. 10.1).6 But even among this general enthusiasm, there were a number of critical voices. Jan Karel Jacob de Jager, registrar of Parliament and later director of the Mauritshuis museum, wrote that Coen,  Algemeen Handelsblad, 14 February 1884. All translations from the Dutch by Markus Balkenhol.  Algemeen Handelsblad, 16 February 1884. 6  See https://www.oudhoorn.nl/kwartaalblad/artikel.php?id=00765, accessed 26 November 2019. 4 5

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Fig. 10.1  Announcement of the unveiling of the statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, 1893

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who, in order to safeguard the Company’s monopoly, did not even shrink back from the complete depopulation of the Banda islands, and smeared his own name and that of the Dutch nation, in this part of the Archipelago, with a virtually indelible blood stain (Jonge 1862: 79).

Others, too, wrote about the cold-blooded extinction of an entire population and concluded that Coen’s hands were ‘smeared with blood’ (Snijders 2012: 60). The national newspaper, Algemeen Handelsblad, published a two-part series on Coen in 1887 that reflected these criticisms: There are concerns when we are asked about our love for a man who thwarted the opponents of the Company, whether Dutch or English, Javanese or Bandanese. The whip raised against Sara Specx [whom Coen had lashed for premarital sex] make us turn away and cover our ears; the destruction of Lonthor and Poeloe Run offend our current notion of justice; the merciless extirpator of all forms of debauchery in East India [Indonesia] has a certain trait of cruelty in his face, which is only softened by the man’s own flawless biography.7

Regardless of these ‘concerns’, the column argues, Coen should be remembered first and foremost for his selfless commitment to a greater good, namely the ‘elevation of his people in East India’. One does not have to cherish such a man, the column concludes, but ‘paying him reverence means honouring greatness’. Clearly, the national cause here trumps the consideration of the violence that was part and parcel of that very cause. Historians in the twentieth century disagreed about Coen’s status, and how to evaluate his brutal reign in East India. Herman Theodor Colenbrander, who collected important archival material on Coen, enthusiastically judged him a diligent, loyal man and an exemplary Dutch Calvinist. He concluded: Power never manifests itself without breaking impotence (onmacht) and causing wounds. Without the hero of these pages Dutch East India would not have existed (see Buijs 2014; Colenbrander 1934: 448).  Algemeen Handelsblad, 28 August 1887.

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The fascist politician and historian Carel Gerretson (1884–1958) embraced Coen in his book Coen’s Eerherstel (Coen’s redemption) as a national hero, while the Bandanese, in his eyes, had sealed their own fate: The Bandanese received the punishment they had brought upon themselves by failing their duties (see Buijs 2014; Gerretson 1944: 46–47).

Annie and Jan Romein were more critical. They dismissed the ‘colonial historians’ who ‘carefully cultivated’ Coen as a legend, and somewhat disdainfully called Coen’s grave in Jakarta a ‘pilgrimage site’. They conclude: He [Coen] laid the foundations of a colonial empire … and he was rewarded – next to the contested ton of gold – with the curse of thousands of wretches. Those who want to see the former as his purposeful deed, may also accept the burden of the latter (Romein and Romein-Verschoor 1941: 284).

Discussion of this entanglement of national pride and colonial violence was rekindled in the late twentieth century. One of the most prominent instances of public critique was the installation Adventures of the Nieuw Hoorn by the New York artist Lisa Fromartz, as part of the Bontekoe-year in Hoorn in 1994.8 The Adventures consisted of six enormous paintings that were displayed on iconic buildings in Hoorn such as the West Frisian Museum, the monumental Hoofdtoren, and the Oosterkerk. The images showed scenes from Coen’s reign in Batavia, for instance, his silhouette towering over a devouring inferno and skulls. As Fromartz explained in an interview in the national newspaper NRC, with the paintings she wanted to ‘point out that the VOC’s wealth came about through conquest and domination’, and that ‘all of these processes set in motion then are still at work now’.9  Willem Ysbrandtszoon Bontekoe (June 2, 1587–1657) from Hoorn, a skipper for the Dutch East India Company, whose journal of his voyage to East India on the vessel De Nieuw Hoorn became a best seller in the seventeenth century. In the 1990s the city of Hoorn sought to attract tourists by brandishing historical heroes such as Bontekoe. 9  NRC Handelsblad, 9 May 1994. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/1994/05/09/amerikaanse-maakte-­ buitenschilderijen-geinspireerd-7224143-a1196322, accessed 29 April 2019. 8

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Today, the discussion has become part of the wider memory politics around the question of how to deal with Dutch colonialism and its violence. Since the early 1990s, black grassroots organizations have launched initiatives to publicly remember slavery in the Netherlands. Many of them had settled in the Netherlands in the wake of Surinamese independence in 1975,10 and began to actively search for their position as Dutch citizens in the Netherlands. Although they are formally Dutch, they encountered various forms of discrimination, restricting their access to work, housing, education, and political representation. Invoking slavery as a historical responsibility of both the Dutch government and society at large offered a way to address these concerns, and to build social and political pressure on the government to act. In recent years, a younger generation of Dutch citizens of Caribbean descent who are born in the Netherlands has started to organize as a political movement. While the central rallying point has been their protest against the blackface figure of Zwarte Piet (Balkenhol et  al. 2016; Helsloot 2012; see Stipriaan, this volume), the debate about the colonial past is now much broader and includes ethnographic and art museums (Balkenhol and Modest 2019), school curricula, and traces of slavery in the urban space (Hondius et al. 2014). In the wake of this postcolonial controversy, the statue of Coen, along with the many streets and places named after him, has once more been a focus of critique. When the statue was accidentally pushed off its pedestal by a crane driver in 2011 (Fig. 10.2) a group of residents of Hoorn demanded to transfer it to a museum rather than placing it back. The city council debated the demand but decided to put the statue back on the pedestal, along with a critical note referencing the Banda massacre. The ‘trial’ described above was an attempt of the museum to address these controversies. The museum’s idea to organize a ‘trial’ suggests the desire for closure and the reinstatement of justice, albeit purely symbolic. However, the museum’s verdict did not end the public trial. In 2017 it was back on the agenda when an antifascist organization vandalized the statue in an attempt to draw attention once more to Coen’s cruelties. In the  Suriname was a Dutch colony from 1667 until 1975. A plantation colony located on the northern coast of South America, it was an important part of the Dutch Atlantic Empire. 10

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Fig. 10.2  Empty pedestal of the Coen statue, 2011. © Vereniging Oud Hoorn

meantime, other colonial figures had become subject to scrutiny, including Michiel de Ruyter, Piet Hein, and Johan Maurits.11

Iconoclasts and Idol Worshippers Still, the trial continued. On Wednesday 17 January 2017, the newspaper De Telegraaf12 published an article about what the commentator saw as the ‘falsification of history’. As the article argued:  Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter (1607–1676), admiral in the Dutch navy and Piet Hein (1577–1629), lieutenant-admiral in the Dutch navy and commander at the West Indian Company were instrumental in building the Dutch Atlantic Empire. Johan Maurits (1604–1679), Count and Prince of Nassau-Siegen, and governor of Dutch Brazil. Controversy enveloped in particular the art museum Mauritshuis, forcing it to reflect more critically on his role in the Dutch Empire. 12  In terms of readership De Telegraaf is the biggest newspaper in the Netherlands. It generally expresses a right-wing conservative perspective. 11

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Now it is Maurits’ head that has to roll. Earlier it had already been the turn of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Michiel de Ruyter, Peerke Donders and the Golden Carriage.13 Historians are fed up: who will be the next victim of this absurd falsification of history?14

In the article emeritus professor Piet Emmer, a contested conservative historian of Dutch colonial slavery who famously compared the Middle Passage with a present-day transatlantic flight, demands that an end be put to ‘rewriting history’. That night, Emmer was a guest in the daily television talk show De Wereld Draait Door (The world turns/gets mad) dedicated to the topic ‘beeldenstorm’ (iconoclasm). Statues of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Emmer argued, should not be removed because that would ‘polish away’ (wegpoetsen) history: Let’s be honest. Presently we would not build a school or a statue for Jan Pieterszoon Coen, or name it after him. But on the other hand, it is part of our colonial past. That colonial past, certainly in the 17th century, was accompanied by a lot of violence. I think it is pointless to continually change things that today appear wrong to us, to change street names, to change statues. Of course, it happens, think of, I believe, ISIS in the Middle East, who want to destroy an entire city dating from the pre-Mohammedan era; think of the Nazis who wanted to change all Jewish names. Come on, we don’t want to belong with them! The best thing to do, as I said before, is to leave those statues, and talk about them. I think that is the best solution.

In his plea, Emmer sketches a ‘we’ with specific characteristics: rational, reasoned, and looking for a constructive conversation. This ‘we’ is  Petrus Norbertus Donders (Tilburg (Nederland), 27 October 1809  – Batavia (Suriname), 14 January 1887) was a catholic missionary in Suriname who was beatified in 1982 for the miracle of curing a child of bone cancer in 1929. Discussion arose when Herman Fitters, resident of Tilburg, published an opinion piece entitled: ‘Donder op! Standbeeld van Peerke Donders kan niet meer.’ (Sod off, statue of Peerke Donders is impossible). See https://www.bd.nl/tilburg-e-o/respect-voor-­ peerke-donders-maar-dat-beeld~a1b6bf73/?referrer=https://www.google.com/, accessed 19 November 2019. The Golden Coach (1898) is a vehicle used by the Royal Family to ride to the state opening of Parliament on the third Tuesday of September each year. The coach has been the focus of decolonial critique because of its side panels displaying colonial subjects labouring and kneeling in front of the Queen. 14  De Telegraaf, 17 January 2018, https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/1550210/stop-de-vervalsing, accessed 22 Oktober 2019. 13

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contrasted with a fanatic, violent, and irrational ‘other’. ‘We’ are civilized, ‘they’ are wild. This wildness not only implies that ‘they’ are incapable of reason, but that this incapability is manifest first and foremost in their belief in the power of things. ‘They’ think that history changes if statues disappear and streets are renamed. But, Emmer explains: ‘If those people [sic, he means statues] are being removed, that will not change the past.’ This is an oft-heard retort to people who argue for the removal of statues. They are, the argument goes, taking statues too seriously, and imagine that by removing them, the past itself might change. But this is their problem, not the statues’, according to this reasoning: it is their belief that a piece of stone or bronze holds some kind of power over the past and themselves. As a consequence, they argue, if you really believe that things can do this to you, you are essentially an animist: somebody who believes that things are alive and wield supernatural powers! Of course, Emmer says, this is nonsense. This is not us—‘we’ know better! ‘We don’t want to belong with them!’ The debate, then, is not only about the past but about the power of images. Should one believe in their power or not? There are a few things to note in Emmer’s statement. First, the case is somewhat more complex than the simple binary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ Emmer seems to suggest. In fact, it is quite remarkable for a historian to assert that removing statues and changing street names is something only Nazis and religious fanatics do. Emmer should know that historically this is the rule rather than the exception, and not at all reserved for violent fanatics. Indeed, in the Netherlands there is a national commission with specified regulations dealing with naming and renaming streets on a daily basis, and this always requires careful and complex deliberations. In Germany, a massive number of Adolf Hitler squares, streets, stadia, and so on were renamed after the Second World War. In the Netherlands, too, an Adolf Hitler-Allee turned back into Kloosterweg, and in Amsterdam a square returned to its prewar name, Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, to name just two instances. Moreover, even in the Middle East the so-called Islamic State is not the only party who tore down statues; think for instance of the iconic photograph of American soldiers tearing down a large statue of Saddam Hussain after the fall of Baghdad in the second Gulf war. Looked at in historical context, removing Coen’s statue, or

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renaming J. P. Coen streets, schools, and tunnels would be nothing special, really. What is more, there is no reason to believe, as Emmer does, that history would be at stake because of the removal of a statue. Historical figures such as the Confederate General Lee, or Jan Pieterszoon Coen, will not disappear from the history books because their statues are being removed. Volumes have been written about Coen, and they will not vanish with the statues. If anything, the conflicts around the statue have led to new publications, including the present one (see also Goor 2015). Conversely, a name such as Anton Mussert, the founder of the National Socialist movement in the Netherlands, does not just disappear from history simply because there are no statues for him. As historian Karwan Fatah-Black, also present in the talk show, countered: ‘This is not how we learn history, is it? We don’t learn history by looking at street names, do we?’ The second dimension of Emmer’s argument is crucial for the argument I develop here. It concerns his employment of religion, that is his reference to religious fanatics and fanatic anti-Semitists. Emmer’s avowedly secularist stance (‘we are not religious fanatics’) glosses over the processes of sacralization in which the statue of Coen is entangled. This began already with the unveiling of the statue in the nineteenth century, when it was inaugurated by its supporters as a quasi-sacred object. Mayor Zimmerman of Hoorn, for instance, claimed during the unveiling in 1884 that Coen ‘is our pride, citizens of Hoorn, who, even though our city no longer plays a role in history, nonetheless keep sacred and in high esteem the memory of so much that once made Hoorn great and powerful’ (Zimmermann as quoted in Snijders 2012: 60). Similarly, the former mayor of Hoorn and then-minister of the colonies, Baron van Dedem, said that ‘Coen’s statue is safe in the midst of his city and his tribesmen. As long as Hoorn, as long as Western Friesia, as long as the Netherlands does not forget their history, this place will be honored as sacred ground’ (Dedem as quoted in Snijders 2012: 61). Historian Emmie Snijders argues that ‘today it is difficult to imagine that [Van Dedem’s] way of relating to Coen’s statue. … A significant number of Horinesians [citizens of Hoorn], Western Friesians, and Dutch have not forgotten their history, but that is precisely the reason why this statue is no longer honored as sacred ground. It has become the subject of intense

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discussions in which emotions can run high’ (Snijders 2012: 61). According to Snijders, the fact that the statue is debated in heated discussions, and that emotions run high is a sign of its profanization. This implies that for the statue to be sacred it should be above such profane discussions. In contrast to this analysis, I would argue that the fiercest conflicts erupt not about profane objects, but those considered sacred. One might even say that it is precisely the intensity with which the Coen statue is being discussed, indeed the willingness by some people to either destroy or defend it (using violence, if necessary), that points to the entanglement of processes of sacralization and heritage formation (Meyer and de Witte 2013). The statue has become what we have termed in the introduction to the volume a ‘secular sacred’, that is ‘a person, object, image, representation, or place in which secular and sacred ideas, feelings, emotions, motivations, experiences, perceptions, intertwine, conflate and conflict’ (this volume). To some extent, this entanglement of secular and sacred dimensions applies to statues in general, at least potentially, so a short detour is needed here. In the field of memory studies, a distinction is often made between historiography on the one hand and memory on the other. On the one hand the scientific, distant, and critical attitude towards the past, and on the other the embodied, subjective, and passionate experience of the past. According to this definition, statues fall into the ‘memory’ category. Political scientist Kevin Bruyneel (2017: 36), for example, writes in a recent article about dealing with statues: The argument [against the removal of statues] has, at least, one fundamental flaw. Removing monuments does not erase history because monuments are not about history. They are about memory.

In practice, these categories usually overlap. An archival document, for example, can be of great value for historical research, but it can also be valued as a historical object independently of the content. Consider, for example, the American Declaration of Independence, an important text for historians and philosophers. At the same time, this piece of paper as cultural heritage can also develop huge attraction. To speak with the

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Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (Huizinga 1948: 564 ff.), it is a ‘historical sensation’ to imagine that this piece of paper was touched by the founding fathers. It means that people, including historians, become emotionally involved in history. As Huizinga put it: ‘I am too much in it, in history, it is no science for me, it is life itself ’. Although history and memory cannot be separated in practice, there are nevertheless different registers in which people relate to the past. Knowledge of the past is always a reconstruction, and therefore constructed socially and culturally. In this reconstruction, sources or historical ‘facts’ are important, but equally important is that people are convinced of the factuality of these facts. In other words, authentication is needed to convince a public, academic or broad, of the truth and credibility of historical sources and their interpretation (Port and Meyer 2018). A source alone does not say much, it is the context in which it is placed that makes a source meaningful to people. This authentication can be done in various ways. In memory studies, history or historiography generally means formalized, usually critical, science of the past. This focuses on retrieving and interpreting data for a reconstruction of the past. Here authentication works according to scientific criteria, such as source references, embedding in existing scientific literature, and peer review. Even though the results are a social construction and therefore not objective or neutral (Trouillot 1995), they are verifiable and therefore, in principle, also refutable. Social, collective, or cultural memory is another register of authentication. Here, too, people must be convinced of the authenticity of a historical ‘fact’, but scientific criteria play a less important role. Where historiography is about documenting and understanding the past, memory is about making it available to experience. Memory therefore derives its authenticity more from the extent to which the past is made tangible, for example, by exhibiting and making historical objects accessible. It is about making history come alive, that is, the goal is to let people literally touch the past. So in theory you could say that history creates critical, contemplative distance to the past, while memory wants to bridge that distance and bring the past to the present. With statues this second dimension is in the foreground. A statue expresses a certain appreciation of a historical fact but does not claim

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factuality as such. Unlike monuments, statues express first and foremost a positive evaluation of a person or an event. Certain aspects can be magnified, with historical accuracy not always being the most important (Stengs 2018b). The expression ‘putting someone on a pedestal’ literally and figuratively refers to the positive appreciation of someone or something from the past. This can be historical persons, but also allegories as in the case of the statue of liberty in New York. They all have in common that they express a positive appreciation. That is why there are piles of books about Anton Mussert, but no statues. Statues do something different than historiography. They are meant to make the past come alive and to establish an embodied relation with the audience. As Caroline van Eck has argued: Speaking to statues or paintings, kissing or beating them, claiming that works of art in their turn look at the viewer, talk or listen to them, move, sweat or bleed; or feeling love, desire, or hatred for images: all these reactions to works of art are part of a large complex of viewers’ responses in which artworks are treated not as the inanimate objects they really are, but as living beings, whose presence is felt to be genuinely akin to that of a living being (Eck 2010: 3).

Of course, not all statues achieve this effect; it is a potential the success or failure of which needs to be understood in the specific context in which it does or does not unfold. Moreover, statues are usually put up to create a sense of positive appreciation among the audience. But if lifelikeness is indeed achieved and the statue does in fact act like a human being, it is difficult to keep it under control. As the Coen statue perfectly shows, responses range from disgust to veneration. The point here is of course not to judge these responses, but to point out that both responses are part of a process of sacralization. The sacred, I might reiterate here, does not necessarily derive its sacredness from veneration alone, but often also from destruction, mutilation, and humiliation. So what about Emmer’s rather firm stance on the ‘religiosity’ of the so-called iconoclasts? Emmer’s stance is a dismissive one. In this view, religion equals fanaticism and is not of our time. This dismissive stance is spelled out further in an article by journalist Willem Pekelder about

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postcolonial critique entitled ‘the church of hate’, in which he shares Emmer’s view. He calls postcolonial critics a ‘new church’ that relentlessly blames him, a white man, for the ‘sins’ of his ancestors: The new church is even more merciless than the God of the Old Testament. For He says in the Second Commandment: ‘For the sins of the parents I will punish the children, and also the third generation, and the fourth.’ This way the Old Testament at least limits the wrath.15

The tenor of both Emmer’s and Pekelder’s arguments is that the Netherlands has been secularized, and it does not wish to revert back to old moral authorities like the church. They portray postcolonial critique as an inquisition. Neither Emmer nor Pekelder is really interested in the sources and goals  of this ‘iconoclasm’. With their characterization of critique as fanaticism, they gloss over the ways in which architecture, monuments, and statues reproduce social orders by imposing particular world views. As George Bataille argued in his famous article on architecture: the great monuments raise themselves before us like levees, countering all troubling elements with the logic of majesty and authority: it is in the guise of cathedrals and palaces that the Church and State speak to and impose silence upon the masses. It is clear, in fact, that these monuments inspire social compliance and often, real fear. The storming of the Bastille exemplifies this state of affairs: it is difficult to explain the motivation of the crowd other than through the peoples' animosity toward the monuments that are their true masters (Bataille 1929).

This means that, as Bhakti Shringarpure has argued, monuments and statues are not just symbols or forms of representation, but they also ‘have the ability to command, prohibit, exclude, or dominate’ (Shringarpure 2012). But equally importantly, Emmer and Pekelder do not explain why, in their view, these statues are necessary to know the past. In fact, it is quite surprising that they, defenders of scientific knowledge, should embrace 15

 Trouw, 12 May 2018, p. 4 ff.

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statues. According to Bruno Latour, precisely the destruction, erasure, and defacement of statues is ‘the ultimate touchstone to prove the validity of one’s faith, of one’s science, of one’s critical acumen, of one’s artistic creativity[.] To the point where being an iconoclast seems the highest virtue, the highest piety, in intellectual circles’ (Latour et al. 2002: 16). Could it be that ‘we moderns’ are just as interested in the metaphysical presence of our ancestors as we are in scientific ‘facts’? It seems that historical facts alone are insufficient to bring our ancestors to life. Coen made an appearance not only in the exhibition at the West Frisian Museum. Later that year Coen was a ‘guest’ at ‘Welcome to the Golden Age’, an educational talk show for primary schools (ages nine to twelve). He was interviewed ‘live’ by the host Dorine Goudsmit (played by  Plien van Bennekom), and bragged about his adventures: ‘It was a marvellous time’. One can be dismissive of this theme-park approach to history, but, I have argued in this chapter, the fascination for the past’s magical presence needs to be taken seriously in order to understand its power.

Conclusion I started this contribution by noting a fascination and play with the possibility that the dead might have a supernatural presence that exceeds positivist historical knowledge. Statues in particular can unfold a power that touches people and evokes strong emotional responses. In this process they are often anthropomorphized, and no longer treated as lifeless objects, but as animated beings that are being treated as though they were human. Yet even though everyone, apparently, likes to play with magic, this game is highly political. That is, the belief in magic is often mobilized as a tool to demarcate and police group boundaries. Common sense states that ‘we’ do not believe in images. In fact, ‘we’ are not religious at all. From that perspective, people who feel hurt by statues are not part of ‘our’ civilization. But this perspective conceals the much more complex social agency of objects such as statues. The idea that they influence human practice and thought cannot be chalked up to an imagined

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primitive other, whether antiracist, progressive, or nationalist. Neither those who feel hurt by statues nor those who feel hurt by their removal are adherents of an imaginary kind of naïve, almost childish belief in the animation of objects. If the belief in images is a characteristic of wildness, it is not a wildness alien to Western enlightened modernity, but rather an important ingredient that enables community, including that of the nation (Verrips 1993). But why are not all statues being treated in this way? For instance, what to make of the fact that the statue of Coen only recently entered this animated state, whereas other colonial statues have already been attacked in the 1960s? There is no general rule or model that can predict which statues evoke such responses. Rather, the answer lies in an ethnographic analysis that shows precisely how, and in which social, political-economic, and historical situations the sacredness of an object is produced. This has important implications for how Europeans, including those with African ancestry, are able to deal with the colonial past. Doubtlessly it is important to raise historical awareness of slavery and colonial violence through education. But the case of statues also shows that improving our knowledge about the colonial past alone will not do. The passionate destruction, defacement, and embrace of statues are much more than a Habermasian ‘discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment about them’ (Hauser 1999: 61). These passionate engagements with statues are difficult to capture in the term ‘rational deliberation’, so central to Habermas’s theory. Indeed, they show the limits to such an approach. If we understand statues themselves as a secular sacred, that is ‘a person, object, image, representation, or place in which secular and sacred ideas, feelings, emotions, motivations, experiences, perceptions, intertwine, conflate and conflict’, we can gain a better understanding of why people kick them, defecate on them, and destroy them, or why they feel that they need to defend them with their lives. This, again, is not to say that people naïvely mistake statues for human beings, but rather that statues and images act like social agents in that they influence social relations.

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This, as we argue in the introduction to this volume, ‘resonates with the idea of religion as an outward form that exerts influence beyond religious contexts as such, but intersects with politics and society at large. … The ‘secular sacred’ indicates a starting point in the middle of this entanglement in order to understand how public spaces, images and bodies are constituted, contested in new ways.’

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Helsloot, J. (2012). Zwarte Piet and Cultural Aphasia in the Netherlands. Quotidian: Journal for the Study of Everyday Life, 3, 1–20. Hondius, D., Jouwe, N., Stam, D., Tosch, J., & de Wildt, A. (Eds.). (2014). Gids slavernijverleden Amsterdam. Arnhem: LM Publishers. Huizinga, J. (1948). Verzamelde werken II, Nederland. Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink. Hyde, W.  W. (1915). Prosecution and Punishment of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times. University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register, 64, 696. Jonge, J. K. J. de (1862). De opkomst van het Nederlandsch gezag in Oost-Indie 1595–1811 III (‘s-Gravenhage, 1862). ‘s Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff. Latour, B. (1993). We have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, B., Bigg, C., & Weibel, P. (2002). Iconoclash: [Beyond the image wars in science, religion, and art]. ZKM, Center for Art and Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Latour, B., Smith, B., & Weintraub, E. (2010). On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press. Accessed March 6, 2014. Meyer, B., & de Witte, M. (2013). Heritage and the Sacred: Introduction. Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 9(3), 274–280. Meyer, B., & Port, M. van de (Eds.) (2018). Sense and Essence. Politics of Authentication, Aesthetics of Persuasion and the Cultural Production of the Real. New York: Berghahn. Palmié, S. (2002). Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Romein, J.  M., & Romein-Verschoor, A.  H. M. (1941). Erflaters van onze beschaving: Nederlandse gestalten uit zes eeuwen. Amsterdam: Querido. Shringarpure, B. (2012). Rage Against the Monuments. Warscapes. Accessed October 28, 2019, from http://www.warscapes.com/opinion/ rage-against-monuments Snijders, E. (2012). Een nationalistische onthulling. In Coen! (pp.  58–61). Hoorn: PolderVondsten. Stengs, I. (2018a). Ascertaining the Future Memory of Our Time: Dutch Institutions Collecting Relics of National Tragedy. In M.  van den  Port & B. Meyer (Eds.), Sense and Essence. Heritage and the Cultural Porductuin of the Real (pp. 266–288). London: Berghahn. Stengs, I. (2018b). Gepopulariseerde cultuur, ritueel en het maken van erfgoed. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit.

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Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Verrips, J. (1993). “Het ding ‘wilde’ niet wat ik wilde.” Enige notities over moderne vormen van animisme in westerse samenlevingen. Etnofoor, 6(2), 59–79.

11 Rooted in the Sacred? On Mark Rothko, Tears Flowing, and Enargeia Herman Roodenburg

The modernist, octagonal chapel has no images of Christ or other holy figures weeping. Yet, as its visitors’ books reveal, quite a few feel the tears welling up. Inside, they are faced with fourteen purplish-black paintings hung on the building’s eight bare walls—that is all. Somehow, the huge, abstract canvases move the viewers to tears (Fig. 11.1). Art historians know the building well: this is the Mark Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. One of them, James Elkins, even gave it a major role in his Pictures & Tears, a fine historical perspective on people crying in front of paintings (Elkins 2001). The chapel opened in 1971, a year after Rothko committed suicide in his studio in New York. Its founders, the French-born art collectors John and Dominique de Menil, were inspired by three Catholic churches in France—the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, Writing this exploratory essay, I have profited greatly from the comments of Christien Smits (especially) and of Yannis Hadjinicolaou, Matt Kavaler, and the editors of this volume.

H. Roodenburg (*) Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_11

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Fig. 11.1  Rothko Chapel, 1970–1971. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, photograph by G.E. Kidder Smith

famously decorated by Henri Matisse, and two other ones, decorated by Fernand Léger and others: the Eglise Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce in Assy (Haute Savoye) and the Sacré Coeur in Audincourt (Doubs) (Barnes 1989: 33). But the Houston philanthropists intended their chapel as an interfaith venue: ‘a sacred space, open to all, every day.’1 Neither a regular sanctuary nor a regular museum, the Rothko Chapel offers an intriguing example of the secular sacred, of how the sacred and the secular, far from excluding each other, may actually converge, emotions and even flowing tears included. How does this work? What is going on? Their sacred setting certainly plays a role. Though not a religious man himself, Rothko already hinted before De Menils approached him that a chapel’s respectful, contemplative silence would heighten the viewer’s  The usual phrase used by the tourist organisations, adopted from the (now revised) chapel’s website. 1

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engagement and response (Barnes 1989: 43–44; Chave and Rothko 1989: 4–5, 188–189). But the fourteen paintings have their own role. Like most of his classic, abstract canvases, all done in the 1950s and 1960s, they radiate a curious, effective force. People have shed tears in front of other abstract paintings. Even Mondrian’s Composition in White, Black and Red (1936) and his Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–3) made some viewers weep (Erftemeijer 2018: 196). There are also plenty of beholders who, viewing a Rothko, never felt a tear coming and said so (while others, one suspects, just claimed they did). Nonetheless, as the accounts recorded by Elkins and other authors on Rothko testify, crying in front of a Rothko became a frequently occurring and significant phenomenon. Remarkably, the first accounts already date from the 1950s, when Rothko’s real fame was yet to come. What makes his viewers cry? As I hope to show, part of the paintings’ emotional force may be explained by their semi-sacred rhetoric. To put it differently, there is rhetoric to his abstract forms and shapes that rouses the beholder’s emotions, because it feeds on proven pictorial practices of the past. It still draws on the affective brushwork of painters such as Titian or Rembrandt, on the way they handled the materiality of texture, color, tonal gradation, or light and shadow. Basically, Rothko makes the spectator view his pictures through the devotional eyes of men and women looking at Titian’s, Rembrandt’s, and kindred painters’ brushwork in the past. Such religious legacies have been highlighted before, perhaps most prominently by the art historian Hans Belting. As he argued, ‘Concepts of belief live through in pictorial concepts, and pictorial practices once started as belief practices.’ (Belting 2006: 7–8, 10). The anthropologist Birgit Meyer agrees. Quoting Belting, she pointed to the ‘long-standing religious roots of contemporary pictorial practices.’ Our attitudes toward pictures are still rooted in Christian repertoires (Meyer 2011: 1034–1036). Rhetoric, the eloquence of the brush, is clearly one of the pictorial practices involved. The following pages take a closer look at its affective eloquence, at its vividness or enargeia, to use the accepted rhetorical term. Originally, the Greek notion of enargeia (Lat. demonstratio or evidentia) denoted the talents of poets and orators to move their audiences. In the

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Middle Ages, it also included the talents of preachers, painters, or sculptors. Most of the medieval texts speak of demonstratio, indebted as they were to an anonymous Roman treatise, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written in the first century BC. In contrast, early modern authors preferred the term evidentia, employed by Cicero and Quintilian. Their treatises were only recovered fully in the fifteenth century (Rosen 2000; Plett 2012; for an anthropologist’s use of the term: Balkenhol 2018: 249).

Coming Alive As the chapel’s guards and attendants informed Elkins, most of the visitors just took a glance at the fourteen panels and left. Others stayed longer, sitting down on the benches in the middle or meditating on cushions lying on the floor. Those, however, who were clearly, visibly moved responded differently. Carefully viewing the canvases, moving to and fro, they took their time—an essential dimension (Elkins 2001: 10). What they and others before and after them must have felt is that the images somehow came alive—a fine instance of Bildakt, to quote Belting’s colleague Horst Bredekamp. As the term implies, images may directly affect the beholder’s thoughts, feelings, and doings. In the act of viewing, in the very process, a latent inner force of the image is unexpectedly awakened (Bredekamp 2010; see also Fehrenbach 2010; Hadjinicolaou 2014: 167–168). In the epilogue to his Theorie des Bildakts Bredekamp even cited one of Elkins’ tearful viewers. Entranced by the fourteen chapel paintings waiting in Rothko’s studio, the woman felt physically drawn into them—as if her eyes, moving across the textures of the paint, were both looking and touching (‘as if my eyes had fingertips’) (Bredekamp 2010: 331–332; Elkins 2001: 2–3). Her viewing and weeping were a cross-modal, intersensory experience, merging the senses of sight and touch and engaging the body, her walking around, as a whole.2 As the philosopher John Krois, a Cassirer scholar, put it provokingly, ‘for images, you don’t need your eyes’ (Krois 2011).  Embodiment perspectives are rarely applied to modern art, but see: Crowther (1993) and Verrips (2009). 2

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What were Rothko’s own thoughts on this? Generally, he hated to talk about his art, like he hated the art critics of his day. But through the years he dropped a number of interesting hints in conversations and a few lectures. And he noted his views on painters and painting in general in a manuscript that only intimates knew about. Composed in the early 1940s, it was only found years after his death. Born as Marcus Rothkowitz in 1903, the young Rothko grew up poor and Jewish in present-day Latvia. At the age of ten, in 1913, he emigrated with his mother to the United States, where they joined his father and older brothers. His Jewish childhood years played a minor role in his work. As a child, he attended cheder (Jewish elementary school). But soon after his father died, in 1914, he completely abandoned the faith (Rothko and Rothko 2015: 253–254). More than fifty years later, in 1967, he even confessed: ‘My relation with God was not very good, and it has gotten worse day by day’ (quoted in: Elkins 2001: 204). Even so, in conversations at the end of his life with the art historian Henk van Os, a well-known expert on late medieval art, he showed a lively interest in the German mystic Meister Eckhart and his ideas on ‘nothingness,’ on nulleitas. A year or so earlier, Os had spotted Rothko’s Red, White, and Brown in the Kunstmuseum Basel. Struck by its ‘silence,’ as he remembered, he felt ‘as if nailed to the spot’ (Os 2012: 69). Rothko’s abstract canvases were undoubtedly more contemplative, more inner-oriented, rather than strictly religious. As he agreed in 1954, they were ‘related to the realms of the spirit and conceived as contemplative experiences’ (Barnes 1989: 44). Accordingly, the viewers’ emotional absorption in his paintings came first. Though the art critics used to range him among the New York abstractionists—painters such as Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell—he already held in 1943 that his pictures were not intended ‘either to create or to emphasize a formal color-­ space arrangement’ (Rothko 2006: 39). He said so again in 1956, bumping into one of the critics. As he told the man, ‘I’m not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else.’ He had a higher aim: ‘I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on (…).’ Indeed, ‘the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate

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those basic emotions.’ ‘The people who weep before my pictures,’ he ended the encounter, ‘are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them, and if you say, you are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point’ (Rothko 2006: 119–120). The conversation is often mentioned in the literature, but three things may be emphasized here. First, as noted above, people were already crying in front of a Rothko in the mid-1950s, at a time when critics still missed the paintings’ emotional force. Second, Rothko calls the weeping of his viewers (and perhaps his own, when painting the pictures?) a religious experience. The tears are, according to Rothko, not just any, but a kind of spiritual, a kind of sacred tears. And, third, the poet, orator, or preacher shedding tears is a well-known figure in the history of rhetoric. ‘If you want me to weep,’ Horace already urged the readers of his Ars Poetica, ‘you must first feel grief yourself ’ (Horace 1991, II: 101–102). In other words, the tears to be roused among the audience should first manifest, be fully and visibly lived, in the orator’s body. Since the late Middle Ages, such self-affection had been a requirement of all sacred rhetoric, Catholic or Protestant. And it equally marked the New  York Actor’s Studio, Lee Strasberg’s school of method-acting, started in the 1950s and nurturing talents like Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro, to mention only a few (Kremer 2007; Plett 2012: 115, 169). On other occasions, Rothko also spoke of the viewers’ absorption, their intimate engagement with the image. For example, he admired Matisse’s l’Atelier rouge with its overwhelming ‘purgatorial gloom,’ as a religious author put it. He studied it closely in the MoMa in 1949, noting tellingly that when you looked at it, ‘you became that color, you became totally saturated with it’ (quoted in: Gage 1998: 261; Madden 2000: 187). Formal color-space arrangements definitely interested him. But immediacy, the beholder’s affective-bodily absorption, clearly aroused his fascination with the Matisse: the kind of latent immediacy defining the image act. As he wrote, ‘I am involved with the human element. I want to create a state of intimacy—an immediate transaction.’ Hence the huge, the life-size or more than life-size, formats of his paintings: ‘Large pictures take you into them. Scale is of tremendous importance to me— human scale’ (Rothko 2006: 128). It was far from a bolt-of-lightning experience (Elkins, rather confusingly, speaks of beholders feeling the wind knocked out of them). As with the chapel’s visitors, those who were

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truly moved, the intimacy takes time, concentration and, moving-to-­ and-fro before the picture, even kinesthesia to develop. To quote Rothko, ‘A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer’ (Rothko 2006: 57). Considering such complete focus and intimacy, one may perhaps speak of a second practice of self-­ affection, performed not by the painter but by the viewer. But what does he or she see? What, in the broadest outlines, may be said to constitute Rothko’s affective rhetoric? Basically, the forms and shapes marking his classic canvases of the 1950s and 1960s are a few differently colored rectangles, floating against an undivided, indeterminate background. Straight edges, let alone any clear lines, are missing. The rectangles’ edges are frayed and irregular, which is precisely why they seem to float, to slightly move. At the same time, when the beholder closely follows the edges, the shapes seem to interact. They seem to near and then again to move away from each other in a spaceless space. Light and dark contrasts, a luminosity here and there emanating from the colored forms and shapes, further enhance the viewer’s feelings of losing control—feelings that have been expressed in religious terms, of catching a glimpse of God, the absolute or just ‘nothingness,’ but also in less sacred, less weighty terms, such as the ‘stillness’ felt by—the practicing believer—Henk van Os. Rothko’s rhetoric, then, revolves around the enargeia, not of any figures depicted but just of the materiality, of the blotches of paint applied to the canvas. Even those may move the viewer, may even elicit tears. But it was not a new rhetoric. Early modern painters like and Titian and Rembrandt already developed such material vividness, lending a new dimension to the affective-devotional rhetoric that had emerged before, in the fifteenth-century Low Countries in particular. It is no coincidence that Rothko greatly admired Rembrandt’s art.

Enargeia: Moving Figures Although reported infrequently (why would one record one’s own or other people’s crying?), we can safely assume that many fifteenth-century believers shed tears in front of a devotional image, whether a painting, a

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woodcut or sculpture. Praying and contemplating over the images were part and parcel of the period’s belief practices, of the believers physically ‘doing’ their emotions, to quote cultural historian Monique Scheer, in a Bourdieuan, performative sense. Correspondingly, one might construe the images and all the other devotionalia involved—from candles, herbs, and rosaries to prayer books and prayer nuts—as the things they did their emotions with (Scheer 2012).3 It was all part of their self- or auto-affection. In fact, when they were doing their devotional practices they were expected to weep. They should weep their ‘tears of compunction’—tears of sorrow and fear (sorrow over one’s sins, fear of God’s anger) that might transform, catching finally a glimpse of God’s grace, into tears of love and joy (tears of loving God mixed with tears of joy at the prospects of heaven) (Gerrits 1986; cf. Elkins 2001: 152–153). This doctrine of compunction, already outlined by Gregory the Great, deeply informed the wide-spread affective piety of the time, especially in the north. ‘After 1430,’ as a specialist wrote, ‘it was scarcely possible to dam up the river of tears in Netherlandish painting’ (Thürlemann 2012: 57). Clearly, the believers’ engagement with the images and the other artifacts was inherently affective, their emotions producing and emerging from the engagement (Randles 2017). The well-to-do had their own devotional images—the so-called Andachtsbilder, the half-length ‘closeups’ of a bleeding, red-eyed Christ, a grieving Virgin or a weeping Mary Magdalen (Fig.  11.2). Like the Sorrowing Virgin, discussed by Elkins, these were the smaller images. Painted around 1490 in the workshop of Dieric Bouts, the panel measures some 30 by 40  cm (Elkins 2001, 155–158). Pictures like these, placed on a table or little house altar in the home, could be quietly contemplated, wept upon or kissed from close by. Less wealthy believers wept over cheaper devotionalia, such as woodcuts or simple crucifixes. There was an abundance of all such images, both in the churches and at home, tangible testimony to the period’s wide-spread affective piety, with its defining focus on the humanity of  Scheer interestingly relates her Bourdieuan approach to Alva Noë’s enactivist and similar embodied theories of cognition. But as Joerg Fingerhut points out, these theories tend to neglect the images’ resistance, their agency or Bildakt (see Fingerhut 2018: 189–90). On ‘doing emotions with things,’ see Downes et al. (2018: 22). 3

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Fig. 11.2  Aelbert Bouts, The Man of Sorrows (oil on oak, 37.9 × 26.5 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, The Kate, Maurice R. and Melvin R. Seiden Special Purchase Fund in honor of Seymour and Zoya Slive

Christ, his Passion in particular (see, for instance, Southern 1953; Walker Bynum 1989; McNamer 2010). But other than the Andachtsbilder, a private and relatively late phenomenon, most of the paintings depicted the Gospel scenes with multiple figures, multiple tears included. One of the genre’s masterpieces is Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. The artist’s contemporaries already praised the five translucent tears trickling down Mary’s face, with one of them about to drop from her chin—a fine detail of the enargeia involved.

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Art historians have studied the fifteenth-century Passion paintings extensively. But they have long neglected a vital aspect: the painters’ own affective rhetoric, their striving for the highest vividness in evoking the biblical events (but see Parshall 1999). They could all draw on the compelling rhetoric of the late medieval vitae Christi. Emerging in the thirteenth century and spreading the wave of affective piety in the first place, these widely circulating vitae depicted Christ’s life on earth to the smallest detail. More than that, evoking his Passion—his being beaten, scourged, crowned with thorns, and finally nailed to the cross—the texts inflated all the cruel and bloody minutiae. And where details were missing (the Gospels’ own account is terse), they basically invented them, all with the aim to rouse the believers’ tears of compunction through their compassion (Marrow 1979). The Passion paintings and sculptures, along with the period’s Passion sermons and Passion plays, followed suit. It was a question of ante oculos ponere, as the Rhetorica ad Herennium, still highly influential, explained. The Gospel scenes had to be put as vividly as possible before the mind’s eye. Preachers, painters, sculptors, and the protagonists of the Passion drama’s actors had to transport their audiences to the biblical past, as if they were physically there, watching Mary cuddle her child or watching the crucifixion, with Mary and the other holy women grieving at the foot of the cross. Appealing to all the viewers’ senses, their sense of touch with all the cruelty depicted in the first place, the Netherlandish painters invented pictorial rhetoric that could indeed move their viewers to tears. Somewhat grudgingly, even the aging Michelangelo uttered his admiration. While his countrymen could not elicit a single tear, the painters in the north made the faithful weep (Hollanda 1928: 15–16). Starting as belief practices, to quote Belting, the painters’ pictorial practices initiated forceful rhetoric that was to stay. Painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would continue and—already anticipating Rothko’s abstract rhetoric—expand the tradition. Basically, the late medieval devotional painters sought to rouse the beholder’s emotions through the rhetorical actio of their holy figures— their compassion-evoking postures, gestures and, most prominently, their tearful facial expressions. They filled their scenes with well-delineated and readily identifiable figures. The violence, the bleeding wounds, and the

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ugly, grinning faces of Christ’s tormentors of Christ did the rest. In contrast, painters like Titian and Rembrandt sought to enhance the enargeia of their work by lending the paint, the picture’s mere material make-up, a vividness of its own.

Enargeia: Moving Matter In his fine book Das unklassische Bild the art historian Werner Busch discusses a rather neglected pictorial tradition, that of a loose group of painters moving away from the classical-idealist art theories of their time. He confined himself to the late Titian, the late Rembrandt and, after 1800, to Constable and Turner. But the group was certainly larger than that. As Busch noted, he could have included Velasquez. The same holds for El Greco, who worked under Titian in Venice, and it holds for the so-called Rembrandtists, a group of pupils and contemporary painters who lastingly adopted the master’s style. Both they and El Greco have been studied from a similar perspective by Yannis Hadjinicolaou (Busch 2009; Hadjinicolaou 2016; Bredekamp 2010: 265–268). To briefly summarize Busch’s argument, in contrast to the canon defended in the art treatises, these non-classical painters doubted the notion of a disegno interno, of the artist working from a premeditated idea in the head. Accordingly, they also doubted the corresponding studio practices—the artist’s materialization of his disegno interno through a series of preparatory sketches leading to a final result, the disegno esterno, copied onto the canvas. Typically, Titian and Rembrandt hardly left such drawings. Instead, as revealed by the pentimenti, their own immediate corrections into the wet paint, they essentially let themselves guide by their brushes, by the inner dynamics of the image taking shape under their hands (Busch 2009: 18–19). Most relevant here are Busch’s and Hadjinicolaou’s investigations on Rembrandt and the Rembrandtists. Rothko greatly admired the Dutch painter. Rembrandt, he noted, enlarged human emotionality to the plane of a ‘universal emotionalism.’ When we think of a picture’s humanity, we undoubtedly think of the type of emotionality Rembrandt achieved—a tragic emotionality, as Rothko believed, resting on ‘pain, frustration, and

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the fear of death.’ It may have been a vestige of Christian myth, with its notion of suffering as an instrument of salvation (Rothko 2004: 35–36, 96; see also Rothko 2006: 38). More than likely, Rothko recognized Rembrandt’s affective rhetoric, a major focus of the master himself. In one of the few comments on his own art, Rembrandt emphasized his striving for beweeglijkheid, the common Dutch term for enargeia, employed by poets, preachers, and painters alike.4 As the Rembrandt specialists agree, beweeglijkheid had a twofold, both a descriptive and a performative, meaning. It alluded to the motions of the figures depicted, to the vividness of their postures, gestures, and facial expressions, and to the figures’ ability, through their vividness, to move the viewer’s emotions (Weststeijn 2008: 234). But unlike the late medieval painters, Titian, Rembrandt, and the other non-classical painters did not confine their striving for vividness to the figures rendered. As argued by Busch and Hadjinicolaou, they created an additional, material enargeia through their handling of the paint— their use of color, tonal gradation, light, and shadow or, bringing in touch, their using impasto or scratching in the still fresh paint. As Hadjinicolaou writes, especially here, in their focusing on the paint, on its sheer materiality, Rembrandt and the Rembrandtists already anticipated the New York abstract expressionists (Hadjinicolaou 2016: 228). Matter was not dead but alive to these painters. In line with their anti-­ idealist views and answering to the contemporary conception of natura naturans, of nature’s generative power, they employed what cultural historian Pamela Smith has described as a wide-spread artisanal epistemology. Matter, in the eyes of its adherents, was ‘like a living being one had to come to know through intimate and bodily acquaintance.’ As Smith established, the artisans’ manuals produced at the time ‘are full of directives about this type of discernment by listening, tasting and smelling, which is very hard to describe in words, but instead is known in the body’ (Smith 2004: 2010; Roodenburg 2014).5  The term may be a sixteenth-century coinage. For its various uses before Rembrandt, see Roodenburg (2016: 658). 5  There is an interesting affinity here with present approaches of embodied or enactive cognition, Alva Noë’s (and others’) in particular; for an accessible introduction, see Noë (2009). 4

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Essentially, Titian and the other painters sought to shape formless matter, the prima materia, by closely following nature and allowing chance, the unforeseen, to do its work. They trusted their brushes and palet knives to guide the way, trusted each stroke of paint to generate the next. Not surprisingly, Rothko also cherished the unforeseen. Comparing his floating rectangles to actors on the stage, he cautioned that neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated. The artist should have ‘faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed.’ This is his most important tool, fashioned ‘through constant practice.’ ‘The picture,’ in other words, ‘must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented solution’ (Rothko 2006: 58–59). Again answering to the natura naturans conception, of making formless matter come alive, the non-classical painters preferred to leave their brush strokes or the scratches of their palet knives unfinished. In contrast to the canon, its ideal of the clear and precise line, they just created their shapes and forms, the human figures included, by applying blotches of paint—nature has no lines.6 In the same way, valuing tonal gradation and chiaroscuro, the variation of light and shadow, they preferred subdued yellows and browns in their work, grading into other earth colors such as green and red. Instead of the canon’s clear lines (and its cherished vanishing-­point perspective), they left it to their darkly colored and contoured shapes, emerging from an indeterminate, monochrome background, to lend their scenes depth and life. Nature, then, unfolded in the painter’s handling of the brush and it could do so again in the beholder’s careful viewing of the picture. Not surprisingly, with matter thus coming alive, with the scene’s enargeia also given material form, the viewer’s emotions are directly engaged. The pictures compel the beholder to imaginatively complete the shapes with their blurring lines and colors. Even the depicted figures’ body parts—their hands, arms, and lower legs—were often simply suggested through a few unsettled strokes of the brush (Fig. 11.3). Kinesthesia, viewing the painting both at a distance and up close, was another vital processual element, heightened through  Of course, the differences between the two approaches were often differences in degree. A famous instance is Vermeer, who by applying glazes over impastos, used to soften the contours of the objects depicted. 6

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Fig. 11.3  Rembrandt van Rijn, Saint Bartholomew, 1657 (oil on canvas, 122.7 × 99.7 cm, detail). Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art

Rembrandt’s famous use of impasto. The result was a state of emotional immediacy and intimacy comparable to what Rothko’s pictorial rhetoric accomplished some three centuries later.

Conclusion At the end of his book, Elkins quotes an astute entry from one of the chapel’s visitors’ books. As the man or woman wrote, viewing the darkish paintings you start scanning the canvas surface ‘for something concrete,

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visible, some touchstone to hold onto amid the rushing wave of color.’ Eventually, pushed to the limit, you may find ‘solace’ in the paintings’ textures, the brushstrokes or the running paint. Indeed, what Rothko offers the viewer in his ‘ever-so-slight variation of color, blotches, lighter zones’ are ‘small, controlled inklings of hope’—a proof of God, as the visitor believed. But it is a fading glimpse of God, the visual markers may or may not emerge. His own absorption, Elkins added, was quite identical, though he did not share the person’s religious take (Elkins 2001: 203–204). Somehow, the fourteen chapel paintings can move religious and non-religious visitors alike. What seems to resonate in the ways religious and non-religious interact with Rothko’s canvases, is an attentive way of viewing, a sensory, cross-modal openness to Rothko’s vivid forms and shapes. In this respect, one might see his large, abstract canvases as a new-style, secular variety of the late medieval Andachtsbilder. Both his pictorial and the beholder’s viewing practices have their contemplative, religious roots, a long-time history developing first around the enargeia of the figures depicted but shifting later, with the non-classical painters, to the enargeia of matter, of just the blotches of paint applied. In the meantime, the Rothko chapel seems to attract thousands of tourists each year, which is undoubtedly putting an end to any state of emotional intimacy. Museums have become the new pilgrimage sites, as the complaint goes. But that is another religious legacy, one that was already complained about by those praying, contemplating, and crying over the Andachtsbilder.

References Balkenhol, M. (2018). Iconic Objects: Making Diasporic Heritage, Blackness and Whiteness in the Netherlands. In B. Meyer & M. van de Port (Eds.), Sense and Essence: Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real (pp. 236–265). New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Barnes, S. (1989). The Rothko Chapel: An Act of Faith. Austin: University of Texas Press. Belting, H. (2006). Das echte Bild. Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen. Munich: Beck. Bredekamp, H. (2010). Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen (p. 52). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

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Busch, W. (2009). Das unklassische Bild. Von Tizian bis Constable und Turner. Munich: Beck. Bynum, C. W. (1989). Jesus as Mother: Studies on Spirituality in the High Middle Ages. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chave, A., & Rothko, M. (1989). Subjects in Abstraction. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Crowther, P. (1993). Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Downes, S., Holloway, S., & Randles, S. (Eds.). (2018). Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elkins, J. (2001). Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings. New York and London: Routledge. Erftemeijer, A. (2018). Kunst om the huilen. Heftige emoties bij het kijken naar kunst. Eindhoven: Lecturis. Fehrenbach, F. (2010). ‘Du lebst und thust mir nichts’. Aby Warburg und die Lebendigkeit der Kunst. In H.  Böhme & J.  Endres (Eds.), Der Code der Leidenschaften (pp. 124–145). Paderborn: Fink. Fingerhut, J. (2018). Verkörperung. In M. Lauschke & P. Schneider (Eds.), 23 Manifeste zu Bildakt und Verkörperung (pp. 183–190). Berlin: De Gruyter. Gage, J. (1998). Rothko: Colour as Subject. In J. Weiss (Ed.), Mark Rothko, exh. cat. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Gerrits, G. H. (1986). Inter Timorem et Spem: A Study of the Theological Thought of Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen. Brill: Leiden. Hadjinicolaou, Y. (2014). Not Only From His Hand but Also From his Temper. ‘Movement’ in the Art and Art Theory of the Rembrandtists. In S. Marienberg & J. Trabant (Eds.), Bildakt at the Warburg Institute (pp. 167–168). Berlin: De Gruyter. Hadjinicolaou, Y. (2016). Denkende Körper – Formende Hände. ‘Handeling’ in Kunst und Kunsttheorie der Rembrandtisten. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hollanda, F. de. (1928). Four Dialogues on Painting (Aubrey Bell, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horace. (1991). Satires, Epistles, and Ars poetica (H. Rushton Fairclough, Ed. and Trans.). (Harvard, MA: Cambridge University Press). Kremer, R. B. (2007). Selbstaffektion. In G. Ueding et al. (Eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (Vol. 8, pp. 1217–1224). Tübingen: Niemeyer. Krois, J. (2011). Für Bilder braucht man keine Augen. Zur Verkörperungstheorie des Ikonischen. In H. Bredekamp & M. Lauschke (Eds.), idem: Bildkörper und Körperschema (pp. 132–161). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

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Madden, N. (2000). Rothko. Irish Theological Quarterly, 65, 183–188. Marrow, J. H. (1979). Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages. Van Ghemmert: Kortrijk. McNamer, S. (2010). Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Meyer, B. (2011). Mediating absence – Effecting spiritual presence: pictures and the Christian imagination. Social Research, 78(4), 1034–1036. Noë, A. (2009). Out of Our Heads: Why You are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. Os, H. van (2012). Kijk nou eens. Amsterdam: Balans. Parshall, P. (1999). The Art of Memory and the Passion. The Art Bulletin, 81(3), 456–472. Plett, H. (2012). Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence. Leiden: Brill. Randles, S. (2017). Materiality. In S. Broomhall (Ed.), Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (pp. 17–19). London: Routledge. Roodenburg, H. (2014). Introduction: Entering the Sensory Worlds of the Renaissance. In H. Roodenburg (Ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Renaissance (pp. 1–18). London: Bloomsbury. Roodenburg, H. (2016). The Body in the Reformations. In U. Rublack (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Protestant Reformations (pp.  643–666). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosen, V. von (2000). Die Enargeia des Gemäldes. Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des Ut-pictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept. Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 27, 171–208. Rothko, M. (2004). The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rothko, M. (2006). In M. López-Remiro (Ed.), Writings on Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rothko, C., & Rothko, M. (2015). From the Inside Out. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scheer, M. (2012). Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion. History and Theory, 51, 193–220. Smith, P. (2004). The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

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Smith, P. (2010). Why Write a Book? From Lived Experience to the Written Word in Early Modern Europe. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 47, 25–50. Southern, R. W. (1953). The Making of the Middle Ages. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thürlemann, F. (2012). The Paradoxical Rhetoric of Tears: Looking at the Madrid ‘Descent from the Cross’. In E. Gertsman (Ed.), Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (pp. 53–78). New York: Routledge. Verrips, J. (2009). Missing Religion, Overlooking the Body. In J.  Elkins & D. Morgan (Eds.), Re-Enchantment (pp. 287–296). New York and London: Routledge. Weststeijn, T. (2008). The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Part V Bodies

12 Disgust and Difference: Conflicting Sensations of the Sacred Jojada Verrips

Case History On 3 July 2016, when I was cycling in the Dominicusstraße in Berlin-­ Schöneberg close to where we lived for almost half a year, my attention was suddenly drawn by something that was written on a glass container along the roadside. In huge black letters, somebody had painted the following slogan on this container: ‘SCHEISS ZIGEUNER’ (shit Gypsies). I was flabbergasted to read this disgusting qualification. Though I had seen all kinds of debunking and discriminating texts and graffiti in the public space of Germany’s capital, I had never come across one like this and I immediately took a picture of it (Fig.  12.1). A similar one was painted on a wall near a church not far away (Fig. 12.2). Each and every

Thanks to Birgit Meyer, Johannes Fabian and the editors of this volume for their critical, but constructive, comments on earlier versions of this essay.

J. Verrips (*) University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_12

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Fig. 12.1  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 3 July 2016

time I passed the container and wall I felt anger and disgust as well as the urge to remove the discriminatory text. Apparently others had felt the same, for on 21 July I noticed that somebody had blackened the word ‘ZIGEUNER’ and added an ‘E’ after ‘SCHEISS’ (Fig. 12.3) expressing his or her disgust and revulsion.1 On the same day I observed that the  This ‘somebody’ might have been an elderly lady who is well known in Berlin for her crusades against right-wing slogans in the public realm of the city and her being arrested by the police for her cleansing activities time and again (Volkskrant 20/10/2016). 1

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Fig. 12.2  Dominicusstr., Berlin, 3 July 2016

wall near the church had been newly painted (Fig. 12.4). Two days later the word ‘SCHEISSE’ on the container was crossed out a bit and under the blackened word was again written ‘ZIGEUNER!’ (Fig.  12.5) this time even with an exclamation mark! When I saw this I realized that a small war had started between two anonymous citizens, one with an apparent disgust of Gypsies and the other with a disgust of the slogan.2 On 29 July I noticed that phase 4 of this mini-war had begun, for I saw that the word ‘SCHEISSE’ had been painted greenish and the word ‘ZIGEUNER’ black again (Fig. 12.6). Remarkable fact: on the container stood a tray with two paint rollers as a kind of invitation to paint over (or  In spite of the fact that the designation ‘Gypsies’ (as well as ‘Zigeuner’ and ‘Tsiganes’) got a negative connation -reason why the L’Union Rom Internationale (IRU) in 1971 started to officially use the term ‘Rom’- I will nevertheless use it, because I do not always know to what specific sub-­category or -group they belong, such as Roma, Sinti, Ursari, Kalés, Lowara or Kalderash. Moreover, not all Gypsy groups want to be called ‘Rom.’ See Clébert (1970: 46–49) and Commission Nationale (2015: 251–261) for an overview of the various categories of Gypsies one can meet in Europe. 2

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Fig. 12.3  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 21 July 2016

add?) new insults at the address of Gypsies (Fig. 12.7). In the evening the tray had disappeared (Fig. 12.8). The next day, 30 July, I observed that the Gypsy hater had been active again. This time with a slogan degrading the Arabs to ‘shit’ on the glass container next to the one on which she or he had ventilated his disgust of Gypsies in the first place (Fig. 12.9). On

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Fig. 12.4  Dominicusstr., Berlin, 21 July 2016

the cleansed wall near the church the same revolting disqualification could be read (Fig. 12.10). Since we had to leave Berlin the following day, I was not able to find out whether the mini-war had a follow-up in the days to come. But when we for a short visit returned to Berlin in December 2016 it became clear that somebody in the meantime had blackened the insult at the address of the Arabs (Fig. 12.11). Since then the war seems to have ended, for in November 2017 the garbage bins still showed the unchanged traces of it (Fig. 12.12). Only in December 2018 they were not visible any longer, for the containers had been cleansed or replaced by new ones (Fig. 12.13).

The Anthropology of the Wild (in the) West That it does not concern a unique case, but one in an almost endless series, is shown, for example, by the following passage from an article by Bogner (2018) on the discrimination of Gypsies in Vienna: ‘A rather new

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Fig. 12.5  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 23 July 2016

aspect are the “Roma-Rauss” (“Away with the Roma”) slogans that…since 2016 again and again appeared on advertisements, election posters and in metro-stations.’ Sinister fact: the two s’s in ‘Rauss’ were typographically the same as the ones used by the German SS. Similarly shocking slogans (such as ‘Scheiß-Zigeuner ihr gehört alle weggeräumt’ (‘Shit-Gypsies you

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Fig. 12.6  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 29 July 2016

have to be deported all’) or even ‘Scheiß-Zigeuner. Ihr gehört vergast’ (‘Shit-Gypsies. You have to be gassed’) can be found on the Internet.3 As  On the Internet one can find a host of special sites that offer the opportunity to ventilate negative stereotypes of and/or experiences with Gypsies. Also telling in this connection is this observation by Gypsy blogger Jacques Debot: ‘La violence des propos à l’égard des Roms, Tsiganes et Gens du Voyage sur le réseaux sociaux Facebook et Twitter ne semble connaître aucune limite. Appels au 3

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Fig. 12.7  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 29 July 2016

the last example I want to mention the gruesome statement painted in 2016 on the wall of a school visited by Gypsy and Jewish kids in Montreuil (France): ‘Extermination totale de tous ces sales cafards de Roms, au plus vite, Juden verboten, sales Juifs…’ (‘Total extermination of all dirty Rom cockroaches, as soon as possible, forbidden for Jews, dirty Jews…’).4 My case history as well as the examples given fit very well what I once called ‘The Anthropology of the Wild (in the) West.’ I roughly defined this research line as follows. It implies the study of how people manage to survive by living together or resisting/fighting each other on the basis of classification, evaluation and fantasizing yielding the following possibilities: (1) veneration and even sacralisation, (2) incorporation and meurtre, au tir à balles réelles, à l’interdiction des transports en commun, comparaisons avec les singes, les rats, la vermine, accusation de propager des maladies sont diffusés quotidiennement, repris, partagés, approuvés, applaudis’ (see his blog Romstorie: La vie des Roms et des Gens du Voyage d.d. 28/12/2015). 4  Compare this with the lyrics of the outlawed German neo-Nazi rock band Landser: ‘In der Oder und in der Neisse/Nacht für Nacht die gleiche Scheisse/Im kalten Wasser Zigeunergewühl/ Gelangen an’s Ufer und schreien „Asyl!“/Zigeunerpack – jagt sie alle weg – ich hasse/diesen Dreck!’

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Fig. 12.8  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 29 July 2016

integration on an equal basis, and/or (3) discrimination, stigmatization, marginalization, dehumanization and, where deemed necessary, decimation and elimination of the Other (Verrips 2011: 207). It was especially the latter ways of negatively relating to fellow human beings in the Western, so-called civilized world that I put centre stage in this anthropology of the Wild (in the) West. That is, all sorts of uncivilized, wild or—maybe it is better to say—barbaric behaviour towards others perceived as beings of another, lower kind who form a threat to the social

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Fig. 12.9  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 30 July 2016

order one clings to. According to Slavoj Žižek one often fantasizes about these disgusting and therefore despised others as being the (potential) thieves of our goods and pleasures,5 the rude disturbers of our peaceful lives and more, providing a reason why one wants them to radically change their nomadic way of life or, even better, to disappear. For ages, Gypsies have been a tragic example of this kind of stereotypical representations of, and fantasies about others whom one classifies and evaluates as not being able to form part of an orderly society.6 The slogan on the glass  See Verrips (2001: 343/344). In a sense the idea of the limited good, as described by Foster (1965) for so-called peasant societies, plays an important role here. 6  This is deeply rooted in enlightenment philosophy. Kant, for instance, distinguished in the introduction of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft also a nomadic reason -nomadische Vernunft or as Röttgers calls it vagabundierende Vernunft. This type of reason Kant disliked very much, because nomads like Gypsies ‘despise all kinds of constant cultivation of the soil,’ married among one another, spoke a kind of secret language and refused to allow themselves to be incorporated in a civilized and sedentary world, reason why they formed a serious threat to societal order (Röttgers 1993; Verrips 2011). A striking example of a well-known Dutch politician -at the beginning of the last century even the 5

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Fig. 12.10  Dominicusstr., Berlin, 30 July 2016

container in the Dominicusstraße is another nasty example of dehumanizing them, in this case by their association with or, even worse, reduction to nothing less than shit, that is, something that generates in general (strong feelings of ) disgust.

The Phenomenon of Disgust It is exactly this sensation of disgust and its role in all kinds of socio-­ cultural arenas (now and in the past) as well as the disqualification of others (whom one cannot perceive as equals) as being nothing less than shit that I want to deal with in this essay. The role disgust plays in drawing boundaries and constructing hierarchies in the socio-cultural realm prime minister of the Netherlands- who despised Gypsies (as well as Jews) and wished them to disappear, was Abraham Kuyper.

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Fig. 12.11  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 14 December 2016

Fig. 12.12  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, 26 November 2017

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Fig. 12.13  Corner Dominicusstr.—Fritz Elsasstr., Berlin, December 2018

seems to be grossly neglected by sociologists and anthropologists. During the last two decades a number of monographs on disgust appeared (see, e.g., Miller 1997; Menninghaus 1999; Wilson 2002; Kick 2003; Nussbaum 2010; Korsmeyer 2011; Kelly 2011; McGinn 2011; Herz 2012; Delville et al. 2015), but almost none of their authors had anthropology or sociology as his/her background.7 Miller, professor of law at the University of Michigan, signalled the great importance of disgust as a boundary-maintaining mechanism as follows: ‘Disgust helps define boundaries between us and them and me and you. It helps prevent our way from being subsumed into their way. Disgust, along with desire,  I traced two ethnological journals that published special issues on disgust: ‘Anatomie du dégoût.’ Ethnologie Française 2011/1 (Vol. 41) and ‘Igitt. Ekel als Kultur.’ Innsbrucker Zeitschrift für Europäische Ethnologie 2015. Though Mary Douglas does not explicitly deal with the phenomenon in her study on purity and danger (1966, see Miller 1997: 43–45), it is clearly implied in her notions pollution and impurity. 7

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locates the bounds of the other, either as something to be avoided, repelled, or attacked, or, in other settings, as something to be emulated, imitated, or married’ (1997: 50).8 How disgust finds a great companion in aggression towards people deemed to be disgusting shit, I will discuss in greater detail below. First I want to pay attention to the ideas about disgust and the disgusting as they were developed by Karl Rosenkranz in the middle of the nineteenth century in his book Ästhetik des Häßlichen ([1853] 1996). Rosenkranz considered the disgusting (‘das Ekelhafte’) to be a sub-category of the repugnant (‘das Scheußliche’), which he again subsumed under the general category of the unpleasant (‘das Widrige’). For him, the sensation of disgust was triggered by (the process of ) decomposition (‘Verwesung’). The disgusting referred to a non-form (‘Un-form’), that is to say to a dissolution or disintegration of a form caused by physical or moral decay. He speaks in this connection of ‘Kulturverwesungsabschnitzeln,’ a fantastic term, but difficult to translate. ‘Cultural decomposition scraps’ might be a possibility. Such products are important sources of intensely felt disgust, especially when they form a complex mixture. Rosenkranz pays special attention to shit (‘Dreck’ and ‘Kot’) as something highly repulsive, a reason why people use these words to turn human beings, objects and even events they experience as revolting into ‘Nullitäten’ one should get rid of the sooner the better (Rosenkranz [1853] 1996: 252–260).9 It is this kind of antisocial nullifying that was implied in the inscriptions on the glass containers in the Dominicusstraße anno 2016.10 This way of categorizing and  Compare this with what the philosopher Daniel Kelly wrote: ‘Ethnic boundary markers are often highly emotionally charged, and attitudes and behaviors associated with ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and prejudice often follow the logic of disgust, depicting out-group members not just as wrong or different, but as tainted, contaminating, even subhuman’ (2011: 7). 9  During the reign of the Nazis the reduction of certain categories of people, such as the Jews and Gypsies, to excrements reached a tragic height in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, sometimes described as a kind of anus mundi (Werner 2011: 180–184). See for the persecution of the Gypsies by the Nazis, for example, Kenrick and Puxon (1972), Geiges and Wette (1979), Lucassen (1990) and Lewy (2000). 10  See in this connection the revealing study of Alan Dundes (1984) on the inclination of Germans -in spite of their obsession with immaculacy or cleanliness- to use a wide range of scatological words and expressions in almost every sphere of life (cf. Werner 2011: 24/25; Breuer and Vidulić 2018: 6; Havryliv 2018: 28). See Inglis for an illuminating theory about ‘the conditions of possibility for the mobilisation of resources of faecal and other forms of corporeal symbolism by one group against another’ (2002: 219). 8

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evaluating human beings in the public space can best be understood as sacralisation in a negative sense. Let me explain why I think that this introduction of the sacred, which normally is associated with the divine, the holy and the pure, in short something positive, is fully justified and relevant for a deeper understanding of the offending disqualification of both the Gypsies and the Arabs I came across in Berlin.

The Ambiguity of the Sacred The etymology of the word ‘sacred’ leads us back to the Latin word ‘sacer’ which according to WordSense.eu/Dictionary (on Google) has the following double meanings: ‘Sacer: 1. Sacred, holy, dedicated to a divinity, consecrated, hallowed... 2. Devoted to a divinity for sacrifice, fated to destruction, forfeited, accursed... 3. Divine, celestial... 4. Execrable, detestable, horrible, infamous, criminal, impious, wicked, abominable, cursed…’ In the Latin/Dutch dictionary edited by Harm Pinkster (2007) one finds the same double meanings, but herein the ‘divinity for sacrifice’ mentioned under 2 in the WordSense dictionary is specified as ‘a deity of the underworld.’11 The painter of the utterly negative slogans on the glass containers and the wall turned the Gypsies and later on the Arabs into a kind of sacred human beings in the second sense of the adjective sacred, that is, into repulsive, decaying and disgusting entities, nothing less than shit ‘fated to destruction’ or ripe for being sacrificed to a deity of the underworld in order to make the upper-world clean and pure again, an age-old way of dealing with others one cannot accept as fellow human beings. In order to make clear that this is no exaggerated or even empty statement, I want to underpin it with some material from the Bible, more specifically the Old Testament. Since I have a special interest in references to disgust and shit (and in its wake to impurity and destruction) I skimmed the Dutch ‘Statenvertaling’ from 1637,12 the first translation based on original texts, for in this translation these words still occur, whereas in later ones they were almost everywhere replaced by ‘nicer’  Mary Douglas, for instance, formulated the ambiguity of the word sacer as follows: ‘…in some cases it may apply to desecration as well as to consecration’ (1966: 8). 12  I grew up with this translation that is still in use in a number of orthodox Calvinist churches in the Bible Belt of the Netherlands. 11

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synonyms.13 The term disgust (‘walging’ and related words such as ‘walg,’ ‘walgen,’ and ‘walgelijkheid’) can be found in the books Leviticus, Numbers, Job, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah. Though the temptation is great to present several passages in which both disgust and/or shit pop up, I will limit myself to two salient passages in which these words occur. The first is Leviticus 26:30 that reads as follows in the ‘Statenvertaling:’ ‘En Ik zal uw hoogten verderven, en uw zonnebeelden uitroeien, en zal uw dode lichamen op de dode lichamen van uw drekgoden werpen; en Mijn ziel zal aan (van) u walgen’ (Italics JV). In The New American Standard Bible, this passage is translated as follows: ‘I then will destroy your high places, and cut down your incense altars, and heap your remains on the remains of your idols; for My soul shall abhor you’ (Italics JV). The second is Ezekiel 6:3, 5: ‘Daartoe zullen uw altaren verwoest, en uw zonnebeelden verbroken worden; en Ik zal uw verslagenen nedervellen voor het aangezicht uwer drekgoden. En ik zal de dode lichamen der kinderen Israëls voor het aangezicht hunner drekgoden leggen, en Ik zal uw beenderen rond uw altaren strooien’ (Italics JV). In English this passage reads as follows: ‘And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men before your idols. And I will lay the dead carcasses of the children of Israel before their idols: and I will scatter your bones round about your altars’ (Italics JV). In the two Dutch quotations from the ‘Statenvertaling’ the God of Israel is speaking about what He will do with the statues and altars of the ‘drekgoden’ (literally: ‘shit-Gods’) and all the people who made themselves impure by worshipping these polluting deities instead of Him.14 In early German translations of the Bible, for instance, the Biblia Pentapla attributed to Johann Otto Glüsing and published in three volumes (1710, 1711 and 1712), one frequently finds the equivalent term ‘Dreckgötter.’15 Also very  A comparison of the passages in the Dutch ‘Statenvertaling’ wherein disgust (‘walging’) was used with the same passages in several German and English translations taught me that in the first the following words were used: ‘Abscheu,’ ‘(sich) ekeln (vor),’ ‘verabscheuen’ (synonyms ‘sich ekeln,’ ‘hassen’) and ‘Abneigung haben,’ and in the latter that the word disgust does not occur as such. Instead, the following words are used: ‘loathe oneself,’ ‘abhor,’ ‘reject’ and ‘loathsome.’ 14  In the ‘Statenvertaling’ the word ‘drekgoden’ or ‘shit-gods’ occurs 48 times. 15  The Biblia Pentapla is a unique work, for it presents the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant, Hebrew and Dutch translations of the Bible next to each other, so that one is able to compare them. The term ‘Dreckgötter’ is only used in the Protestant translation of the Old Testament, not in the 13

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interesting in this context is, for example, the following German publication from 1730 containing translations of the four great prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel: Die heilige Propheten Alle, Nach der fürtreflichen Ubersetzung und mit den Vorreden, auch Rand-Glossen D. Martin Luthers… (The holy prophets all according to the excellent translation and with the preface, also marginal notes of Martin Luther). In the comments on the worshipping of idols in Ezekiel words like ‘Dreck-Götzen’ (‘shit-idols’) and ‘Dreck-Götter’ (‘shit-gods’) are used all the time. What I deem remarkable is that the God of Israel in early Dutch and German translations of the Bible speaks of other gods as ‘shit-gods’ or ‘shit-idols’16 in a similar way as the slogan-painter in Berlin did with regard to others whom he or she disliked and despised, that is, Gypsies and Arabs. Even more remarkable I find the fact that this God not only behaved as an angry, blasphemous iconoclast, but also as a killer of all the unfaithful who made both themselves and the landscapes in which they brought sacrifices to disgusting gods sacred in the negative sense.17 The Bible (and in its wake the Christian tradition based on it) offers in a certain sense next to a humane also a rather aggressive divine model for how to think about and behave towards people perceived as infidels, heathens or non-­ Christians (and their religious material culture and holy places and spaces). They are just like their deities in a certain sense also nothing less but disgusting, impure, polluting shit18 and therefore in the last instance other ones. Luther spoke in his translation of ‘Götzen’ in the sense of ‘Abgott’ (or ‘idol’). The popping up of ‘Dreckgötter’ in later editions of the Bible might be a direct consequence of a more precise translation of the word used in the original texts. According to Bergmann & Schart it concerns the noun šiqûș meaning, amongst other things, ‘Dreckszeug’ (‘shitty things’) as designation for idols (2012). 16  In the French translation of 1744 of the Luther Bible one finds the expression ‘dieux de fiente’ (‘shit-gods’). 17  The English scholar of biblical literature Yvonne Sherwood extensively sketched in great detail the blasphemous iconoclasm of the God of Israel as it occurs in Ezekiel in her brilliant study ‘Biblical Blaspheming’ (2012). 18  The pernicious perception of Gypsies as being impure and shitty people polluting each and every environment they enter is nowadays as widespread as it used to be in the past. See, for example, https://www.20min.ch/schweiz/romandie/story/Roma-lassen-Abfall-zurueck-Volksseele-­­ kocht%2D%2D-12711549. However, it is important to know that Gypsies perceive non-Gypsies in a similar way and that they have their own complex ideas of purity and cleanliness the latter do not know anything about (see Sutherland 1975: Chap. 8; Rao 1975: 149–155, Okely 1983: Chap. 6 and Mroz 1984).

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fated to be ruthlessly sent away and even killed. Though I cannot fall back on solid empirical evidence that indisputably proves that the slogan-­ painter in Berlin was directly inspired by the kind of negative representations of idol worshippers in early German Bible translations, I nevertheless think that the genealogical roots of his or her hatred towards Gypsies and Arabs, at least partly can be found in the aforementioned Christian tradition. One might interpret it as a kind of secular echo of a more outspoken religious past. The fact that Christianity is based on holy texts explicitly containing an intolerant and destructive model towards other believers forms, at least in my view, in combination with the recent rebirth and rise of new secular nationalisms and the occurrence of similar models within Judaism and Islam, an important source of the great conflicts that we witness in the world today, Europe being no civilized exception. Since this model springs from a learned (and not so much inborn) disgust of others one might say that this sentiment (or emotion) in the last instance forms a terrifying kind of double-edged sword, for, on the one hand, it helps people to form rather solidary groups, for instance religious, ethnic and/ or national ones, but on the other, it at the same time sharpens boundary-­ building and -defending, if need be with sheer violence as happened, for example, during the Balkan wars in the nineties of the last century. Of course, there are also other factors that play a role in these processes, such as greed and the image of the limited good, not to speak of poverty, inequality and geo-political circumstances to mention just a few. But for the moment I want to stress the significance of disgust for processes of in- and exclusion, for the desire to live in what the Germans call ‘a heile Welt,’ a world without people of whom one thinks that they (will) disturb and pollute the (wo)menscapes and environments one is part of and one lives in. All over the world, we are faced with efforts to protect these ‘scapes’—not seldom with brute force—against putative spoiling intruders, often perceived as flows or swarms, by building fences (of barbed wire) and walls, or with efforts to cleanse or purify them when these ‘sacred’ trespassers succeeded in finding or making holes in these obstacles (cf. Sibley 1995: Chaps. 4 and 5).19  Recent examples of places where walls were built to separate Gypsy camps or settlements from non-Gypsy neighbourhoods are Usti Nad Labem in the Czech Republic (1999), Berehove in the Ukraine (2012) and Wattrelos in France (2015). 19

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Agamben’s Homines sacri For readers familiar with the work on the homo sacer by Giorgio Agamben everything I said so far might sound rather familiar, even as a kind of summary of his ideas with regard to the type of being (the bare life) he is putting centre stage. There indeed is an important overlap between his homines sacri and my type of sacred human beings, for instance, their grim fate of always being manoeuvred into the position of an outsider or outlaw, but also a crucial difference. Let me try to sketch succinctly where our perspectives differ. In his study, Agamben wants to solve the riddle of the homo sacer, a bad and impure figure in Roman law, whom the people have judged on account of a crime and whom one might kill—though not as a sacrifice—without being condemned for homicide (1998: 71). According to him this tragic figure—a banned outlaw who was excluded from both the ius humanum and the ius divinum and thereby reduced by sovereigns to what he calls ‘bare life’—has started to play an essential role in modern bio-politics, for example, that of the Nazis in the last century who treated Jews as well as Gypsies20 as a kind of homines sacri who could ruthlessly be exterminated. In his opinion it would be a great mistake to mobilize ‘the theory of the ambivalence of the sacred’ as it was developed by William Robertson Smith at the end of the nineteenth century and elaborated thereafter by such great scholars as Henri Hubert, Marcel Mauss, Emile Durkheim, Rudolph Otto and Sigmund Freud to understand the phenomenon of the homo sacer. In this theory, the double-­ sidedness of the sacred, as something that can at the same time refer to the divine and the accursed or polluted, is connected with rules of purity and impurity. Agamben disqualifies this approach of the sacred, without seriously paying attention to it scornfully as ‘a scientific mythologeme’ (Ibid.: 75), not usable to shed light on the figure of the homo sacer in its classical, original sense as well as his occurrence in a modern, bio-political shape two millennia later. As a matter of fact, Agamben spends only three pages on the insights of the scholars mentioned to reach this bold conclusion

20

 Agamben refers two times to the killing of Gypsies by the Nazis (1998: 155, 179).

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(Ibid.: 75–79).21 Instead of putting their ideas regarding the sacred aside and clinging stubbornly to a rather narrow, almost nominalist sort of meaning of the words sacer and sacredness, Agamben could have gained from including the perspectives he so easily rejects.22 That would have enabled him to put a dimension into the spotlight that he very explicitly does not want to acknowledge as relevant, that is, the family resemblance between the disgusting, modern, bio-political practices of getting rid of unwanted human beings by putting them in camps and eventually killing them (as, e.g., implemented by the Nazis) and bringing a sacrifice of a specific type. However, in Agamben’s view the representation of, for example, the Holocaust as a kind of sacrifice is beside the point and the result of what he calls ‘an irresponsible historiographical blindness.’ Jews as well as Gypsies were for him homines sacri that might be killed, but were not sacrificed. Their death was neither the consequence of a death penalty nor sacrifice, but simply the concretization of their capacity to being killed inherent to being a Jew or Gypsy as such. In my view, Agamben takes a position that blinds to the fact that the injunction to not sacrifice a homo sacer implies that one cannot recognize the kind of family resemblance I just mentioned. Doing so, by contrast, is important for a better understanding of the role of perceptions of purity and impurity in the cleansing of the social order. Concentrating on the reduction of certain categories of human beings to ‘bare life’ and on how this reduction eventually might lead to their destruction, Agamben fails to pay detailed attention to at least two important things. First, he neglects to describe and analyse the (ideological) reasons of the sovereign powers and their supporters for their draconic decisions to label certain people as deportable and killable, or the kind of worldview that inspires them to classify specific Others as trespassers, intruders, parasites, vermin, bad,  The chapter on the ambivalence of the sacred in Part Two (Agamben 1998: 75–81) is both scientifically and technically weak. Not only the lack of presenting convincing arguments for the blunt rejection of their approaches, except that they are not based on the meaning Agamben gives to the term sacred as formulated in the quote from a classical juridical text, is striking, but also the fact that there are mistakes in the quotes from Robertson Smith’s work and lacking references to the literature mentioned as relevant for a better understanding of the phenomenon of the homo sacer. 22  Another topic that escapes Agamben’s attention by rejecting the work of Durkheim on the sacred is that of the ‘sacrality of the person’ (introduced by him in 1898, see Joas 2015: 81–86), in a sense the positive conceptual counterpart of the banned homo sacer. 21

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impure and polluting entities or…shit. Second, due to his narrow and nominalist definition of the sacred, he overlooks the fact that the practices used to free the world of all these disturbing beings or elements show age-old sacrificial traits or traces of the religious in secular settings.

Sacrificial Echoes in Secular Times In this connection, I think that it can be fruitful to take notice of what Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss have said about the phenomenon of sacrifice in their brilliant ‘Essai sur la nature et la function du sacrifice’ ([1898] 1964) that Agamben pushes aside in one sentence as irrelevant for a better understanding of the deplorable fate of the homo sacer (1998: 77). According to them all forms of sacrifice ‘…are the same in essence (…) the outer coverings of one single mechanism’ (Hubert and Mauss [1898] 1964: 18). And it is this mechanism or scheme that they deal with in their essay. They define sacrifice as follows: ‘Sacrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which he is concerned’ (Ibid.: 13). Subsequently, they outline this scheme or basic structure in which specific actors and acts play crucial roles. The important actors are the sacrifier, the sacrificer and the victim. The sacrifier might be an individual or a collective of persons either wishing to get near to the sacred in a positive sense (e.g., a deity or God) or …to get rid of something sacred in the negative sense, that is, an impurity of himself/ themselves or of specific objects in his/their possession (e.g., houses or land). The sacrificer is the one who actually performs the sacrifice for the sacrifier, for instance, a priest or another religious specialist. The victim, finally, is the subject or object that has to be destroyed in order to either get in close contact with the sacred world and its supposed inhabitants (Gods, deities, spirits or powers) or to radically expel disgusting pollution and impurity of people and/or things one values very much.23 In fact,  In the case of expelling pollution and impurity the victim is often a real or symbolic scapegoat, a sacrificial being Agamben refuses to associate –in my view erroneously- with his homo sacer, because it is forbidden to sacrifice it. See in this connection Brittnacher (2012: 218–222) who follows 23

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Hubert and Mauss lay bare the basic scheme (or structure) of all sacrifices and distinguish two types: (a) sacrifices of sacralisation and (b) sacrifices of de-sacralisation. In both cases one sees ‘…the same sacrificial procedure, in which the elements not only are identical, but arranged in the same order and moving in the same direction’ (Ibid.: 58). What I deem important is that especially the sacrifices of de-sacralisation as outlined by Hubert and Mauss can be helpful in understanding what happens in case of symbolic and actual manifestations of violent ethnic cleansing we are confronted with nowadays. The basic scheme followed and the same sort of actors and acts can be signalled in these cases too. Only explicit religious justifications of the cleansing processes, implying the killing of thousands of victims that are qualified as disgusting polluters of cherished socio-­ cultural environments, are often not given by the violent sacrificers, such as soldiers and rebels, and the sacrifiers, for instance, political leaders of nations and ethnic groups.24 However, this should not lead to closing our eyes for the continuous upsurge of age-old techniques or symbolic forms grounded in the realm of religion to stigmatize, or even to get rid of people, animals and things that are perceived as a threat to the secular societal order.

Final Remarks The basic scheme underlying sacrifices, especially sacrifices of de-­ sacralization as revealed by Hubert and Mauss seems to also underlie many manifestations of very scary outbursts of violence in our global world nowadays and the mistreatment of people who, for instance, try to escape an often gloomy economic and/or political situation by voting with their feet and illegally crossing borders (cf. Sibley 1995: Chap. 3). The role which learned disgust, and in its wake the degrading of others to shit (as in the case of the Gypsies I started with) plays in these outbursts and mistreatment should not be underestimated and be therefore the object of much more Agamben’s line of argumentation with regard to Gypsies in a way I find inconsistent and therefore unsatisfactory. 24  Clear cases wherein religious justifications of gruesome and terrifying cleansing practices are presented are the so-called Islamic State and Boko Haram.

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research. To what kind of tragic developments this sort of depreciation and dehumanization of fellow citizens in the last instance might lead was shown by the Nazis (see Werner 2011: 180 ff.). Mini-wars against reprehensible slogans on glass containers and walls reducing human beings to a kind of ‘sacred waste,’ to use a concept coined by Irene Stengs (2014), can be seen as a kind of social hygiene in the public space, aiming to find something of a road towards a better world.25 However, I am afraid that it will be difficult to find a fitting, humanitarian solution for the problem I signalled in this essay. One of the reasons for this rather sad perspective is the fact that human beings are highly ambivalent creatures or walking bundles of contradictions able to transform from good (civilized) into evil (barbarian) beings and vice versa or being both at the same time. With populist-nativist movements striving for ‘pure nations’ on the rise in Europe and elsewhere, our future looks grim. Nevertheless, it is my hope that my anthropology of the ‘Wild (in the) West’ paying close attention to all kinds of barbaric and therefore disquieting phenomena may contribute to be on our guard.

References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (D.  Heller-­ Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted Lives. Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bergmann, C., & Schart, A. (2012). Kot/Mist/Dreck. Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet (WiBiLex). http://www.bibelwissenschaft.de/ stichwort/24000/ Bogner, V. (2018). Roma werden in Österreich immer noch diskriminiert – und es istjedemscheißegal. https://www.vice.com/de_at/article/j5byxg/roma-werden-inosterreich-immer-noch-diskriminiert Breuer, I., & Vidulić, S.  L. (2018). Schöne Scheiße  – Konfigurationen des Skatologischen in Sprache und Literatur. Zagreber germanistische Beiträge: Jahrbuch für Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaft, 27(1), 5–25. Brittnacher, H.  R. (2012). Leben auf der Grenze. Klischee und Faszination des Zigeunerbildes in Literatur und Kunst. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. 25

 Cf. Bauman (2004) who speaks about the outcasts of modernity as ‘wasted lives.’

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Clébert, J.-P. (1970). The Gypsies (Charles Duff, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme. (2015). La lutte contre le racisme, l’antisemitisme et la xenophobie. Année 2014. Paris: Direction de l’information légale et administrative. Delville, M., Norris, A., & von Hoffmann, V. (2015). Le Dégoût. Histoire, langage, esthétique et politique d’une emotion plurielle. Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger. An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge. Dundes, A. (1984). Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder. A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore. New York: Columbia University Press. Foster, G.  M. (1965). Peasant Society and the Image of the Limited Good. American Anthropologist, 67, 293–316. Geigges, A., & Wette, B.  W. (1979). Zigeuner heute. Verfolgung und Diskriminierung in der BRD.  Eine Anklageschrift. Bornheim-Merten, Lamuw Verlag. Havryliv, O. (2018). Skatologismen in aggressiven Sprechakten. Zagreber germanistische Beiträge: Jahrbuch für Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaft, 27(1), 27–45. Herz, R. (2012). That’s Disgusting. Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Hubert, H., & Mauss, M. ([1898] 1964). Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (W.D. Halls, Trans.). London: Cohen & West. Inglis, D. (2002). Dirt and denigration: the faecal imagery and rhetorics of abuse. Postcolonial Studies, 5(2), 207–221. Joas, H. (2015). Die Sakralität der Person. Eine neue Genealogie der Menschenrechte. Mit einem neuen Vorwort. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Kelly, D. (2011). Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kenrick, D., & Puxon, G. (1972). The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. London: Sussex University Press. Kick, H. A. (Ed.). (2003). Ekel. Darstellung und Deutung in den Wissenschaften und Künsten. Schriften zu Psychopathologie, Kunst und Literatuur VII. Hürtgenwald: Guido Pressler Verlag. Korsmeyer, C. (2011). Savoring Disgust. The Foul & the Fair in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewy, G. (2000). The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Lucassen, L. (1990). En men noemde hen Zigeuners… De geschiedenis van Kalderasch, Ursari, Lowara en Sinti in Nederland (1750–1944). Amsterdam/‘s-­ Gravenhage: Stichting beheer IISG/SDU uitgeverij. McGinn, C. (2011). The Meaning of Disgust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menninghaus, W. (1999). Ekel. Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung. Suhrkamp Tasschenbuch Wissenschaft 1634. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Miller, W.  I. (1997). The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mróz, L. (1984). People and Non-People. The Way of Distinguishing One’s Own Group by Gypsies in Poland. Ethnologia Polona, 10, 109–128. Nussbaum, M.  C. (2010). From Disgust to Humanity. Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Okely, J. (1983). The Traveller-Gypsies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinkster, H. (Ed.). (2007). Woordenboek Latijn/Nederlands. Tweede Herziene Druk. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Rao, A. (1975). Some Mānuš Conceptions and Attitudes. In F. Rehfish (Ed.), Gypsies, Tinkers and other Travellers (pp. 139–169). London: Academic Press. Rosenkrantz, K. ([1853] 1996). Ästhetik des Häßlichen. 2., überarbeitete Auflage. Reclam-Bibliothek Band 1555. Leipzig: Reclam Verlag. Röttgers, K. (1993). Kants Kollege und seine Ungeschriebene Schrift über die Zigeuner. Heidelberg: Manutius Verlag. Sherwood, Y. (2012). Biblical Blaspheming. Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sibley, D. (1995). Geographies of Exclusion. Society and Difference in the West. London: Routledge. Stengs, I. (2014). Sacred Waste. Material Religion, 10(2), 235–238. Sutherland, A. (1975). Gypsies: The Hidden Americans. London: Tavistock Publications. Verrips, J. (2001). The Golden Bough and Apocalypse Now: An-other fantasy. Postcolonial Studies, 4(3), 335–351. Verrips, J. (2011). Some Notes on (New) Savages and Savagery. Etnofoor, 23(1), 205–212. Werner, F. (2011). Dunkle Materie. Die Geschichte der Scheisse. München: Nagel & Kimche. Wilson, R.  R. (2002). The Hydra’s Tale. Imagining Disgust. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.

13 United in Competitive Mourning: Commemorative Spectacle in Tribute to King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand Irene Stengs

King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the ninth king of the Chakri dynasty, died on 13 October 2016 in Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok. During the final months of the king’s hospitalization people had been gathering in growing numbers in front of the hospital to pray for his health and recovery. Many of the well-wishers were wearing bright pink shirts, a reference to the pink jacket the king himself had been wearing that Tuesday in November 2007, when he was released from another period of hospitalization.1 In Thailand, each day of the week is astrologically associated with a specific colour and pink is the colour of Tuesday. Donning pink had become a ritualized tribute to the ailing king. 1  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-king/thais-wear-auspicious-pink-to-helphospitalized-­king-recover-idUSKCN12B0EA?il=0 (accessed 25 September 2019). For the significance of Siriraj Hospital as a site of worship, see Rotheray (2010).

I. Stengs (*) Meertens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2_13

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Immediately upon the king’s demise, the colour of paying tribute changed to black and white, the Thai colours of mourning since the Fifth Reign (King Chulalongkorn, Rama V, 1868–1910). The government, the military junta headed by self-appointed PM Gen. Prayuth Chan-­ ocha, announced a one-year mourning period, with an emphasis on the first and last months. In the first month, voluntarily or not, restaurants refrained from serving alcohol, performances were cancelled, as were all kinds of festive celebrations. Wearing black and/or white was declared compulsory. Within twenty-four hours, the Thai nation had turned black and white, black being prominent: the public sphere was marked by compliance with this colour code  (see Figs.  13.1, 13.2 and 13.3). On Facebook, the effects of the code were revealing: personal cover photos had been replaced by black-and-white images of the king. In addition, as it would not be respectful to have one’s own portrait appearing so close to that of the monarch, people deleted their profile photos, a gesture that left—or, perhaps more precisely, created—‘black holes’. The intimidating consequence was that those who had not done so yet stood out. In that first month of mourning various witch-hunts took place against people who, in the eyes of others, whether online or offline, had not sufficiently complied with the code of mourning.2 Apparently, in a sphere of compulsory mourning, a visual absence of the mourning code entailed the risk of being interpreted as an act of contempt for the king. Thailand being the country with the most rigid and severe lese-majesty law in the world (‘Article 112’), such could be a serious offence. According to the law, the king is ‘enthroned in a position of revered worship and shall not be violated’ (Streckfuss 2010: 108). Moreover, the law strictly forbids insulting the king, stating, as translated by Haberkorn: ‘Whoever defames, insults, or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir Apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment from three to fifteen years’ (2016: 227). With the interpretation of the law increasingly widening, any critical utterance about the king—or about royalty in general, including the kings and queens of previous dynasties (some of them semi-­mythical) and even the king’s dogs—may be interpreted as insulting  Such vigilant actions, although incidental, must be placed in a broader context of policing-citizen initiatives in ‘defense of the monarchy’ (see Haberkorn 2016). 2

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Fig. 13.1  Identification and dress code check point at the entrance of Sanam Luang, Bangkok July 2017

or defamatory. Because, in the words of Streckfuss, ‘insult lies in the eye of the beholder’, anyone in Thai society might fall victim to accusations of lese-majesty (ibid: 126) and, conversely, ‘[a]ny individual can file a complaint of alleged violation of Article 112’ (Haberkorn 2016: 228). Consequently, ‘public comment on the monarchy can only be one of praise’ (Streckfuss 2010: 126). I suggest, however, that to fully understand the present workings of the lese-majesty law, these observations need to be taken a step further: over the last fifteen to twenty years, ‘praising the monarchy’ has become a pressing requirement for almost anything present in public space, whether that be objects, persons or actions. Or, to put it differently, the sphere of reverence and worship of the king, is such that any absence of praise may be understood as an insult or a display of contempt.

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Fig. 13.2  Billboard commemorating King Bhumibol, Bangkok 2018

Fig. 13.3  Food counter with mourning stickers, Bangkok July 2017

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In the prevalent Thai royalist-nationalist ideology, the massive engagement with the mourning rituals is not a direct consequence of the lese-­ majesty law, but naturally flows from the undisputed love and respect all Thai are supposed to feel for their semi-divine (samuthithep) king. Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul calls this an ideology of hyper-royalism: ‘The royalist logic that a Thai must naturally be a royalist, therefore a non-royalist must not be a Thai, is not absurd in Thailand. As this ideology is widespread, it generates the climate of fear in which the non-­ conformist individuals must learn to live in silence and anonymity’ (2014: 80).3 The mourning colour code’s exclusionary and inclusionary effects position the massive compliance with the code clearly within the above royalist-nationalist framework. The power of expression of this royalist-nationalism, however, tends to reach far beyond the Thai border. Since long it has served the orientalist romanticism prevalent in much of the international popular press to explain the exalted expressions of veneration from the special relationship between the Thai people and the monarchy, Bhumibol in particular. Although recently more critical reflections on the monarchy may be discerned, these rather concern Thailand’s present king, Vajiralongkorn (Rama X, r. 2016-), who has not accrued the same degree of respect as his father. For Thailand and the rest of the world alike, the images of massive gatherings of people in black carrying portraits of Bhumibol have been both an expression and proof of a nation unified in grief and love for their great monarch. Providing an ethnographic perspective on a selection of the many mourning rituals, this chapter aims to shed light on the engagement of  A concrete example of what this ideology may result in, is presented by Tyrell Haberkorn’s article on what she calls ‘hyper-royalist parapolitics’, a politics in which every individual is sovereign in protecting the king. A 2012 proposal to review Article 112, presented by the critical lawyers group Khana Nitirat, evoked many threatening reactions, ‘suggesting that the members of Khana Nitirat were not Thai and should leave the country’, or were ‘less than humans, describing them as dogs or aliens’. Others called for intervention of the military, some even suggesting that soldiers should make them ‘disappear by throwing them from helicopters’, ‘having them and their families necklaced and burned alive’, or ‘beheaded and their heads put at stakes in front of the entrance of the Thammasat University’. No action was undertaken against the individuals who posted such treats (2016: 234–235). 3

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so many Thai with the period of mourning. A secular-sacred divide that either emphasizes enforcement by the prevalent royalist-nationalism or the sacrosanct qualities of the king will fall short for understanding the breadth and depth of the mourning rituals. In order to overcome this opposition, I will introduce the notion of ‘competitive mourning’ to flesh out the processes that accelerated, magnified and intensified many of the mourning activities. From this perspective, the violence directed at so-­called incompliant others, as well as people’s participation in elaborate mourning initiatives, appear as two sides of the same coin: both hint at a ‘competition in mourning’ fuelled by the above moral (sacred) and legal (secular) frameworks. Highlighting the entanglement of coercion and competition in analysing the extensiveness of the mourning rituals, I seek to move beyond a perspective that naturalizes the ‘love of the Thai for their king’, while taking care not to frame participation in the rituals in terms of falseness or insincerity, because imposed. From the royalist, as well as the orientalist romantic perspective, the Thai have always venerated their kings. Yet, as the next section will demonstrate, there is a specific historical dimension to the veneration for Bhumibol, which sets it apart from the worshipping of earlier Siamese kings or from early twentieth-century kings, that of Rama VI (r. 1910–1925) and Rama VII (r. 1925–1935) in particular. I will therefore start with a short digression on the sacralization of kingship during the ninth reign, highlighting the role of royal rituals in the production of the sacred.

The Sacralization of Kingship Thailand has been a constitutional monarchy since the absolute monarchy was overthrown in 1932. The country holds a notorious record in terms of numbers of coup d’états followed by new constitutions: two of each in the twenty-first century alone (2006 and 2014 respectively). Since the 1950s, the position of the monarch has gradually made a remarkable political come-back, eventually relocating the monarchy in

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the centre of the Thai political constellation. Over the decades, a hagiography has taken shape in which King Bhumibol, who had been on the throne since 1946, is depicted as the nation’s ‘protector of democracy’ (Thongchai 2008) and ‘pillar of stability’ (Stengs 2009: 232) in a politically turbulent and precarious society. Although, officially, the king/monarchy is ‘above politics’, Bhumibol has shown himself to be a strong monarch, regularly intervening in politics. Since the second half of the twentieth century, a process of sacralisation of kingship has taken place that Thongchai has captured as ‘neo-royalism’ (2008) and later ‘hyper-­ royalism’ (2014), an exalted idea of kingship that has its roots in Buddhist perceptions of the king as a dhammaraja or ‘righteous ruler’. Such a king is said to rule in accordance to the ‘Ten Kingly Virtues’: charity, morality, self-sacrifice, rectitude, gentleness, self-restriction, non-anger, non-­ violence, forbearance and non-obstruction (Dhani 1946: 95). In this ideology, Bhumibol’s adherence to the Ten Kingly Virtues accounts for his barami, a charismatic, moral authority with auspicious qualities. In Thongchai’s perspective of neo-royalism, the king is perceived as ‘being sacred, popular and democratic’ (2008: 21). Crucial for this ideology to take root has been the development of a ‘deification industry’ aimed at enhancing Bhumibol’s perceived barami. As various authors have suggested (Bowie 1997; Gray 1986; Stengs 2009; Tambiah 1977; Thongchai 2008, 2014), the deployment of royal rituals has been central in promoting the monarchy. This reminds of Christel Lane’s work on ritual in the Soviet-Union, where she draws attention to the significance of rituals as tools of ‘conscious cultural management’ (1981: 45). Following Lane, we can see how the Thai royal rituals are part of a larger ‘system of rituals’ and of ‘a sustained and general campaign’ (ibid.: 3), aimed at enhancing and intensifying nationalist, royalist and Buddhist values and norms, which all can be captured in the idea of a unanimous veneration for the monarchy, and for Bhumibol in particular. For one part, the royal ritual repertoire entails rituals in which the king engages in religious, auspicious merit-making activities, such as constructing temples, donating robes to monks and the ‘seasonal changing of the clothes of the Emerald Buddha’ in the main temple of the Grand Palace complex. Some rituals are Buddhistified Hindu-Brahmin court rituals with adaptations made by King Mongkut (Rama IV, r. 1851–1868).

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These ritual reformations did not, as argued by Tambiah, entail ‘diminishing of the brahmanical features (…) but of interpolating and adding Buddhist sequences to them’ (1977: 227, italics in original). To a perception of the king as divine, Mongkut added that of the ideal Buddhist monarch as the source of the kingdom’s prosperousness and well-being, and defender and protector of the Sangha, the Thai brotherhood of monks. Another category of royal rituals, also firstly introduced by Mongkut, does not resort to ancient court ritual, but is influenced by European customs (Riggs 1966: 105). Such rituals, therefore, were regarded as ‘secular’ and, by implication, more modern, by the British and the French colonial powers in particular. Such rituals involve, for instance, nationwide celebrations of the king’s birthday and coronation anniversaries. These ‘modernizations’ were part of Mongkut’s strategy of countering European allegations of ‘oriental despotism’, which otherwise might have legitimized colonialist intervention (Gray 1986: 262–263). Celebrating events in the life of the king truly was a novelty, since the Thai state so far only had celebrated anniversaries of events in the life of the Buddha (ibid.: 265). The twentieth century saw the introduction of other ‘secular’ rituals, celebrating the 1932 revolution (National Day), the first constitution (Constitution Day), Labour’s Day and New Year. A significant change and, with the wisdom of hindsight, an indication of what was to follow, was the transfer of National Day from 24 June to 5 December, Bhumibol’s birthday. Again, foreign pressure played an important role: The United States, in its campaign against communism in Southeast Asia, supported a strong royalism, countering any celebration of ‘left-wing’ revolutionary triumph, among which the abolition of the absolute monarchy (Thongchai 2014: 84). Twenty years later, in 1980, National Day would become Thailand’s Father’s Day; in 1976, the birthday of Queen Sirikit, presently the queen-mother (12 August), had already been designated National Mother’s Day. In short, Western ‘secular’ celebrations were converted into nationalist royal celebrations. Since then, Thailand has been celebrating the monarchy in a seemingly ever-expanding number of ever-grander annual royal festive or commemorative days and jubilees. Bhumibol’s reign has been celebrated in Silver,

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Golden and Diamond jubilees of both the king’s birthdays and number of years on the throne. In addition, each ‘auspicious completion of a twelve-year-cycle’ was celebrated with exceptional festive events, as was for instance Bhumibol ‘breaking the record of the longest reign in Thai history’ (in 1988). It would be virtually impossible to sum up all the special occasions of the other members of the royal family that have been celebrated over the years. Altogether, the Thai ‘system of royal rituals’ encompasses a vast and expanding spectrum of ritualized moments, activities, places and events, varying from national holidays (royal birthdays, royal jubilees), playing of the royal anthem4 (the preamble of films in cinemas), daily royal news broadcasts, royal religious duties, and the endless (re)production of royal statues, portraits, works of art and monuments, to mention the system’s most important ritual components. The conceptualisation, in terms of a system of rituals to be distinguished from earlier Hindu-Brahmin and Theravada Buddhist forms of veneration of kingship, is justified by the system’s everyday mass-mediated presence, in combination with the expansion and standardization, both in textual and visual forms, of the monarchy’s benefits for the nation,  resulting from Bhumibol’s righteousness and perseverance in particular. In terms of royal ritual, the mourning period of an entire year dedicated to this king has been the culminating episode.

The Sacredness of the Secular State During the year of mourning, hardly any person would appear in public without at least a tiny visible sign of mourning. T-shirts, cars, magazines, lottery tickets and websites were decorated with black ribbons, black wrist ties, images of the king, or the Thai figure 9 (referring to King Rama  The royal anthem (Sansoen Phra Barami) is not to be confused with the national anthem. The royal anthem is played when members of royal family arrive or depart as well as in a selection of designated contexts, such as before the start of a film or theatre performance.  In cinemas, the anthem is always accompanied by royal portraiture, for long mainly portraits of Bhumibol. Bronwyn Isaacs observed an interesting change in the aesthetics of this cinematic portraiture, making the king appear ‘less as a man and more as a spirit’. To capture this development, Isaacs introduces the notion of ‘cinematic shrine’,  see http://www.americananthropologist.org/2019/04/26/ media-circulation-of-images/. 4

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IX). In addition, countless kilometres of black and white mourning garlands decorated the entrances, fences, walls and roofs of department stores, railroad stations, government offices, schools, banks, shops, industrial estates, petrol stations, markets and temples, together with myriads of black-and-white versions of established portraits of the late king. Many of these expressions of mourning were accompanied by the slogans, both in Thai and English, ‘I was born in the reign of King Rama IX’ and ‘May I be your humble servant under your feet in the eternal cycle of rebirth’5 (Fig. 13.4). With the transition of (public) everyday life into a permanent emanation of mourning, commemorative ritual had become predominant in

Fig. 13.4  Street art ‘we were born in the reign of King Rama 9’, Bangkok July 2017  Another, not that literal, translation of this text is ‘I will forever be your humble subject/servant’. So far, I have not found any official version for its translation. The intensive debates at the time about the correctness and origin of the phrase is a topic of research in itself, but would lead to far away from the central issues this chapter seeks to address. 5

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Fig. 13.5 Building-to-let-advertisement-cum-mourning board, Chiang May July 2017

public space (Fig. 13.5). It is my argument that for an understanding of some of the ritual processes at work, and the ways these confirmed and furthered the sacredness of the king, and by implication, as will be demonstrated below, that of the nation, a focus is needed on the pivotal role of the administrative state structure. Thailand’s present-day administrative structure was established during the reign of King Chulalongkorn. In a similar vein as the introduction of the first ‘secular royal rituals’ by Mongkut, the transformation of the feudal Siamese polity into a modern bureaucracy has to be placed in the context of the threat of high imperialism, which for Siam coincided with the Fourth and Fifth Reigns (Mongkut and Chulalongkorn). The intellectual architect of the kingdom’s administrative reforms was Chulalongkorn’s brother, Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (1862–1943), Minister of Interior from 1892 to 1915. According to the prince’s personal recollections ‘Chulalongkorn

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reminded Damrong of foreign threats to Siam at the time and thus encouraged him to undertake the reform. If Siam did not quickly tidy up its provincial administration but carelessly left it in such a mess, the country would be in danger. Siam might lose its independence’ (Thongchai 1994: 145). The gist of the reforms, generally referred to as the Chakri Reformation, was the centralization of control by the Bangkok administration over such areas as finance, justice and education by gradually displacing the local autonomy of tributaries and provinces. In fact, the Bangkok rulers largely implemented the style of governing of neighbouring colonial regimes, which made the centre actually a colonizing power. Colonialism as an external pressure and as a regime model offered the kingdom an opportunity to consolidate itself as an integrated nation-state. In the prevalent royalist-nationalist perspective, King Chulalongkorn appears both as the saviour of Siamese independence and as the founding father of the modern Thai nation state. Since the creation of the latter was the voluntary act of this legitimate, virtuous king, the present Thai state can only be good. In fact, the legitimacy of the modern secular state is placed within the framework of a Theravada Buddhist cosmology, with the virtuous, righteous ruler, the king, as its apex. Since his death on 23 October 1910, Chulalongkorn is annually commemorated in collective ceremonies that follow the administrative state structure. On this day, Chulalongkorn Day, another national day modelled after European custom, representatives of governmental (provincial, district, subdistrict and village) and semi-governmental institutions (educational, railroads, banking and communication) of the modern state whose origins go back to the Fifth Reign, will pay respect to this great, modernizing Thai king, to express their gratitude to their founder (see Stengs 2009). The main element of the ritual is the presentation of memorial wreaths at a statue or portrait of the king. This annual wreath-laying ceremony is conducted simultaneously in the entire country, at all provincial, and most district and subdistrict administration centres. Following the same organizational path, the sacredness of the Thai state structure is celebrated in many other monarchy-related rituals. In interpreting these rituals, I take my inspiration here from Clifford Geertz’s (1980) classical work on the pre-colonial Balinese ‘theatre state’. Geertz

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distinguishes two opposing forces in societies that are dictated by what he calls ‘the myth of the exemplary centre’ (…) ‘the theory that the court-­ and-­capital is at once a microcosm of the supernatural order—“an image of (…) the universe on a smaller scale”—and the material embodiment of the political order. It is not just the nucleus, the engine or the pivot of the state, it is the state’ (1980: 13). According to Geertz, the politics of such states are governed by a centripetal force of exemplary state ritual and a centrifugal force of state structure (ibid.: 18). Though the limitations of Geertz’s entirely symbolic interpretation of the meaning of royal rituals have been widely acknowledged, in particular his depiction of almost unrelated elite and commoners’ worlds, and a ‘too close parallel between the divine order and the politics of the people’ (Schulte Northolt 1993: 295), his perspective provides insight into the ways present-day rituals that celebrate the Thai monarchy produce sacredness. The rituals that form the further empirical content of this chapter appear to follow Geertz’s two structural forces: a centripetal force drawing people’s attention and bodies towards the moral centre and a centrifugal force unfolding along the lines of the administrative state structure: from the capital to provincial capitals and other provincial bodies, to the district and sub-district, and finally, village levels. There are good arguments to understand the Grand Palace-cum-­ Bangkok in terms of an exemplary centre. During the year of mourning, Bangkok’s sacred heart, the field (Sanam Luang) in front of the Grand Palace and Temple of the Emerald Buddha complex, provided the centre stage for large collective commemorations. At this location, we may observe the centripetal force of Geertz’s exemplary centre at work. Fifteen days after the king’s demise, the Grand Palace, where the king’s body was lying in state in the Throne Hall, opened to the general public to enable mourners to pay their respect to the royal remains, initially allowing in a maximum of 10,000 people per day, but much, much higher numbers in the last months before the cremation. The government facilitated traveling to the capital by providing free special buses and trains for mourners.6  A colleague observed a social dynamic in which especially women in rural communities were subject to a mild peer pressure to join their local groups in travelling to Bangkok. Such pressure to go together also was the case for people in certain jobs, in particular in the civil service and larger private companies. 6

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To protect people from the sun and rain during waiting, most of the pedestrian area of the Sanam Luang had been transformed into a long tent, with sections of about hundred chairs each and large fans for cooling. Each section had its own screen hanging from the ceiling, showing a wide variety of well-known footage on the life and works of Bhumibol. The day I joined the ritual (7 July 2017), the time to be spent in the tent was not too long: about forty-five minutes. Volunteers provided us with bottles of water, cooled, perfumed wipes and banana cakes. Then, in a strictly organized way—Bangkok Metropolitan Police officers giving amplified instructions—our section and the one in front of us were guided across the street that separates the Sanam Luang from the palace-­ temple complex, to enter the latter. In the temple, we were guided along a designated route following the roofed, muraled temple walls, which had been closed to tourists for the purpose. Here, periods of waiting alternated with moving forward at very high speed, almost running. The atmosphere was one of good spirits. People where chatting, taking selfies and occasionally close-ups of details of the murals (Fig. 13.6). The walk across the open area between the temple and the Throne Hall, a space with trees and palace buildings, definitively was a photo occasion. Upon arrival in the vicinity of the Throne Hall, the sphere became quieter. We were all given a plastic bag to put our shoes in. The adjacent walls and fences were full of wreaths (phuangmala). There was no time to look at these in detail and taking pictures was no longer allowed. An elaborate shrine dedicated to Bhumibol had been established next to the entrance to the narrow stairs leading up to the actual hall. The tribute ritual was over before I knew it. In a highly efficient manner, in sections of about sixty people, we prostrated ourselves with our faces in the direction of the throne where the king’s coffin stood out of view, behind the throne. Then we made a specific saluting gesture (thawai bangkhom), to leave immediately to an exit at the right side of the building, down the stairs into an area where we could put on our shoes and return the plastic bags. With the week of the cremation ceremonies approaching (the Grand Palace would close on 7 October), the lengths of the queues broke record upon record, in the end people lining up for twenty-four hours before reaching the Throne Hall. In the final weeks, the palace even opened 24/7. By 6 October 2017, nearly thirteen million people had filed

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Fig. 13.6  Queuing mourners in the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Bangkok 7 July 2017

through the Throne Hall.7 The logistics of the endeavour had been ­massive, comprising both security checks and checks for compliance with all details of the dress code: black long skirts, long trousers, long sleeves and black shoes. Together, the bodies in black transformed the heart of the nation into an overwhelming spectacle of mourning. As such, this

 Altogether, an exact number of 12,739,531 people, https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/ general/1337852/13m-people-paid-respects-to-late-king (accessed 25 September 2019). Yet, we cannot jump to the conclusion that 18.4% of the total population joined in the farewell ritual. The few people that I spoke while waiting in line to reach the throne hall where all there for the second time. Take for example this elderly woman from Hat Yai (900 km South of Bangkok), whose three adult children lived in Bangkok. We met at the charity food market next to the Sanam Luang, all stalls run by volunteers. This was her second visit. Both times, she took the government-sponsored train, arriving in Bangkok in the early morning, subsequently paying respect to the royal remains. Before returning to Hat Yai she would stay two nights with her daughter. The colleague mentioned in note 6 reported to have spoken people who had come for a third or even fourth time. 7

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spectacle reconfirmed the promoted national Thai self-image as well as the romanticizing orientalist image of the country prevalent abroad.

Mourning by Numbers The week following Bhumibol’s demise also saw the first performances of a centrifugally evolving mourning ritual. Other than the above mass gatherings, these rituals, broadcast every evening by local and national news, remained visible to the Thai public only. The Thai expression for these rituals best translates as ‘figure gatherings of all Thai citizens from all over Thailand to form the figure 9 to express their feelings of loss’ (phasoknikon thuathai prae akson 9 sadaeng khwam alai). As such, the rituals were to be understood as materializations of ‘the unique Thai quality of unity’, a notion also part of the royalist-nationalist ideology, and the supposed precondition for the entire Thai population to engage in these performances and hence a proper expression of Thainess (khwam pen thai). For the purpose of this chapter, I will use the shorthand ‘figure 9 ritual’ although in practice quite a few variations and elaborations existed in addition to the shape of the figure 9, such as elephants, lotuses, hearts, mourning ribbons and written messages. The gist of the ritual is that the participants express their feelings of loss collectively by arranging their joint black and/or white dressed bodies in the form of the Thai figure 9 (๙), while—depending on the design of the ritual—prostrating (krap) themselves simultaneously. The latter gesture—a deep kneeling, with the head over the hands pressed together (wai) just above the ground—was abolished by Chulalongkorn, but made a comeback during Bhumibol’s reign as the compulsory pose in presence of the king. Carefully choreographed black-and-white patterned arrangements established the intended aesthetics of the rituals performed during day-­ time. After dark, figure 9 rituals were performed with burning candles. Thus, to give an impression, the figure 9 ritual of the province of Rayong consisted of a black heart within the centre the figure 9 in white, plus the name of the province in capital letters in black, all of this ‘framed’ in black. The people who made up the frame remained standing, while the

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others prostrated. The figure 9 ritual of a school in Buriram province, performed by teachers and students, also consisted of a heart, black outside, white inside, with a black 9 in the centre. In this case, the ritual was performed with all participants standing.8 The figure 9 mourning rituals are an ‘invention’, yet, as is the case with all ritual, they have predecessors (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). They are specific elaborations of the mass gatherings and stadium rituals the world knows best from North Korean Mass Games or Olympic Games opening ceremonies. They are also reminiscent of Soviet Union parades and political rallies in Nazi Germany as recorded by Leni Riefenstahl. Although no comparison in grandeur, in the Thai context the Thammasat– Chulalongkorn universities football matches have a long-standing ‘new’ tradition of figure-expressing stadium performances.9 But specifically for the figure 9 rituals, two events possibly offered a template. In 2015, then Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn took the initiative for two cycling events: the ‘Bike for Mom’ (Sirikit, the queen-mother) and ‘Bike for Dad’ (Bhumibol). These national bike rides also entailed some performances of figure rituals (phrae akson) including the figure 9, albeit in different colours.10 The colour code of the Bike for Mom ride was sky blue, the colour of the Queen and related to Friday, the day of the week that she was born; the colour code for the Bike for Dad ride was yellow, the colour of the king, and related to Monday, the day of the week Bhumibol was born. In some places, these rides included a halt to perform the figure 9, with the participants (mostly men) bowing their bodies while remaining on their bikes.11  https://campus.campus-star.com/variety/22697.html (accessed 25 September 2019)  See https://www.matichonweekly.com/hot-news/article_79945 (accessed 25 September 2019). 10  Yet, who or what organization took the first initiative is unclear, as well as whether the figure 9 mourning rituals directly resulted from governmental instructions. After Bhumibol’s death, a cremation committee (khanakam kanamnuaikanjatngan phrarachaphithi thawaiphraphleungphraboromasob) was established under the responsibility of the Ministry of Interior. This committee, chaired by the Head of the Royal Household, was in charge of the organisation of the cremation celebrations (25–29 October 2017) and of the mourning policy. Although in particular the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Agriculture have been important with regard to disseminating instructions to the general public, the creative minds behind the mourning period policy so far have remained untraceable. 11  See for example https://www.posttoday.com/social/local/404500 for a ‘9 in heart’ figure ritual https://mgronline.com/local/detail/9580000135671, https://www.thairath.co.th/content/54735 ‘for Dad’, and http://www.komchadluek.net/news/politic/211658 ‘for Mom’. Websites accessed 25 April 2019. 8 9

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Significantly, the aesthetic effect of such configurations can only be fully appreciated from a bird-eye view. This implies that in order to make these rituals realize their full potential—that is, to make them visible to their performers and to the wider world a specific technology was required: camera drones. More than providing bird’s-eye recordings of rituals, I suggest that this drone technology is as much part of the making of figure 9 rituals as are the bodies of the performers. The drone recordings are spectacular mediations of the idea of each individual organisational unit being united in love for the king and sorrow about his demise. For one part, these visualisations are spectacles visible from heaven for a so-called ‘presumed (divine) spectator’, comparable for instance to the Nazca lines. For another part, the recordings enabled showing these rituals on national and local television channels, and viewing them time and again on YouTube and on other social media, as to give substance to and proof of the unanimity of the Thai people and their willingness to go at far length to give proof of their grief. In the first months of mourning, the television evening news would have a special item on the figure 9 rituals conducted that day or the previous evening, usually presented as a sequence (literally a ‘collection’, pramuanphab) of stills and video recordings accompanied by music (Fig. 13.7).

Fig. 13.7  Screen shot of a figure 9 rituals compilation

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Each ritual was performed by the members of an existing collective, in particular government officials of provincial capitals or (sub)district offices, military divisions, employees of hospitals, universities, banks, broadcast organisations, larger companies, students and schoolchildren of schools and colleges, and even the inmates of certain prisons. Sports fields, city squares, military training grounds, meadows, highways, beaches and schoolyards were the kind of open spaces where the rituals were performed. Some performances required considerable amounts of space, indeed. In particular, the rituals organized by larger cities or provincial administrations could involve tens of thousands of people. The figure 9 rituals well illustrate the importance of the element of competition in fleshing out the processes that accelerate and magnify the Thai mourning rituals. The last months of 2016 saw ever-larger numbers of participants in ever more complex aesthetics. The daily news coverages would always, after mentioning the province, town or organisation that had conducted the ritual, tell the numbers of people involved, for instance, 30,000 people in the city of Nakhon Ratchasima, or 9999 (an auspicious number) participants in the province of Phayao. Although a heart with the figure 9 in the centre was one of the more common figure 9 rituals, the executions could vary widely in size and complexity. The extraordinary bird’s eye view recording of the figure 9 ritual of ‘the people of subdistrict Nakhon Thai’ showed a sophisticated choreography of the creation of a heart with the figure 9, by streams of bodies in black and streams of bodies in white at perfect pace and ending up in perfect ranks. The whole configuration was underlined with bodies forming the text ‘King of Kings’ (in English) and the name of the subdistrict in Thai.12 The province of Surin performed a complex design of two mirroring elephants, with their trunks ‘raising’ a heart with the figure 9 in it, everything in black with white outlines and details, the audience at the left in white and at the right in black. In addition to a rather straightforward white-lined black circle with a white figure 9 in it, the figure 9 ritual of the province of Nakhon Sawan comprised a very sophisticated Chinese-­ style, rampant, dragon.13 After 2016, performing figure 9 rituals came to 12 13

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGig5-YT9TA (accessed 26 September 2019).  http://mediastudio.co.th/2016/10/27/64621 (accessed 26 September 2019).

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an end. Instead, other ritualized activities, similarly organized along the lines of the administrative state structure, had been initiated to engage the citizenry more structurally in the year of mourning and to ensure their interest and involvement in the eventual cremation.14

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated that the massive compliance with the mourning colour and dress code was much more than a self-evident, ritualized way of expressing sorrow, gratitude and respect towards the Thai king. Instead, the colour code was part of a carefully designed mourning policy (‘cultural management’), entailing a broad range of aesthetic practices, materialising in public space through bodies, art, (social) media, decorations and ritualized settings. The figure 9 rituals illustrate well the remarkable forms such a policy is able to evoke and the powerful emotional effect of the ‘mourning-coloured’ body: each black-and-white choreography aimed at mediating a unanimous and forceful message of grief and unity. With potentially the entire nation watching, such invites elaboration and perfection to the extent of competition. The exalted moral and legal frameworks exercised a coercive force that further added to the competitive dimension in the performance of mourning. Finally, the year of mourning has highlighted the pivotal role of ritual in generating emotions and feelings of belonging towards the king and the nation. Whether of ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ origin, together these rituals make up the ‘system of royal rituals’, disseminated and produced by the ‘secular’ administrative state structure. The Thai state therefore is key to understanding the king’s apparently endless increase in sacredness. In the Thai polity, the secular and the sacred never have been separated domains, irrespective of the establishment of institutions generally regarded as secular, the constitutional monarchy and the administrative state system in particular. Twenty-first century Thailand therefore is ever more moving  These initiatives entailed: sandalwood funeral flower making, registering as a volunteer, and the growing of marigolds (yellow being the color of Bhumibol). Again, we may speak of ‘a mourning by numbers’: the element of competition encouraged organizations and people to set substantial targets in making sandalwood flowers and growing marigolds (see Stengs 2020 f.c.). 14

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towards an inextricably intertwined secular-sacred of king, nation and state. The sacredness of the king creates a culture of compliance, in which criticizing the state, the nation, the military regime or any government always implies criticizing the king. In light of the worrying recent political developments, a better understanding of these entanglements is of particular urgency.

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Streckfuss, D. (2010). The Intricacies of Lese-Majesty: A Comparative Study of Imperial. Germany and Modern Thailand. In S. Ivarsson & L. Isager (Eds.), Saying the Unsayable: Monarchy and Democracy in Thailand (pp. 105–146). Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Tambiah, S. J. (1977). World Conqueror & World Renouncer. A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background. London: Cambridge University Press. Thongchai, W. (1994). Siam Mapped. A History of the Geo-body of a Nation. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Thongchai, W. (2008). Toppling Democracy. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38(1), 11–37. Thongchai, W. (2014). The Monarchy and Anti-Monarchy. Two Elephants in the Room of Thai Politics and the State of Denial. In Pavin Chachavalpongpun (Ed.), ‘Good Coup’ Gone Bad. Thailand’s Political Development Since Thaksin’s Downfall (pp. 79–108). Singapore: ISEAS Publishing.

Afterword Birgit Meyer

The state of our world in 2020 is a far cry from the high expectations of modernity that arose in the aftermath of fascism, decolonization and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. As the social sciences and humanities emerged along with—and were shaped by—the unfolding of the modernist project, their theories, concepts and methods are inflected with it. How to come to terms—epistemologically, politically and ethically—with the ugly, irrational and uncivilized faces of current politics of inclusion and exclusion, in which nativist culture and identity are mobilized for the sake of political agendas that violate the rights of citizens and refugees guaranteed by democratic constitutions? And in so doing, how to reconfigure the social sciences and humanities from a critical, non-eurocentric and postcolonial angle that, moreover, does not downplay bodies, things and emotions in favor of abstraction and rationality? Such questions trigger critical reflections about how to analyze culture and society in our time, in ways that acknowledge continuities from antiquity and the

B. Meyer Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2

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middle ages to modernity (rather that postulating sharp breaks) and similarities between Western and non-Western cultures and societies (rather than postulating sharp differences between a developed ‘West’ and a backward ‘Rest’). Calling attention to the arousal of emotions in political settings in which ‘sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce and spill over into each other’ (Balkenhol, Hemel, Stengs, this volume p. 1), this volume is part of this critical endeavor. All contributors form part of a longstanding, international network for scholarly exchange and public activities in which the Meertens Institute, the home base of the three editors, forms an important node and hospitable forum. Concomitantly, for Markus Balkenhol, Ernst van den Hemel and Irene Stengs this network is important in redirecting the focus of the institute from ‘Dutch (folk) culture’ to ‘culture in the Netherlands,’ against a broader global horizon that allows for comparison and the tracing of transregional connections. The volume’s grounded case studies place societies in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America in one conceptual frame, thereby showing how ‘the perils of nation and religion’ play out across the world. The rise of populist identitarian movements with their highly exclusivist, discriminating and racist agendas across Europe reminds us that modern democracy both facilitates and is threatened by such perils. There is little reason to maintain an idea of Europe as the global vanguard of modernization, democracy and wellbeing. The point is to conduct research and theorize from ‘the middle of things’ as proposed by this volume, which combines featuring a frightening parade of the ugly, unsettling side of the dynamics of belonging and exclusion in modern nation-states with plastic critical analysis. The anchor-point for this analysis is the notion of the ‘secular sacred.’ The coinage of this notion is grounded in the insight, as developed by Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, that secularity is not religion’s opposite. Such a take on religion would merely reiterate the master narrative of modernization, according to which religion was bound to vanish or at least withdraw from the public into the private sphere. The starting point for a critical approach to modernity is the recognition that secularity is not only the frame for regulating the role and place of religions in society but is also shaped by, and yet concealing, its Christian foundations. The editors introduce the ‘secular sacred’ composite as a conceptual and

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methodological device to spot unexpected and partly hidden links between secular and religious in contemporary nation-states. In so doing, they make the secular-religious binary intersect with the profane-sacred binary. The latter is grounded in the work of Durkheim, who advocated a non-substantive, sociological understanding of the sacred, according to which anything could be sacralized and thus made to enshrine common representations and values that arouse sentiments of effervescence, thereby affirming the bonds of those experiencing these sentiments. The attraction of Durkheim’s binary is that it allows the expansion of the notion of the sacred beyond the narrow confines of what is conventionally recognized as religion (e.g. Chidester 2012). By the same token, this notion of the sacred blinds attention to the specific ways in which secularity produces and regulates religion. Combining the two sets of binaries, however, felicitously opens up new possibilities for thought. Next to the ‘secular sacred,’ the central focus of this volume, other possible combinations are the ‘religious sacred,’ the ‘secular profane’ and the ‘religious profane.’ If we add the pure-polluted binary (as mobilized in Verrips’s chapter), even more heuristic possibilities for analysis open up that allow the taking into account of the positive and negative dimensions of sacrality. As this volume shows, the notion of the ‘secular sacred’ indicates some kind of canalization and cannibalization of ‘belief energy’ (Certeau 1984: 187) into the sphere of politics. This idea is also deployed in the literature on political theologies (e.g. Vries and Sullivan 2006) which, somewhat to my surprise, is not discussed in the context of the volume. Clearly, many of the contributions show in a detailed manner how in the face of a presumed ‘enemy’ political power taps into—or even ‘hijacks’ (Marzouki et al. 2016)—religious cosmologies and affective repertoires, or engages in new modes of sacralization steeped in religious emotions and woweffects. Thereby they are echoing Carl Schmitt’s (2005, orig. 1922) point that modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts, and that sovereignty means the right to declare a ‘state of exception’ and curtail the rights of those considered to not belong. For future research, it would be interesting to explore in detail how theories of political theology align with, and possibly differ from, the notion of the ‘secular sacred’ proposed by this volume, and possibly the other related binaries

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mentioned above. A salient convergence, in my view, forms the importance of resilient religious forms, that are not easy to identify from a modernist perspective and instead require detailed genealogical tracing grounded in knowledge of theology and the history of religion (as proposed by Yelle 2019). What I find particularly compelling and distinctive about this volume is that many contributions situate the embracement of political theologies under the aegis of the ‘secular sacred’ in plural configurations, in which people with different cultural, religious and ethnic identities co-exist. It seems that the marked mobilization of a ‘secular sacred’—on the part of the state, nationalist movements, or contestations thereof—gains momentum in moments of political precariousness, and a shared sense of instability and insecurity. Looking across the chapters, it can be noticed that the ‘secular sacred’ appears in different modalities. Let me distinguish four. One, it appears that secularity can easily be fused with a privileged religious tradition into a nationalistic project, as in the case of Dutch right wing populism and nativism where Christianity is embraced as part of national culture (Hemel, Kešić & Duyvendak), the appraisal of Hinduism as part of Indian secularism at the expense of Islam and other religions (Binder), the privileging of Sunni Islam in North-Nigerian secularism and the violent rejection of Shia public performances (Ibrahim), or the—ever more contested—idea of Brazil as a secular country with a Catholic national culture and Afro-Brazilian undercurrents (Oosterbaan and Godoy). In all these settings, we encounter an appraisal of a particular religion as conducive to nationhood and identity, while at the same time members of other religious groups are discriminated against or even persecuted. Clearly, nationhood does not simply come in as a secular substitute for religion; it may be made to embrace and privilege a particular religion, albeit in a more or less culturalized form, while rejecting others. Such embracement, of course, triggers contestations. As Oosterbaan and Godoy show in their study of the contestations around carnaval, evangelicals re-religionize this festival in their own terms, thereby striving to shift the Brazilian national-religious configuration in their favor. Second, the volume shows how sacralization plays a key role in dynamics of Othering, as in the populist idea of a German Leitkultur to which Islam and Muslims are irredeemably foreign (Götz), or the dismissal of ‘gypsies’

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and ‘Arabs’ as ‘shit’ in public space in Berlin (Verrips). While Götz focuses on the sacralization of a secular German nationhood that fiercely rejects Islam as an instance of ‘bad’ religion, Verrips points at the peculiar sacrality of the despised Other—an echo of longstanding sacrificial traits in secular times. Third, one can note a sacralization of secular values and history. This may occur in the face of postcolonial criticisms, as in the sacralization of the figure of Black Peet (Stipriaan) or contested statues of Jan Pieterszoon Coen and colonial history (Balkenhol) in the Netherlands. In both cases, sacralization is to protect items of national pride and heritage against removal, going along with a repressive use of proverbial Dutch tolerance to which protestors are expected to succumb. But such a sacralization may also pertain to the valuation of human rights and heritage in hypersecular socialist settings, in which this valuation offers possibilities for religious resilience, albeit in culturalized form, as shown in Salemink’s analysis of the reframing of spirit possession rituals in Vietnam as cultural heritage and a matter of human rights. Fourth, and lastly, Irene Stengs’s analysis of Thai divine kingship in modern times appears to make the secular-sacred implode, in that nationalist royal celebrations incorporate more and more Western cultural forms, and aims to envelop people in a claustrophobic manner into the production of sacredness of the monarchy, as epitomized in mourning rituals. Striking in these modalities of appearance of the ‘secular sacred’ is the mobilization of emotions and affective energies. As Herman Roodenburg shows in detail in his examination of Rothko’s secular sacred chapel of art, the sphere of art has long featured a site in which belief energies, and Christian modes and experiences of looking, are brought to bear on experiences of an artistic sublime. Interestingly, such evocation of affects and emotions also occurs in the context of the various modalities of the ‘secular sacred’ in political contexts. The question how to grasp the systematic arousal of affects and emotions—and the profiling of grandiose feelings of belonging to a certain body, such as the nation—has become a major issue in social-cultural research. This becomes more pertinent in plural configurations, which are prone to trigger tensions and clashes between sensibilities and emotions that are grounded in different sensational

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regimes and aesthetic formations (e.g. Meyer 2018). In my view, the analysis of big and hot feelings generated through an involvement with a ‘secular sacred’ requires a ‘cool’ analysis which details meticulously how they emerge, and how they may be grounded in (past) religious sensational regimes or generated in new modes of sacralization that tap into longstanding belief energies. While both the nation and religion do not form perils per se, this volume shows that under the aegis of a ‘secular sacred’ they may form rather toxic combinations, that, though difficult to unhinge, must be traced and deconstructed via a genealogical and praxeological approach.

References Chidester, D. (2012). Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Certeau, M. de (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Vries, H. de, & Sullivan, L. E. (Eds.). (2006). Political Theologies. Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press. Marzouki, N., McDonnell, D., & Roy, O. (Eds.). (2016). Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion. London: Hurst. Meyer, B. (2018). The Dynamics of Taking Offense. Concluding Thoughts and Outlook. In B. Meyer, C. Kruse, & A. Korte (Eds.), Taking Offense. Religion, Art and Visual Culture in Plural Settings (pp. 340–372). München: Fink Verlag. https://www.fink.de/fileadmin/downloads/fink/13_Birgit_ Meyer.pdf. Schmitt, C. (2005). [orig. 1922]. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Yelle, R.  A. (2019). Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Index1

A

B

Abolition (of slavery), 180 Aesthetic, 15, 58, 69–85, 95, 134, 278, 280–282, 290 Affective, 70, 82 Afro-/Black, 119 Afro-Brazilian, 108–112, 114, 115, 117–123, 288 Andachtsbilder, 224, 225, 231 Ashura, 4, 78, 79, 90, 91, 93–101, 103 Assimilation/assimilate/ assimilationist, 50, 55, 56, 61, 167–169, 174, 174n2, 181, 183, 188 Authentic/authentication, 50, 59, 97, 114, 137, 144, 145, 209 Authority, 3, 4, 98, 131, 148, 211, 269

Backward, backwardness, 164 Bayle, Pierre, 177 Belonging, 4, 80 Belting, Hans, 13, 219, 220, 226 Berlin, 4, 15, 54n11, 62, 238–249, 238n1, 251, 253, 254 Bible Belt, 24, 24n6, 29, 34, 38, 251n12 Bildakt, 220, 224n3 Blackface, 174, 179–188, 203 Blasphemy, 13 Body/bodies, 7, 8, 11, 13–15, 75–78, 80, 83, 91, 99, 101, 134, 214, 220, 222, 228, 229, 275, 277–282 Boundaries, 2, 7, 12, 13, 70, 72, 95, 104, 185, 212, 247, 249 Bouts, Dieric, 224

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Balkenhol et al. (eds.), The Secular Sacred, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38050-2

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292 Index

Brando, Marlon, 222 Bredekamp, Horst, 220, 227 Busch, Werner, 227, 228 C

Caribbean/Antilles/Curaçao, 180, 180n11, 180n12, 181, 183, 184, 184n16, 203 Catholic, 23, 79, 107–111, 115–122, 134, 165, 177, 184, 205n13, 222, 288 Catholic Church, 107, 109, 115–119, 116n5, 121–123, 131n2, 217 chapel, 217, 218, 220, 222, 230, 231, 289 Christians, 30 Cicero, 220 Cinema, 75, 76, 82, 83, 271 Citizenship, 80 dual, 10, 43, 44, 46–51, 54, 55, 59, 60, 62, 168 See also Movie/film Collective identity, 70, 71 Colonial/colonialism/colonization, 4, 8, 13, 70, 71, 117, 135, 154, 166, 180, 183, 185, 188, 190, 195–214, 270, 274, 289 Commemoration/commemorate, 2, 23n3, 75, 77, 79, 93, 98, 199, 274, 275 Commodification, 70, 72 Communalism, 70–73, 79, 81 Community, 4, 9–11, 14, 24, 29, 47, 58, 69n1, 70, 72–74, 76, 78–81, 90, 94n4, 95, 96n5, 108, 112, 115, 130, 138, 139, 167, 168, 181, 198, 213, 275n6

Confessional politics, 21–39 Constable, John, 227 Cultural Christianity, 157–160, 162, 163, 166, 170 Culturalization, 1, 9, 54, 137 Culture, 8–11, 22, 25–29, 31–35, 37–39, 43n1, 44, 49, 54, 57, 60–62, 69–72, 75, 78–80, 108–111, 111n2, 113, 118–122, 137, 138, 141, 155, 158, 160, 164, 167, 168, 175, 178, 179, 184, 185, 187, 188, 253, 283 D

De Menil, Dominique, 217 De Menil, John, 217, 218 De Niro, Robert, 222 Dehumanization, 245, 259 Depoliticization, 71 Discourse, 10, 12, 21, 22, 26–30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 54, 56, 57, 59, 71, 78–82, 102, 129–131, 150, 155–158, 160, 162, 169, 170, 174, 174n2, 182, 183, 185 Disgust, 4, 13, 15, 210, 237–259 Displacement, 169 Drone, 280 Dutch, 12 E

Eckhart, Meister, 221 El Greco, 227 Elkins, James, 217, 219–222, 224, 230, 231 Emotions, 1

 Index 

Enargeia, 217–231 Enlightenment, 132n3, 159–161, 179, 179n10, 246n6 Erasmus, 176 Essentialist/essentialised, 57, 182, 185 Evangelicals Neo-Pentecostal, 113 Exclusion/exclude, 6, 7, 46, 47, 84, 101, 169, 170, 177, 177n8, 181, 183, 188, 211, 254, 286 G

Geertz, Clifford, 274, 275 Gender, 79, 134, 157–160, 162, 165, 168, 170 Golden Age, 13, 175, 178, 189 Gregory the Great, 224 Gypsies, 237, 239–241, 239n2, 243n3, 246, 246–247n6, 250n9, 251, 253–256, 253n18, 255n20, 258, 258n23, 288 H

Heritage, 9, 26, 27, 61, 108, 109, 117, 119, 129–150, 161, 190, 208, 289 Hindu nationalism/Hindutva, 70, 72, 82, 84 History, 12, 13, 24n6, 28, 34, 35, 70, 73, 78, 79, 108, 111, 118, 119, 123, 132, 146, 149, 157, 161–165, 168, 170, 174, 176, 186n18, 188, 197, 205–209, 212, 222, 231, 237–249, 271, 288, 289

293

national, 162, 164, 165 Horace, 222 Huntington, Samuel, 9, 26, 161 I

Identity, 4, 9, 11, 22, 27, 31, 34–38, 45, 46, 49–52, 58–60, 63, 70–73, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 92, 95, 100, 102, 109, 117, 134, 137, 155–170, 174, 175, 182, 185, 198, 285, 288 collective, 70, 71 politics, 160–162, 165, 168, 169, 185 Image, 5, 7, 8, 10, 13–15, 21, 25, 35, 61, 77, 81, 82, 94, 95, 108, 110, 111, 116, 118, 156, 158, 174n2, 189n24, 195, 198, 202, 206, 208, 210, 212–214, 220, 222–224, 224n3, 227, 254, 264, 267, 271, 275, 278 India, 11 Integration/integrating, 26, 36, 45, 50–52, 55–57, 78, 168, 169, 174, 174n2, 175, 179, 183, 245 Islam/Muslim, 4, 11, 21–23, 25–39, 43, 43n1, 45–47, 56, 57, 60, 69–85, 90–100, 92n3, 94n4, 102, 103, 130, 155–160, 162, 164, 165, 167–170, 183, 187, 189, 189n24, 254, 288, 289 Islamophobia, 21, 25, 156

294 Index J

Jan Pieterszoon Coen, 13, 195–214, 289 Jew, 43n1, 176, 177, 244, 247n6, 250n9, 255, 256 Judeo-Christian, 4, 5, 9, 22, 26–28, 159, 161 K

Knowledge, 80 Kooning, Willem de, 221 L

Léger, Fernand, 218 Leitkultur, 25, 37–38, 43n1, 288 Lese-majesty, 264

Modernity, 8, 11, 70, 80, 131, 132, 157, 161, 189, 197, 213, 285, 286 Mondrian, Pieter, 219 Moral, 79 Motherwell, Robert, 221 Mourning, 2–5, 11, 15, 74, 77, 78, 81, 98, 103, 263–283 See also Ritual Movie/film, 70, 74–78, 82–84, 271, 271n4 Muharram, 77–79, 90, 93, 94, 94n4 Multiculturalism, 174, 178, 179, 189 Museum, 195, 202, 212 N

M

Majoritarian/majoritarianism, 69–73, 73n2, 82–84 Matisse, Henri, 218, 222 Media, 3, 10, 11, 48, 52, 57, 59, 72, 80–82, 100n6, 112, 113, 121, 146, 148, 166 Memory, 45, 46, 61, 197–199, 207–209 Memory politics, 203 Meyer, Birgit, 5, 8, 10, 14, 15, 95, 208, 209, 219, 290 Migrants, 44, 45, 48, 49, 159, 167, 168, 176, 184, 184n16, 187 Minority, 31, 69–85, 103, 104, 156, 158, 165, 167, 184, 185, 188 minoritization, 71, 79

Nation/Nationalism, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 23, 25, 31, 44, 45n2, 46, 49–52, 49n7, 57–63, 69, 70, 72, 73, 78, 80, 82, 84, 104, 109, 111n2, 116, 117, 122, 123, 156–159, 161, 167, 169, 175, 185, 186, 198, 198n3, 201, 213, 254, 258, 264, 267, 271, 273, 274, 277, 282, 283, 286, 289, 290 post-secular nationalism, 156n3 Nationality, 49, 180–182 Nation-building, 44, 46, 55, 198n3, 199 Nationhood, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 158, 288, 289 Nativism, 22n2, 155–170, 288 Natura naturans, 228, 229 Newman, Barnett, 221 Nostalgia, 81

 Index  O

Offence/offensive/offended, 70, 75–77, 84, 121, 264 Os, Henk van, 221 P

Parades, 59, 90, 92, 94, 185, 279, 286 Personhood, 71, 72, 77 pictorial, 219, 226, 227, 230, 231 Piety, affective, 224, 226 Pillarization/pillarized, 163, 178, 187–189 Pluriform, 3, 23 Pollock, Jackson, 221 Populism, 63 Populist Radical Right, 21–39 Post-colonial, 179, 182, 183, 186, 190 Protestant, 6, 10, 11, 22, 23, 31–33, 38, 164, 168, 184, 222, 252n15 Public procession, 93–95, 98–102, 104 Public space, 7, 8, 10–11, 15, 51, 89–104, 111, 214, 237, 251, 259, 265, 273, 282, 289 Public visibility, 100, 104 Q

Quintilian, 220 R

Racism/racist/race, 9, 49n7, 51, 107–123, 173, 174, 185–187, 190, 199, 286 Rembrandt, 219, 223, 227, 228, 230

295

Representation, 5, 24, 77–82, 95, 109, 111, 117–120, 122, 123, 197, 203, 208, 211, 213, 246, 254, 256, 287 Rhetoric affective, 223, 226, 228 pictorial, 226, 230 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 220, 226 Rio de Janeiro, 111–113, 113n3, 120, 121 Ritual, 81 ceremony/ceremonies, 274, 279 mourning, 2, 4, 5, 74, 103, 267, 268, 278, 279, 279n10, 281 Rothko, Mark (chapel), 7, 14, 217–231, 289 S

Sacredness, 3, 4, 6, 13, 213, 256, 271–278, 282, 283, 289 São Paulo, 107, 112, 113, 115–117 Secularism, 6, 8, 14, 61, 69–72, 79, 97, 103, 104, 130–133, 156, 160, 162, 167, 189, 288 Segregation, 177, 178, 181–183, 187n23, 188 Sensational, 80 Sentiment, 4, 9, 10, 15, 28, 43–63, 69–85, 95, 97, 254, 287 national, 43–63 Sexuality, 157–160, 162, 165, 170 Shia, 4, 11, 69, 69n1, 70, 73–85, 89–104, 288 Shit, 237, 240, 247, 250–253, 257, 258, 289 Short skirts, 33–37, 39, 173 Sinterklaas/Saint Nicholas, 185, 187

296 Index

Slave/slavery/enslaved, 13, 118, 119, 179–181, 180n11, 185, 187, 203, 205, 213 abolition of, 180 Spectacle, 280 Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP), 21, 23–25, 28–35, 31n13, 37–39 State, 3 Statue, 4, 13, 109, 111, 115, 116, 118, 195–214, 252, 271, 274, 289 Strasberg, Lee, 222 Sunni, 73, 76, 78–80, 90, 91, 92n3, 95, 98–103, 288 Superstition, 146 Superstitious, 80 Suriname, 180, 180n11, 180n12, 181, 183, 184, 203, 203n10, 205n13 Symbolism, 83, 84, 98, 250n10

T

Tears, 2, 7, 14, 78, 217–231 Thailand, 2 Titian, 219, 223, 227–229 Tolerance, 1, 5, 8, 11–13, 33, 39, 79, 157, 161–164, 173–190, 289 V

Vietnam, 12 Visibility, 11, 43n1, 69–85, 91, 98–104, 132 W

Weyden, van der, 225 Z

Zwarte Piet/Black Pete, 174, 185–188, 187n23, 190, 203