Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520943650

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Transnational Transcendence

Transnational Transcendence Essays on Religion and Globalization

EDITED BY

Thomas J. Csordas

qa UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, o n e of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives a r o u n d the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the U C Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions f r o m individuals and institutions. F o r m o r e information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2 0 0 9 by T h e Regents of the University of California F o r acknowledgment of previous publication, please see chapter endnotes.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Transnational transcendance : essays on religion and globalization / edited by T h o m a s J . Csordas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9 7 8 - 0 - 5 2 0 - 2 5 7 4 1 - 2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9 7 8 - 0 - 5 2 0 - 2 5 7 4 2 - g (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Globalization—Religious aspects. I. Csordas, T h o m a s J . BL65.G55T73 2009 201'.7—dc22

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This book is printed on Natures B o o k , which contains 3 0 % post-consumer waste and meets the m i n i m u m requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 3 9 . 4 8 - 1 9 9 2 (R 1 9 9 7 ) (Permanence of Paper).

For my family, for the light

CONTENTS

L I S T OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S

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I N T R O D U C T I O N : M O D A L I T I E S OF T R A N S N A T I O N A L TRANSCENDENCE

Thomas J. Csordas /

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1. Missionization in the Postcolonial World: A View from Brazil and Elsewhere Otdvio Velho / 2. Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in Transcendent? O n Alterity and the Sacred in the A g e of Globalization Joel Rabbins / 55 3. Global Religion and the Reenchantment of the World: T h e Case of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal Thomas J. Csordas / 73 4. Veiled Missionaries and Embattled Christians in Colonial Sudan Janice Boddy / gy 5. Beyond Integration and Recognition: Diasporic Constructions of Alevi Muslim Identity between Germany and Turkey Esra Ozyiirek / 121 6. T h e Burning: Finitude and the Political-Theological Imagination of Illegal Migration Stejania Pandolfo / 145 7. Trajectories, Frontiers, and Reparations in the Expansion of Santo Daime to Europe Alberto Groisman / 1S5

8. The Orisha Atlantic: Historicizing the Roots of a Global Religion Peter F. Cohen

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g. The Many Who Dance in Me: Afro-Atlantic Ontology and the Problem with "Transnationalism" J. Lorand Matory

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1 o. Global Breathing: Religious Utopias in India and China Peter van der Veer /

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11. The Return Path: Anthropology of a Western Yogi Kathinka Fr0ystad /

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12. The Global Reach of Gods and the Travels of Korean Shamans Laurel Kendall

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CONTRIBUTORS INDEX

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505 /

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ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER 5

5.1 Cem ceremony in Karacaahmet Sultan Dergahi, Istanbul

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CHAPTER 11

11.1 Paramhansa Yogananda in the early 1920s 11.2 Swami Kriyananda, 2004

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11.3 Yogacharya Dharmadas gives blessings at the celebration of Lahiri Mahasaya's mahasamadhi in 2004 / 293

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Introduction

Modalities of Transnational Transcendence T H O M A S J. CSORDAS

T h e rhetorical force of religious moods and motivations in contemporary society and human experience may be as compelling today as at any period in history. In the first half of the twentieth century, the thoughtful appreciation of religion was still perhaps best summarized in Freud's ([ 1928] 1957) phrase "the future of an illusion," expressing an anticipation that enlightened rationalism and sober secularism would render religion obsolete. By the second half of the century, the scene on the horizon was already much better captured by Peter Berger's (1969) phrase "a rumor of angels," anticipating a resurgence of religious sensibility and a revitalized appeal of the transcendent. Indeed, the present global situation calls into question an understanding that the world is undergoing a progressive and irreversible secularization (Asad 2003) or disenchantment (Gauchet 1997). T h e sleeping giant of religion, whose perpetual dream is our collective dream as a species, has never died, and it is now in the process of at least rolling over and at most leaping to its feet. Yet in one of the most vital contemporary arenas of scholarly debate in the human sciences—that having to do with world systems, transnationalism, and globalization—the role of religion remains understudied and undertheorized. T h e phrase "transnational transcendence" in our title is intended to point to the existence of modalities of religious intersubjectivity that are both experientially compelling and transcend cultural borders and boundaries (while in some instances forging new ones). These two senses of transcendence converge, we would argue, insofar as traversing boundaries is an aspiration to the universal and insofar as the intersubjective reality forged among adherents is an aspiration to the sacred. These modalities of intersubjectivity are explicitly religious, but precisely because they are immersed in the political and economic, social and cultural, institutional and ideo1

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logical they partake of and contribute to an emergent global social imaginary that may amount to the reenchantment of the world. Here the distinction between transcendence and immanence breaks down, or reveals itself as artificial, in that we are forced to confront the immanence of alterity itself as the phenomenological kernel of religious consciousness and subjectivity (Csordas 2004). Whether understood as an element of human nature or as an element of embodied existence, this alterity is deeply implicated in the global religious resurgence.

THE T H E O R E T I C A L STATUS OF RELIGION

In elaborating the problematic of the volume, I want first to remark on the difference between talking about "religion and globalization" and talking about the "globalization of religion." T h e former phrase implies the relation of religion and globalization as two separate analytic domains, with the sense of globalization being the dominant one of economic globalization. This is a globalization the institutional locus of which is the big four, the World Trade Organization ( W T O ) , the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for E c o n o m i c C o o p e r a t i o n and Development; the ideological engine of which is neoliberal economic theory; and the technological apparatus of which is the Internet. If this is the way the issue is framed, the danger is that religion will be considered insofar as it is a reaction to global economics rather than as one of two domains that constitute equivalent or equipotent loci of social and cultural forces. In its crudest form this would be a return to earlier debates about the priority of the material or the ideal, with the question being prejudiced toward the apparent secondary nature of religious developments cast as e p i p h e n o m e n a or mystifications of a primary economic reality. Particularly misleading in this respect is the kind of metaphorical reductionism that goes even beyond causal priority to assert that processes of religious change can be adequately described as if they were economic, in terms of a "spiritual marketplace" where people "buy in" to a system of beliefs or "shop for" a religious identity. This kind of approach was developed among sociologists of American religion (Finke and Stark 1988; Roof 1999) to analyze processes of conversion, adherence, or expansion of religions as competitive processes. T h e marketplace metaphor has been taken up relatively uncritically in the popular media (Lattin 1998a, 1998b; Micklethwait 2007), as well as in the emerging scholarly literature on religion and globalization such as Adogame's (2000) discussion of the expansion of African Christian denominations to Europe. T h e market metaphor might be especially seductive in the case of postsocialist Europe, where capitalism has f l o o d e d into an economic vacuum to create an emerging global market simultaneously with the florescence of religious freedom and a multitude of religious pos-

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sibilities ranging from orthodox to New Age. However, there is more than a semantic difference in describing the religious situation in this part of world as a "cultic milieu" (Kiirti 2001) rather than as a "spiritual marketplace," insofar as these terms carry different connotations about motivation, agency, identity, and experience. Indeed, one can talk about the economics of religion without treating religion literally or metaphorically as a commodity, and one can recognize that religious activities are subject to economic constraints, including market forces, without suggesting that religion operates according to the laws of the market. Certainly, there is an economics of global media and global travel with which global religious actors must contend, finance required to support transnational congregations as well as local buildings, and a commodity aspect to religious objects that can be purchased such as films, tapes, books, icons, holy pictures, statues, or relics. There are even religious commodities strictly speaking such as wheat, oil, or sugar used as payment for the services of mullahs in Afghanistan (Roy 2004: 94). T h e economic dimension to the work of shrine-based sellers of divinely inspired fortunes in the market in H o n g Kong (Lang and Ragvald 1993) allows us to say that spiritual activities are conducted in the marketplace without requiring us to make the conceptual leap to a spiritual marketplace. From this standpoint, global religious activity is neither determined by economic globalization nor describable on the model of economic decision making. It is more productive to understand globalization from the outset as a multidimensional process, with religion, popular culture, politics, and economics as necessarily coeval and intimately intertwined, as they are in the lives of actors responsible for bringing about globalization in the first place. At the very least, if it is granted that religion is a given in social reality, with the addition of a global or planetary layer of social organization religious activity will take its place within that layer on terms not entirely determined by other dimensions of social reality. If instead of talking about globalization and religion our inquiry is cast in terms of the globalization of religion, we are at first spared the immediate assumption of a causal vector in favor of what might at least initially be taken for a purely descriptive endeavor. There is caution to be sounded here, too, though, for if this is the way the issue is framed, the assumption can too easily be that the cultural influence of globalization is unidirectional, from globalizing center to passive periphery, with religion a neocolonial form of cultural imperialism. T h e empirical problematic in this case would be to determine whether this centrifugal impulse is toward the imposition or reimposition of religious master narratives on a global scale, and whether such an impulse is bound to fragment like a shattered mirror as it becomes instantiated in local cultural settings. Again there is a viable alternative, one that recognizes that once global channels are open, the flow of religious phenomena—symbols, ideas, practices, moods, motivations—is at least bi-

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directional, more likely multidirectional. We can think of this either in a kind of world-as-neural-network image in which religious manifestations can issue from any node and proceed in any direction or in a kind of postmodern free-floating-signifier image in which religious impulses are decentered and float like dandelion seeds in the breeze of the cultural imaginary. Particularly in a situation in which the globalization of religion has only recently begun to be examined in the human sciences, the empirical determination of its conditions is a necessary first step. An initial question in this respect is to identify what travels well across geographic and cultural space. This issue has to do with characteristics of religions and raises the question of what should count under the category of religion. Certainly we must hold in mind the critique by Asad (1993) to the effect that the category of religion has its own history and can be given a universalized definition only at some intellectual risk. Such a critique does not require abandonment of the category, only that it be used wisely and reflectively. For my part, I prefer a minimal understanding of religion as phenomenologically predicated on and culturally elaborated from a primordial sense of alterity or Otherness that, insofar as it is an elementary structure of embodied existence, renders "religion" an inevitable, perhaps even necessary dimension of human experience (Csordas 2004). Without commitment to this premise or any single definition of religion or religious experience, the contributors to this volume have n o difficulty identifying the p h e n o m e n a they examine as religious. This being said, we can propose two aspects of religions that must be attended to in determining whether or not they travel well, what I will call portable practice and transposable message. *£>y portable practice, I mean rites that can be easily learned, require relatively little esoteric knowledge or paraphernalia, are not held as proprietary or necessarily linked to a specific cultural context, and can be performed without commitment to an elaborate ideological or institutional apparatus. T h e many forms of yoga are perhaps the archetypal instances of portable practice, explicit bodily practices accompanied by more or less spiritual elaboration and which may or may not form the basis for communal commitments or transformation of everyday life (Strauss 2005; van der Veer this volume; Fr0ystad this volume). Chinese feng shui is another recently globalizing portable practice that, although requiring expertise in its performance, can be applied in any cultural setting in which the felicitous orientation of energy in space can be construed as appealing (Bruun 2003). A m o n g Native American peoples, consider the contrast between the Lakota and the Navajo. T h e Lakota sacred pipe ceremony is relatively more portable than any Navajo ceremony both because of its simplicity and because some individuals are willing to share it with other tribes and non-Indians, sometimes even traveling with it on the New A g e circuit. Most Navajo ceremonies not only tend to require considerably more symbolic elaboration and complex paraphernalia, but also tend to be regarded as relatively

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more distinctive to Navajo life within the territory defined by four sacred mountains, sacred in the sense that they contain elements that must be kept secret and protected. It is thus likely that in contemporary society Lakota religion has greater potential to travel well than does Navajo religion. By transposable message, I mean that the basis of appeal contained in religious tenets, premises, or promises can find footing across diverse linguistic and cultural settings. I prefer the notion of transposability to those of transmissibility, transferability, or even translatability in part because its definition encompasses several of these ideas and also in part because it includes the connotations of being susceptible to being transformed or reordered without being denatured, as well as the valuable musical metaphor of being performable in a different key. Whether a religious message is transposable and in what degree depends on either its plasticity (transformability) or its generalizability (universality). In their emphasis on acquisition of material goods through spiritual means, Melanesian cargo cults and the contemporary Christian "prosperity gospel" would appear to have much in c o m m o n . Yet cargo cults had a clear limit of both geographic expansion and temporal viability, whereas the prosperity gospel has f o u n d a foothold in many corners of the contemporary world. Robbins (2004b) has described a situation among the Urapmin of New Guinea in which the Christian notion of sin and moral culpability was transposed in such a way as to transform the entire culture even in the absence of overt missionary activity from outside. In the present volume, Robbins takes up the argument that, in contrast to many indigenous religions, world religions tend to posit a radical discontinuity between the transcendent and mundane spheres and that this is likely a feature that enhances their transposability into a variety of cultural settings. Beyond the characteristics of religions that determine whether they might travel well lies the question of the means by which they traverse geographic and cultural space. Perhaps foremost among these is missionization. T h e missionary enterprise can be said to have different qualities corresponding to the epochs of the initial spread of world religions, the colonial period, and the current postcolonial world (Keane 2007; Velho this volume; Boddy this volume). For example, as Keane notes, in postcolonial Christianity missionary activity often originates in non-Western sources or occurs in revival movements among Christians (2007:45). A second means through which the globalization of religion takes place is migration. Transnational population movements such as the forced transatlantic dislocation of sub-Saharan Africans in the colonial slave trade have powerful contemporary consequences (Cohen this volume; Matory 2005, this volume), as do contemporary migrations of Muslim populations to Europe (Ozyiirek this volume; Pandolfo this volume). To be distinguished from both overt missionization and the migration of populations is the mobility of individuals in the contemporary globalizing world. Travel between Brazil and the Netherlands resulted in

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expansion of the Santo Daime church to Europe (Groisman this volume), the mobility of Korean shamans creates a global reach for their activities (Kendall this volume), and the ability of American yoga practitioners to relocate in India results in a return globalization of Hindu practices from their instantiation abroad (Fr0ystad this volume). Pilgrimage and religious tourism are powerful engines of religious globalization over traditionally wellestablished pathways enhanced by global transportation networks and technology (Badone and Roseman 2004). Finally, mediatization is a critical means through which religions are globalized. Beyond television, radio, and print media, cassette tapes have been a powerful f o r m for the spread of religious ideas in New Age, Christian, and Islamic circles. Such cassettes are the subject of a recent monograph by Hirschkind (2006) that deals with what we have called reglobalization of world religions through the formation of contemporary Islamic "counterpublics." Potentially even more far-reaching, the Internet is increasingly influential in globalizing religion. It has become the site of new social forms such as online Christian churches and communities and a network of followers of Yoruba deities, as well as virtual pilgrimages such as a version of the hajj and a trip to holy places in India (Hadden and Cowan 2000; Campbell 2001, 2005; Dawson and Cowan 2004; Kalinock 2006).

MODALITIES OF RELIGIOUS INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Given the outline above of characteristics of religions that may or may not travel well and the means by which they travel, I would like to sketch four intersubjective modalities in which the globalization of religion is taking place, each of which suggests a somewhat different problematic for research. T h e first is that in which the local religious imagination takes up the encroachments of global economy and technology. Perhaps the classic image in this modality is the scenario in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy in which a CocaCola bottle littered from an airplane becomes an object of religious speculation for the Kalahari Bushmen who pick it up. I'd like to suggest that an even more compelling image of this kind of reflexive response is Skylab, the U.S. satellite that was in the process of falling back to earth in 1979 and 1980. As its orbit decomposed there was n o clear way to predict exactly where on the globe it would come down. T h e reentry of Skylab became a truly global media event, signifying the global scope and the global threat of U.S. technological domination. What came through only faintly and sporadically in media reports was that Skylab was also a global religious event. Thus in one part of the world Skylab became understood as an avenging angel of doom; in another, as an evil spirit by which individuals could be possessed, and which could be used as a vile epithet in c o n d e m n i n g enemies; in yet another, as a bogeyman for children, in the genre of "Skylab will fall on you if you don't behave." For a moment, Skylab thus embodied that awesome, powerful, and

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dangerous Other that Rudolf Otto ( 1 9 2 3 ) identified as central to the idea of the holy—the alterity of globalization. This kind of engagement of the religious imagination becomes ever more complex as global culture develops. To remain with the theme of objects from the sky, let me use as an example a Navajo scenario of local religious reasoning in dialogue with cosmopolitan current events. To understand the scenario we must first grasp two ethnographic facts. The first is that among the Navajo, acquisition of sacred knowledge requires an exchange, a kind of honorific payment in which the apprentice acknowledges the value of the knowledge bestowed. If the knowledge is of an evil nature, say, knowledge that allows one to perform witchcraft, one must pay with the life of a loved one. A sacrifice must be made in which a relative will fall ill and die in consequence of the exchange of knowledge. The second ethnographic fact is that the Navajo are highly skeptical of space travel, on the grounds both that humans were created to dwell on the earth's surface, and hence it is unnatural for us to venture beyond, and that the blackness of space is a realm of evil, in fact the realm to which evil is often dispatched by ceremonial means. Given this background, recall that during summer 1 ggg an event occurred that had an impact on the American national psyche in a way from which Navajos were hardly immune: the death in a plane crash of John KennedyJr. For Navajos, the question of why such an event occurred is not an idle rhetorical one, and among some of my acquaintances the answer was readily at hand, as I discovered one evening while watching the news on television with some acquaintances at home on their reservation. The report was of a historic launching of a NASA space shuttle captained for the first time by a woman. As we discussed this event it became clear that it was no coincidence that the shuttle mission was taking place within a week of the Kennedy death. The equation was elegant: if one must pay for evil knowledge with the death of a loved one, then a nation must pay for unnatural knowledge from an evil realm with the death of someone loved by that nation. Kennedy was sacrificed by the nation for knowledge from space—such is the Navajo philosophy of balance and harmony in nature. A second modality of religious intersubjectivity in the context of globalization and global culture is one that we could call pan-indigenous. It results in some surprisingjuxtapositions—but surprising perhaps only because they take place at the initiative of those erstwhile people without history (Wolf 1982) whose agency and ability to give voice the dominant society is still reluctant to acknowledge. Thus we are presented with the existence of a Hopi reggae society in which the residents of the ancient mesas embrace a kindred Rastafarian spirituality. In one concert under their auspices held in the late 1980s in Hopiland, I was able to witness at the same moment the lithe swaying of Jamaican musicians onstage, the deep concentration of a Hopi audience standing impassively with arms folded, and the blissful rapture of

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white hippies whirling with abandon on the open gym floor of the Hopi Civic Center. From another direction, the Dalai Lama had visited Hopiland with the implicit message that the shared origin in a high mountain homeland had predisposed Tibetans and Hopis to a kindred spirituality. Meanwhile, a segment of the neighboring Navajos has since the 1980s supplemented their highly liturgical indigenous religion by regularly inviting Lakota medicine men to lead and train them in the Dionysian practice of the Plains Sun Dance. A final example is the appearance of an Aztec dancer in the style popular in the North American Chicano cultural movement at the annual festival of the patron saint in the small Chiapas village of San Juan de Chamula, his feverish half-naked body dancing wildly in front of the church a m o n g the modestly clothed and distinctly local-minded peasants. O f course, the transcendence of local boundaries by indigenous religious traditions is not limited to contacts among third and fourth world peoples. T h e current context of globalization includes the increasing likelihood of religious influence extending in a "reverse" direction, from the margins to the metropole. T h e global spread of Yoruba religion is the prime example of this third modality of religious intersubjectivity (Matory 1999, this volume; Cohen 2002, this volume; Mahler 2005). A highly elaborated, if decentralized, system of practices based on a pantheon of morally ambiguous deities called orixas, its original expansion was a result of slavery and part of an earlier period of colonial globalization. Today it is neither confined by locality nor strictly speaking restricted to a "Black Atlantic" cultural zone but has made inroads throughout the western hemisphere as far as the suburban living rooms of North America. From the heart of the Amazon and crossing the Adantic from the opposite direction is another religion embodied in new churches such as the Uniao do Vegetal and the Santo Daime.This religion has incorporated the hallucinogenic ayahuasca as a sacrament in its rites and has recently moved from its origin in Brazil into the cosmopolitan centers of Europe (Groisman 2000, this volume). N o more explicit examples can be given of the tenet that religious globalization is not a one-way street from center to periphery. Fourth, we come to the so-called world religions and their trajectories within the cultural space of globalization. T h e question is of the "newness" of globalization: certainly there's nothing special about talking of the globalization of Catholicism, Buddhism, or Islam when these are religions that have been globalized for many centuries. Yet surely there is a profound difference between these premodern globalizations of religion and the postmodern globalization we are studying today. Consider the situation: In December 1997 the diplomatic supplement of the newspaper Le Monde published an article on the increasing popularity of Buddhism in France, citing a total of two and a half million adherents of Zen and Tibetan variants of the religion (Renon 1997; cf. Etienne and Liogier 1997). More than two-thirds of these adher-

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ents were Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, and these were augmented by an increasingly large number of indigenous French from all social classes and walks of life. Nearly 90 percent of the latter come from a Christian background and appear to be in search of a more vibrant and living spirituality than they feel is offered by established churches, one that they claim allows them to enter into an authentic self-awareness or self-realization. O n the other side of the spiritual coin, the June 15, 1998, edition of the New York Times published an article on the resident exorcist at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, noting the increasing demand for his services (Simons 1998). Moreover, it notes that there is a formally appointed exorcist in each French diocese and that there are five times more exorcists today than twenty years ago. Those who have recourse to exorcism include immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as indigenous French. T h e author states that priests attribute the increased demand to "social and cultural dislocation, the erosion of traditional religion, and the rise of sects and cults dealing in spiritism" but also recognizes the influence of the Charismatic Renewal movement, which since the end of the 1960s has popularized prayer for deliverance from evil spirits outside formally controlled ecclesiastical channels. Perhaps what we are becoming able to see is not so much a resurgence of religion, a reenchantment, or a resacralization. Perhaps we are instead simply beginning to recognize the same age-old waters of religion as they fill the newly constructed channels that flow between the local and global. Recall Appadurai's invocation of "transnational irony" in his anecdote of the long j o u r n e y with his family back to India, only to learn on arriving at the Meenaski Temple in Madurai that the priest with whom his wife had worked in previous years was currently in Houston (1996: 5 6 - 5 7 ) . Barely twelve years old, this anecdote already seems quaint. For my part, having sketched the outlines of four such intersubjective channels for religion in the global c o n t e x t — t h a t of the Skylab engagement of local religious imagination with the encroachment of global culture, that of pan-indigenous interaction and crosstalk among indigenous religions and either ecumenical or conflictual encounter among world religions, that of reverse religious influence from margin to metropole, and that of the reglobalization of world religions— there is one more aspect of the situation that we might entertain. In this sense our key phrase would have to be neither "globalization and religion" nor "globalization of religion" but "globalization as religion." T h e r e are several senses in which we could elaborate this idea, which in some respects is an inversion of the economic metaphor of the global spiritual marketplace discussed earlier. Thus we can play with the notion that economic globalization is a religion or religious movement, conceptualizing the ensemble of institutions like the W T O and the IMF as a global church or ecclesium, neoliberal economics as a kind of canon law, world beat as a

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liturgical music of global culture, and cyberspace as a privileged site of ritually altered global consciousness. H o p k i n s ( 2 0 0 i ) has taken this idea furthest, arguing not metaphorically but literally that globalization is a religion the god of which is the concentration of finance capitalist wealth in the form of a Trinity composed by the W T O , the IMF, and multinational corporations, with its own theological justifications of neoliberalism, privatization, and deregulation, its own theological anthropology, and its distinct forms of economic, political, and cultural revelation. Strenski (2004) argues that economic globalization is a religious phenomenon insofar as it was from its origin embedded in and legitimized by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings on natural law and the law of nations by Catholic theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria and Protestant theologians such as H u g o Grotius, and particularly that their formulation of the right to free passage among nations for purposes of trade was a theological justification for the imposition of colonial economic regimes. Matory (this volume) suggests that contemporary globalization theory is often predicated upon religions conceptualizations and language. Beyond these interpretations, there is a more existential sense in which we can ask if globalization is a religious p h e n o m e n o n , or at the very least if globalization necessarily has a religious dimension. Does it possess a mythic structure, an eschatological promise, a soteriological message, a magical spontaneity, a moral imperative, a dogmatic inevitability, a demonic urge, an inquisitional universality, a structure of alterity or Otherness that is at some level inescapably religious? Perhaps there are spiritual consequences to whether we find ourselves living in a global village of universal intimacy or in a boundless realm of anonymous and impersonal processes. Perhaps Skylab was not just a technological phenomenon but a religious one, and the religious glosses on its trajectory were not epiphenomenal sidelights but captured something deeper about its human meaning. There was indeed some awe-inspiring alterity about the fact that this technological artifact—the epitome, as it were, of human capability to achieve the orbital plane of existence—suddenly transcended the human capacity for control, losing its status as a product of human culture to become an object of unpredictable, wholly Other, nature. Formulated in this way, the problematic lends a new sense, even a new urgency, to the question of whether global culture is to be considered as universal c u l t u r e — m i g h t this mean universal in the sense of being dominated by a single master narrative, or universal in the sense that any element can be transposed onto or transported into any other cultural setting? Are we witnessing in these planetary religious phenomena the emergence of a "sanctified" global culture in the process of generating its own mythos, or perhaps a reenchanted world characterized by spiritual Balkanization and the eclipse of Enlightenment? Or, as I suggested before, are we merely beginning to recognize the same age-old waters of religion as they seek their own level in the channels that flow between the local and the global (maybe old wine in new

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skins is the appropriate metaphor). Perhaps in its religious dimension the edifice of globalization is a new Babel; if so, let us hope that the analyses we produce will indeed be global, and not garbled.

TAKING THE NEXT STEP

The time has most certainly arrived for serious theorization of religion in relation to globalization. Retracing our trajectory over more than thirty years since the advent of world systems theory, the sonority of religion that for much of this period remained a languid whisper has in the past decade swelled into an insistent crescendo. The early literature on world systems theory, and later literature on globalization, typically touches only incidentally on religion and the sacred (Wallerstein 1974, 1983, 1990; Godelier 1977; Meyer and Hannan 1979; Bergeson 1980, 1990; Chirot and Hall 1982; Hannerz 1989, 1992; Featherstone 1990, 1991; Luhmann 1990; King 1991). Sustained attempts to identify the religious dimension of the global social system were relatively rare through the early 1990s (Wuthnow 1980; Douglas 1982; Robertson and Chirico 1985; Robertson 1989, 1992; Robertson and Garrett 1991; Csordas 1992). Beginning in the mid-1990s, five factors contributed to a virtual explosion of interest in religion and global culture. The first was the sheer momentum of studies on globalization and transnationalism that often begged the question of, and thus eventually made it impossible to avoid, their religious dimension (Bhabha 1994; Friedman 1994, 2003; Griswold 1994; Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson 1995; Marcus 1995; Arizpe 1996; Appadurai 1996, 2004; Hannerz 1996; Melucci 1996; Ong 1997; Jameson 1998; Mintz 1998; Sassen 1999, 2007; Tomlinson 1999; Velho 1999; Tsing 2000, 2005; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Nancy 2002; Trouillot 2002; Berger and Huntington 2003; Pieterse 2003; Robertson and White 2003; van Binsbergen and van Dijk 2004; Ong and Collier 2005; Cole and Durham 2006; Ferguson 2006; Scholte and Robertson 2006; Sloterdijk 2006). The second factor was the appearance of the first monograph-length theorization of the relation between religion and globalization (Beyer 1994). Third was the seemingly sudden collective awareness among social scientists of the implications of Pentecostalism as a global social movement (Ranger ig93;Poewe 1994; Cox 1995; Csordas 1995, 1997; Meyer 1999; Coleman 2000; Corten and MarshallFratani 2001; Robbins 2001, 2003, 2004a, 2004b). Fourth was the development of research on the religions of peoples in diaspora (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993; Hinnells igg7;terHaar 1998; Warner and Wittner 1998; Vertovec 2000, 2004; see also the Web site www.diaspora.fi). Fifth was a new wave of studies on transnational pilgrimage and religious tourism (Eickelman and Piscatoni 1990; Vukonic 1996; Eade and Sallnow 2000; Badone and Roseman 2004; Coleman and Eade 2004; Hammoudi 2006).

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Given these developments, the relationship between religion and globalization has rapidly become a central concern for the social sciences and religious studies (Schenk 1995; van der Veer 1995; Hexham and Poewe 1997; Rudolph and Piscatoni 1997; Hefner igg8;Jain and Pandey 1998; Oro and Steil 1998; Meyer and Geschiere 1999; Berger et al. 1999; Clarke 2000, 2006; Beckford 2000; Casanova 2001; Hopkins et al. 2001; Mische and Merkling 2001 ;Ebaugh and Chafetz 2001; Turner 2001; Wolffe 2002; Vasquez and Marquardt 2003; Werbner 2003; Juergensmeyer 2003a, 2003b, 2006a, 2006b; Coleman and Collins 2004; Roy 2004; Strenski 2004; Roudometof, Agadjanian, and Pamkhurst 2005; Thomas 2005; Beyer 2006; Cannell 2006; Hart 2006;Jenkins 2007; Kurtz 2007). A rising tide of literature on Islam and globalization emerged through the 2000s (Ahmed 1994, 2007; Diouf 2000; AlSayyad 2002; Meuleman 2002; Roy 2004; Markham and Ozdemir 2005; Badru 2006; Hammoudi 2006; Sharam 2006; Mazrui, Kafrawi, and Sebuharara 2008), much of it attuned to the aftermath of the attacks of September 1 1 , 2 0 0 1 . The articles collected here, all written from the disciplinary standpoint of anthropology, together issue a call for further development of a theory of religion in relation to globalization, and, we hope, constitute a step toward that theory. In chapter 1 Otavio Velho engages the notion of missionization as developed within Christianity, clearly a globalizing practice in both the colonial and postcolonial eras. Velho examines the theological notion of inculturation and poses the question of the sense in which a paganized, nonartificial Christianity can be considered conservative. In doing so, he introduces the notion of "productive anachronism" that reciprocally allows us to see the emergence of colonial missionization in terms of contemporary globalization and postcolonial globalization in terms of missionization. This methodology of anachronism does not rely on precedent and repetition in linear time but requires a temporality characterized by folds and abductive connections, further problematizing the already vexed relation between tradition and modernity. Within this temporal perspective, the notion of a "paganized Christianity" simultaneously engages the modality of reverse flow of religious influence and the reglobalization of world religions, as I outlined above. Velho touches on the case of Brazil to show that country's status as a postcolonial source of globalizing spiritual practices surrounding the drug ayahuasca, the martial art capoeira, and the democratization of apparitions (particularly of the Virgin Mary) within Catholicism. The contribution by Joel Robbins addresses both what I have referred to as the globalization of religion and the relation between economic globalization and religion. His discussion moves to the farthest corners of the Christian world, where during the 1970s the Urapmin of New Guinea converted en masse to Pentecostal Christianity on their own, without direct missionary influence. Robbins identifies a correspondence between the Urapmin sense of their own remoteness from the metropolitan centers of contemporary civ-

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ilization and their commitment to a sense of heaven as located in the remoteness of the sky, such that they become significantly unsettled by the suggestion that paradise might somehow be found on earth. He interprets this correspondence by taking up the theme of alterity as the phenomenological kernel of religious sensibility and addressing the hypothesis of an "axial age" between the eighth and third centuries B . C . E . as the historical moment of differentiation wherein immanently enchanted worlds first became hierarchically differentiated into m u n d a n e and transcendental cosmic domains. Treading carefully around the anthropological uneasiness with formulations of the philosophy of history that can too easily be interpreted in simple us/ them, traditional/modern, or primitive/civilized terms, Robbins observes that the religions that have become world religions tend to be those that emphasize this axial age split between transcendental and mundane, and further that the civilizations in which they have developed are those that produce an intellectual elite capable of formulating a transposable message (cf. Matory this volume). He addresses the question raised above of why some religious forms travel better than others, shifting from Velho's emphasis on missionization and inculturation to the religious message and the manner in which it effects change. His focus is on Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, religious forms that have demonstrated remarkable success in traveling intact to a diversity of cultures. He suggests that their success has to do in part with the emphasis on the cosmic divide and the ability of the Holy Spirit to bridge or mediate it, and points to the homology between this hierarchical model of cosmic space and the hierarchical center-periphery model of social space introduced by economic globalization. Working out his argument in the Urapmin case, he plays out the implications of a polarity between religious salvation and economic development. My own contribution updates an ongoing attempt to follow the transnational expansion of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement as a case in which cultural dynamics are played out between center and periphery, global and local, tradition and modernity, universal culture and postmodern cultural fragmentation. The focus of this discussion is a comparison of the movement's instantiations in Brazil, India, and Nigeria. Here we encounter portable practice such as speaking in tongues and faith healing, along with a transposable message, in conjunction with missionization, mediatization, and the mobility of individual religious adherents, in an instance of a reglobalizing world religion. In posing the question of whether the Charismatic Renewal is an instance of reenchantment and resacralization, the discussion adds further specificity to some of Velho's reflections on productive anachronism. Insofar as the Catholic Church was history's first global religious institution, how can we understand a global religious movement that is taking place within this institution? Is the Church a kind of preexisting global trellis on which the movement grows vinelike, does it reproduce patterns first es-

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tablished by its early spread, or does it reflect entirely contemporary processes? What are the relative advantages of understanding the international expansion of the Charismatic Renewal in terms of missionization or in terms of the spread of a religious movement? Certainly the Charismatic Renewal exhibits elements of Velho's paganized Christianity, as in the events I describe surrounding the Zambian archbishop Emanuel Milingo. In the case of Brazil, which is also discussed by Velho, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement both occupies some of the same spiritual frontier as the Protestant Pentecostal churches and revitalizes traditional Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary. But while the movement partakes of the same Pentecostal message as that described by Robbins, the global coherence of the Catholic version of charismatic religiosity lends itself as easily to implicit notions of a global Kingdom of God on Earth as to maximizing distance between realms of the transcendent and the mundane. A period extending from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century in the transnational encounter between Christianity and Islam is the theme of Janice Boddy's examination of relations among the Sudan, Egypt, and Britain. Beginning with the Muslim insurrection against Ottoman Egypt led by the Mahdi and the "martyrdom" of British general Charles Gordon at the hands of the Mahdists, Boddy shows how the Sudan was a biblical land in the colonial imagination of the British. Colonial officers were not only devout Christians, but fully a third were the sons of clergymen. This small corps of unmarried males from the privileged classes attempted to manage Islam, supporting orthodoxy and suppressing the "radical" Islam of Sufism and Mahdism and at the same time promoting imperial pomp and ritual and moderating the evangelizing impact of the Christian Missionary Society. Gender plays a role in this story not only in the exclusion of British women from the colonial effort in the Sudan but also in the ultimately unsuccessful effort of missionaries to change the religious face of society by undertaking the project of founding schools to educate Sudanese girls. Colonial policies of encouraging tribalism and excluding Arab influence in the non-Muslim regions in order both to stymie the growth of nationalism and to limit the spread of Islam created conditions for later civil wars between north and south and in the Darfur region. The colonial legacy was ultimately quite the opposite of either the spread of religions transnationally or the convergence of different spiritual traditions, and instead entailed the enhancement of preexisting divisions and the production of new ones. In distinct contrast to the colonial encounter between Christianity and Islam, Esra Ozyiirek takes up the issues of integration and identity for contemporary Muslim residents of Europe. Ozyiirek examines religion and identity politics among the Alevi, a periodically persecuted Turkish religious group that has in part redefined itself based on the experience of those of its members who have emigrated to Germany since the guest worker pro-

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gram of the 1960s. In a conceptualization reminiscent of dependency theory, she frames the axis of Alevi activities between Germany and Turkey in terms of the relationship between the European core with its Christian majority and the periphery of Europe with its Muslim majority, and raises the issue of what a "Euro-Islam" might look like in the near future. Answering Velho's (this volume) question about whether European Islam can be considered an exogenous factor, Ozyiirek makes the argument that European Muslim identities are indigenous to Europe. Moreover, in a manner related to the idea of return globalization put forward by Fr0ystad (this volume), these identities have a reflexive effect on coreligionists in their home country. The development of a distinct Alevi identity was facilitated by conditions in Germany, including new possibilities for developing political organization, greater financial resources, and a climate in which cultural characteristics seen as negative by the Sunni majority in Turkey were regarded as positive and prpgressive in Germany. An Alevi cultural revival beginning in the 1990s, highly mediatized on the Internet and leading to a degree of institutionalization and standardization of a formerly oral tradition, spanned Europe and Turkey and linked urban and rural locales within Turkey. Tensions between European and Turkish Alevis over issues such as the rhetorical consequences of defining themselves as a "minority" demonstrate the dialogical aspect of an emerging transnational Alevi identity. Examining a different kind of relationship between Europe and the Islamic world, Stefania Pandolfo discusses an aspect of the global reenchantment of the world reflected in the lives of Moroccan street youth in Casablanca and Rabat. For Pandolfo, the youths' pragmatic and imaginal struggle to transcend stifling material, emotional, and spiritual conditions by transnational flight from Morocco to Europe is encapsulated in the metaphor of lharg, "the burning." Through a series of key terms in the discourse of these youth—death, suicide, jihad, despair, being crushed, being touched by the jinn, nerves, awareness—Pandolfo shows that Islamic theology is not only a pursuit of bearded scholars but also has a street life as an idiom of suffering and the means for clinging tenuously to a life surrounded by death. She engages the work of Arab psychoanalysts, already a transnational pursuit, and the philosophy of Al-Ghazali to discuss subjectivity and alterity among these youths in the wake of the bombings of May 16, 2003, in Casablanca. She demonstrates that the transcendence of national boundaries through migration is undergirded by a theological debate over whether migration attempts are a heroic transcendence toward freedom or a dark transcendence into death through suicide. Migration is thus as much an act fraught with spiritual preconditions and consequences as one determined by the economic exigencies of postcolonial economics or global capitalism. A strikingly different trajectory into Europe is traced by Alberto Groisman, this time in the modality of "reverse" religious influence, from mar-

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gin to metropole. From the remote Brazilian Amazon to the cosmopolitan centers of the Netherlands, Groisman documents the transnational expansion of Santo Daime, a religion based on the portable practice of sacramentally ingesting the hallucinogenic herbal beverage ayahuasca. H e dates interest in ayahuasca on the part of non-Indian Brazilians and seekers from Europe to the turn of the twentieth century and accelerating with the advent of the New A g e movement in the 1 g6os. Creation of organized groups of adherents in Europe began in the 1980s as Brazilian adepts were invited to bring the sacramental daime and teach its ritual use. Groisman focuses on the development of three Santo Daime churches currently extant in the Netherlands, each with its distinctive ritual style and network of Brazilian contacts. He elaborates what I have called a transposable message in the "Salvationist" ethos of the daimistas that not only uses a substance derived from indigenous Amazonian cultures as an element of New A g e shamanism oriented toward individual therapeutics and personal spiritual growth but also cultivates a mentality in which Europeans are responsible to make reparations for the ignominies of colonial exploitation of indigenous peoples. Groisman implicitly protests the use of economic globalization as a metaphor for transnational religious expansion in the sense of "religious marketplace," emphasizing the daimistas' spiritual alternative of creating a "planetary citizenship." Situating his discussion in the context of the transnational Black Atlantic cultural world, Peter C o h e n presents another instance of the reverse globalization of religion from an indigenous society far beyond its homeland. Parallel to the manner in which Boddy in chapter 4 examines the historical underpinnings of transnational encounter between Christianity and Islam, C o h e n does this by taking a historical approach to the global expansion of Yoruba religion from West Africa. C o h e n shows that the modality of globalization was not only the diasporic forced migration perpetrated by the slave trade but also the mobility of individuals in travel back to Africa as repatriates or for religious and commercial purposes during the period between the end of the British slave trade and the colonial subjugation of Africa. T h e existence of a single Yoruba ethnic identity was a product of bidirectional mobility, created in large part by Christianized, English-speaking, liberated captives. Likewise, the development of Yoruba religion as the worship of a pantheon of delocalized deities, rather than gods and goddesses of specific locales within the West African homeland, came about as individuals traveled back and forth for purposes of education, religious initiation, or transportation of plants and objects with ritual significance as well as commercial value. These developments were further facilitated by the traditional urbanization of Yoruba society, the high status and access to resources of its religious specialists, and its high development of voluntary societies, both religious and nonreligious.

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J. L o r a n d M a t o r y c o n t i n u e s the discussion o f Y o r u b a Afro-Atlantic spirit possession religions, b e g i n n i n g w h e r e C o h e n l e f t o f f , with an e m p h a s i s o n the historical d e p t h o f transnational religious p h e n o m e n a . M a t o r y qualifies an assertion that religion is i n h e r e n t l y transnational with the caveat that we m u s t have the g e n e r a l i z a t i o n c o n f i r m e d by students o f the " B o n g o - B o n g o " ( a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l slang r e f e r r i n g to the m o s t r e m o t e o f tribal p e o p l e s ) — i f the U r a p m i n discussed by R o b b i n s in c h a p t e r 2 qualify, the g e n e r a l i z a t i o n is s u p p o r t e d insofar as this r e m o t e N e w G u i n e a tribe a d o p t e d Christianity w i t h o u t any active missionary i n f l u e n c e , b u t p e r h a p s n o t s u p p o r t e d insofar as the i n d i g e n o u s religion o f the U r a p m i n has n o t p r o v e n to travel well outside its h o m e c o m m u n i t y . Yet, as M a t o r y observes, a c o n c e r n with a trans c e n d e n t " O t h e r P l a c e " a n d an invocation o f paths, roads, a n d j o u r n e y s are i n d e e d w i d e s p r e a d features o f religious imagery. A d h e r e n t s o f the variants o f Yoruba-Atlantic religion participate in deterritorialized spiritual "nations" ( L u c u m i , nago, q u e t u , C o n g o , etc.), as well as in territorial nation-states. C e n tral to Matory's a r g u m e n t is the p r o b l e m o f r e t h i n k i n g the n a t u r e o f transnationalism a n d i m a g i n e d c o m m u n i t y f r o m the s t a n d p o i n t o f these religions' polytheism a n d e m p h a s i s o n spirit possession in contrast to the m o n o t h e ism a n d e m p h a s i s o n t r a n s c e n d e n c e o f the A b r a h a m i c a n d k a r m i c religions, w h i c h implicitly set the theoretical a g e n d a . Specifically, a n d parallel to my a r g u m e n t above that globalization itself exhibits s o m e characteristics o f a religious process, M a t o r y suggests that theories o f transnationalism a n d globalization have a religious t e n o r b e c a u s e they are p r e d i c a t e d o n s o m e o f the same o n t o l o g i c a l assumptions as the A b r a h a m i c a n d k a r m i c religions. H e consolidates his a r g u m e n t with a c o m p a r i s o n a m o n g O y o - Y o r u b a religion in West Africa, C a n d o m b l é in Brazil, a n d Santería in C u b a , d r a w i n g o u t the c o m p l e x symbolic relations b e t w e e n the sacred O t h e r Place a n d the P r e s e n t Place encapsulated in ritual objects, costumes, colors, animals, foods, peoples, a n d deities o f multicultural a n d transnational origin, all in the c o n t e m p o rary setting o f g l o b a l capitalism in w h i c h transnational religious interaction is a m p l i f i e d by mediatization a n d p e r s o n a l mobility. Peter van d e r V e e r takes u p the issue o f g l o b a l i z i n g Asian spiritual-somatic practices, specifically I n d i a n Y o g a a n d C h i n e s e Q i g o n g . W i t h respect to the e l e m e n t s o f religious globalization o u t l i n e d above, this discussion b o t h identifies a distinct type o f p o r t a b l e practice a n d e x e m p l i f i e s the reglobalization o f world religions, I n d i a n a n d C h i n e s e . F r o m a historical p e r s p e c tive, as well as with respect to the c o n t e m p o r a r y scene, van d e r Veer uses the bodily disciplines as t o u c h s t o n e s f o r c o m p a r i n g d i f f e r e n t versions o f enc o u n t e r b e t w e e n spiritual nationalism a n d imperial m o d e r n i t y . H e d e m o n strates h o w the practices partake o f b o t h religion a n d politics a n d are n o t only spiritual practices b u t c o m m e r c i a l products. In this respect the argum e n t d o e s n o t f o c u s o n w h a t I have called the globalization o f religion b u t o f f e r s an i n t r i g u i n g perspective o n the relationship b e t w e e n religion a n d

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globalization. This relationship can be seen in terms of implicit polarities between spirituality and rationality, devotion and marketing, health and political identity. For van der Veer, it is also evident in an explicit alignment of yoga with the development of global capital and, more generally, in the freeing of spiritual movements to organize civil society by the liberalization of the Indian and Chinese economies through the influence of global capitalism. Insofar as these practices are genuinely widespread and can take on the structure of marketable commodities, they can be seen as relatively contextindependent elements of an incipient universal culture as discussed above, in contrast to Pentecostalism's requisite of an explicit life commitment, Marian devotion's presupposition of Catholic cultural background, or transMediterranean migration's embeddedness in an Islamic life-world. Complementary to van der Veer's broad comparative discussion of Asian traditions in the Occident, Kathinka Fr0ystad offers a close-up of a single yoga tradition, Kriya Yoga, as practiced in the Ananda Sangha community. Her description of how the group's U.S. swami decided to relocate from California to India identifies a species of what I referred to above as the reglobalization of world religions. What is at issue, however, is not a renewed wave of global expansion but what Fr0ystad terms "return globalization," in which a spiritual tradition that takes root abroad subsequently returns to its land of origin under new conditions and with somewhat new consequences (see also Ozyürek this volume). A t the same time, she astutely observes that the notion of return globalization, with its emphasis on geographic displacement and spatial discontinuity, does not fully account for the p h e n o m e n o n . A corresponding recognition of lineage legitimacy, insofar as the swami carries the authentic spiritual heritage of his tradition, introduces a dimension of genealogical integrity and temporal continuity. Evident also are elements of what makes religion travel well with respect to the portable practices and transposable message of Kriya Yoga that can be taken up as individual practice or form the basis for an ongoing community. T h e discussion deals cogently with mechanisms of transmission, including missionization, mediatization, and the mobility of individuals, approaching from Tsing's suggested vantage points of material and technological conditions and concrete social encounters that highlight communicative conditions of religious globalization. Insight into the relation between the globalization of religion and economic globalization is available in the way a language of "spiritual marketing" appears as explicitly metaphoric alongside the literal sense in which a liberalized global economy facilitates the transfer of money to support a foreign-financed media blitz promoting the swami's activities. T h e transnational mobility of individuals is highlighted in Laurel Kendall's discussion of spiritual tourism and pilgrimage led by Korean shamans to sacred mountains throughout their land, centering on Mount Paektu, mythic birthplace of the Korean nation. T h e discourse of shamans invokes activity

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and movement across China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Vietnam, the United States, and both North and South Korea. It thus taps into what, in discussing the globalization of religion, I referred to above as a pan-indigenous awareness of kindred shamanic traditions. Within the contemporary economic expansion, shamans' work has also become mediatized by means such as telephone and Internet and takes advantage of increasingly efficient means of transportation, thus providing another instance of the relation between religion and globalization. Critical to Kendall's account of the symbolically charged ritual landscape of Korea is the fact that the far northern Mount Paektu is today accessible to South Koreans only from China, not from North Korea. This leads to complex transnational interactions among Han Chinese, Korean Chinese, and South Korean tourist-pilgrims, some of whom are refugees from the North. In this "global moment" of Korean shamanism, a local, indigenous religion is enacted in a transnational space traversed by novel routes of travel and geopolitical implications. Formerly regarded as practitioners of superstitious rites, shamans are regarded today as bearers of authentic, original Korean culture and heritage. Public, mediatized cultural performances by "superstar" shamans evoke a transcendent unity of the Korean people in the midst of the mundane reality of continued national division, while at the same time shamans continue to address the same problems of their clients' everyday life that has traditionally been their stock-in-trade. Are we witnessing in these phenomena a resacralization or a reenchantment on a planetary scale? If so, are the consequences for individuals dealienation or remystification? While de-alienating possibilities may exist in principle, to suggest that contemporary global religious manifestations amount to authentic de-alienation would have the dubious methodological distinction of repeating the claims made by many of those religions themselves. Such religions are distinctive not because of their de-alienating potential but because they are critical components in the ideological-religious dimension of a global social system. Insofar as religion is a cultural component of any social system, it would be a mistake not to recognize that religious developments must accompany the development of a planetarized social system that includes a global economic order, global communications, and global population movements and diasporas. Specifically, it would appear that the increasing articulation of the world social system generates an ideological impulse toward formulations of universal culture. What requires empirical determination is the conditions under which global religious phenomena have an agentive impetus toward the status of universality—toward becoming world religions in a literal sense—in contrast to conditions in which they are examples of religious ideology as flickering reflections, reflexes, or epiphenomena of the global social reality. In either case, such religious phenomena constitute a significant part of the consciousness of the postmodern world system, and this can be judged to be a false conscious-

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ness in no more or less a sense than was religion in the classic era of industrializing nation-states.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I presented a very early version of the argument made in this introduction to the World Congress of Sociology in Montreal in 1998 at the invitation of Philip Wexler. I had the good fortune to present later versions as part of the Presidential Roundtable on Religion at the meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in 2000, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 2002, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle in 2004, and at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2006. The introduction and chapters by Boddy, Kendall, Groisman, and Csordas were presented as a session to the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 2006. The introduction and chapters by Velho, Csordas, van der Veer, and Pandolfo appeared as a special issue of the journal Anthropological Theory in 2007; thanks to Jonathan Friedman for the invitation to organize and guest-edit the issue, to Joel Robbins during the review process, and to editorial assistants Jon Bialecki and Naomi Haynes. At University of California Press I thank Reed Malcolm, Kalicia Pivirotto, Juliana Froggatt, Rachel Berchten, and Heather Vaughan. For critical support and unwavering loyalty throughout this period, I thank Janis Jenkins, my wife and closest colleague.

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Chapter 1

Missionization in the Postcolonial World A View from Brazil and Elsewhere OTAVIO VELHO

Translation by David Rodgers

I For many observers, the contemporary process of globalization has brought about profound ruptures in social life. However, an equally important consequence has been the rereading of the past enabled by these supposed ruptures, or at least the sense of rupture. We can imagine this possibility as a productive anachronism, one that paradoxically enables a (re)approximation of the past and present—a temporal fold throwing into question even our naturalized notion of time. Missionization is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Absent in any explicit form in the Bible, missionization is typically associated with the birth of modernity, coming into full force with the great navigations of the sixteenth century and the formation of the colonial world. Viewed from the present, however, it seems to possess many of the characteristics normally associated with globalization (Velho 2006). This especially applies when we compare it to other forms of spatial dislocation motivated by religious aims that presuppose a particular destination, such as the Crusades, whose destination was Palestine. Missionization, by contrast, takes its agents to any part of the world—a dynamism that reflects not only the universal project driving it forward but also the fact that any route change can be incorporated as God's design (Roscioni 2001). Examining missionization in the globalized and postcolonial world (a notion used here in preference to the sometimes problematic application of the blanket notion of postcolonialism to highly specific cases) must involve, therefore, a simultaneous understanding of the new and what we can say anew without losing sight of the long term (or longue durée). I thus attempt to deal with these complex relationships without any undue simplification, such as reducing all that is new to what is already known in absolute continuity or, alternatively, accepting a radical belief in absolute 31

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ruptures. Unfortunately, it seems that the either/or logic of academic rhetoric tends to lead to these dualisms, which may permit endless polemics, but it does not do justice to historical events. It does not do justice even to the awareness that many social actors—such as missionaries themselves and theologians—have of historical events, producing what should be an embarrassing situation for analysts once they expose themselves to the outside world. This chapter gives special attention to a comparison of the contemporary situation with the first centuries of what until recently was called the Christian Era. But this has basically an operational intention, since our main interest is with what happens with missionization in our globalized era, taking seriously the views and projects of the different actors involved. I address so-called Southern Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the strategies that have been envisaged by churches and missionaries, such as conversion, inculturation, and aggressive proselytism; the sometimes unexpected result of the networking involved, including relationships with other "religions;" and the present meaning(s) of missionization. Historically, missionization has been associated with conversion, a term the historian of religion Arthur D. Nock defines, in his 1933 classic Conversion (a book I use as a point of reference for this chapter), as follows: "By conversion we mean the reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right" ([1933] 1963: 7). More than a concept, this definition presents us with a central category of Christian thought. T h e notion of missionization is attached to this category as a movement expanding in the wake of precisely this universal impulse toward conversion. As a result, missionization is frequently associated with various passages from the Gospels (Matt. 28:16-20; Acts 2:1-4), although it does not explicitly appear in the holy text and despite the fact that there are numerous other verses that define Christianity as a movement internal to Judaism (Matt. 10:5-6; 15:24). According to Nock, the first conversion in the full sense takes place only with Saint Paul, whose persecution of the early Christians as Saul already confirms the sense of being faced with a rupture. From then on, repentance and conversion become an attraction in themselves (Nock [1933] 1963: 220). Following this line of reasoning, the first missionary voyages were undertaken by Paul (and Barnabas)—at least when seen (or reinterpreted) in hindsight (191). Seen at a farther distance today, we can perceive just how much this narrative is connected to a focus on the western development of Christianity and hence Latin rather than Greek, Syriac, or Coptic Christianity. Taken to an extreme, this bias ignores the expansion of Christianity into Africa and Asia (especially Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia) during the first centuries after C h r i s t — a n expansion that did not always involve the same conceptions

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o f r u p t u r e (many African Christians, f o r e x a m p l e , maintained ancient Hebraic customs) or the same relationship to conversion. T h i s Eastern Christianity would survive, albeit constrained and subjugated by the tide o f Islam, f r o m the seventh century onward. As a result of ignoring this survival, the Christian West would c o m e to imagine an intimate relationship between classical Latin a n d the divine W o r d — L a t i n later serving in Spain, for e x a m p l e , as a m o d e l for reorganizing Castilian. T h e latter subsequently acted as the m o d e l f o r the official grammars o f the colonial language, especially (and precisely) for missionary purposes. This c o m p l e x d e v e l o p m e n t m e a n t that vernacular languages b e c a m e appropriated for aims other than those o f their speakers (Rafael 1988). But at a m o r e general level N o c k also mentions "prophetic r e l i g i o n " — closely associated with c r i s e s — i n contrast to "religions o f tradition": "While a Jew or a Christian held that there was only o n e true G o d and that most p e o p l e a r o u n d h i m were given u p to idolatry a n d sin, a devotee o f Isis c o u l d a n d did think that his cult was the original a n d best expression o f a devotion voiced by all m e n in their several ways" ( [ 1 9 3 3 ] 1963: 16). Here, t h o u g h , it is worth r e m e m b e r i n g that the relations between prophetism, conversion, and missionization are variable. A l t h o u g h Judaism, for instance, has passed t h r o u g h the m o m e n t s of missionary f e r v o r m e n t i o n e d by N o c k a n d illustrated by the B o o k o fJ o n a h a n d the e x p e r i e n c e o f exile ( N o c k [ 1 9 3 3 ] 1963: 6 1 ) , in the l o n g r u n Israel was perceived m o r e as a sign o f G o d than an active witness, m e a n i n g conversion in this case a m o u n t s to an eschatological action u n d e r t a k e n by G o d himself. I n d e e d , N o c k points out how some thinkers in Christianity's earliest p e r i o d accentuated continuities, not only with Judaism, but a l s o — a s in the case o f j u s t i n Martyr cited b e l o w — w i t h traditions alien to this line of historical development; these included transverse continuities with G r e e k philosophy and o t h e r manifestations o f the spirit o f the times, sometimes as tools o f p r o p a g a n d a (250). Paul himself would say: For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law I became as one under the law—though not being myself under the law—that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law—not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ—that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. (1 Cor. 9:19-22) O f course, N o c k was referring specifically to the ancient world. W h i l e retaining the categories h e employs, we can update his survey by including Islam as a n o t h e r prophetic religion a n d a d d i n g many o f the "religions" of the p e o p l e s typically studied by anthropologists alongside the "devotees o f Isis." T h e issue we face is knowing what an a n t h r o p o l o g y d e v e l o p e d in the con-

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text of the postcolonial and globalized world can effectively add to Nock's description while bearing in mind the customary identification of missionization with colonialism.

II

For Nock, the prophetic religions can be associated with reason, which guides practice; these religions stand in polar relation to religions of tradition that suppose only the sanctity of custom ([1933] 1963: 3). T h e first pole has also been labeled by other authors as a set composed by the world religions, that is, those religions whose impulse toward missionization invests them with a universal vocation. T h e second pole, meanwhile, is occupied by religions defined as local or traditional, in general associated with a particular territory and people. In fact, this association was not set in concrete by Nock: although he stressed attachments to local traditions, he also recognized that the worship of Isis and other cults (including Egyptian and Hellenized Syrian cults and Mithraism) enjoyed wide circulation and acquired new "adhesions." At the same time, these adhesions—in contrast to the conversions to prophetic religions—were not exclusive in kind; indeed, Nock observes the need for traditions of alien origin to b e c o m e naturalized in order for them to be effective (162). While the prophetic religions occupying the first pole have also been labeled the religions of conversion and salvation, the religions of tradition occupying the second pole have been classified as those of initiations and acceptance of the world. In both cases, however, it is as though the opposition between modernity and nonmodernity were already (pre) figured. Nonetheless, perhaps we can identify a g o o d example of an apparent productive anachronism in the postcolonial doubts about how to describe these "traditional" religiosities. Still in the field of the history of religions, Terence Ranger ( 1993)—certainly inspired by contemporary globalization—provides a good example of this when he contests the distinction between the local and the global in South African religious history. This distinction, it should be pointed out, provided the basis for one of the most respected theories of conversion (Horton 1971). Ranger argues that the local is itself a product of colonialism, a regime that obscures flows and interconnections while simultaneously attempting to impede t h e m — a n operation that in itself amounts to a (self-fulfilling) prophecy. At the same time, it is worth observing that in many regions of Africa, as well as India, the norm is a multilingualism more commonly associated with m o d e r n cosmopolitanism, a phen o m e n o n revealing the strength with which any pure localism is negated. Examples abound of other images constructed by the West of religions of tradition. A typical case is examined by Bruno Latour (1996) in his critique

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of the notion offetish, which—like that of mission—emerged precisely at the start of the great navigations and the modern waves of missionization. Latour argues that the notion of fetish involves a misunderstanding produced by supposing an inescapable contradiction between the real and the constructed (in this case, the construction of "idols"), a contradiction that is not recognized even in the religiosity of the Portuguese themselves—inventors of the notion in their contacts with Africans on the coast of Guinea. For Latour, this confirms the fact that it is we who "have never been modern" (Latour 1991). But for now we can concentrate on the hypothesis, without losing sight of the possibility that it can be expanded through the use of the so-called productive anachronism, that in the postcolonial world this polarization of world and local religions can at least be relativized—a possibility the implications of which interest us here primarily in terms of missionization.

Ill Insofar as they symptomize events in this postcolonial environment, the theological vicissitudes of the notion of incultwration are revealing. Promoted by the Roman Catholic Church, this notion is an offspring of the aggiornamento established by the Second Vatican Council ( 1 9 6 2 - 6 5 ) , in particular, the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes and the decree Ad Gentes on the mission activity of the Church. T h e liturgical reform that led to the substitution of Latin by vernacular languages, transformed into vox ecclesi (note the revealing paradox of this concept being formulated in Latin), is at once its result and its condition. In fact, this substitution, together with its modernizing but banal interpretation, should also be read as a (partial) return to the era when the dominance of Latin and the Christian West had yet to see the light of day. It is not my intention here to enter into a detailed theological discussion concerning the notion of inculturation; instead, I wish to call attention to certain aspects pertaining to the theme of missions in the postcolonial world, since this movement undoubtedly constituted a response to the new conditions in which the Catholic Church found itself operating. These conditions obviously included a rejection of the missionary work associated with colonialism. Another key factor, though, was the growing influence of postcolonial Christianity in contrast to the supposed secularization of E u r o p e — an influence tending over the long term (and only over the long term, given the powerful resistance to recognizing its implications) to alter the balance of forces within the Church. This was also closely associated with the need to recognize other religions and with the promotion—simply for practical r e a s o n s — o f the so-called interreligious dialogue, an extremely delicate issue for a tradition generally conceiving a single route to salvation. Indeed, this dialogue sometimes demands the invention of religions, insofar as the

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recognition of religions presupposes the classifications and condensations involved in applying the modern category of religion to encountered practices and traditions (Giumbelli 2002). Initially inculturation focused on the necessary relationship between faith and culture. But attention to the question of culture increased over time, including attempts to recognize other "religions." A special emphasis was given to the analogy between the incarnation of Christ and inculturation as a practice: just as the Logos emptied himself to live among us, so the Church should proceed with each culture. T h e reference to the Logos was in turn associated with a renewed theological interest in this notion. First introduced as a principle by the ancient Stoics, it was given a personalist spin by Philo Judaeus and later adopted by John the Evangelist. T h e Samaritan Justin Martyr ( 1 0 0 - 6 5 ) subsequently added the expression logos spermatikos, referring to the idea that the seeds of the Word were already present in ancient philosophy and subsequently disseminated to refer to all cultures and to a worldwide religious process (Anastasios 1988). Ad Gentes (no. 11 ) had already proclaimed, "let them [the missionaries] . . . lay bare the seeds of the Word which lie hidden among their fellows," emphasizing a complete immersion of missionaries in the lives of the people among whom they work. This shift included a new attention to pre-Augustinian Eastern patristic thought, along with an emphasis on the cosmic Christ as presented in the Gospel of John vis-à-vis his historical manifestation in Palestine, as well as the notion of a God who created all things, including cultures. A new emphasis whose association with reevaluating relations with non-Western Christianity and the Eastern patristic tradition should be underlined. At the same time, renewed attention was given to the involvement of laypeople and the constitution of autochthonous churches, all of which opened the way for a theological justification for a shift in the Church's relationship with different cultures. A significant aspect of these developments has been the networking undertaken in the name of ecumenism among those sectors of the Catholic Church that are proponents of inculturation, as well as the equivalent sectors in the World Council of Churches, composed of Protestant and Orthodox churches (Fitzgerald and Ucko 1998). This movement creates transverse solidarities that cross ecclesial boundaries, even as it strengthens these sectors in their internal clashes with the more traditional sectors in both organizations. At the same time, by maintaining a certain ambiguity over the actual scope of ecumenism (strictly speaking, only macro-ecumenism would address relationships outside the Christian fold) the wider problematic of interreligious dialogue can be addressed. T h e presence (alongside the Protestant churches) of O r t h o d o x churches in the World Council of Churches has also been fundamental, thanks to their experience of being the objects of conquest rather than conquerors. Indeed, their presence has been especially important for reevaluating the Eastern patristic tradition. After the Willingen Conference

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in 1952, the world of Protestant ecumenism and the World Council of Churches witnessed the development of the related notion of Missio Dei (which later had a significant impact on those sectors of the Catholic Church more committed to inculturation). This notion was attributed to the prominent theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968), despite his own exclusivist tendencies. It suggests that mission begins with God, thereby implying that the mission is already present when the missionary arrives: hence the latter is never faced with a society with n o knowledge of God. This notion is itself linked to the idea of evangelical preparation derived from the Eastern patristic tradition and associated with Eusebius of Caesarea (263-339), a dimension that also involves attempts to counterbalance the attention traditionally given to orthodoxy with a focus on orthopraxis—in other words, acts that extend beyond formal declarations to speak of the presence of God. This emphasis is associated with the pragmatic endeavor to break with past impasses, shifting attention from doctrinal issues onto pastoral c o n c e r n s — a l l of which express an implicit critique of the intellectualist emphasis on beliefstatements at the cost of embodied and performative practices. Recognition of this critique, in turn, re-poses the issue of communicative action (and consequently interreligious dialogue) in a way that remains extremely challenging for modern religious institutions, accustomed as they are to privileging declarations of faith and the incompatibilities between them. Taken as a whole, it is interesting to note that, despite all the novelties that seem to have emerged, this style of rhetoric (in contrast to scientific rhetoric, for example, though closer to juridical rhetoric) continues to assume the supposed productive anachronism. In other words, it continually makes reference—including in p o l e m i c s — t o precedents that generally relate back to the same period covered by Nock. After all, it is always possible to maintain, "I have become all things to all men" (1 Cor. 9:22). Just as in the case of the figure studied by Auerbach (1984) where the personalities and episodes from the Old Testament prefigured personalities and episodes from the Gospels, here contemporary personalities and episodes postfigurc personalities and episodes from the Bible and the first centuries A.D. O n the other hand, the Jesuits, who played a central role in the development of the notion of inculturation (the term gaining full acceptance within the order after the Thirty-second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus in 1974) could not fail to associate it with the famous controversy on Chinese rites ( 1 6 4 5 1742), where their position of protoinculturation had been defeated with the ban on Christians participating in Confucian rituals. Similarly, they could not fail to link the emptying of the Logos with the annihilation of the individual extolled by the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola as a means of reaching God (thus very far from the usual notion of the exclusive and ethnocentric relation between missions and colonial conquests), already associated with missionary experiences and spirituality itself (Agnolin 2004).

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Obviously, all this has allowed leeway for multiple interpretations, provoking a permanent tension between the "local" applications of this doctrine (in Latin American countries with large indigenous populations, for example, the theme of autochthonous churches has been transmuted into one of the "Indian church") and the Vatican's efforts to maintain a common language and the Church's universality. This tension is revealed in the paradox of affirming vernacular languages in Latin (vox ecclesi)—indeed, a paradox that in itself reveals the complexity of this process, where the voice of universality cannot be considered a priori less tuned to the vicissitudes of globalization than those of multiculturalism. All of which effectively relativizes the polarization between local and global: not only does incultured Christianity valorize the local and global simultaneously, but it also demonstrates a respect for other religions reminiscent of Nock's "devotee of Isis" in the idea that Christianity (simply) provides a better formulation of something that is already present everywhere. Although this idea still distinguishes the seeds of the Word from its full blossoming, it undoubtedly runs counter to the conception (particularly associated with certain currents of the ref o r m e d churches and Augustinianism) of the absolute nature of the biblical Fall. Nonetheless, this full blossoming is not supposed without some kind of missionary support, already implicitly contained in the notion of an evangelical preparation. Indeed, this missionary support has now transmuted into the interreligious d i a l o g u e — a fact to be borne in mind when distinguishing the Church's culturalism from the culturalism of mainstream anthropology, though in many cases, such as Brazil, inculturation has provided a large margin for collaboration (sometimes based on a productive misunderstanding and hybrid personae) between anthropologists and religious figures. Yet it is important to note that the missionaries associated with inculturation are consistently filled with hesitancies and doubts, to the extent that they frequently give up any attempts to convert and even, in certain cases, abandon the priesthood. In either event, the sociocultural fate of the populations seems to be a higher priority than the question of individual salvation, which was for centuries the apparently indisputable keystone of the missionary endeavor. In hindsight, it could be argued that ecumenism was to some extent a pagan invention, while its r e d i s c o v e r y — a f t e r a period of burial or at least of severe restriction, caused in part by watershed events such as the defeat of Arianism and the schism between Eastern and Western Christianity—can be seen as the announcement of a post-Christian era. Especially after the 1970s, the established missionary apparatus, considered authoritarian, was practically dismantled. A n d here the new conceptions proved crucial. Perhaps the most infamous case of these authoritarian practices was the separation of Aboriginal children from their families in Australia, but this was far from the only example of its kind: in Brazil, for in-

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stance, boarding schools were set up for indigenous children, also closed down during the 1970s. However, these practices were not replaced by any consensual alternative, although many missionaries stood apart through their defense of the living conditions and culture of the populations with which they were associated. Furthermore, important, though sometimes obscured, remnants of the past conceptions continued, especially within the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

IV

However symptomatic inculturation may be of contemporary processes of postcolonial globalization, missionary fervor par excellence today resides e l s e w h e r e — a n d this fervor even foments accusations against it of lack of interest in specific cultures. Much of Christianity's contemporary growth in the old Third World appears to be unconnected to the theological currents responsible for formulating the notion of inculturation. Instead, it seems to be spurred more by the determination of missionaries w h o — i n vivid contrast to the hesitancy displayed by proponents of inculturation—not onlyjourney into remote areas but also, whenever possible, preach door-to-door in the towns and cities developing rapidly in the ever less alien, and ever more urban, landscape of the South, precisely targeting dislocated migrants. Jenkins (2002) synthesized available, if sometimes questionable, information in order to formulate a fascinating and provocative thesis—useful to us here as a point of reference. Jenkins claims that Christianity is experiencing a period of exponential growth, going as far as to declare that this growth is inversely related to the end of colonialism, heralding a new relationship that challenges any essentialist identification of colonialism with missionization. He also underlines the predominance of Pentecostalism in this missionary boom, including the impact of what has already been termed the "pentecostalization" of the religious field as a whole, a p h e n o m e n o n that equally applies to the so-called historical churches (Velho 1999-2000). He goes on with the important insight that the Church has always been "incultured," insofar as the theological formulation is minimized as a driving factor in favor of a natural process of inculturation that mostly unfolds unconsciously. This is a process that the Church has always known how to accept, despite the resistance of minorities, today represented by non-Hispanic whites—descendants of the beneficiaries of the widespread and by now naturalized (and perhaps surpassed) inculturation that took place with the original migration of Christianity to Europe. T h e Church also knew how to accept and even exploit local cultures, even with theological formulations occurring post facto in relation to new patterns of worship and practice in general. With the secularization of Europe, the tendency has been for an enthusiastic version of Christianity to rise to the fore, one more directly associated with the super-

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natural through prophecies, visions, and cures: the southern Christianity of Asia, Africa, and, above all, Latin America. Indeed, this predominance is becoming global through migration, a diffuse influence, and in some cases even through a brand of missionization that takes the first world as its target, reversing the direction of the missionization in force from at least the sixteenth century onward. But although enthusiastic, this version of Christianity is also held to be conservative. Taking a highly provocative standpoint, Jenkins claims, for example, that rather than the product of a gerontocracy d o o m e d to disappear, as Western liberals suppose, the conservatism manifested by the current papacy is a reflection of the growing influence of the South within the Catholic Church and the conservatism of this southern Christianity. Thus, in contrast to the premises contained in the theological formulation of inculturation, the latter does not always seem to go hand in hand with an acceptance of religious pluralism. Some of the information synthesized by Jenkins appears questionable. Clearly, it would be impossible to discuss this impressive set of information in its entirety, but we can briefly analyze the Brazilian case to at least test the possibility of generalizing his i d e a s — e m p l o y i n g a kind of methodological suspicion—especially since Jenkins himself highlights the importance of Latin America in the development of southern Christianity. In this case, it is undoubtedly an exaggeration, for example, to claim that the well-known and internationally active Universal Church of the Kingdom of God has its own political party (at least for the present). Likewise, there is no basis for declaring that Brazil has been just as devastated as Africa by the AIDS crisis, to the extent of being reflected in the population growth rate. Indeed, this declaration obscures other more important factors, namely, the changes that have tended to draw Brazil closer to Euro-American demographic patterns as the outcome of rapid growth in the urban population (from 44.6 percent in i 9 6 0 to 81.2 percent in 2000) and the influence of new social models. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the population growth rate dropped from 3 percent per year in the 1950s to 1.44 percent in 2004 and is projected to reach 0.24 percent by 2050. Brazil is estimated to attain a zero growth rate around 2062. T h e average number of children per mother, which was 4.06 until 1980, fell to 2.31 in 2004 and may drop as low as 1.85 by 2050. T h e r e is no evidence that this is related to AIDS. In fact, Brazil is widely recognized for the success of its program for controlling the epidemic. Any disturbances in the population growth rate are more than likely due in large part to the increase in violence. These observations are made simply to demonstrate that it is safe to take some ofJenkins's generalizations with a pinch of salt, however thought-provoking they may be. Continuing to use Brazil as a test case, we can turn to the question of conservatism. First, Jenkins's argument undoubtedly makes a lot of sense at a global level. In addition to the examples listed by the au-

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thor, we can mention the recent crisis that shook the Lutheran World Federation, prompted by African and Asian churches taking a vehement stance against the recognition of homosexual unions by the European Lutheran churches. In terms of Catholic conservatism, we can also cite the recent cooling of relations with the Kimbanguist Church in Africa. But in Brazil, two correlated questions arise: to what extent can Brazilian Christians be said to be conservative, and what does being conservative actually mean? From the outset, we should note that individual style and self-presentation displays an immense variety across the country. Even within the Pentecostal world, members of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, for example, are far from conservative (in contrast to those from the Assembly of God and other churches). But this immediately prompts another question— knowing what it means to be conservative in the first place. Can a church that takes part in Carnival playing percussion instruments, dancing samba, and singing in praise of God and against drugs be described as conservative or progressive? At a minimum, it must be admitted that the Universal Church is innovative, in terms of the ecclesiastical world and from the point of view of Carnival itself. But what about the Catholics, the target of Jenkins's original thesis that the conservatism of the papacy is already a response to the demands of the South? After all, Brazil is usually held to be the largest Catholic country in the world whose Catholic culture developed largely independently of the priests. For the sake of argument, we could accept that Brazilian Catholics are conservative. But a paradox immediately arises: the conservatism of Brazilian Catholics, insofar as it is real, includes the idea of tolerance and therefore contains an element that impedes this supposed conservatism from becoming absolute by promoting an interreligious dialogue avant la lettre. In other words—and contrary to what is usually presumed—conservatism in this case is not a synonym of intolerance. It is traditional for Brazilian Catholics to be tolerant. This can be observed in relation to syncretism, the sexual life of priests, the belief in the agency of spirits, acceptance of marriage involving divorcees, and even issues that have recently been the object of admonitions from the Vatican, such as the use of contraceptives and—albeit in an undoubtedly complex fashion—homosexual practices. It could be retorted that these topics fail to touch on people's deepest beliefs or their declarations of faith. But Jenkins himself claims, with good reason, that the way in which we worship reveals what we believe (lex orandi, lex credendi), and the same can be said of practices in general. Whatever the case, the fact remains that what is taken as conservatism needs to be deconstructed—especially if we adopt a viewpoint that values practices. To return to the theme of this chapter, there is one key point on which we can fully agree with Jenkins. Accepting, for the sake of argument, the sociological content of the notion of inculturation, it is undoubtedly a much

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more widespread process than theologians f o r m u l a t e — e v e n if we choose to recognize this process via the distinction between discourses and practices rather than the question of the unconscious (as does Jenkins); or if we admit that this expansion of inculturation, on the other hand, highlights the fact that it is not necessarily synonymous with the acceptance of religious pluralism. Mosher has pointed out that the inculturation of Pentecostals in Latin America has placed much emphasis on an intensely lived spirituality, as well as the role of women, the importance of one's natural appearance, and so on. However, this is an inculturation that does not represent subordination to the dominant culture (which, after all, is generally held to be sexist): instead, it acts as an "inspiring principle" capable of immersing itself in cultural questions and re-creating the culture based on the seeds of the Word (Mosher and Roberto 1998), a process echoing the ideas ofJustin Martyr at the beginning of the Christian e r a — a kind of cownterinculturation. But for this very reason, we can say that the culture operating in this process is itself different. T h e o l o g i a n s — i n part, under the sway of a n t h r o p o l o g y — t e n d to have a highly territorialized notion of culture. A n d yet what we consistently find among Christians is a very natural acceptance of religious claims that seemingly have little connection to the "local" culture, such as when a Brazilian pastor from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God declares in a service in Lisbon that Afro-Brazilian entities—now diabolized—are present and active in Portugal too. Apparently we are not only face-to-face with the reperformance of a diabolizing practice that took place during the first centuries A.D. vis-à-vis paganism, but also an "inculturation" that is much more globalized than its more crystallized forms found in political and theologically correct vocabulary. A very clear example of how Minerva's owl has much to learn from the "objects" of its research, people who are typically agents of a kind of wild applied anthropology are running counter to established knowledge. Indeed, the latter also provide proof of the fact t h a t — t o use a theological vocabulary—the seeds of the Word (the logos spermatikos, after all) can be found everywhere rather than confined to particular cultures. In fact, by accentuating discontinuities, these particular cultures may have always been (again, the supposed productive anachronism) more erudite constructions than social categories of unrestricted circulation. In constituting Others as such, we cannot suppose that the opposite is true and that we are necessarily the Others of our Others, a trap that continually betrays the ethnocentrism of the champions of multiculturalism. T h e very division of the world into particular cultures is far from being a universal. Had we taken seriously the actions and achievements of missionaries and their disrespect for these divisions, we would have known this much earlier. Another factor that makes complex these cultural processes is what we

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can d u b the syndrome of being more royalist than the royals (Velho 2005). T h e book More Blessed to Give (Johansson 1992) tells of a visit to a church among Chimba Indians in Bolivia: "The pastor, Rosemir Donizetti, is a Brazilian missionary. T h a t explains the austere and 'Swedish' outward form of the service (like it was in the 1950s)" (111). T h e author goes on to explain: " T h e encounter between the Brazilian and Swedish Pentecostal Missions in Bolivia illustrates the change which is taking place within the missionary enterprise. In the doctrinaire controversies between Swedish and Brazilian missionaries the latter hold the trump cards. They can assert 'We alone follow the way you once taught us. You are the ones who are changing'" (102). In other words, within this complex globalized cultural process, rather than a mirror of the local culture, conservatism is often a mirror (sometimes a rearview mirror) of the relation with the missionaries themselves. Indeed, this process is clearly much more generalized (Velho 1995, 2005), such as in the case of localism examined by Ranger (1993) in South Africa. It may be asked to what point the regional division into South and North (as proposed by Jenkins), although wider than the division into particular cultures, does not itself suffer from the same type of restriction.

V

Whatever the case, Jenkins's work at least highlights the sea changes affecting the context in which missionization does or does not take place, as well as the challenges these pose for analysis. But perhaps this is a timely m o m e n t for reevaluating the very terms in which the question is framed. As we have seen, Jenkins concludes that southern Christianity is a conservative f o r c e — a conservatism that contrasts with European modernity. Taking a different position, Latour declares that "we have never been modern." This suggests that perhaps we should question to what extent European secularism is really happening. Various authors have insisted that Christianity continues in Europe in new forms (e.g., Davie 2000). In other words, we have to differentiate between official discourses and officious practices (Latour 1991). We also need to ask whether it is still valid to treat European Islam as an exogenous factor, or whether it should be recognized as a (religious) element endogenous to this context; an internal development running counter to secularization in its usual sense and capable of affecting even those who do not count themselves among its adherents. But what interests us here is what Jenkins calls southern Christianity. This returns us to the symptom of being "more royalist than the royals." In contrast to the disparity between the official and the officious found in European modernity, we can ask whether, paradoxically, those countries traditionally targeted by missionization are not the ones that take the discourse (s)

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of modernity the most seriously by narrowing the gap between the official and the officious. If so, what appears as conservatism may perhaps very often be no more than a reified modernity; a "cargo cult" modernity. Seeing the world in this way—turning c o m m o n sense upside down—requires us to accept the idea that the tendency toward purifications, binary classifications, and the classificatory impulse itself is modern rather than conservative (in the sense of nonmodern). A n d if so, Western Judeo-Christianity emerges as the tradition par excellence enabling this modernity to flourish. A JudeoChristianity marked by what Nietzsche (who, as it happens, made n o distinction between the Western and Eastern versions of Christianity) considered its artificialism, (1980), leading, for instance, to conversion becoming so demanding and absolute. From the critical viewpoint of Eastern Christian Orthodoxy, this Western Judeo-Christianity has accentuated the operation of dichotomy since Augustine—according to some authors, an aspect that can be traced back to the Manichaeism of Augustine himself (Cracknell 1 9 9 4 ) — while seeking to overcome its own construction (Anastasios 1988). In this sense, the South is the home of modernity today—more modern, perhaps, than Latour believes possible anywhere (Velho 2 0 0 5 ) — t h e home of a sometimes triumphant modernity, which, for example, hinders the emergence of ecological awareness or any intimate relationship between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, as the basis of an alternative paradigm (which in this sense would be conservative). A n d the missionary work undertaken by Pentecostals seems to be very much part of this triumphant modernity. At the same time, alongside this modern Christianity á outrance, the South is also home to a nonartificial Christianity—in contrast to the version exclusively considered by Nietzsche. A paganized Christianity, nonexclusivist and unanticipated, though amply reflected in the anthropological literature (Hefner 1993), where adhesion (as among the ancient pagans) seems more appropriately descriptive than conversion. Inculturation theology is to a certain extent left to chase this Christianity by applying a complex hermeneutics to rereadings of the biblical text, including in terms of the relationship with nature and nonhumans. This is despite the fact that this paganized Christianity is more usually treated by anthropologists as a transformation of indigenous thinking and cosmology, an approach that typically finds support in the native point of view. A revealing example is Chinese Christian glyphomancy, which involves revealing how Chinese characters contain a Christian symbolism as manifestations of the true seed of the Word (Jordan 1993). O r the case of the Tagalog in the Philippines, which leads Vicente Rafael to state that "conversion . . . was predicated on conventions of signification, exchange, and authority distinct from those of the missionaries" (1988: 84). In all cases, we encounter a paganized Christianity that a modern perspective stricto sensu and its focus on discontinuities calls syncretism, bireligiosity, double archive, and so on. But a paganized Christianity that paradoxically forms

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a pair with modern Christianity stricto sensu, with one feeding off the other (although the dichotomy itself is more a product of the modern perspective, often also represented by the missionaries). Indeed, they feed off each other just like Christianity and paganism in the first centuries. This also has an even closer latter-day equivalent, an interesting example of this influence being the postcolonial tendency to reinterpret African (and Afro-Brazilian) religions as monotheistic, a process analogous to the interpretations of paganism during the first centuries A.d. (Nock [1933] 1963), especially under the pagan revival promoted by the emperor Julian (331-63). In fact, the analogy drawn here with the first centuries of the Christian era was also explicitly made at the start of colonization, though contemporary analysts generally take it to be a product of the lack of conceptual tools adequate for dealing with the new situation. However, this evaluation may likewise be taken as a product of a strictly modern perspective, itself i n c a p a b l e — unlike this religious c u l t u r e — o f imagining a nonlinear time that produces folds and abductive connections (Velho 2005). These folds create proximities between apparently distant historical moments and allow an anachronism to become productive. But here a crucial point needs to be made: this is anachronism only from the perspective of linear time, and it is for this reason and no other that whenever reference is made to the productive anachronism, I adjectivize it as apparent or supposed. From a nonlinear time perspective, there is in fact n o anachronism involved, and such analogies do not necessarily reveal any particular conceptual carelessness.

VI

It is important to note that even in the West the allure of the pure is opposed by the allure of connections. This also applies to the special case of the Gnosis (Velho 1999-2000), which traverses the a g e s — a l t h o u g h we should note its esoteric version has been privileged, a symptom of the fact that it has always been taken as a countercurrent in the West (at least until the 1960s). Indeed, this is the same fascination that still feeds the imagination today and makes us more open to various kinds of orientalism, at least at a fictional level—meaning that, for example, we are told on the first page of the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code that the interest of the main character, Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard [sic], lies in the "pagan symbolism hidden in the stones of Chartres Cathedral" (Brown 2003: 7). T h e great conflict with purism occupies this entire book, not by chance a best-seller (and perhaps notjust because of the substantive narrative). Here epistemology—in the sense of ways of thinking—seems to be the primary attraction. Likewise, the notion of "hidden" connects it with a wider set of literary works that take abduction and detective stories as a model (Eco and Sebeok [1983] 1988). Perhaps we are faced here with a fascination for the

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most heterogenic connections possible; one that today enables, for instance, at an apparently generalized level and already free of the limits of esotericism, a growing number of specialists to believe (in contrast to the purists) that "there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution" (Shapin 1996: 1 ) — a revolution that would supposedly mark a fundamental rupture that denies the "intimate connections between science and religion" (195). We should bear in mind, however, that connections do not signify identifications and purification may be tacitly reintroduced when the risk of a reduction in favor of the strongest is present. At any rate, the question of intimacy and connections is also found closer to anthropology (and again in the religious field) in the issue of the relationship between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, and so forth. T h e religiosities of nonartificialChristiZLxnty (in contrast to Nietzsche's version) may be conceived as nonmodern. But it is equally possible to think of them as an alternative modernity: an imagining of modernity closer to its practices and in favor of connections, mixtures, and continuities that allow room for analogies and the supposed productive anachronisms. This favors, therefore, the production of compatibilities rather than ruptures (Velho 2005), adhesions instead of conversions. T h e conviviality displayed between these religiosities and economic development, globalization, and complexity seems to point in this direction, as well as to the importance of modernity as a project, as Talal Asad (2003) insists. Indeed, Asad appears to be describing this kind of alternative modernity when he analyzes the outcome of reforms implemented in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century as "expressions of different experiences rooted in part in traditions other than those to which the European-inspired reforms belonged, and in part in contradictory European representations of European modernity" (217). Jenkins warns of the risks of wide-scale conflicts between Christians and Moslems occurring during the twenty-first century. However, conflicts between artificial Christianity (in the strictly modern sense) and nonartificial Christianity should also not be underestimated, just as in the fourth century the conflicts between rival Christian groups—especially Arians and non-Arians— matched the conflicts between Christians and pagans. Indeed, these clashes continue to have present-day relevance, including in terms of their impact on Christianity's relationship with Islam. Not only because the latter faces similar questions but also, above all, because of the different postures in the face of them. Always remembering that in all cases—whether that of compatibilizations (via fusions, convergence, or coexistence) or incompatibilizations— this involves productions, whose meaning is not given a priori but always depends on a network of interactions. At an extreme, even the notion of the Christian G o d as a being separate from the world is not immune today to rereadings produced via an apparent productive anachronism that holds modernity responsible for the naturalization of this image. This casts doubt

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on any essentialism or consequent claims of incommensurabilities. Fundamentalism sometimes seems to be more in the eyes (and mind) of the beholder than in those whose practices we should observe in addition to their discourses.

VII

A degree of mystery still surrounds the success of Pentecostalism, particularly given the fact that Pentecostal movements do not seem overly sensitive to cultural variations. Various anthropologists, for example, confess (especially in informal conversations) their surprise over the conversion of their natives. I have already mentioned Mosher's countercultural interpretation (Mosher and Roberto 1998). But a number of authors have suggested hypotheses that undoubtedly deserve more extensive verification. Alvarsson (2003a, 2003b) provides a synthesis of some of these ideas, and here we can make a selective use of his conclusions. The first point concerns the fact that, socially, Pentecostalism has been from its outset (originating in a single church located on Asuza Street, Los Angeles, in 1906) a highly heterogenic movement with a strong black presence, including in its leadership. This is further reflected in its strongly antihierarchical and libertarian approach and its emphasis on the experience, rather than the declaration, of faith. This emphasis in turn helps accentuate the centrality of spiritual and bodily rapture, the vivacity of power as well as healing, in detriment to (or at least in conjunction with) questions such as sin, repentance, and redemption, which do not always encounter equivalents in other cultures. Thus conversion to these movements contains from the outset a certain double bind: although it indeed represents an adhesion to the conqueror's religion, this adhesion is achieved via a popular and peripheral movement. Conversion in some cases is even being experienced as the freedom to revive threatened aspects of traditional life—a freedom accentuated by the emphasis on personal interpretation that allows (individual and collective) appropriations potentially very different from those of missionaries, despite their co-participation in religious practices—a fact that in turn facilitates communication across ethnic and linguistic barriers. This participation has a leveling effect, one that neutralizes the hierarchy generally present in the relations between natives and colonizers, insofar as the spiritual experience is taken to be uncontrollable, either by those involved in it or by missionary authority. In turn, the ambiguity and polysemy of symbolic language (in contrast to dogmatic language) enables a similar latitude, providing space for idiosyncratic or culturally specific interpretations. None of this seems far from the observations made by Birgit Meyer in Ghana, which can be given a more general application. Meyer argues that Pentecostalism, by promoting a discourse and ritual practices that include

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demons, offers a bridge with tradition that enables problems with modernity and globalization to be thematized (1995: 6 4 - 6 5 ) . O n the other hand, members of societies that practice shamanism or spirit possession regularly discover affinities in the Pentecostal experience that allow chains of meaning to be constructed in a veritable democratization ofshamanism, previously reserved for specific figures, through the development of a possibility that was always in some sense present. Indeed, Brazil possesses many cases corroborating this line of reasoning, such as that of the shaman who, according to a report from the anthropologist Lux Vidal (pers. com.), converted to Pentecostalism— without ever catching sight of a flesh-and-blood Pentecostal—via radio waves in a procedure associated with shamanic trance (before abandoning his position as shaman, he prepared his successor). O r the case of the Palikur Indians, where "the ways through which G o d is experienced, primarily through dreams and trances, allude directly to the universe of the shaman" (Capiberibe 2004: 24). This does not exclude the possibility of Pentecostalism also implanting itself among groups that do not practice shamanism; indeed, this is consistent with the idea propounded by several authors that shamanism (also) tends to flourish extraordinarily "when people are caught by the gears of the world system" (Carneiro 1998: 8). Thus Pentecostalism could both follow shamanism and serve as an alternative response to similar questions. Using the case of the Tagalog in the Philippines, Rafael, in turn, has already called attention to a possible source for conversion's success—one also applicable, perhaps, to some examples of contemporary Pentecostal conversions, namely, that conversion may act as a way of taming the fear produced by invisible spirits, substituting this fear for the hope of encountering the Christian G o d — t h i s in the Kingdom of Heaven, finally made visible (1988: 1 9 1 92). Whatever the case, the key point for our purposes in this line of reasoning is once more the removal of the ideological and discursive veil that presumes a necessarily absolute rupture between Christianity and the "pagan religions," even in the case of its enthusiastic Pentecostal form, and even if in extreme cases this interconnection takes place through the diabolization of the pagan pantheon, insofar as this remains a paradoxical form of recognition (Meyer 1994). A n d none of this fails to be just as surprising as the Pentecostal success itself. A success, in fact, that needs to be relativized: all these characteristics are capable of unleashing a process of conversion (with or without quotation marks) only in the face of concrete circumstances such as the current wave of ethnicization. This is an ethnicization whose valorization of native traditions (reconstructed, obviously, in accordance with a pattern established by the process of globalization) contributes powerfully to the valorization too of the substantively or epistemologically paganized Christianities. This is the case, for example, of the importance of spiritual healing for identity politics in the "Fourth World" of the Navajo, as shown by Csordas (2002): prominent alongside traditional Navajo healing and Native American

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church healing are the healing of i n d e p e n d e n t Pentecostal pastors and of Charismatic Catholic prayer groups, with their "communal integration of Navajo and Roman Catholic practices"; these are matched by "a number of independent congregations and networks of congregations that appear to be proto-denominations, all headed by indigenous Navajo pastors," that "constitute an emergent and distinctly Navajo form of Christianity" (151).

VIII

In many Pentecostal groups, the notion of freedom is fundamental. Indeed, it displaces the notion of salvation, despite the theological, historical, and institutional importance of the latter. This seems to be symptomatic of the forces shaping contemporary religiosity. Apparently, the greatest success is achieved by religious groups that focus on "freeing" people from their concrete physical and emotional problems, sometimes materialized in the figure of demons and analogous entities. This in turn is often associated with personal projects for transforming living conditions that do not fit neatly under the rubric of conservativism but which can actually have a transformative effect on their surroundings, as Clara Mafra (2002) has shown in relation to the activities of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of G o d in Portugal. Likewise, it is frequently claimed that among the poorer sections of the Brazilian population, belonging to a Pentecostal group constitutes the only form of protection against drug trafficker networks, particularly as a way of building an alternative life for one's children. T h e Pentecostal groups thereby simultaneously create bonds with these poorer sectors, meaning that these groups are prevented from being consistently conservative. This knowhow is itself exported; indeed, today Brazilian missionaries can be found in many parts of the world, especially among poor and migrant populations in need of networks of protection. Brazil is an interesting case of a country that by never having been a colonial power (and therefore having escaped the stigmas attached to this condition), has been developing into a middle-size "postcolonial" power (Velho 2000), especially in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and in the vacuum left by Brazil's past colonizers, the Portuguese. This situation at the state level also applies at the missionary level, in general in inverse order: for instance, in Africa, Timor, and among the Portuguese themselves wherever they are found. In the same way, Brazil has begun to occupy spaces such as those left in Latin America by the United States, which since the end of the cold war and the neutralization of Cuba has demonstrated (including among academics) its inability to prioritize the continent. This occupation has included incursions into the United States, where Brazilians have belatedly discovered their identity as Latins and "Hispanics." In fact, it is notable that missionaries are not limited to Christians but also include adepts of Afro-Brazilian re-

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ligions and others who have developed a variety of rites based on the consumption of a hallucinogenic drink of indigenous origin, ayahuasca. Although numerically insignificant, the latter are highly symptomatic of globalization, having spread (in this instance, among the young middle classes rather than the poor) all the way from Holland to Japan (Groisman 2000, this volume), denying in practice the opposition between world religions and religions of tradition while transforming Portuguese into an esoteric language whose meaning is typically unknown to practitioners of the rites. T h e Afro-Brazilian martial art known as capoeira has also been spreading worldwide, variously retaining or losing its mystical content in the process. Brazil also plays a part in the democratization of apparitions, especially of the Virgin Mary (where Medjugorje is the point of reference), manifested today across the world and enthusiasticallywelcomed by the Charismatic Catholic movement, though they also serve as a model for displays of popular religiosity on the fringes of the Church. All these kinds of diffusion invariably challenge the state apparatus of the recipient countries in terms of legislation. They even challenge the very definition of what comprises a religion, such as the controversy over sects in France, a label that includes the Universal Church of the Kingdom of G o d (Giumbelli 2002). O n e of the most provocative examples of globalization produced by Brazil has been the case of the New A g e "missionary" Paulo Coelho, whose work is read and discussed in more than a hundred countries, even in Eastern Europe and Islamic n a t i o n s — a peculiar and revealing ecumenical p h e n o m e n o n that recently has been studied with special emphasis on Argentina (Seman 2003). In many of these instances, in a fashion analogous to the actual invention of religions studied by Robertson (1992) and Beyer (1994), Christian missionization serves as a point of comparison in the constitution of these new breeds of missionaries, whether as a paradigm or as a contrast (Velho 2006). Pondered in more general terms, all this undoubtedly contradicts those who contend that globalization flows outward one way from the central powers, just as it challenges culturalist notions that every social group has a corresponding culture and religion, as well as essentializing conceptions that presume a defining nucleus to each religion. It also questions generalizations such as the supposed conservatism of Christianity in the third world. It is highly likely, therefore, that study of these p h e n o m e n a may have a key role in advancing our knowledge of the contemporary world, after neutralizing the tendencies toward secularist fundamentalism that have extolled academic centers as the kernel of development. T h e denial and narcissism involved in these tendencies impedes Minerva's owl from ever taking flight. Recently, the Moroccan sociologist Reda Benkirane (2004) proposed that analysis of the controversy surrounding the use of the Islamic veil in France may shed light on what French universalism—

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as well as, by contrast, A n g l o - S a x o n differentialism—is really about. Both o f these are associated as models with their respective traditions, while "transnational horizons widen their sphere o f i n f l u e n c e well b e y o n d the anthropological zones which o n c e saw their e m e r g e n c e " (Benkirane 2004: 50). Ind e e d , Benkirane argues that this kind of analysis, a l o n g with the recognition given to o t h e r traditions, c o u l d also facilitate the e m e r g e n c e of hybrids, such as a "Gallic Islam," o n c e again challenging o u r essentializing conceptions. Perhaps this suggestion is a step forward f r o m (or to the side o f ) what Asad has in mind w h e n he asks, " W h a t kind o f conditions can be d e v e l o p e d in secular E u r o p e — a n d b e y o n d — i n which everyone may live as a minority a m o n g minorities" within a c o m p l e x space and time (180)? Even in Brazil, the more-royalist-than-the-royals elites would certainly be sensitive to any signs of such a process o f recognition e m e r g i n g f r o m the very source of the models that serve them as (reified) points of reference. Within this interplay o f c o m p l e x spaces a n d times, the very notion of mission has acquired such scope a n d diversity that it is a m o o t p o i n t w h e t h e r it may in fact i m p l o d e , a paradoxical victim o f the very sensation o f contemporaneity m e n t i o n e d at the start of this chapter. Again e c h o i n g Eastern tendencies (Anastasios 1994), today e c u m e n i c a l theological circles seem to display a symptomatic bias in substituting the notion of mission for that of witness (martyria), o n c e m o r e raising the question o f n o n l i n e a r times a n d folds. B u t w h e t h e r or n o t it is i m p l o d i n g , we are certainly still c a p a b l e — a v o i d i n g a binary l o g i c — o f recognizing the presence o f the notion of mission. H a d we taken it seriously m u c h earlier—especially in terms o f its dynamic a n d i m p l i c a t i o n s — w e m i g h t have avoided some o f the errors that have h i n d e r e d a m o r e rigorous appreciation of the history a n d actuality o f the issues pertaining to religion e x t e n d i n g b e y o n d a certain b e n i g n i n d u l g e n c e in relation to the Others.

REFERENCES

Agnolin, Adone 2004 "Catequese e tradufáo: Gramática cultural, religiosa e lingüística do encontró catequético no século XVI." Unpublished MS. Alvarsson, Jan-Ake 2003a "A Few Notes on Conversion to Pentecostalism, Especially among the Ethnic Minority Groups." In Religion in Transition: Mobility, Merging and Globalization in Contemporary Religious Adhesions, edited by Jan-Ake Alvarsson and Rita L. Segato, 33-64. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. 2003b "True Pentecostals or True Amerindians—or Both? Religious Identity among the 'Weenhayek Indians of Southern Bolivia.'" In Religion in Transition: Mobility, Merging and Globalization in Contemporary Religious Adhesions, edited by Jan-Ake Alvarsson and Rita L. Segato, 209-52. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.

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Anastasios, Bishop 1988 "Emerging Perspectives on the Relationships of Christians to People of Other Faith: An Eastern Orthodox Contribution." International Review of Mission 78: 307. 1994 "Understanding and Witnessing to Christ in a Pluralistic World." Current Dialogue 26. http://wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/interreligious/cd26-oi.html. Asad, Talal 2003 Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Auerbach, Eric 1984 Scenesfrom the Drama ofEuropean Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benkirane, Reda 2004 "What the Islamic Veil Unveils about French Universalism." Current Dialogue43. http://wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/interreligious/cd43-01 .html. Beyer, Peter 1994 Religion and Globalization. London: Sage. Brown, Dan 2003 The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday. Capiberibe, Artionka 2004 "Os caminhos da evangelizado entre os Palikur do Urukauá: Percursos de urna conversäo." Paper presented at the Seminária Missöes Cristas e Populagöes Indígenas, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Carneiro Da Cunha, Manuela 1 gg8 "Pontos de vista sobre a floresta amazónica: Xamanismo e traduf áo." Mana 4 (1): 7-22Cracknell, Kenneth 1994 "The Theology of Religious Plurality." Current Dialogue 26. http://wcc-coe ,org/wcc/what/interreligious/cd26-oi .html. Csordas, Thomas J . 2002 Body/Meaning/Healing. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. Davie, Grace 2000 Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates. New York: Oxford University Press. Eco, Umberto, and Thomas Sebeok, eds. 1983 The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fitzgerald, Michael L., and Hans Ucko 1998 Editorial. Pro Dialogo: Interreligious Prayer, no. 2, 1 4 9 - 5 1 . Pontificium Consilium pro Dialogo Inter Religiones. Giumbelli, Emerson 2002 Ofimda religiáo: Dilemas da liberdade religiosa no Brasil e na Franca. Säo Paulo: Attar Editorial.

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Groisman, Alberto 2000 "Santo Daime in the Netherlands: An Anthropological Study of a New World Religion in a European Setting." Ph.D. dissertation, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Hefner, Robert W., ed. 1993 Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Horton, Robin 1971 "African Conversion." Africa 41 ( 2 ) 8 6 - 1 0 8 . Jenkins, Philip 2002 The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johansson, Góran 1992 More Blessed to Give: A Pentecostal Mission to Bolivia in Anthropological Perspective. Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology. Jordan, David K 1993 "The Glyphomancy Factor: Observations on Chinese Conversion." In Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, edited by Robert W. Hefner, 285-304. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno 1991 Nous n'avons jamais été modernes: Essai d'anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte. 1996 Petite réflexion sur le culte moderne des Dieux Faitiches. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser em Rond. Mafra, Clara 2002 Na posse da palavra: Religiâo, conversâo e liberdade pessoal em dois contextos nacionais. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciencias Sociais. Meyer, Birgit 1994 "Beyond Syncretism: Translation and Diabolization in the Appropriation of Protestantism in Africa." In Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, edited by Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw, 45-68. London: Routledge. 1995 "Magic, Mermaids and Modernity: The Attraction of Pentecostalism in Africa." Special Issue Religion and Modernity. Etnofoor 8 (2): 47-68. Mosher, Roberto 1998 "El Pentecostalismo y la inculturación em América Latina." Teología y Pastoral para América Latina 24 (95): 4 7 1 - 8 8 . Nietzsche, Friedrich 1980 "The Antichrist." In The Portable Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann, 5 6 5 656. New York: Vintage Books. Nock, A.D. [ 1933] 1963 Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Rafael, Vicente L. 1988 Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ranger, Terence 1 gg3 " T h e Local and the Global in Southern African Religious History." In Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, edited by Robert Hefner, 6 5 - 9 7 . Berkeley: University of California Press. Robertson, Roland 1992

Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. L o n d o n : Sage.

Roscioni, Gian Carlo 2001 II Desiderio delle Indie: Storie, sogni e fughe di Giovani Gesuiti italiani. Turin: Einaudi. Seman, Pablo 2003 "Notas sobre a pulsafao entre Pentecostes e Babel." In Circuitos infinitos: Comparagoes ereligioes noBrasil, Argentina, Portugal, Franca e Gra-Bretanha, edited by Otavio Velho, 1 2 7 - 5 7 . Sao Paulo: Attar Editorial. Shapin, Steven 1996 The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of C h i c a g o Press. Velho, Otavio "Preventing or Criticising the Process of Modernization? T h e Case of Brazil." 1 gg5 In The Search for Fundamentals, edited by L. Van Vucht Tijssen et al., 1 8 7 - 9 5 . Netherlands U N E S C O Commission. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1999 " T h e Topicality of Gnosis for the Study of Religion." Ciencia e Cultura: Journal of the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science 5 1 : 9 7 - 1 0 3 . 1999-2000 "Globalization: Object, Perspective, I lor'uon." Journal of Latin American Anthropology 4 (2); 5 (1). Reprinted in Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology, vol. 1: Analytical Perspectives, edited by Roland Robertson and Kathleen E. White, 3 2 0 - 3 9 . L o n d o n : Routledge, 2003. 2000 "Assessment of the Interreligious Situation in Brazil." Current Dialogue 36. http://wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/interreligious/cd36-oo.html. 2005 "Is Religion a Way of Knowing?" Paper presented at St. Andrews Anniversary C o n f e r e n c e o n Ways of Knowing: Perspectives on the Generation of Knowledge and Forms of Engagement, St. Andrews University. 2007 "Missionaries." In The Encyclopaedia of Globalization, edited by Roland Robertson and Jan Aart Scholte, 8 0 7 - 1 2 . New York: Routledge.

Chapter 2

Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in Transcendent? On Alterity and the Sacred in the Age of Globalization J O E L ROBBINS

It is a key feature of many kinds of Christianity that heaven is understood to be far away from earth, generally somewhere in the sky. This is a banal observation, so pedestrian that it tends to go without much mention in ethnographic accounts of Christian communities. But consider two ethnographic vignettes that indicate the importance of this idea for Christian converts living in remote parts of Papua New Guinea. T h e first vignette comes from my own research among the Urapmin, a group living in West Sepik Province that converted in its entirety to a charismatic form of Christianity during a revival movement in the late 1970s. Rom is one of the most prominent members of thè Urapmin community. He is one of its political leaders and is a generally unflappable character. He is also the person in the community who is most comfortable with Westerners and Westernized Papua New Guineans, having worked for a year during his teens in the house of a tea plantation master. This makes him the natural choice to take the lead in all dealings the community has with outsiders, such as government officers or mineral prospectors. A l o n g with his status as a political leader, Rom is recognized as a very knowledgeable Christian, one of those who have finished a course of study at a locally highly esteemed bush "Bible college" started by a man from a nearby ethnic group. O f all Urapmin, Rom has made the most of the opportunities o p e n e d up by the cultural changes that have followed upon contact with the West, a contact only meaningfully begun for the Urapmin with the onset of colonization in the late 1940s. Possessed of a keen intelligence, Rom takes what comes in stride and generally makes very g o o d decisions both for himself and for the Urapmin community with a minimum of fuss. Having come to know Rom as such a self-possessed person, I was surprised 55

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one day to find him deeply flustered by something he had learned on a trip to one of the villages surrounding the government office at Telefomin, about half a day's walk to the east. While he was there, he had met with a young man who had found himself in touch with his deceased mother, who was sending him messages from someplace underground, and had set himself up as something of a prophet. Urapmin people in general are very concerned with the possibility that the second coming ofJesus might be imminent, and they are inclined to at least lend an ear to anyone who claims to have knowledge of the timing of this eagerly (and also apprehensively) awaited event. I imagine it was in this spirit that Rom went to visit this prophet and hear what he had to say, and this despite the fact that prophets per se, those who claim a regular source of revelation, as opposed to those who receive the occasional dream or vision from the Holy Spirit, are not common in this region and are not generally accorded much interest. But what Rom learned from the prophet disturbed him more greatly than any piece of apocalyptic prognostication had in the past, at least as I had observed. What the prophet had said, Rom told me, is that his mother told him that there was no heaven. Jesus would come, just as the Bible said, and after he came good Christians would live perfect lives of harmony and abundance, but they would do this on earth, right in the places they lived now. Things would get much better, but there would be no other place to go. This prophecy powerfully disturbed Rom because, he said, he had learned that heaven was not earth and that this was very important to him. That heaven would be on earth, he proclaimed, just cannot be true. Uncharacteristically at a loss for words, he could not say more than this—but he made it very clear that if in fact it were true that there was no heaven, if all Christianity could promise was paradise on earth, then he would feel deeply betrayed. By the time I saw Rom again he seemed recovered from the shock the prophet had delivered to his ontology, and as the prophet failed to become an important figure on the regional scene (perhaps because others found his message as inassimilable as Rom had) we never spoke about it again. Rom, true to form, had eventually found a way to keep his world moving in ways he could live with, though the effort it had taken to do so in this case made this a very marked moment in my field research. The second case I want to discuss may have had more lasting consequences for at least one of its participants. It involves an Ipili man from the Porgera Valley in Enga Province. Porgera has since 1990 been home to a major goldmining operation that has funneled what are by Papua New Guinea standards huge amounts of cash into local hands. But the money is not equally distributed; not everyone is rich, and moreover most Ipili people still feel their area is disappointingly remote in geographic terms, making the "developed" world difficult for them to connect with. While the Ipili may look rich and

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developed by the kind of measuring stick the Urapmin tend to use to judge such things, the two groups actually share very similar estimations of their marginal place in relation to the wider world. In the late 1990s, JerryJacka was talking to some Ipili men who asked him about the International Space Station, a topic that came up fairly frequently when people learned he was from the United States (2005: 643-44). After he had described the space station in some detail, Semai Kakopeya, the oldest man in the group, noted "matter-of-factly" that the space station "must be pretty close to Jerusalem" (643). Jacka, misunderstanding the sense in which Semai meant Jerusalem (he was referring to the "new Jerusalem," a phrase Christians sometimes use to refer to heaven), answered that there was no way that could be right, since Jerusalem was on earth and the space station was in the sky. Faced with this answer, Semai quickly became rattled. He said the pastors had always told Ipili people that if they were saved they would be going to heaven, to "Jerusalem in the sky," and ifJerusalem and the space station are both in the sky, they must be near each other. In light of the new information thatJerusalem was not in the sky, Semai angrily announced that people should stop giving money to the church. The next day, he told Jacka that he was thinking about leaving the church, or at least ceasing to donate. "All along," he said, "I thought I was giving money to assure my place in Jerusalem. Now, I found out I've just been sending my money to some white men who live on the ground" (643). Another Ipili man with whom Jacka discussed the matter responded with similar disappointment, though seemingly less rage: "chagrined and wistful at the same time . . . [he] commented, 'I thought that we really knew where heaven was'" (644). For Rom, Semai, and the unnamed younger man whom Jacka quotes, the idea that heaven might be a place on earth was deeply disturbing. In Rom's case, the prophet had explicitly said that the world Christians would live in after the second coming still would be paradisiacal compared to the one they inhabited now, and Jacka does not report that he told the Ipili men anything aboutJerusalem other than that it occupied an earthly location. But that news alone seemed to be enough to deeply disturb these Christians living in areas where the religion was a recent import and where its coming was tightly linked to processes of colonialism and economic and cultural globalization. This chapter aims to examine why a distinct separation between heaven and earth is so important to these people and, more generally, why versions of Christianity that stress the difference and distance between the two places are so popular at locations rendered remote by the world system of global modernity. Why, I want to ask, is separation between the two realms such a popular part of globalizing religious cosmologies, and what does news of its potential collapse mean for these people who find such a possibility deeply unsettling?

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ALTERITY, TRANSCENDENCE, AND RELIGION

At a key point in his introduction to this volume, Csordas refers to "the immanence of alterity itself as the phenomenological kernel of religious consciousness and subjectivity" and argues that "this alterity is the basis for the global religious resurgence." This argument refers back to his major statement on the theory of religion, in which he develops the argument that "alterity itself is the object of religion" (2004: 173), but it also goes beyond this earlier claim to offer, at least by implication, a further one linking the radical upsurge in occasions for experiencing alterity that the current era of globalization has provided for so many people to the upsurge in many places of religious expression and perhaps also religious commitment. It is this line of thought that I want to elaborate on in working toward an account of the importance of a heaven that is elsewhere for people in Papua New Guinea and in other parts of the world where conversion to Christianity, or, more specifically, to forms of Christianity that stress the distance between heaven and earth, is very much a contemporary p h e n o m e n o n . Csordas's theoretical account of religion is aimed at laying out the "elementary structure" or, to refer again to a phrase used in his introduction here, the "phenomenological kernel" of alterity that accounts for the human tendency to produce religions (2004: 176). He finds this kernel in the intimate alterity of embodiment as described by phenomenologists such as MerleauPonty who delineate the sense in which our bodies are both part of and alien to ourselves. H e sees this experience as universal and as providing the fundamental and inescapable encounter with alterity that funds the religious imagination. My own concerns, however, are a bit less general, and to pursue them I do not need to take on board this argument for a single elementary source of the experience of alterity. 1 Instead, I want to draw on the insight that religion has alterity as its object and the further point that different religions elaborate the notion of alterity differently, points on which one can agree with Csordas, even without taking a position on whether the alterity that is elaborated ultimately has a single experiential or existential source (176). I have taken up the issue of the central role alterity plays in religion because as the Papua New Guinea Christians I discussed above see matters, heaven is nothing if not a figure of alterity, and they find very unsettling any attempt to suggest that it might be a less radical figure in this regard than they had been imagining. In thinking about how critical the radical character of heaven's alterity is for their religious understanding, it is useful to turn to a quite different theoretical d i s c o u r s e — o n e that has made a great deal of the role of radical alterity in some religions (including Christianity) instead of focusing on the place of alterity in general in all of them. T h e theoretical discourse I have in mind is the one most often referred to as the axial age hypothesis.

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T h e core assertion of the axial age hypothesis, first proposed by Jaspers (1953) and most influentially elaborated, for our purposes, by Eisenstadt (1982), is that during the period that falls between roughly the eighth and the third century B . C . E . a set of similar revolutions in ideas and in the institutional grounding of ideas occurred in a number of Eurasian cultures, including those of "Ancient Israel, Ancient Greece [,] . . . Zoroastrian Iran, early Imperial China and in the Hindu and Buddhist civilizations," and that Christianity and Islam, while coming later, were based on ideas that were recognizably axial age in origin (Eisenstadt 1982: 294). T h e revolutions of the axial age were distinctive for leading to "the emergence, conceptualization and institutionalization of a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders" (294). It was this tension that in one form or another all the axial age civilizations shared. In all of them, people perceived "a sharp disjunction between the mundane and the transmundane," and they stressed "the existence of a higher transcendental moral or metaphysical order which is beyond any given this- or other-worldly reality" (296). T h e idea of heaven shared by the two Papua New Guineans with whom I began belongs to a world marked by this kind of split between realms, a split that is both radical and hierarchical, with the transcendent being more valued. In order to find the axial age hypothesis of interest, one has to accept that this kind of split was not in place in pre-axial cultures. In terms that accord with Csordas's suggestion that alterity is the object of all religions, Eisenstadt acknowledges that "the transmundane order has, in all human societies, been perceived as somewhat different, usually higher and stronger, than the mundane o n e " (1982: 296). But he goes on to argue that "in the pre-axial-age 'pagan' civilizations this higher world has been symbolically structured according to principles very similar to those of the mundane or lower o n e " (296). Furthermore, in such civilizations "a conception of an autonomous, distinct moral order which is qualitatively different from both this world and 'the other world' developed only to a minimal degree" (296). T h e kind of dichotomizing Eisenstadt is engaged in here is not popular in anthropology these days, particularly when it is put in the service of us/them kinds of arguments (which is one place to which the axial age hypothesis can lead). But it is true nonetheless that it is not difficult for anthropologists of places like Papua New Guinea to recognize some force in the claim that traditional religions were not structured around a radical distinction between the transcendental and the mundane. These are the kinds of religions in which gods are generally ancestors, ultimately relatives, and in which even when they are not they are generally thought to respond to various situations in ways that are similar to those of contemporary men and women. These are the kinds of worlds where, as de C o p p e t and Iteanu (1995) put it for the cultures of Oceania, cosmos and society are one. They are places where a focus on Csordas's "intimate alterity" captures the tenor of religious life better than

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does the kind of stance produced by the emphasis on the encounter with the "wholly other" that the axial religions tend to foster. One could do much more to specify how it is that the transcendental and mundane orders are not radically distinguished in many cultures. For present purposes, however, I have only wanted to sketch Eisenstadt's basic model of non-axial religions in order to clarify the nature and depth of the changes he sees the axial age as having introduced. For Eisenstadt and other axial age theorists, the opening of a chasm between the mundane and the transcendental calls forth the creation of a dedicated intellectual elite (which includes figures such as prophets and revolutionaries) whose purpose is to clarify the nature of the transcendental realm and who often come to lead movements that encourage people to try to realize the goals of the transcendental domain within the mundane one. By a series of complex arguments, the social reflexivity and revolutionary impulse of axial intellectuals is held to have been crucial to the production of modernity (see Eisenstadt 1999 for the argument in full and a broad and useful bibliography). Modernities differ in how the axial impulse to remake society on the basis of transcendental visions has played out, and Eisenstadt (2000) has thus long been a proponent of the notion of multiple modernities. But on his account the tension between clearly distinct and hierarchically arranged mundane and transcendental realms has been a driving force of the developmental dynamics of almost all societies we would want to call modern (the exception being contemporary Japan, about which see Eisenstadt 1996). Given the brief review I have just offered, it should perhaps come as no surprise that the axial age hypothesis has had virtually no uptake in anthropology. As noted above, its us-axial-modernizing versus them-pre-axialtraditional binary exemplifies a style of distinction making that is completely out of favor in the contemporary discipline. Furthermore, as Wagner has helpfully pointed out, the discussion of the axial age shifts uneasily between "two quite different genres of investigation [,] . . . namely historical sociology and philosophy of history" (2005: 89). It is marked both by the construction of some useful ideal-typical distinctions between kinds of cultural formations and sweeping discussions of the import of what are taken to be fundamental transformations in human consciousness and agentive capabilities and their effects over very broad swaths of time. Even Eisenstadt himself has recently noted that the "typological" factors in the debate need to be distinguished from the "chronological" ones (2005: 532). Following his and Wagner's lead here, we might suggest that it is the philosophy of history and the tendency to produce analyses that make grand claims across huge time periods to which anthropologists are so allergic. If this is the case, we might be able to leave those aspects of the axial age hypothesis aside but still pick up and try out the historical sociological, typological claims that have

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been developed in the axial age literature. This is precisely what I suggest that we do. If we take this approach, the key typological claim we would want to pick up is the one that says that cultures that make a radical and ranked distinction between the transcendental and the mundane are different from those that do not so radically separate these two realms. If we look at the canonical list of axial age cultures—a list that includes the cultures that spawned Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam—we can also note that the only religions that are generally understood to have become world religions are also the ones in which the axial age split plays a key role. What is unique about these religions is not that they are focused on alterity but that they treat alterity in a special way: as absolute or at least marked and as more valuable than that which is familiar. One could offer a number of answers to the question of why it is that religions that have this characteristic should tend to travel so much better than religions that do not—and Eisenstadt's model of axial cultures as ones that produce an intellectual elite determined to spread its vision in an effort to remake the world in transcendental terms would be one of them. But here I want to look at the question from a different direction, asking not how holders of axial religions come to want to spread them but why those to whom they have been spread have wanted to take them up. And in order to keep my analysis manageable, I want to focus my consideration of this issue on the spread of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity during the contemporary era of globalization.

T R A N S C E N D E N C E AND T H E G L O B A L I Z A T I O N OF P E N T E C O S T A L AND C H A R I S M A T I C C H R I S T I A N I T Y

Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity have arguably been one of the maj o r success stories of the past several decades of cultural globalization. Kinds of Christianity focused on the availability of the gifts of the Holy Spirit to all contemporary believers, they have spread rapidly around the world since the birth of Pentecostalism in the early years of the twentieth century. The past thirty years or so have been a period of particularly rapid growth in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Oceania, and recent estimates suggest that at present Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity have as many 5 2 3 million adherents, of whom two-thirds live outside the Western world in which these religions originated (Barrett and Johnson 2002: 284). Along with such quantitative indexes of the globalizing success of these religions, one must note the extent to which they have been able to reproduce their basic tenets in the majority of the cultures to which they have been introduced. Paradigms of the class of what Appadurai (1996) calls hard cultural forms, ones that people tend to pick up as a whole and not to overwhelmingly remake in local terms, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian-

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ity have shown a remarkable ability to hold their cultural shape as they have traveled the globe (Robbins 2004b). On both quantitative and qualitative grounds, then, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity have to be counted as a major part of the global religious resurgence that is the focus of this volume. In relation to the argument I have been developing here, what is most notable about Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is their way of handling the split between the transcendental and the mundane. There are two features of these religions that bear notice in this regard. First, they very much emphasize the split. They tend to demonize the earth as a place filled with evil and temptation and the lives people lead upon it as ones too often given over to sin. The local sacred, a false model of transcendence, is also treated as an earthly matter and subject to vigorous attack by believers who are enjoined to engage in "spiritual warfare" against traditional spirits (DeBernardi 199g;Jorgensen 2005). Moreover, local cultural ways of life on earth are similarly defined as evil, and adherents are urged, as Meyer (1998) reports from Ghana, to "make a complete break with the past." Counterposed to the Pentecostal and Charismatic treatment of the earth as a space of evil is their emphasis on heaven as a perfect paradise, a place where all the problems that beset people in their earthly lives will be solved and everyone will be able to live without sin. The move from earth to heaven will be discrete, set to occur for believers when Jesus returns. There is no sense in these religions that believers should attempt to create heaven or a facsimile of it on earth. The split between the transcendental and the mundane is thus as extreme in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity as it is in any other form of Christianity or in any other world religion. The second notable feature of the Pentecostal and Charismatic way of handling the distance between heaven and earth is that they suggest that this gap is regularly mediated by the Holy Spirit, who can fill earthly people with God's heavenly power in order to allow them, among other things, to speak in tongues, heal, speak prophetically, lead moral lives, and bring others to the faith. The Holy Spirit does not, to reemphasize a point I have just made, enable people to create heaven on earth. It merely helps them deal with some of the problems of this earth and cultivate the strong belief and upright behavior they will need to demonstrate if they are to be among the saved when the millennium comes. The difference between heaven and earth remains absolute, but the Spirit's mediation does forge a connection between the two realms that keeps heaven's promise concrete for believers and lends them some of the power they need to work toward earning the right to move from one realm to the other when Jesus returns. The stress that Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity place on the mediation that allows people to experience some of heaven's power on earth is what makes them stand out from many other kinds of Christianity. What

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I want to suggest here is that it is this distinctiveness in the way they handle the axial theme of the difference between the transcendental and the mundane, combined with their tendency nonetheless to emphasize the enormity of this difference, that has made them such a powerful globalizing force. It is perhaps best to begin with an obvious point, though one I have not seen made elsewhere, pertaining to the uncanny likeness between the structure of the axial cosmology of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity and the social worlds of so many of the people peripheral to the global market economy who have converted to these religions in recent decades. For many such people, in particular, those who have not left home, or have not moved farther from home than the nearest urban squatter settlement if they come from a more rural area, globalization has generally meant coming to see themselves as no longer living in a central or powerful place. There is among them a profound sense that real power and real economic success and real health are elsewhere. Everywhere it makes sense to talk about globalization, people have come to recognize some version of a global hierarchy of places, and for the people who are the focus of this chapter, the most highly valued places—the places where work is plentiful and food and shelter and medicine are easy to acquire—are far away and maximally different from home. And just as their social maps recognize great distances between places and put the highest value on those places most distant from where they live, so too do the Pentecostal and Charismatic cosmological maps they have adopted devalue their earthly dwelling places and tell them that the place they really want to be is a heaven that is nothing like home. Put more simply, the axial split in Pentecostal and Charismatic cosmology between the mundane realm and the more highly valued transcendent one mirrors the split globalization opens up between the local and the more highly valued central or "global" places that make up the social landscape. But the homologies between the two models of space go beyond this. For people living on the periphery of the global market economy, at least some of the things they want from the center, things like money, goods, and knowledge, occasionally do reach them, albeit often in less than fully realized form. On the periphery, as people often see it, one can sometimes get a j o b but not a reliable one or one that pays enough to support the lifestyle one wants to live, or one can occasionally buy nice clothes but not the latest styles, and so on. Furthermore, ideas and images from the center are regularly available, and they do much to orient desire in the direction of the lives lived in central places. Yet these fragments of the global modern that people can grasp hold of are never enough to allow them to make the spaces of their own lives into central ones. In Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, the Holy Spirit similarly makes some part of heaven real on earth. Yet even as one can sometimes call on God's power for help in solving earthly problems, one cannot use it to turn earth into heaven. In both models, people from

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peripheral-mundane places have some access to central-transcendent ones, but in neither model can they, under the current dispensation, collapse the two places into one. My point is not that for peripheral people these homologies become identities—that heaven looks like a global city or that there is little difference between the Holy Spirit and a pocket full of cash. In my experience in Papua New Guinea and in reading the literature on global Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity elsewhere, one rarely sees such a flat melding of the two models (see my discussion of ideas of heaven in Urapmin below). I want to argue instead that the Pentecostal and Charismatic cosmology is good for peripheral people to think with because it structurally mirrors the global model with which they have increasingly come to interpret their social lives. It provides an idiom in which to meaningfully discuss what it's like to be living far away from the ultimate centers of power, meaning, and well-being in the world. But more than just good to think with in this way, Pentecostal and Charismatic cosmology is also good to live with, and this in a way in which the social map of globalization often is not. It is good to live with because it suggests ways for people who see themselves as peripheral on the social map to live lives that still have ultimate value because they are undertaken in preparation for heaven, and the ways of life it promotes are most often ones that people can achieve by employing only the resources available to them (Robbins 2004b). Unlike globalization, which too often demands of people who want to move to the center that they transform themselves by means of education and employment they are not able to obtain, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity offer workable plans that people who want to reach heaven can use to live toward that goal. It gives them ways to think of their practices of constructing life as aimed at making something of great value, even if they are not able to deploy the resources of the center in this task. It is to this process of life construction that I want to turn in the next section, giving it some specificity by looking at how it unfolds in the Urapmin case.

LIVING FOR HEAVEN

The Urapmin, whose whole community converted to Charismatic Christianity in the late 1970s, see themselves as socially marginal to the world of global modernity in very much the terms outlined above. They are fond of referring to themselves as "last New Guinea," by which they mean that everything modern, from money to medicine to Christianity, reaches them only when it has already spread everywhere else (see also Jacka 2005: 649). This feeling of being at the periphery of the global system is deeply troubling to them, all the more so because they formerly saw themselves as central to the regional world that was their most important frame of reference before contact (Robbins 2004a: 84-121). There are two primary ways in which they

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imagine they might address their current marginality. O n e is the coming of development, which they usually figure as the construction of a major mineral mine on their land, one that might rival the huge O k Tedi mine that was built in the early 1 g8os on the land of their trading partners about four days' walk to the north. T h e other is the second coming of Jesus, which they believe will result in those Urapmin who are "strong believers" being taken to live in a heaven in which no one will be marginal. From an analyst's point of view, the clear difference between these two ways of responding to social marginality is that the Urapmin can work on their salvation themselves, without outside help (except that of the Holy Spirit, whose help is amply available), but that they cannot by themselves bring about development (cf. Knauft 2002 on the passivity other kinds of Christianity, those not focused on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, can foster). T h e Urapmin do not discuss the difference between the two ways of responding to their marginality in quite this way, but they do value salvation over development, and looking at their reasons for doing so will help us understand how the axial character of their Christianity has been crucial to their way of coping with the marginality globalization has bequeathed to them. In order to understand why the Urapmin value salvation over development, it is necessary first to note that their Charismatic Christianity is built around a stark split between the transcendent and the mundane realms. Heaven is referred to as the "place [clearing] in the sky" (abiil tigin f and is held to be far from earth in physical terms; people often dream of seeing individuals, or groups of them, taken up into the sky by Jesus, carried farther and farther until they disappear into the clouds. Heaven is also a place where people will be without sin and without the desires that lead them to sin on earth. Urapmin speculate that it may even be the case that people will be without bodies or genders in heaven. But even if this is not true, minimally there will be n o distinction between black- and white-skinned people in heaven (this racial distinction provides the most important terms in which the Urapmin talk about the opposition between the local-traditional and the global-modern; see Robbins 2004a). There will also be no hunger, and people will be able to travel at will and quickly to anywhere they want to go (cf.Jacka 2005: 6 4 8 - 4 9 , for similar Ipili ideas of heaven; see alsojebens 2005, for comparable ideas about heaven in another Papua New Guinea society). This set of characteristics is not one Urapmin imagine m o d e r n cities to possess, though these cities are thought to approach some aspects of this condition more closely than Urapmin villages do. It is rather a picture of a place in which the things that are difficult about life in Urapmin, and in particular the difficulties that come from being marginal to the global system, are reversed: where there is want and the desires that lead to sin, there will satiety; where there is stasis, there will be movement; where there is hunger, there will be plenty; where there is most generally marginality, there will be cen-

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trality. As in all axial religions, Urapmin Christianity is built on the idea that life in the transcendent world will be better than life on earth. In the course of describing heaven as a place that is better than earth, I have already had to indicate how the Urapmin view life on what they call "this ground" (towal diim). It is full of desire and sin, anger, strife, and hardship. It is also a life of marginality. I have discussed in detail elsewhere how the Urapmin experience earthly life in these terms and so will not go into further detail here (Robbins 2004a). Suffice it to note that as the inverse of life in heaven, earthly existence is also maximally different from that life. T h e physical gap between heaven and earth thus represents in its enormity the extent of the gap between how life is lived in the two places. A l o n g with recognizing this extreme gap between the mundane and transcendent realms, the Urapmin have also become quite expert at criticizing mundane life from the point of view of the transcendent, another key feature of the axial age model. T h e struggle that animates Urapmin lives and gives them direction is one in which against all of the attractions and compulsions of earthly life people aim to live morally in ways that meet the standards of heaven. Church services (held at least three times a week but frequently more often), village meetings, and private discussions are full of moral harangues (wengtitil, lit. "strong talk"; and wengkem, lit. "clear talk") focused on people's propensity to follow the ways of the ground and hence their failure to live up to heaven's dictates. These admonishments, so much a part of the substance of what is said everyday, bring the transcendent to bear on the mundane even as they reinforce the reality of the yawning gap between them. T h e h o p e that motivates those who speak them is that if people can only live up to the heavenly moral model the harangues spell out, then they will be able to leave the ground forever when Jesus returns. T h e hope that people might be able to accomplish what the harangues require is bolstered by the fact that believers are helped by the Holy Spirit to live in accord with the demands of transcendental morality. It is those w h o have the Spirit inside their hearts (aget tem; for Urapmin, the heart is the seat of all thought, feeling, and motivation) who are able to approach the moral perfection that heaven demands even while living on earth. Much of Urapmin ritual life, which ranges from private prayer to group possession dances and is a ubiquitous feature of the daily round, is aimed at soliciting the Spirit's help in this endeavor. It is in this way that the Spirit's mediation between the transcendental and the mundane makes living with the gap a meaningful project for the Urapmin. Even if heaven is unobtainable until the millennium arrives, e n o u g h of its power is available here and now on earth to make living for it a workable project. T h e same cannot be said for the project of living "developed" lives. T h e Urapmin are constantly and painfully aware that they do not possess e n o u g h of the "power" (powa) or "knowledge" (save) of the global Western center

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to construct lives that are effectively pointed toward the goal of being developed. T h e mediations on offer between Urapmin and that center simply do not provide the tools they would need to accomplish such a task. T h e one h o p e they hold out that this might change is based, as noted before, on the possibility of mining development, a hope that is given some concrete impetus by the occasional arrival in Urapmin of prospecting teams from multinational mining companies. Although the teams have f o u n d some gold in Urapmin, it has not yet proven enough, or concentrated enough in one place, to make mining a real possibility in an area where there are immense infrastructural hurdles to initiating mining operations. Yet if we take these prospecting teams to be mediators on the global map the same way the Holy Spirit serves as one on the cosmological map, we can perhaps see why even their relatively rare appearance provides rich fuel for Urapmin imaginations. Yet even as the Urapmin continue to plant seeds of h o p e for development in the soil the mineral prospecting teams dig up and take away, they also work hard in their public and private talk to keep the desire for development in its p l a c e — a place that is decidedly subordinate to the desire for heaven. As the Urapmin regularly remind themselves, mining and development are only "things of this g r o u n d " (towal diirn mafak mafak, samting bilong graun). This is the Urapmin phrase that most fully carries the force that the word mundane has in axial age thinking: it refers not only to the earthy provenience of the things it describes but also to their secondary importance. Its use in public and private speech always signals a demand that people not invest so m u c h in such earthly things and instead return their thoughts to heaven. W h e n the phrase is applied to mining and development, it serves as a loaded reminder that the transcendental is more important than the global modern and that people should not confused about which one should have priority in their lives. O n e might be tempted to see a bit of sour grapes in the Urapmin claim that mining is merely something of the ground. To be sure, they regularly voice it when they have experienced the disappointment of yet another inconclusive visit by a prospecting team. But they use it far more frequently than this, and I am inclined to analyze it in another way. Urapmin people's efforts to stabilize a clear hierarchical relation between salvation and develo p m e n t are, I would argue, their way of acknowledging that the f o r m e r is in their hands in a way in which the latter is not. It is their way of asserting that despite their newfound marginality on the global map, they remain in control of their own destinies (cf. Tuzin 1997). Their Charismatic Christianity makes this sense of control possible by allowing them to oppose a transcendental realm they can effectively work toward with their own resources to a global modern one they cannot. This same move is one made by Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians in peripheral locales throughout the world, and the way their construction of transcendent alterity allows for this is one

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key reason why they have been so successful in spreading themselves during the current era of globalization.

CONCLUSION

This chapter began with accounts of two Papua New Guinea men w h o became very disturbed by reports that heaven might not be in the sky, far from earth. I have interpreted their distress at this suggestion that heaven might not be distant from earth as an indication of how important a notion of absolute alterity is to their religious lives. Even if all religion takes u p themes of alterity, not all religions put their stock in the kind of radical alterity in which Rom and Semai's version of Christianity is invested. To understand the nature of this kind of religion, I have turned to the axial age theorists who have developed an elaborate and useful typological account of religions that emphasize a strong relationship of alterity between the transcendental and the mundane. Pairing an account of axial cosmologies with the kind of earthly map of a world hierarchy of places that globalization has delivered to those living on its margins, I have also sought to explain why for Rom and Semai alterity has to have a place; why heaven has to be somewhere else. Jacka argues that it is important to the Ipili that heaven be a place because of the role places traditionally play for them of "verifying and historicizing personal and collective experiences" (2005: 644; see also 649). I would not dispute that something like this is true in the Urapmin case as well. But I would also add that heaven has to be a place for the Urapmin and for the Ipili because were it not to be one, it could not adequately provide them with terms in which to reckon with what they see as their geographically based marginality to the global system. By rendering so many people in the world "off-center" in their own lives, globalization has produced a deep pool of experienced alterity, a feeling that the real powers in the world are different from those people have previously known and that they come from elsewhere. Axial religions draw on this pool to fund their own global expansion. But what of the question asked in my title? T h o u g h I have hinted at an answer, I have yet to say whether or not the trans- in transnational is in fact the trans- in transcendent. My title echoes that of Appiah's influential essay "Is the Post- in Postmodern the Post- in Postcolonial?" (1991). Appiah's answer to the question posed by his title is a qualified yes, in that for African and Euro-American elites the post- in both cases signifies a rejection of previous legitimating narratives: the narrative of the progressive dominance of reason in the postmodern case and that of the colonial and postcolonial orders as the embodiments of such reason in the postcolonial one. As calls for a rejection of what has come before, both post- discourses have always pointed toward, among other things, the need for social reconstruction in a world where previous certainties no longer hold. In hindsight, it is not difficult to

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interpret the rise to p r o m i n e n c e o f both o f these discourses as early elite responses to the unsettling effects of neoliberal globalization o n the sureties o f Western t h o u g h t (a c o n c e r n that surfaces in A p p i a h ' s article in his discussion o f commoditization a n d the w i d e n i n g i n f l u e n c e o f the market). I would suggest that in the c o n t e m p o r a r y world axial religions carry similar tendencies toward rejection a n d renewal in the face o f globalization b e y o n d the high-culture enclaves A p p i a h so ably interrogates. In this chapter I have a r g u e d that the rapid global spread o f Pentecostal Christianity in the past several d e c a d e s has b o r n e o u t the truth o f this claim, a n d I have e x p l o r e d the role it has played in many places in h e l p i n g p e o p l e r e s p o n d to transnationally p r o d u c e d e n c o u n t e r s with different, more privil e g e d ways o f living by imagining a transcendental vantage point f r o m which to reconstruct their own lives. T h e c o n j u n c t i o n o f e x p a n d i n g transnational c o n n e c t e d n e s s a n d a rapid upsurge in c o m m i t m e n t to an axial religion that emphasizes the radical distinctiveness of the transcendental realm leads me, like A p p i a h , to answer my titular question in the affirmative. In both transnationalism and transcendence, the trans- signals the challenge o f distant or once-distant alterities to people's sense o f their own centrality. T h e recognition o f a world o f p e o p l e a n d things that originate b e y o n d the borders o f one's place and travel transnationally in ways local p e o p l e a n d things d o not travel forces a loss o f c o n f i d e n c e in the centrality o f o n e ' s place, as d o e s the idea o f heaven that is m o r e p e r f e c t than any place o n earth. Like postmodernism a n d postcolonialism, transnationalism a n d trans c e n d e n c e as I have discussed t h e m here are discourses that call for the rej e c t i o n o f things f r o m the past a n d the valorization of things to c o m e . But there is also an important d i f f e r e n c e . In p o s t m o d e r n i s m and postcolonialism, what is rejected is first a n d foremost past ideologies, whereas in transnationalist a n d transcendent t h o u g h t what is rejected is first a n d foremost the places in which the p e o p l e w h o take u p this t h o u g h t have lived. Such places are o f course m e t o n y m s for ideologies a n d ways of life that also have to b e overcome. But in the cases I have e x a m i n e d here, place is an irreducible part o f the p r o b l e m . As seen f r o m the margins, in the era o f globalization heaven o n earth is n o heaven at all.

NOTES

i. While I find Csordas's account of the way embodiment generates experiences of alterity quite compelling, I am not so convinced by his dismissal of Durkheim's (1995) claim that humans also inescapably experience society as at once intimate and alien. Csordas argues that Durkheim has mistaken a "specific instance" of alterity "for the general case—the alterity of the social for the general existential condition of alterity" (2004: 176). But humans are as inescapably socialized as they are embodied, and I find it hard to see these conditions as anything but equiprimoridal in

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human experience. I would therefore be inclined to argue that there are at least two elementary structures of alterity that shape the human condition and feed religious development. While this level of argument is not the one I pursue in the rest of this chapter, it might be interesting to think through the different ways social and embodied sources of alterity contribute to the experienced distinction between "the intimate alterity of the self" and "the imposing alterity of the wholly other" that is important to Csordas's (2004: 174) argument and that I will have occasion to refer to later in the text. 2. In this chapter, words in the Urap language are given in italics; those in Tok Pisin, the primary lingua franca of Papua New Guinea and a language that is important in Urapmin Christianity, are underlined.

REFERENCES Appadurai, Arjun 1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony 1991

"Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" Critical Inquiry

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Barrett, D. B., and T. M.Johnson 2002 "Global Statistics." In The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, edited by S. M. Burgess and E. M. van der Maas, 2 8 3 302. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Csordas, Thomas J . 2004 "Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion." Current Anthropology 45 (2): 1 6 3 - 8 5 . de Coppet, Daniel, and Andre Iteanu 1995

"Introduction." In Cosmos and Society in Oceania, edited by Daniel de Cop-

pet and Andre Iteanu, 1 - 1 9 . Oxford: Berg. DeBernardi, Jean 1999 "Spiritual Warfare and Territorial Spirits: The Globalization and Localisation of a 'Practical Theology.'" Religious Studies and Theology 18 (2): 66-96. Durkheim, Emil 1995 The Elementary Forms ofthe Religious Life. Translated by K. E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Eisenstadt, S. N. 1982 "The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendental Visions and the Rise of the Clerics." Archives Europeennes de Sociologie 23 (2): 2 9 4 - 3 1 4 . 1996 Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1 ggg Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: TheJacobin Dimension ofModernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000 "Multiple Modernities." Daedalus 1 2 9 (1): 1-29.

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2005 "Axial Civilizations and the Axial Age Reconsidered." In Axial Civilizations and World History, edited byj. P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and B. Wittrock, 531— 64. Leiden: Brill. Jacka, Jerry K. 2005 "Emplacement and Millennial Expectations in an Era of Development and Globalization: Heaven and the Appeal of Christianity for the Ipili." American Anthropologist 107 (4): 643-53. Jaspers, Karl 1953

The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by M. Bullock. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jebens, Holger 2005 Pathways to Heaven: Contesting Mainline and Fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea. New York: Berghahn. Jorgensen, Dan 2005 "Third Wave Evangelism and the Politics of the Global in Papua New Guinea: Spiritual Warfare and the Recreation of Place in Telefolmin." Oceania 75 (4): 4 4 4 - 6 1 . Knauft, Bruce M. 2002 Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, Birgit 1998 ' "Make a Complete Break with the Past': Memory and Postcolonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostal Discourse." In Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, edited by R. Werbner, 182-208. London: Zed Books. Robbins, Joel 2004a Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2004b "The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity." Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117-43. Tuzin, Donald 1QQ7 The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wagner, Peter 2005 "Palomar's Questions: The Axial Age Hypothesis, European Modernity and Historical Contingency." In Axial Civilizations and World History, edited by J.P. Arnason, S.N. Eisenstadt, and B. Wittrock, 87-106. Leiden: Brill.

Chapter 3

Global Religion and the Reenchantment of the World The Case of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal THOMAS J . CSORDAS

Christianity in its earliest phase of globalization spread on the power of a Church that was the dominant world institution of its time and later on the power of the colonial empires that were the dominant institutions of their time. No such dominant institution supports the current wave of globalization of Christianity, which often takes the form of Pentecostal or charismatic evangelization spread rapidly and dramatically by movements, ministries, fellowships, or independent denominations taking advantage of all the available technologies of travel and communication (Csordas 1992, ig95;Poewe 1994; Coleman 2000; Corten and Marshall-Fratini 2001; Robbins 2004). Among these forms of contemporary Christianity, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal is a movement that began in the United States within the Roman Catholic Church, synthesizing elements of Catholicism and Pentecostalism, with ecumenical leanings and a tropism toward development of intentional communities. I want to focus on this movement as an especially apt example of reglobalization (see the introduction), or perhaps planetarization (Melucci 1996), of world religions. To rehearse, in brief, the history of the movement, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal began in the United States in 1967, blending influences from the Cursillo movement that originated in Spain and the indigenous American enthusiasm of Protestant Pentecostalism. In the midst of 1960s cultural ferment, it promised a dramatic renewal of Church life based on a born-again spirituality of "personal relationship" with Jesus and direct access to divine power and inspiration through "spiritual gifts" or "charisms," including faith healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues. Adherents associated in informal prayer groups or tightly disciplined "covenant communities," with larger institutional structures taking the form of a National Service Committee in the United States in 1970 and an International Communications Office (ICO) 73

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in 1 9 7 5 . The latter began under the auspices of The Word of God covenant community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, subsequently moving to Brussels under the auspices of Cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens and finally to the center of the Catholic world in Rome, where it was renamed the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services (ICCRS). Pope Paul VI took note of the movement's existence as early as 1 9 7 1 and publicly addressed the movement's 1 9 7 5 International Conference in Rome. Pope J o h n Paul II continued to be generally supportive, apparently tolerating the movement's relatively radical theology for the sake of encouraging its markedly conservative politics, its militant activism for "traditional" values and against women's rights to contraception and abortion, and its encouragement of individual spirituality and contribution to parish activities and finances. In sum, there have been two principal modes of international expansion. Evidence suggests that the typical pattern for the movement's introduction in a Third World region was as follows: a missionary priest visited the United States, was exposed to Baptism of the Holy Spirit, organized a prayer group on his return, and subsequently called on outside help for doctrinal instruction or healing services. A class of Catholic healer-evangelists can be called on for such purposes. The ICCRS has become an instrumental clearinghouse in this respect through the retreats, workshops, leadership training, and newsletter that it sponsors. The second mechanism is via the communitarian branch of the movement. From very early on, some Charismatics wanted to live lives of greater commitment to spiritual ideals of Christian community than was found in weekly prayer groups. They began to adopt formal written documents, or covenants, that established basic rules of life and referred to the resulting groups as covenant communities. The Word of God Community, whose leaders founded the ICO/ICCRS, was among the earliest covenant communities. During the 1980s these groups began to affiliate, creating two broad-based international "communities of communities." The Word of God created a supercommunity called T h e Sword of the Spirit. Authoritarian and even apocalyptic tendencies within The Sword of the Spirit led to a split within The Word of God, with one of its two founding leaders remaining in the original community and founding an international charismatic evangelistic ministry focused on countries in Eastern Europe and Africa and the other remaining as president of The Sword of the Spirit. Today the Internet ethnographer can identify forty-seven member communities and sixteen affiliated communities globally. The second major network is called the Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities and Fellowships, which today includes thirty-four members, six communities in the process of becoming members, and three associate members. The cultural diacritic between the two major networks is that membership in The Sword of the Spirit is "ecumenical," meaning that non-Catholics can be members of the constituent communities while the Catholic Fraternity

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is restricted to Roman Catholic membership and is embraced by the Vatican by means of recognition "as a private association of the Christian faithful, of pontifical right and endowed with juridic personality, in accordance with the norms of canons 298-300, 3 0 4 - 3 2 9 . T h e s e covenant community networks are powerful transnational religious entities alongside the ICCRS. Given this formulation of the typical modes of the movement's transnational expansion, however, there is no consensus over whether the movement spread initially from a North American center and later from its official center in Rome or whether separate local movements eventually became coopted by the Charismatic Renewal and hence tied to its social center and ideological agenda. Setha Low (pers. com.) has suggested for Costa Rica and Johannes Fabian (1991) has documented for Zaire that non-Charismatic Catholic prayer groups began independently and were subsequendy co-opted into the international movement. In Zambia the movement had two origins, one with missionary priests and one with former Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo (1984). In Italy independent groups appear to have existed outside formal movement sanction (Pace 1978). Having followed the Catholic Charismatic Renewal since the early 1970s, when world systems theory (Wallerstein 1974) for the most part did not address religion and there was as yet no theoretical discourse on globalization, I have for some time imagined a study that could examine the multinational character of this movement. Such a study would require a team of ethnographers in different countries where the movement has taken root and a research presence at the ICCRS in the Vatican. The required resources would perhaps be prohibitive, but to my gratification there has begun to emerge a small but intriguing literature on the movement by ethnographers working independently of one another who have encountered the phenomenon in the field. In earlier writings I have presented descriptions from available sources of the movement's development in the United States, Quebec, France, Italy, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Nigeria, Zambia, Zaire, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan (Csordas 1992, 1994, 1995, 1997)- In this chapter I update these accounts with recent material from India, Brazil, and Nigeria, then proceed to some reflections on what the Charismatic Renewal has to teach us on the theme of religion and globalization.

INDIA

As in many countries, the Charismatic Renewal was introduced to India in the early 1970s. By 1976 a national convention in Bombay attracted 1,500 registered delegates, and another in 1978 attracted 3,500, including Cardinal Lawrence Picachy of Calcutta, along with the archbishops of Bombay and Hyderabad and the bishops of Quilon and Kottar. Adjunct to the conven-

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tion were a leaders' conference, two priests' retreats, and a three-day leaders' seminar on healing conducted by the renowned Francis MacNutt, at the time still a Dominican priest. A report in the movement's international newsletter in 1986 cited the spread of the movement into rural northwestern India, and one in 1994 documented evangelization into tribal areas of northeastern India bordering on China. The movement is perhaps most prominent in the southwestern state of Kerala, where there is a concentration of Catholics following Syro-Malabar, Syro-Malankara, and Latin rites. In 1987 a priest of the Vincentian Congregation named Mathew Naickomparambil received a divine inspiration to transform his small prayer group at Potta into a healing ministry, which has since grown into a veritable moral metropole within the movement, even bragging its own train station. Daylong healing services attract as many as 5,000 to 10,000 attendees, foreigners as well as people from all across India, apparently including substantial numbers of non-Christians. Six kilometers from the church/ashram, the group has built its Divine Retreat Centre, where weeklong retreats are conducted for as many as 10,000 and up to 20,000 in the summer season, with preaching from 6:30 A.M. until 10:00 P.M. simultaneously in six auditoriums: in the buildings on one side of the road services are conducted in Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu, and in those on the other side are services in English, Konkani, Hindi, and Kannada. Mental patients are excluded from retreats, and instead their family members are instructed to attend as surrogates. The anthropologist Murphy Halliburton (2000) visited Potta in 1997 and reported that during the weeklong retreat participants are not allowed to leave the grounds, nor are they permitted to drink or smoke. The facilities are impressive, with physicians, bookstores, snack bars, and pharmacies onsite and the auditoriums large enough to hold several thousand people. He described the atmosphere as "like that of a major rock concert in a big stadium, only with more facilities." He was also able to see patient wards, including a locked ward for alcoholics, where television monitors constantly show what is transpiring onstage in the auditorium. Halliburton's informant indicated that about 60 percent of those at the Retreat Centre are patients with a variety of medical problems, including psychiatric and substance abuse problems; many others come for issues such as marital problems, infertility, or other life difficulties, and about 1 o percent come 'just for prayer." Of critical import for our discussion is not only that Potta has become a destination for foreigners and non-Christians, or that Father Naickomparambil and his colleagues conduct retreats and services throughout India, but also that they have an energetic presence in North America and Europe. For example, its Web site announced a five-week, nine-stop tour of the United States and a Bible conference in Germany and listed numerous contacts among past retreat participants from the United States, England, and Germany.

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Matthew Schmalz (1998, 1999, 2002) has documented a series of striking postmodern dislocations and juxtapositions of Hindu and Catholic elements on the level of personal transformation through Catholic charismatic healing in North India. He describes the healing ministry of Jude, a lay Catholic South Indian living in a North Indian city sacred to Hindus, who attracts both Catholic Charismatic and Hindu supplicants. Jude was a repentant alcoholic and womanizer who relocated following a dishonorable discharge from the military and a failed business venture selling an Ayurvedic remedy for sexual impotence and subsequently returned to the Church and j o i n e d the Charismatic Renewal on the advice of a confessor. T h e crossfertilization of Hinduism and Catholicism appears on several levels in the account of Jude's healing ministry. T h e forms of empowerment he deploys include the readily recognizable Charismatic "spiritual gift" of "discernment," a form of divine inspiration that allows him to identify the problems of supplicants, often embodying their afflictions himself as cues to their nature. They also include an authenticating narrative of a miraculous birth in which during a medical crisis he was surgically removed and replaced into his mother's womb, a theme paralleled in myths of the births of Krishna, Mahavira, Buddha, and Parikshit. O n the level of disjunction in practice and interpretation, Schmalz recounts the case of a female patient who, experiencing disturbing visions of three men who appeared to be traditional Hindu bkut or pret spirits, was brought to the Catholic healer by a Protestant lawyer convinced of the Satanic identity of the spirits. T h e Catholic healer attributed the problem instead to the effects of sin and troubled interpersonal relations but was understood by the patients' parents in terms of a Hindu paradigm of the body's response to purifying fluids when the patient was blessed with Catholic holy water. Homologies in ritual symbolism appear in the juxtapositions of the Christian Eucharist and the eating of prasad, or food left over from offerings to the Hindu deities, of the Christian scapular and the rakhi, or wrist string worn as protection, of Christian holy water and water or milk used to ritually cool the Hindu deities, of prayerful repetition of the name of Jesus and the H i n d u use of mantra, of the Charismatic blowing of a blessing in a supplicant's face and the parallel Hindu practice of duha. Again, that such parallels can be f o u n d is predictable; what is of interest is whether and the way in which they are thematized in practice. For instance, the healer Jude strenuously objected to equation of repeating the name ofJesus with the "pagan" practice of uttering mantras but quite unselfconsciously blew his blessings in a way that would not be recognized by Catholic Charismatics elsewhere. Finally, in several ways Indian and non-Indian notions become inextricably conflated, as in the healer's implicit understanding of sin not necessarily as a matter of intent but as one of contamination by the acts of others, implying an Ayurvedic conception of the body in terms of vital fluids passing through

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channels, such that the effect of sin is that it "occludes the flow of grace as it ripens or hardens in the body" (Schmalz 1999: 32). T h e outlines traced by the Potta p h e n o m e n o n o n and by this interface between Hinduism and Catholicism, and the points of both syncretism and contradiction that become highlighted in such accounts, are more than jarring anomalies; they are symptomatic of the simultaneous pull toward universal culture and postmodern cultural fragmentation that characterizes the global condition of religion. A final dimension is added by the work of the anthropologist Corinne Dempsey (2001) on Christianity in Kerala with respect to competition between indigenous Syrian Christianity purportedly introduced by Thomas the Apostle in the first century and Roman Christianity forcibly imposed by Portuguese colonialists in the sixteenth century. She recounts a conversation with a priest whose denunciation of Western influences included everything from the Portuguese to contemporary culture (which he claimed was undermining the faith of young people in particular), but who was optimistic in part because of the Charismatic Renewal. She notes the irony in the fact that the movement itself is an import from the United States but resolves the irony by suggesting, "The Charismatic movement has been assimilated and transformed by the Kerala Catholic community. . . . [DJomestic adoption of this 'Western' movement seems to have been so thorough as to enable it to be wielded by and on behalf of Malayali Christians as a means to combat what it used to be itself: 'Western' influence" (2001: 32). Dempsey interprets this in light of Homi Bhabha's understanding of how hybridity reverses the effects of "colonialist disavowal," that is, of the rhetorical/ideological assertion of sameness that masks domination. T h e hybrid assertion of sameness, in this instance participation in a purportedly universal and h o m o g e n e o u s international movement under allegiance to Rome, in effect is not only a strategy for autonomy, but has the potential to subtly transform the center. In this sense the empirical fascination of the Charismatic Renewal is that there is no bipolarity between colonist and colonizer but a multinational religious conglomerate that invites the layering of hybridity upon syncretism upon synthesis in a universal culture that is not polyglot but glossolalic.

BRAZIL

My initial observation must be that Brazil, unlike India, is a predominantly Catholic country, and therefore the cultural landscape in which the Charismatic Renewal can move differs in precisely this most significant way. T h e Charismatic Renwal was introduced to Brazil in Sao Paulo by Jesuit priests from the United States, by one account in 1969 and by another in 1972. By 1992 the movement's international office reported 2 million Catholic Charismatics in Brazil. T h e estimated number of followers in 1994 according to

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Pierucci and Prandi (1995) was 3.8 million. T h e Charismatic Renewal has been reported to be largely a p h e n o m e n o n of the middle class since de Oliveira's 1978 article, when participants numbered only in the thousands, through Prandi's 1997 work (Prandi 1997: 159-62). A m o n g the many Charismatic prayer groups and communities in Brazil, the Catholic Fraternity covenant community network has three affiliates in Brazil, while T h e Sword of the Spirit has none. T h e literature I have relied on for India was produced by young ethnographers from the United States. For Brazil the literature on the Charismatic Renewal is the work of Brazilian anthropologists. Uniformly they situate their analyses in relation to four cultural forces within the Brazilian religious landscape: popular Catholicism, with its devotion to Mary and the saints; liberation theology, with its base communities; Protestant Pentecostalism; and the dynamic between clerics and laity (Maues 1998; Steil 2001, 2004; Braga 2004; de Oliveira 2004; de Theije 2004). Much less attention is given in these works to the movement's relations with spiritism and the Afro-Brazilian religions that are so prominent in the literature on Brazilian religion. T h e r e is a sense that the movement has imposed itself on the religious scene in a striking and unavoidable fashion. O n e author, Raymundo Heraldo Maues (1998), begins his discussion by saying that his initial interest was in popular Catholicism in rural Para state, but his attention was "powerfully diverted" by the lay participants in the Charismatic Renewal in the city of Belém. T h e research of Carlos Steil—at the other end of the country, in Porto A l e g r e — originally focused on contemporary apparitions of the Virgin Mary, but his attention was drawn to the involvement of Charismatics in activities of the faithful surrounding these apparitions (Steil 2001; Steil and Mariz et al. 2003). T h e work of Maria José Alves De A b r e u (2002) examines the manner in which Charismatic experience is understood as unmediated access to the divine not only in relation to the Church as the traditional mediator of religious experience for its faithful but also, and especially, in relation to the electronic media, in the manipulation of which the movement has exhibited a certain virtuosity. T h e issue is the possibility of "transferring an idea concerning non-mediation to the very core of the media sphere" such that "the T V screen is not so much about images as about revelatory communication." This is in effect the question of whether televangelism is conceived in terms of transparency and immediacy or opacity and mediatization. In other words, the problem for Charismatics is how to maintain the "principle of subjectivity," or the fundamental experiential postulate that the imitation of Christ "is an inward process of imitation, a spiritual resemblance, which stems from a presence rather than a mere representation enacted on stage." She looks at two of the most visible Charismatic media presences in Brazil, the C a n g i o Nova Media System of Communication and the ministry

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o f the evangelistic healing priest Marcelo Rossi. C a n g a o Nova is o n e o f the original a n d best-known Brazilian Charismatic communities, with twelve b r a n c h e s t h r o u g h o u t Brazil, two in Portugal, a n d o n e in R o m e , facilities o n c a m p u s for retreats a n d services as well as broadcasting a n d publishing, a n d o n e hundred fifty transmission antennas across the country as well as Internet broadcasting. Rossi is a h a n d s o m e priest, in his late thirties, w h o has comp o s e d many devotional songs a n d is widely known for elaborate Masses "of cure a n d liberation o f bad energies, d u r i n g which p e o p l e p a r t i c i p a t e ] in what h e califs] the 'aerobics o f Jesus,'" Masses that are in e f f e c t Charismatic pageants p e r f o r m e d in f r o n t o f large audiences. De A b r e u (2002) sees both p h e n o m e n a as reflecting "the extent to which the Chrismatic Renewal has gradually moved f r o m the intimate space o f the prayer g r o u p (grupo de ora(ao) to the big stadiums a n d the global media space." A key event in De A b r e u ' s a c c o u n t is a gathering at which Rossi, r e g a r d e d by some both within a n d outside the m o v e m e n t as a marginal loner w h o has b e c o m e m o r e a showman than a Charismatic leader, consorting with celebrities a n d film stars, was r e c o g n i z e d by the p r e e m i n e n t m o v e m e n t leader and f o u n d e r of C a n g a o Nova, Father Jonas A b i b , as having b e e n the victim o f enemies o f the Renewal. As h e called o n the crowd, including those watching o n television, to collectively pray f o r a n d lay hands o n Rossi, the latter fell o n his knees, awash in tears, a n d A b i b cried o u t that the m o v e m e n t b e l o n g e d to the masses a n d participants should n o t b e afraid to say so. De A b r e u marshals several important observations to a c c o u n t for this event. She points out that unlike b o t h popular Catholicism a n d liberation theology, the Charismatic Renewal is "compatible with the urban segmentation o f identities a n d spatial f r a g m e n t a t i o n " and, further, that it holds the "idea that it is n o t the c o n t e n t per se, but the f o r m a n d means of dealing with symbols a n d images that distinguish the movement." T h e m o v e m e n t is in part predicated o n the f u n d a m e n t a l n e e d to transmit the Word o f G o d by testimony, prophecy, a n d healing, but "as a result o f the mass media, the gift o f transmission, which should b e a sign o f inward spirituality, b e c o m e s an outward token o f p o p u larity." In sum, there are two contradictory effects o f mediatization. In D e A b r e u ' s words: 1) While Charismatics initially wanted to change the meanings attached to sanctity by redefining the borders between this world and the other, the media has created a new divide, jeopardizing the distinction between a living icon and an icon of idolatry. 2) [M] edia can enhance and reproduce the logic of charismatic embodiment and transform frozen images into "lively" ones. Since this reformulation depends on the primacy of the Charismatic self, the dynamic character of the mass media reaffirms the notion of "living icons" rather than that of religious representations.

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Thus, the famous healing priest, by falling on his knees and allowing himself to be prayed over in public, was saved for the movement from becoming a representation, a creature of the virtual reality of media stardom. Carlos Steil (2001) takes up the encounter between the Charismatic Renewal and apparitions of the Virgin Mary, another prominent phenomenon of contemporary Catholicism. He sees this encounter in terms of a multiple intersection or syncretism between Pentecostalism and Catholicism, popular Catholicism and the Charismatic Renewal, tradition and modernity; one might add the intersection between the local and the global in the precise sense in which Steil, while placing the Brazilian apparitions firmly in the Brazilian context, recognizes the Marian apparition of 1981 in the Croatian village of Medjugorje as the transnational prototype of a new mode of performativity in the historical genre of Marian apparitions. Moreover, whereas for the Indian situation Dempsey invoked Bhabha's notion of an inversion of the colonialist disavowal of difference, Steil (2001) invokes Bhabha's notion of the narrative ambivalence of disjunctive temporalities and significations. He discusses an apparition in Taquari in ig88 and juxtaposes it to a similar recent phenomenon known as the Piedade de Gerais. In both cases Charismatics were involved from the outset, some moving to live in the locality of the apparitions while at the same time deploying their access to media to transmit the message beyond the locality as one of universal significance. In Taquari they went so far as to acquire control of a local radio station. In the case of the Piedade do Gerais, not only did the Charismatic ethos penetrate the community of local devotees, but the Charismatics became a network of support for disseminating the event, assisting the original visionaries in their travel to other cities and even to Europe. A different outcome was at hand in Taquari, where the Franciscan friars who ran the parish developed strategies of control, suppressing the Charismatic gift of prophecy by limiting it to one individual of their choice, disallowing it in the chapel and restricting it to the sacristy, subjecting it to the scrutiny of a committee, and allowing it to be disseminated only in writing. Their rationale was the desire to protect the faith of the poor from the implicit standpoint of a liberation theology suspicious of the bourgeois Charismatics. Steil's discussion emphasizes the issue of mediation in a number of ways that complement and enrich the discussion by De Abreu. Beyond the use of the mass electronic media, the mediation achieved by middle-class social capital, and the use of science as a medium of authentication rather than of debunking the experience of visionaries, performance of the genre of Charismatic ritual language known as prophecy is critical in this respect. Prophecy is the most typically Charismatic among Charismatic media and epitomizes the notion of transparency and immediacy of access to the divine, for it is an inspired first-person utterance in which the ultimate speaker is understood to be God (note that I am referring to the genre as the medium, not

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the person m a k i n g the utterance, as is typically implied in referring to spirit possession). T h e transmutation o f the g e n r e between the Charismatic context a n d the c o n t e x t o f apparitions in p o p u l a r Catholicism consists in the fact that the speaker is n o l o n g e r G o d but the Virgin. However, the implications are far greater. Certainly o n e o f t h e m is the appropriation o f discourse f r o m the local visionaries by the translocal Charismatics. B u t o n an experiential level there is a m o v e m e n t o f revelation f r o m the apparition in the f o r m o f an externality to the e x p e r i e n c e o f p r o p h e c y as an "inner locution," contributing to the subjectivity and reflexivity characteristic of the Charismatic sacred self. Steil (2001) reports that in Taquari eventually even o n e of the original visionaries b e g a n to recast h e r e x p e r i e n c e in terms o f such inner locutions. O n the sensory level this marks a p r o f o u n d shift away f r o m a visual orientation, with images o f the Virgin, the d a n c i n g sun, and the w e e p i n g tree as emblems f o r a fixed message or series o f secrets to b e transmitted f r o m the Virgin t h r o u g h the visionaries to the faithful, a n d toward an auditory/oral m o d a l i t y — o n e that is indeterminately productive/generative as new prophecies are received. A n d to the extent that the prophets include m e m b e r s o f a c o m m u n i t y n o t limited to the original visionaries, the revelatory inspiration is dispersed a m o n g a field o f the faithful that has the potential to exp a n d indefinitely a n d on a global scale. Steil summarizes nicely: Insofar as the clergy seeks to define truth from outside the event, by the authority of the Church, the Charismatics want to produce a truth through the adherence of a constantly increasing—that is, within a specific mode of temporality— number of devotees. What is more, it is critical to observe that [ironically or not] the criterion applied by Charismatics also belongs to Catholic orthodoxy, which recognizes the sensufideliumas a secure basis for defining a dogma or recognizing the authenticity of a divine manifestation. (2001: 139) This is the globalization o f religion o n the level o f populations, spreading devotees in networks o f c o m m u n i t i e s that create styles o f intersubjectivity a n d intercorporeality t h r o u g h a d h e r e n c e to c o m m o n experiential modalities a n d performative genres. Steil (2004) also observes that the Charismatic Renewal is not only a synthesis between Catholic and Pentecostal ritual forms; its activities provide a revolving d o o r o p e n i n g on to both Catholicism a n d Pentecostalism for participants a n d thus f o r m i n g a threshold between the two f o r m s o f religious sociality. In this process, aspiration to a universal culture (or, in i n d i g e n o u s terms, to the task of bringing about the K i n g d o m of G o d ) exists in generative tension with the cultural prismatics of diverse settings a n d syncretistic opportunities crisscrossed by transnational m e d i a activities of healing and evangelization (or, in indigenous terms, the m o v e m e n t o f the Holy Spirit a m o n g the people).

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NIGERIA

Pentecostalism e x e r t e d an i n f l u e n c e o n the religious s c e n e in N i g e r i a f r o m v e r y early o n , t a k i n g the f o r m o f the A l a d u r a c h u r c h e s d e s c r i b e d by H a r o l d W. T u r n e r (1967) a n d j . D. Y. Peel (1968), as well as the classical Pentecostal d e n o m i n a t i o n s . Neo-Pentecostalism or Charismatic Christianity is discussed by Matthews A . O j o (1988), w h o observes that this wave o f P e n t e costalism originated in the early 1970s a m o n g college students and university g r a d u a t e s o f various d e n o m i n a t i o n s . As in m a n y settings a r o u n d the g l o b e , a p r i m a r y e m p h a s i s is divine h e a l i n g , b u t in a d d i t i o n t h e r e is m u c h attention to restitution "for o n e ' s past sins, mistakes, a n d every sort o f unchristian act" ( O j o 1988: 184), r e f l e c t i n g aspects o f the traditional Y o r u b a c o n c e r n f o r purification. Restitution o f t e n takes the f o r m o f r e t u r n i n g stolen articles, w h i c h O j o interprets as a r e a c t i o n against the quest f o r material wealth foll o w i n g the N i g e r i a n oil b o o m o f the 1970s a n d w h i c h was d u p l i c a t e d duri n g the m i d - 1 9 9 0 s a m o n g students at A m e r i c a n Christian colleges in a wave o f p u b l i c confessionals quite likely in reaction against the quest f o r wealth d u r i n g the " y u p p i e m e - g e n e r a t i o n " o f the 1980s. Restitution a p p l i e d to marriage assumes the g r e e d o f a polygynous m a n w h o makes a m e n d s by divorcing all b u t his first wife ( O j o 1988: 1 8 4 - 8 5 ) . Specifically a m o n g Catholics, by 1 9 7 6 the m o v e m e n t ' s first national leade r s h i p c o n f e r e n c e in B e n i n City attracted 1 1 0 participants a n d h a d official s u p p o r t f r o m the local b i s h o p . In 1 9 8 3 the N a t i o n a l A d v i s o r y C o u n c i l was f o r m e d to oversee m o v e m e n t activities. A c c o r d i n g to Bastian (2002), by the late 1980s born-again neo-Pentecostalism was w i d e s p r e a d in s o u t h e r n N i g e ria a n d the n o t i o n o f charisms or spiritual gifts was intriguing to many Protestants a n d Catholics, with n u m b e r s o f a d h e r e n t s skyrocketing d u r i n g the 1990s a n d the m o v e m e n t highly m e d i a t i z e d by the 2000s. Particularly striki n g is the p o p u l a r i t y o f "spiritual w a r f a r e " against Satan a n d his l e g i o n o f d e m o n i c spirits, in N i g e r i a a u g m e n t e d by t h e s e d u c t i v e sea spirit M a m i Wata ( Q u e e n o f the Coast) a n d a variety o f ancestral spirits, t h r o u g h the f o r m o f h e a l i n g called " d e l i v e r a n c e " as p o p u l a r i z e d by N o r t h A m e r i c a n n e o Pentecostals (Bastian 2002). In the early 2000s Catholic Charismatic regional integration was m a n i f e s t in events such as the I n t e r n a t i o n a l Praise a n d Worship W o r k s h o p , o r g a n i z e d by the A n g l o p h o n e West A f r i c a n C o - o r d i n a t i n g T e a m Services a n d d r a w i n g eighty-five participants f r o m N i g e r i a a n d G h a n a . The firstjointFrancophone-Anglophone Charismatic e v e n t w a s held in 2002, a n d in 2004 the C o u n c i l o f the C a t h o l i c Charismatic R e n e w a l f o r A n g l o p h o n e A f r i c a h a d as part o f its a g e n d a the organization o f a pan-African event in 2006. Francis M a c N u t t ( 1 9 7 5 ) , the first a n d m o s t widely k n o w n a m o n g A m e r ican C a t h o l i c C h a r i s m a t i c healers, r e c o u n t s a C h a r i s m a t i c retreat in N i g e -

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ria in w h i c h traditional deities were cast o u t or "delivered" as o c c u l t spirits, i n c l u d i n g the following case o f a man in B e n i n City: An outstanding Catholic Layman, he was a convert who had been brought up in the old religion. He discovered as a child that after certain practices of dedication his toes were affected by a divining spirit. If the day of his plans were to be propitious, one toe would pinch him; if they were to be unlucky, a different toe would pinch. Consequently, he came to plan his life around these omens, which he said always came true, even if he tried to disregard them. When he desired to pray out loud at our retreat, however, his unpropitious toe began to act up; at this point, he decided that these strange manifestations must be from an evil spirit and had to be renounced. (9) T h i s incident is a variant of the time-honored Catholic strategy of ritual incorporation o f i n d i g e n o u s practices, based o n acceptance o f their existential reality but negation o f their spiritual value, c o n d e m n i n g them as inspired by the d e m o n i c forces of Satan. T h e anthropologist Misty Bastian e n c o u n t e r e d the Catholic Charismatic Renewal d u r i n g the 1980s in the ethnically I g b o southeast o f Nigeria, where Catholicism is the d o m i n a n t f o r m o f Christianity. Bastian (2005) describes a male healer-visionary firmly e n s c o n c e d in the official C h u r c h networks a n d e n d o r s e d by the hierarchy and a f e m a l e healer-visionary w h o was both explicitly criticized by h e r male c o u n t e r p a r t a n d marginalized by the C h u r c h hierarchy. Both healers were most active f r o m the mid-1980s t h r o u g h the early 1990s. We can interpret Bastian's a c c o u n t as an excellent e x a m p l e o f how the Charismatic Renewal can b e seen as a discrete interactional milieu in w h i c h cultural tensions between tradition a n d modernity, and between male and female, are played out. Father E d e h was a mainstream priest whose ministry was at least initially supported by his colleagues in the C h u r c h hierarchy, a n d appreciated as an overt c o u n t e r b a l a n c e to the appeal o f Protestant Pentecostalism. H e was academically trained at a U.S. university a n d had published a b o o k titled Igbo Metaphysics, based o n e t h n o g r a p h i c fieldwork, with Loyola University Press. His ministry was highly mediatized, a n d h e was building a cathedral a n d prayer c o m p o u n d at his h o m e parish, to a c c o m m o d a t e the press as well as day trippers a n d campers wanting to e x p e r i e n c e healing prayer, while at the same time traveling to c o n d u c t open-air rallies and healing masses througho u t Igboland. His ministry was in decline by the late 1990s, according to Bastian, in part because his followers did not see e n o u g h o f the miracles they e x p e c t e d , because his reputation was c o m p r o m i s e d by involvement in commercial activities, a n d because a variety o f o t h e r spiritual options h a d e m e r g e d to c o m p e t e with him. Sister Kate was a y o u n g w o m a n w h o described herself as having three occupations: housewife, hospital worker, a n d prophet. She h a d e x p e r i e n c e d

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visions since her youth in the 1960s, beginning at her First Communion. Alienated from her family in part because of her spiritual characteristics, her father disinherited her and she found a haven among Protestant Pentecostals. Eventually she became reinvolved in the Catholic Church and began exercising her spiritual gifts of healing and prophecy in the 1970s against the background of the Charismatic Renewal. She carried out her ministry entirely from her home, remaining deferential to a disapproving pastor by continuing to attend Mass but abstaining from the sacraments in order to avoid confrontation. During the Marian year of 1987 she heard increasingly from both Mary and the Holy Spirit and was banned from her parish and eventually excommunicated from the Church. The contrast between these two healers plays out a variety of crisscrossing themes in the dynamics between tradition and modernity, male and female. The power manifest in Edeh's ministry could have a remote effect through notes submitted with prayer requests or holy water blessed by the priest to protect against theft, to expose witchcraft, or to tap the healer's power, whereas Kate's power was manifest only in direct personal contact, by granting individualized attention to each patient. Geographically, Edeh's activities and reputation extended throughout Igboland, whereas Kate's ministry was localized in her home and parish. Edeh's group disseminated items such as bumper stickers and preprinted prayers, engaging in a variety of commercial ventures, whereas Kate had no merchandise and merely charged a nominal fee for those who registered by number for her consultations. Edeh's activities invoked the power of literacy both through preprinted prayers and through the practice of submitting written prayer requests, whereas Kate's communication with her followers was exclusively oral. Edeh attributed his inspiration for the most part to the Holy Spirit, whereas Kate claimed inspiration from both the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. Edeh's prayers and revelations were primarily directed toward healing, whereas Kate engaged in both healing and prophecy. Kate's prophetic messages often included quite precise predictions of personal tragedy—a feature that was likely perceived by religious authorities as a focus on the negative and hence spiritually suspect—as well as of the dark political times under the regime of General Ababcha. Whereas Edeh gave prominence to the struggle against evil and countering witchcraft, Kate in addition placed considerable emphasis on healing barrenness in her female clients. Finally, Father Edeh preached spiritual submissiveness, whereas the life, work, and demeanor of Sister Kate was a testimony to spiritual and personal independence. Indeed, Sister Kate explicitly described herself as "modern," and Bastian describes her not only as a full-time career hospital worker but also in terms of her demure but contemporary attire, in contrast to the black clothing of the traditional Igbo visionary woman who never bathes and is either sexually submissive or celibate. It was likewise striking that during Bastian's in-

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terview with her, Sister Kate remained seated while a male follower stood in her presence, an explicit reversal of traditional gender dominance. In this context it is noteworthy that Father Edeh made overt public attacks on Sister Kate, saying that she was inspired by Satan and a manifestation of Mami Wata, the archetypal urban witch. A m o n g the stories of Edeh's healings is one about a rich woman who obtained her money by witching and killing her husband and who repented when touched with holy water blessed by Edeh. Again, sick children w h o were in fact enchanted dada twins turned into serpents when sprinkled with holy water, the moral of the incident being that bringing animal spirits into a patrilineage through bestial adultery is to be condemned. According to Bastian, this Edeh story bears the antifemale message that multiple births are bad; for Sister Kate, multiple births were signs of blessing and double evidence of the healer's success in relieving barrenness. In sum, this Nigerian case outlines the convergence of Igbo culture, in which it is more common to encounter male than female dibia, or diviners, and Catholic culture, which is characterized by an age-old tension between female visionary experience and male hierarchical control or suppression of such experience. Although males have never been excluded from such visionary experience, in the Charismatic Renewal males as well as females have relatively equal access to the "gifts of the Spirit," or charisms, with the overall apparent result of further strengthening the framework of patriarchal domination. All these interwoven themes and contrasts merit further examination in the Igbo context and could well constitute an outline for comparative examination of local instantiations of the global Charismatic Renewal.

CHARISMATIC PERMUTATIONS OF T R A N S N A T I O N A L TRANSCENDENCE

When I began to examine the international expansion of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the mid- 1970s there was no scholarly language of globalization to support the discussion. What we had was the initial wave of world systems theory (Wallerstein 1974), which paid virtually n o attention to the cultural dimension or to the existence of religion. O n e can point only to Maurice Godelier's ( 1 9 7 7 ) discussion of religion and ideology in the Inca "world-empire" and to a few later articles by Robert Wuthnow (1980) and Roland Robertson (1989, 1992; Robertson and Chirico 1985). In a review article Chirot and Hall noted that "along with the material world-system there is an ideological o n e " (1982: 90), and Wallerstein eventually addressed issues of ideology (1983) and culture (1990). This was particularly problematic, since a world system was supposed to be a complete social system and therefore must be expected to have all the institutional dimensions of a social system, including religion. In this climate I reverted to describing the movement as a "religious multinational" in analogy to multinational corporations that were beginning to attract attention with respect to the interplay

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of local and global economic forces and the influential intentional communities that were the center of much Charismatic activity as "moral metropoles" in analogy to the center-periphery imagery of dependency theory. 2 T h e Charismatic Renewal today still offers an opportunity to examine the nexus of local and global insofar as transnational influences within the movement, including highly mobile healing ministries and highly organized evangelism such as that associated with Ralph Martin's "Fire Rallies," intersect with prayer groups and communities embedded in the religious life of distinct cultural settings. Likewise, the Renewal offers the opportunity to examine the center-periphery relation with respect to its orientation toward Rome and its embeddedness in distinct local cultural milieus. T h e three comparative cases I have discussed based on recently published scholarly material represent three continents and perhaps not coincidentally come from populous countries each of which is recognized as the most dynamic and diverse nation on its continent. Standing economically between the developed and developing worlds, these three crucibles of globalization may also be points of convergence between the fetishization of commodities and the fetishization of experience, and hence crucibles of religious ferment and reenchantment. Part of this is certainly related to the technological possibilities for mediatization of spirituality in these nearly developed nations. A t the same time, specificities of the cultural milieu in these countries offer intriguing grounds for further comparison of Charismatic permutations. Brazil is a predominantly Catholic nation where the Renewal interacts with strong Marian traditions, Kardecist spiritism, and the gamut of Afro-Brazilian religions. Nigeria is an ethnically diverse nation where Catholicism is strongest among the Igbo and the Renewal exists in relation to traditional religion in the local setting and within the Christian/Islamic dynamic on the national scene. India's Catholic population tends to be concentrated regionally in the southwest, and the Renewal exists in relation to Hindu and Muslim traditions. T h e dimensions of comparison multiply if one considers the varying contours of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal around the globe (Csordas 1997). T h e relative roles of clergy and laity participating in the movement constitutes one such dimension: the Renewal in Canada emphasizes its distinctiveness from the U.S. branch of the movement by highlighting the prominent role of the clergy. T h e degree of U.S. influence is varyingly acknowledged, for example, in France, with the caveat that the flavor of the movement was quickly nationalized toward French sensibilities. T h e relative role of missionaries from various religious orders and of covenant communities from the United States and France also affects the tenor of transnational transcendence within the movement. Differing patterns of penetration to ethnic Catholics in multicultural societies such as the United States and to indigenous groups such as the Mapuche in Chile or the Navajo in the United States

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can be traced. Some countries entertain more than one strand of what is ostensibly the same Renewal: Italy has a strand associated with the international movement that includes both prayer groups and communities and another composed of conservative and elderly people oriented toward experiencing and documenting charismas; Zambia has a branch started by Irish missionaries and a branch started by the indigenous Archbishop Milingo; Zaire has charismatiques, w h o participate in organized prayer groups with an identified leader and emphasis on charisms, and the renouveau, composed of young educated urbanites whose practice emphasizes group prayer. Adherents in some countries can cite precedents for the Renewal or for orientation toward the Holy Spirit. In the United States it was the Cursillo movement; in the C o n g o it was the Jamaa movement; Hungary had the Social Mission Society founded in 1908 and the Holy Spirit Society f o u n d e d in the 1930s. Various patterns of transclass alliances in the name of helping the poor and in competition with social justice Catholicism can be identified in a number of countries, particularly in Latin America. T h e r e is variation in the relative importance of ritual healing, especially deliverance from evil spirits, in countries where the encounter with "paganism" in the form of indigenous religion or of New A g e spirituality is prominent. In some instances the Renewal may be part of a broader shift in the entire religious landscape; for example, in Indonesia it has been reported that the main distinction within the Christian community is no longer between Catholic and Protestant but between Charismatic/Pentecostal and non-Charismatic, or between "those who clap in church and those who don't." Equally as interesting as examining relations within the Charismatic Renewal between the global and the local, or the center and the periphery, is to recognize in this and perhaps other contemporary transnational religious p h e n o m e n a a tension between the impulse toward a universal culture and the tendency for postmodern cultural fragmentation. I shall frame the poles of this tension with two images. In 2001 I was poised to reinitiate my study of the Charismatic Renewal after a ten-year hiatus. I learned that the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services in Rome was planning to hold a seminar in the Mediterranean on the topic of deliverance from evil spirits led by a leading expert on this form of healing, a Portuguese-surnamed priest from the west of India. This seminar, intended as advanced training for those from around the world who already had experience in the deliverance ministry, appeared to present an ideal opportunity for me to gain an initial sense of cross-cultural variation in the encounter with evil spirits, as well as to develop a set of contacts that could be pursued with subsequent visits to the field. Mobilizing some of my old contacts among movement leadership, I obtained the letter of sponsorship required to register for the seminar—a prerequisite intended to ensure the necessary level of spiritual maturity and legitimacy among partici-

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pants, who would be dealing with the sensitive issues of casting out demons, and certainly necessary for a movement outsider such as myself. Then, just as the preparations were under way, I learned that the seminar had been canceled for lack of sufficient participants. The reason, however—and this is the point of the story—was not that there was insufficient interest or that the likely candidates could not afford the expense of travel but that the Portuguese Indian priest had already presented his experiences among so many Charismatics in so many settings around the world that those who would have participated appear to have judged that the experience would be redundant. The voice for a universal culture of healing had preempted itself from drawing into the center that which it had already sallied forth to touch in its indigenous setting. Given Velho's (this volume) discussion of inculturation, we cannot predict whether an encounter among healers with diverse experiences might have called into question rather than promoted the homogenizing goals of the event. The image of cultural fragmentation, on the other hand, is contained in the story of Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo of Lusaka, Zambia. Quite independently of any broader movement, Milingo had begun to practice faith healing in 1973 (Milingo 1984; ter Haar 1987, 1992). In 1976, however, he established a relationship with The Word of God Catholic Charismatic Community in the United States and founded his own Divine Providence Community. In 1979 the archbishop was a prominent participant in a Charismatic pilgrimage to Lourdes. His teachings exhibited a simultaneous "indigenization" of Charismatic ritual healing and a "Charismatization" of a distinctly African form of Christian healing. More remarkable, however, is that within a decade his healing ministry had created such controversy that he was recalled to Rome. There he was detained and interrogated, and he eventually relinquished his ecclesiastical post. In return he was granted an appointment as Special Delegate to the Pontifical Commission for Migration and Tourism, with the freedom to travel (except to Zambia), and was reassured by the pope that his healing ministry would be "safeguarded" (Milingo 1984: 137). Ironically, given that the overt goal of his recall was in part to protect Zambian Catholics from what must have appeared to Church officials as a kind of neopaganism, Milingo subsequently became immensely popular as a healer among Italian Catholic Charismatics. In 1987, with established followings in ten Italian cities and already a figure on national television, he moved his public healing service from the Church of Argentini of Rome to a large room in the Ergife Hotel. Once again, in 1989, his controversial ministry was temporarily suspended by the Church but later renewed outside Rome (Lanternari 1994). In 1994 the Bishop's Conference in Tuscany issued a pastoral note on demonology and witchcraft quite likely targeted at Milingo's ministry. The archbishop next reemerged into the public spotlight at the turn of the millennium as a new devotee of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. As much of a scandal as his apparent

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defection from the C h u r c h — o r perhaps from his own standpoint a new level of ecumenism—was his ritual marriage to a nubile Korean follower of Moon in a ceremony central to the Unification doctrine. Only after a great deal of effort that doubtless included coaxing, negotiation, and threat did Milingo recant and return to the fold. T h e odyssey of Archbishop Milingo contributes to a decentering of meaning that cannot but take place in a global movement whose key symbol is, after all, speaking in tongues. Although Lanternari (1987) describes the effect as a "religious short-circuit" between Africa and Europe, there is less, not more, anomaly in the Milingo case if it is acknowledged that the contemporary situation is best represented not as a modernist circuit diagram but as a global, postmodern montage of transposable spiritualities. Neither of these two images allows us to conclude that the global Catholic Church simply served as a kind of institutional trellis on which the florescence of the Charismatic movement easily climbed. What is at stake is the fate of that particularly powerful master narrative called "salvation history," which, rather than being undermined by the decentering force of postmodernism, is now globally promulgated in a Charismatic, sensuous immediacy and in a multiplicity of idioms, not least among which is that of glossolalia. T h e differences between the early globalization of Catholicism and the globalization of the contemporary Catholic Charismatic Renewal lie in changed conditions having to do with mass media and the ease of travel that dramatically affect interaction between local adherents and the central leadership, as well as in changed idioms of interaction with indigenous religions. A movement such as the Charismatic Renewal weaves the cosmic time of salvation history into the fabric of everyday life, speeding it up and lending it a sense of urgency with the notion that the movement is part of a preparation for the "end times" before Christ's second coming but also providing the discipline of a carefully reconstructed habitus that structures the rhythms of everyday life, particularly in the more highly elaborated Charismatic intentional communities (Csordas 1997). I am convinced that consideration of this movement will allow us to pose, if not yet to answer, some of these issues central to an understanding of religion as a global p h e n o m e n o n in the twenty-first century. In my early analysis of the global implications of the movement, I proposed three hypotheses. T h e cultural hypothesis was that the Charismatic Renewal was a potential vehicle of class consciousness for a transnational bourgeoisie insofar as it could be assumed that a world political-economic system must be accompanied by world religious and ideological systems. T h e structural hypothesis (especially relevant to Latin America) was that the appeal of the movement leapfrogs over the working classes to link the bourgeoisie with the very poor, with the excluded middle being the group with the greatest class antagonism to the bourgeoisie and the strongest affinity for both classical Pen-

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tecostalism and socialism. It thus may be an ideological articulation of preexisting social relationships in terms of transcending class and cultural barriers in the name of Christianity, and also (as appears now to have been quite true) of appealing to communitarian sentiment while advancing conservative values in opposition to liberation theology. Finally, the historical hypothesis was that the Charismatic Renewal may play a role on a global scale analogous to that played by Methodism on a national scale in eighteenthcentury England, insofar as it can be argued that both contributed to providing a moral framework and motivational language for the emergence of a new socioeconomic order (Csordas 1992). O n another level—that of bodily e x p e r i e n c e — I will consider only one theme that bears implications for the constitution of the self in global religious phenomena. Charismatics place a premium on bodily events and practices ranging from revelatory sensory imagery to the sacred swoon of being overcome by the Holy Spirit to ritual gestures such as laying on of hands and prostration in prayer (Csordas 1990, 1994, 1997, 2002). To understand the central place of embodiment in the global Charismatic resacralization, it is useful to turn to the concept elaborated by Mellor and Schilling (1997) of the "baroque modern body" characteristic of contemporary society. For Mellor and Schilling, baroque modern bodies are characterized by heightened sensuality and are, in addition, "internally differentiated, prone to all sorts of doubts and anxieties, and [prone] to be arenas of conflict" (1997:47). Such a description fits the Charismatic body perfectly, and given examples such those from and India and Brazil, we can suggest that the Charismatic Renewal and perhaps other planetary religious forms are promulgating this variant of embodiment in the global arena. Certainly, an analogy between the contemporary upsurge of sensuousness and that of the baroque cultures of CounterReformation Catholicism is telling, insofar as in the contemporary world Charismatic healing and various spiritual manifestations are playing a role counter to the enthusiastic spirituality of Protestant Pentecostalism. Finally, the Charismatic Renewal and other global religious p h e n o m e n a lead us back to the question of whether we are witnessing an era of resacralization or reenchantment. In everyday social life, religious p h e n o m e n a have already led to reformulated relations between local and global, center and periphery. As we have seen in the case of the Charismatic Renewal, this has potential cultural and structural consequences, as well as implications for our understanding of historical process. Contrary impulses toward universal culture and cultural fragmentation have both b e c o m e imbued with an aura of enchantment. Religious inflections of body and self combine with new modalities of alterity and subjectivity. At the least, such p h e n o m e n a are of interest because they constitute the religious dimension of a global social system; at the most, they portend that religious consciousness will be seen to be a defining feature of contemporary global consciousness.

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NOTES 1. T h i s q u o t e is f r o m the C a t h o l i c Fraternity W e b site, www.catholicfraternity.net/ definition.html. 2. Since that time R o b e r t s o n ( 1 9 9 5 ) has b o r r o w e d the i n t e r n a t i o n a l business jarg o n t e r m glocalizationand i n t r o d u c e d it to social t h e o r y as a m e a n s of i d e n t i f y i n g the local-global p r o b l e m a t i c .

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Chapter 4

Veiled Missionaries and Embattled Christians in Colonial Sudan JANICE BODDY

"The Northern Sudan was once a Christian land." So wrote J. Spencer Trimingham, head, in the 1940s, of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Omdurman and a prolific scholar of African Islam. Yet, Trimingham continues, by the sixteenth century Sudan had "lost touch with Christianity," such that "not a vestige remains" save for archaeological remnants and graves (1948: 9). This past, he suggests, authorized a Christian presence among colonized Muslim Sudanese. More immediate circumstances seemed to justify it too. Though often downplayed by colonial officials, religion was central to the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan in 1898 and a vital concern to its administrators thereafter. Britain's pretext for invading the upper Nile was the "martyrdom" of Charles Gordon, a zealous Christian countryman, in a Muslim holy war. Publicly undertaken in reprisal for this shocking blow to imperial pride, the offensive was thoroughly informed by religious claims to right and truth. Later, Christian ideals discreetly informed colonial projects undertaken "for the good of the Sudanese." Commerce and Christianity were the hallmarks of "modern civilization," whose global spread—in this overtly imperial age—was an implicitly religious enterprise intended to reshape subject selves. When northern Sudanese Muslims parried the process they did so in the language of their faith. The colonial encounter between politically dominant British and socially dominant Muslim Sudanese was a contest of rival religious imaginations. While British authorities, wary of fomenting Islamic revolt, forbade Christian proselytizing in the north, a Christian ethos saturated the colonial administration in Khartoum, as did a sense of unending besiegement by Islam. The figurative boundary between Muslim East and Christian West was realized there, if ephemerally, as members of each faith engaged the other in terms that made sense to themselves. 97

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CONTEXT

Here is a sketch of what happened. In 1821 Sudan was colonized by Ottoman Egypt under Viceroy (Khedive) Mohammad Ali, who sought resources (mainly gold and slaves) to fund his plan to modernize Egypt along European lines. Sixty years on, some Sudanese, weary of heavy Egyptian taxes and troubled by growing European interference in what had once been a lucrative slave trade, rebelled. Their leader was a charismatic Muslim holy man, Mohammad Ahmad, declared by his followers the Mahdi (the Prophet's awaited descendant). In 1883 Britain supported an expedition of some eight thousand Egyptian Army troops to crush the Mahdi's insurrection. It failed; its leader, William Hicks, several journalists, and all but a few hundred soldiers were killed. No Europeans survived. Three months later, as the Mahdist revolt gained momentum, Parliament, urged by Queen Victoria and the popular press, sent General Charles Gordon to Sudan, ostensibly to organize the withdrawal of Europeans and Egyptian troops from the Ottoman capital, Khartoum. Gordon, however, had other ideas. A fervent Christian, he believed it was his duty to deliver Sudan from the "evil fate" of Islamic rule (Jackson 1954: 12). Guided by quixoticism and fervid readings of the Bible, he made several tactical errors, miscalculated his opponents' strength, and grossly misjudged their conviction. By May 1884 he and his retinue were besieged by Mahdist forces in Khartoum (Wingate 1955; Marlowe 1969; Holt 1970; Johnson 1985). At length a British force was sent up the Nile, arriving too late to save him. He had been slain by Mahdists two days before, on January 26, 1885. His dejected rescuers withdrew to Egypt to await an opportune time to avenge him. The Mahdi now controlled Sudan. Though he soon succumbed to disease, his successor, Khalifa Abdullahi, consolidated the Islamic state and ruled for thirteen years more. Under the khalifa's rule Khartoum was razed and a Muslim capital built across the Nile in the Mahdi's bastion, Omdurman. In 1892 Egypt, burdened by debt and growing anti-European unrest, effectively fell to British rule. With an eye to avenging Gordon but also to secure the Nile watershed and stanch French, Italian, and Belgian claims, Britain authorized the "reconquest" of Sudan. The invasion began in 1896. Under the command of Lord Kitchener, a force of British, Egyptians, and southern Sudanese former slaves marched up the Nile, supported by a railway that was slowly and methodically thrust from Awan into the core of Islamic Africa. By 1898 Omdurman had been won and the Mahdi's army vanquished. Kitchener now ordered Khartoum rebuilt as the capital of the reclaimed colonial state. Thenceforth Sudan would be governed by an asymmetric administration, with British in executive ranks and Egyptians, later also Sudanese, in supporting roles. Gordon now became the de facto "patron saint" of the Anglo-Egyptian

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Sudan. Each January from 18gg to 1956, when Sudan gained independence, Gordon Sunday was observed in memory of his death (Marlowe 1969: 10; Coray 1984: 29).1 At first services were held in the rebuilt palace near whose steps the martyr had fallen. Later they took place in an imposing Anglican cathedral erected in memory of Gordon and consecrated in 1912 on the anniversary of his death (Jackson i960: 131; Warburg 1971: ii2). 2 Inside the cathedral was the Gordon Chapel, with gold braid from the hero's uniform woven into the altar cloth (Jackson i960: 131-32; Woodward 1990: 33).3 Fronting the government enclave was a bronze statue of the general sitting astride a tasseled camel, a stern and superior look on his face. Years later the image was floodlit on Sunday evenings—to one observer, "an impressive and ghostly reminder of a great Christian who gave his service and his life for the Sudan" (Sarsfield-Hall 1975: 112). An avenue was named for Gordon. Gordon College was built to train Sudanese for government service and the Gordon Music Hall to furnish entertainment (though the martyr might have demurred). As one Egyptian administrator wrote, "At Khartum . . . everything is a la Gordon. . . . On the spot where his massacre is supposed to have taken place is a superb, wellkept rose-tree, whose red blooms are witness of the blood that has watered it" (Artin 1911: 15). The rebuilt walls of Gordon's palace were hung with Mahdist spears and swords, relics ofjihad put to work for the new regime in a tangible display of its triumph over popular Islam. Monuments to Gordon and rites exalting his "martyrdom" both realized and invoked social memory: a narrative that informs experience in the present by reference to the past (Connerton 1989: 18 ff.). These historical images embodied in meaningful objects, places, and acts, or summoned in annual rites, served to legitimate and sustain a moral order and provided a thread of continuity through the weave of time. Still, it was a past suffused with present concerns, never anachronous but, in offering a perspective on the contemporary world, continuously relevant and alive. In Sudan the tale of Gordon's conflict with the Mahdi proved remarkably supple in this regard. That was also true for Gordon's devoted public at home. British newspapers had reported his death with predictable outrage and vilifications of Islam. Poems, advertisements, novels—two boys' adventure stories by G. A. Henty (1892, 1903), a novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1898), and A. E. A. Mason's oft-filmed book, The Four Feathers ([1 go 2] 2002)—all played on the theme. Subsequent interactions between the British and Muslim Sudanese were inexorably shaped by the parable of Gordon and the Mahdi to which the affair gave rise. For early-twentieth-century Europeans, that parable condensed some key antitheses: between Christianity and Islam, civilization and barbarism, individualism and an "archaic" communal past. As a foundational narrative, ever present and annually revived, it became a touchstone for generations of

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British serving—never settling—in Sudan. Sometimes Gordon's image was invoked explicitly, as when his example was set before novice officials as "the ideal of what a British administrator should be" (Marlowe 1969: 10). O f t e n it was tacit, asserted in the symbolism of built and rebuilt civic space. T h e image worked in several related ways: as a disciplinary tool summoned to unify Britons divided by denomination and class, as a support for Victorian racial categories and their attendant character traits, and as an allegory of sacred, ultimate t r u t h — t h e passion of Christ enacted on an African stage.

COLONIZERS

Many of those who served in colonial Sudan had been stirred by stories of Gordon's heroics in their youth. T h e Sudan Political Service (SPS) sought "active young men, endowed with g o o d health, high character and fair abilities, not the mediocre by-products of the race, but the flower of those who are turned out from our schools and colleges." 4 Four-fifths of successful SPS candidates held university degrees. T h e martial establishment, skeptical of the value of Latin or Greek for effective command, insisted that they undergo military drill and learn to shoot and ride (Low 1914: 8 9 - 9 1 ) . Most recruits were also skilled athletes. A popular aphorism has it that Sudan (whose name is derived from the Arabic for "black," aswad) was "the land of Blacks ruled by Blues," referring to men who had represented Oxford or Cambridge in extramural sports. Some were Blues in more than one field. "Evidence of the importance attached to athletic prowess" came from the "further score of international and trial cups, county players, national and University captains, and three Olympic gold medalists" among members of the SPS. 5 Probationers were selected by serving officers, a system that ensured conformity in outlook, accomplishment, and religious belief. Non-British subjects were not formally barred, but none was hired; an English applicant with "Levantine" features was deemed "undesirable" and refused (Daly 1986: 87). Most of the 393 men who served between 1901 and 1955 had middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds and were graduates of distinguished public schools and universities (Mangan 1982). Few state-educated applicants were hired, nor, tellingly, was a single graduate of an English provincial university or college. T h e SPS counted 180 O x f o r d men, 103 from Cambridge, and the rest from a smattering of historic institutions in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. T h e y were idealistic, bright, and very young, between twentyone and twenty-five years of age. T h e y spoke with a standard accent (occasionally a Scottish burr), affected similar mannerisms, and embraced a common set ofvalues (Kirk-Greene 1982; Mangan 1982; D e n g and Daly 1989;). T h e majority held a deep faith in Christianity, and, though parentage is no guarantor of conviction, a striking third of their number were clergymen's

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sons.6 As one former official wrote, they had "a genuine belief in Britain's God given mission to rule."7 Uniform backgrounds and interests ensured solidarity among members of the SPS. Together they hunted large game and waterfowl in numbers that could not have failed to impress (possibly alarm) the Sudanese. Sports supplied a degree of collaborative training, with polo as the game of choice, played wherever teams could be mustered and a flat stretch of land could be found. If the SPS sounds like a gentlemen's club, in several ways it was. In keeping with public school custom, annual cohorts were often named, with biblical epithets preferred; the illustrious dozen who joined in 1920, for instance, were christened the "Twelve Apostles." Less fabled were the "Four Horsemen" and the "Seven Deadly Sins." When independence was declared sooner than most expected and several senior officers had their careers peremptorily curtailed, they formed a self-mocking club called "The Fallen Angels," which met for dinner in London once a year. Wives were included (as "fallen women"), and when numbers began to decline from attrition, their children were invited to attend as "angelettes."8 The SPS was a men's club in another sense. Political recruits were required to be single (Kenrick 1987; Hetherington 1989: 23).® The exemplary Gordon had never married, nor had Kitchener, conqueror of Sudan. Marriage during the two-year SPS probationary period was cause for dismissal, and permission to wed was routinely denied for two or three years after that, longer if an applicant's posting was considered unsafe. Even when officers wed, they were actively discouraged and often prevented from bringing their wives to Sudan. Only in the 1920s did European women begin coming to Khartoum for longer than a brief winter stay. Still, at the end of 1930, a mere "64 of the service's 158 members were married, and 26 of those were governors or district commissioners at headquarters" in Khartoum (Daly 1986: 357; see Kenrick 1987; Deng and Daly 1989). The exclusion of women was justified by fears that Muslim fanaticism could reerupt at any time. Officials were expected to live the all-male life of the barracks and British boarding school, or be seen to do so by Sudanese. An ethos of monkish asceticism prevailed. In British imaginations northern Sudan was a biblical land, a wilderness into which knightly crusaders bodied forth to battle the dark forces of Islam. 10 Rudyard Kipling's political satire, "The Little Foxes," has the place governed by British horsemen who spend their time hunting along the banks of the River Gihon, an Old Testament name for the Nile (Kipling 1909). For some, Sudan symbolized the holy land itself. Llewellyn Gwynne, drafted from the CMS to become pastor of Khartoum, opened the Anglican cathedral in 1 9 1 2 with a spirited sermon that framed Khartoum as Jerusalem and Britons as Israelites who "in their prosperity . . . forgot God and became proud in their hearts and would only worship the works of their own hands." Thus

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"when Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, came up with a large army and laid siege to Jerusalem, he took it."11 To wit: the Mahdi, Omdurman, Khartoum. Gordon he described as a deliverer and "martyr for the Sudan" whose people are "already . . . reaping the benefits of his death. How he would rejoice at the kind of revenge his fellow countrymen are meting o u t . . . Christian tolerance, justice, liberty and fair dealing." 12 For Gwynne, the British occupation was a biblical event; Jerusalem, England, and Khartoum were folded into one. No mention of Egyptian contributions or those of pro-British Sudanese. British rule was Christian rule, centered on the reborn "holy city" of Khartoum. As one officer mused, "Some cities have the power to evoke memories Khartoum commemorates the devoted life and sacrificial death of General Gordon, a Christian victim of Islam" (Jackson 1954: 18).

ISLAM

Sudan covers a million square miles of territory, two-thirds of it in the Muslim north. However heroic SPS officers thought they appeared to Sudanese, they were always thin on the ground, numbering at most some 160 men (Collins 1984: 15). How, then, did they manage to keep the peace? For one thing, they visibly endorsed Islam. Yet fearing a Mahdist resurgence, the regime supported conservative mosque-based Islam over charismatic versions with which popular devotion lay. Sufi orders were discouraged as being unorthodox, based on "superstition"; their leaders were closely watched. The British arrogated authority to decide what was properly Islamic and what was not, expecting their select board of Egyptian religious scholars to back them up. By posing as the champions of "true" Islam, they hoped the volatile followings of resident preachers would decline. As the historian Noah Salomon observes: An Islam whose seats of authority and learning were spread out through the villages and towns, and whose teachers were individual sheikhs of Sufi orders, was to be replaced, in the British ideal, by one central authority, one official seat of learning, in the capital, under the watchful gaze (and indirect administration) of the British authorities. In an interesting reversal of the common secularization thesis, wherein secular government is supposed to encourage the privatization of religion [,] . . . "private" religious institutions . . . pose[d] the deepest threat to [imperial] Sudan. (2003: 5)

But Mahdism deepest of all, for belief in the Mahdi was still alive. Several revolts occurred in the first three decades of British rule, of Mahdists who spurned the new regime, farmers using a religious idiom to protest an unfair division of land, thwarted slave dealers, or Sudanese heeding the call of one or another self-declared Nabi 'Isa—Prophet Jesus.13 These last believed the British to be al-Dajjal, the Deceiver or Antichrist, who was predicted to ap-

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pear during an age of chaos and injustice following the Mahdi's death. AlDajjal will supply food and water to tempt the suffering; his miracles and false teachings will lead many astray. His arrival will herald 'Isa's second coming shortly before the day of judgment and resurrection (Holt and Daly 1979: 119; Esposito 2003: 21-22). Nabi 'Isa outbreaks were local and garnered slight support, yet officials "bred on the Gordon hagiography" were easily persuaded of their threat (Woodward 1990: 27; see also Warburg 1971). Millenarian movements were unflinchingly suppressed, sometimes by summary execution in defiance of Foreign Office command (Warburg 1971; Daly 1986). Prophets and charismatics aside, great care was taken to avoid antagonizing Sudanese Muslims and cultivate their trust—by facilitating the pilgrimage, funding the construction of mosques, affirming Islamic law in matters of personal status,14 sponsoring religious schools for boys entrusted to orthodox teachers, and making Friday rather than Sunday a day of rest in the north. 15 Importantly, as noted above, Christians were forbidden to proselytize Muslims. So deep ran this concern that during the first few years of British rule, signs posted in public places declared that if a Muslim Sudanese were found talking to a missionary, both would be subject to arrest (Frost 1984: 69; see also Warburg 1971: 95-100).

THE CMS

The actions taken to avoid antagonizing Sudanese Muslims alarmed the Church Missionary Society, the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church, whose members felt they had a duty to Sudan and the right, as Gordon's congregants, to install themselves in Khartoum. Since Gordon's death in 1885 the CMS had been flooded with donations to found the Gordon Memorial Mission to the Soudan. Fortunes were bequeathed under strict instruction that they be used to convert Muslims once the country had been wrested from Mahdist control. Intriguingly, period CMS texts are rife with end-of-the-world claims similar to those of Muslim Nabi 'Isa cults. Members believed that only after they had evangelized the entire world could Jesus reappear and they be redeemed. They considered the empire an instrument of God entrusted to their use. 16 But if preaching was illegal in Muslim Sudan, how might evangelists further their global cause? In 1903 Sudan's governor-general agreed to a compromise. The CMS could establish schools in the Muslim north, but only for girls and only if missionaries refrained from teaching Christianity to pupils whose families objected. The concession proved useful to both. Government could side-step the issue of female education, which it feared (unjustly, as it turned out) would bring hostile reaction from Muslim men; 17 the CMS could "plant Christian ideas without pressing the name," 18 optimistic that schooling the mothers of the next generation would win the Sudan for Christ. 19

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Eager now to secure a monopoly on female education, the CMS cannily arranged that where mission schools existed and met academic standards, secular schools for girls would not be built.20 Yet only the Omdurman school enrolled more than the occasional Muslim Sudanese. 21 The missionaries, however, considered education "the most important part of [their] work in the Northern Sudan, in view of the influence it was exerting upon the Sudanese girls."22 The curriculum aimed "to help [girls] to become better wives and mothers, and through religious teaching to develop a purpose in life" (Trimingham 1948: 21). Subjects included literacy, numeracy, home economics, child care, English, and ever controversial Scripture (Trimingham 1948: 21). Indeed, the purpose of the schools was to provide "an education with a Christian foundation and outlook" (Beshir 1969: 50),23 regardless of students' beliefs. By allowing such interventions the government hoped obliquely to weaken the hold of Islam. The political service and the CMS were each compelled by Gordon's martyrdom; the former to suppress Islamic zeal, the latter to go forth and spread the Word.24 There were class inflections in their positions, a struggle between low church and high, for the missionaries' fervor threatened not just the peace but also the dignity, composure, and detachment that officials strove to maintain in the face of "native fanaticism"—actual or supposed.

DISPLAY

The SPS publicly nurtured a dignified, heroic demeanor vis-à-vis Egyptians and Sudanese by maintaining formality, cultivating imperial prestige, and assiduously policing official ranks. As in India and elsewhere, colonial rule owed much to spectacle and disciplinary protocol as brute force, though the latter was not lacking when required. A pattern was set during the early governorgeneralship of Sir Reginald Wingate ( 1899-1916), who "exalted his position with viceregal trappings" and simulated a court at Khartoum (Daly 1986: 93). Out from Gordon's splendid rebuilt palace he rode each morning in state, parading the broad avenues of the newly rebuilt imperial city, "the cavalcade . . . glittering and immense, black cavalry men with lances[,] . . . and a herd of all grades of officials" in ceremonial plumes and braid (96).25 Wingate spent much of the year in England and Cairo avoiding the heat, being feted by royalty and consulting with colleagues on leave. With November's cooler weather he and his wife would return to Sudan for "the season," arriving at the palace with grandeur and dash in a double landau and four, complete with outriders and an escort of mounted aides-de-camp. They were met by executive officers in formal whites and a regimental honor guard mustered before the steps (96).26 The weeks from December through February were punctuated by formal "levees," garden parties, teas, and palace receptions. Tourists were encouraged to visit, in particular, European nobility and so-

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cialites whom the Wingates met on leave; they were often accommodated in the palace at government expense. T h e costs, mind, were met not by Britain but by Egypt, which underwrote Sudan's bureaucracy until 1 9 1 3 and bore its military burden for some time after that. Sudan became a popular winter holiday stop, with cruises organized to the south and visits to the dustblown site of Kitchener's victory near O m d u r m a n . T h e mysterious land of Gordon became an imperial marvel: an open-air exhibit in which all manner of exotic flora and fauna were displayed. As the travelers bore witness to British mastery of Sudan, a European spectacle was laid before the Sudanese, w h o glimpsed them visiting ancient monuments, sailing by government steamer along the White Nile or the Blue, disembarking periodically to hunt or watch a "native show." Displays were deemed useful for convincing natives and lesser officials of Britain's status in lands beyond their own. Wingate, for example, justified the cost of fireworks in honor of a nobleman's visit as good for "giving these Sudanese people some impression of Govt, prestige"(Daly 1986: 100). 27 Such moves were meant to draw Arab Sudanese into the imperial project and diminish the influence of Egypt, which was, after all, another largely Muslim, Arabic-speaking country immediately downstream. Wingate tried to remedy "insufficient British influence" in Sudan by promoting the royal family so as to divert popular interest from the Egyptian khedive, ostensible vassal to the Ottoman caliph in Istanbul. Photographs of the king were hung in prominent places to convey a sense of the sovereign's immediacy. T h e coronation of Edward VII was celebrated with considerable p o m p and its anniversary publicly observed until his death in 1 g 1 o; it was superseded in 1911 by that of George V (Warburg 1971: 22-23). When the prince of Wales visited Sudan in 1 9 1 6 and relations with Egypt were especially strained by the war, the palace ordered that "two or three hundred pounds" be doled out to the poor, hoping it would be seen as imperial largess (23). 28 Analogous tactics used throughout colonial Africa were intended "to turn the whites into a convincing ruling class" (Ranger 1983: 215). But in Sudan there was a complication: most Sudanese saw both British and Egyptians as "Turks" and the condominium as the "second Ottoman regime." T h e British thus strove to distinguish themselves from Egyptians in Sudanese eyes without antagonizing either, or raising the specter of religious revolt that officials feared. For though they gravely mistrusted Egyptians (even the many Copts in their employ), without them their chances of holding Sudan were poor. By promoting the British monarchy as a secular faith, and one supportive of Islam, they hoped to foster a unifying ideology and gently counter Egypt's sway. By 1 g 14 some eighteen annual celebrations—Islamic and imperial b o t h — were held throughout Sudan. T h e Muslim ceremonial calendar was aligned with that of the Christian West, strengthening, it was hoped, the link between Islam and imperial rule. Religious and state anniversaries were staged at sub-

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stantial government expense (Daly 1986: 98). All focused on the governorgeneral, the embodiment of imperial authority, known to many Sudanese simply as al-kukuma, "the government." When he passed soldiers were required to salute; civilians were expected to doff turbans and hats and risked being scolded by his aides for failing to conform (see Daly 1986: 96). In the provinces, the governor substituted for the governor-general at the apex of the ceremonial state. Protocol policed the steps from low to high, with each post cast in terms of merit that obscured the structure's racial and religious slant. The problem of anomalies makes this clear. A CMS missionary, for instance, wrote of the first Islamic 'Id al Kabir (Great Feast) held in Khartoum after the reconquest, which "the administration took great trouble to keep in grand display": 29 T h e great notables of the Sudan were . . . present in w o n d e r f u l festival robes, and the sheiks of the mosques and the schools were present in good numbers, also the officers of the Egyptian Army, the British, the Egyptian and the Sudanese, with all their medals and in their best uniform. T h e n came the native Government officials, all in order according to their rank and pay. 30

As each man's name was read aloud, he was directed to salute, shake hands with the governor-general, and move on. Having been asked his rate of pay, the impecunious missionary was lined up with the Egyptian and Sudanese clerks. It was a mistake. "Shortly afterward a young officer galloped down along the procession, and seeing a white man in a helmet hauled me o u t . . . ," the missionary wrote. "I found myself placed right up against the high dignitaries of the British." 31 Decorum was serious business in Sudan, and fraternizing across religious and racial lines was a threat to British dominion. In 1 9 1 2 an intelligence officer wrote, "[I am] busy about a mad Dutchman, who . . . professes Islam and is a great nuisance. He goes about among the lowest natives dressed in a kind of towel and pair of sandals only and is generally lowering the prestige of the white man. I am going to boot him out of the place." 32 The veiled protocols of race and creed encouraged cohesion among expatriate British, eliding internal differences of Christian denomination and class. To those in power, state rituals were pedagogically useful, attuning participants and observers to the habits of hierarchy on which imperial rule and global commerce relied.

CONFRONTATION

Endorse conventional Islam all they might and cultivate allegiance to the crown, the specter of Gordon still hovered over Khartoum. In 1 9 2 4 it rematerialized in the wake of a violent native rebellion inspired by pro-Egyptian propaganda advocating unification of the Nile Valley under the banner of Islam. Then an Egyptian assassinated Sudan's governor-general when the

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latter was in Cairo for talks. Immediately the British expelled Egyptian soldiers, police, teachers in government schools, and those in other "politically sensitive" posts.33 Thereafter Sudan remained a condominium in name, with Egypt's role severely reduced. The 1924 threat of unified Islamic revolt was especially troubling because Britain had just opened a massive cotton project in central Sudan (the Gezira Scheme) to supply its Lancashire mills, in competition with Egyptian growers who also depended on irrigation from the Nile. Given the apparent potential of Islam to disrupt the colony's prosperity and errant peace, Sudan's administrators now moved more forcefully than before to prevent the spread of the faith from the northern two-thirds of Sudan, where it was all but universal, to the southern third, where it was not. The strategy was to promote "tribalism" as a means of indirect rule—governing through native elites— so as to foil the rise of pro-Egyptian nationalism and preclude conversions of "detribalized" folk and "pagans" to Arab culture and Islam. A memorandum circulated by the civil secretary's office in 1924 spoke of the district commissioner's task "as that of 'regenerating the tribal soul.'" Officials were persuaded that, with proper encouragement, the remnants of tribes could be reconstituted "and perhaps in time... give birth to genuine 'chiefs.'" Thus "it became one of the major duties of DCs to discover by research this 'ancient governing organization', and if possible to revive it" (in Sanderson and Sanderson 1981: 124). Especially in "outlying areas," away from the Nile—in the non-Muslim south and Muslim but non-Arab west and east— administrators held a romantic view of their subjects, shunning "modernization," which, one critic notes, was just as well, as there was no money to carry it out (Prunier 2005: 26). Here is Governor-General Maffey justifying his government's position in a memo of 1927: Before the old traditions die we ought to get on with extension and expansion [of indirect rule] in every direction, thereby sterilising and localising the political germs which must spread from the lower Nile [Egypt] into Khartoum. Under the impulse of new ideas and with the rise of a new generation, old traditions may pass away with astonishing rapidity. It is advisable to fortify them while the memories of Mahdism . . . are still vivid. . . . [T]he British Officer must realise that it is his duty to lay down the role of Father of the People. He must entrust it to the natural leaders of the people whom he must support and influence as occasion requires. In this manner the country will be parcelled out into nicely balanced compartments, protective glands against the septic germs which will inevitably be passed on from the Khartoum of the future. 34

As late as 1953, as the condominium drew to a close, the civil secretary's office crowed, "The effect of these reforms was not only to restore but also to increase the prestige of tribalism."35 The use of ethnicity to prevent the growth

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of nationalism and halt the spread of Islam would have long-term consequences for Sudan in the south, the Nuba Hills, and, most recently, in Darfur.

T H E SOUTH

The Southern Policy that crystallized during the post-ig24 period all but closed the south to Egyptians and Arab Sudanese. To replace deportees, southern men were trained for junior government posts. Yet economic and social development in the south had long been neglected, while from the beginning the north had received preference in education, health care, infrastructure, and government work. Ironically, the suspect Muslim north had been absorbed more fully into the imperial economy than the south, where colonial presence was light and Christian missions had been assigned the task of delivering, with government subventions, what little education and medicine were to be had. At work was the well-meant but ultimately damaging desire of officials to shield "gullible" southern Sudanese from the alleged evils of Islam (Collins 1983; Daly 1986). Southern Policy meant more than keeping Muslims out. It meant eradicating all "inauthentic" cultural practices that southerners had "borrowed" from the north. In southern Sudan any expression of Arab identity became a potentially subversive act. Southerners were forbidden to wear northern dress; in the Western District of Bahr al-Ghazal, where the social border with the Muslim north was exceptionally porous and blurred, it was prohibited to make or sell Arab clothes, and if an official happened to find some, they were burned. 35 Speaking English was encouraged, and Arabic, including Arabic words commonly used in English, was gradually (if incompletely) suppressed. As discussed below, where Arabic was inevitable for correspondence, it was taught in Roman script so as to limit access to Arabic literature. 37 The civil secretary, H. A. MacMichael, rationalized these moves in a biting 1928 memorandum: It is not necessary to stress the fact—presumably undisputed—that the spread of Arabic a m o n g the negroes of the south means the spread of Arab thought, Arab culture, Arab religion, but I would venture to dispute the assumption that these in fact occupy so high a plane as to deserve to be regarded as intrinsically desirable. T h e religion of the Arab is the fruit of thirteen centuries of discipline and dogma, and it appears now to have reached a stage of world-wide stagnation periodically rippled by political restlessness. . . . It has shown, it is true, a w o n d e r f u l power of inspiring the ignorant to sudden heights of fanaticism, but has it in it the seeds of any real mental or moral progress? Is it not, rather, stationary in essence, and therefore retrograde? 3 8

In fact, the path of Arabization would increase the danger to the government by extending "the zone in which Islamic fundamentalism is endemic,"

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allowing rebellious Arabs to call on the south for aid "in the name of a common religion," or in fact the reverse, "which might become a serious embarrassment."39 However, by preventing the spread of Arab culture, "a series of self-contained racial units will be developed . . . based on the solid rock of indigenous traditions and beliefs [,] .. . and in the process a solid barrier will be created against the insidious political intrigue which must in the ordinary course of events increasingly beset our path in the North." 40 In light of these remarks it is hardly surprising that even career officials who had assiduously studied Arabic to qualify for the SPS now feigned ignorance of the language in the south (Daly 1991: 44)-41 There were more drastic measures still. A no-man's land was cleared along the border dividing the province of Bahr al-Ghazal (in the "south") from Darfur and Kordofan (in the "north"). Here a welter of shatter groups from the slave trade or the Mahdi's war mingled with northern traders from the Nile, Dinka (non-Arab cattle herders), and Baggara Arabs, and some two-thirds of the population spoke Arabic. Government troops expelled Muslim inhabitants to Darfur. Settlements were moved or burned, and mosques were destroyed, methods that even MacMichael compared to those of "Tamburlane or Genghis Khan" (Collins 1983: 184; Daly 1986: 415; Daly 1991: 44) and today evoke images of ethnic cleansing. Marriage between "Africans" and "Arabs" was forbidden (how successfully so is not clear), in part to prevent the adoption of "Arab"customs such as female circumcision, which southerners had begun to emulate in order to marry their daughters into "Arab" families and thereby raise their status within the colonial state.42 Little effort is required to see in these steps the shadow of eugenics, a discourse not yet discredited by the ravages of National Socialism and World War II. Ethnic intermarriage in Sudan could lead to "detribalized" offspring and was inimical to indirect rule; mating within one's tribe was politically preferred and may have been why the ostensibly unsafe Arab custom of marrying close cousins excited little concern. 43 Tribalism was the watchword: where groups had become mixed, they were separated; where inappropriately divided, they were joined: nonsoutherners were forcibly removed from the south; southerners in towns were assigned to residential quarters according to tribe; outside of towns peoples deemed ethnically similar were combined. Those identified as southern Sudanese were forbidden to use Arab names, and, though Christianity was welcomed over Islam, baptismal names were frowned on as unauthentic (Daly 1986: 414). It was imperative during the 1920s and early 1930s that "detribalization" be checked and crossethnic relations quashed. Though the policy relaxed somewhat in subsequent years, the exigencies of tribalism remained. Moreover, Christian missions continued to be responsible for social and economic development in the south, though they received modest government support for their work. Distortions in financial investment continued into the postindependence period, with

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the bulk of resources going to the upper Nile and precious little to peripheral locales. The colonial mission to stabilize, and in some cases create, social and physical boundaries between Muslim "Arabs" and Christian and pagan "Africans" exacerbated the cultural racism that already existed in Sudan. For centuries, those deemed black had been subject to enslavement by self-styled Arabs, though members of the two populations might have equally dark skin and similar physical features, speak Arabic, and profess Islam. In Sudan, African and Arab are relative terms; what is most significant is the knowledge that one has of the other's ethnic or tribal background and the context in which the labels are applied. Between Nile Valley Muslims at the northern extreme and Azande at the other, there is a great deal of variation. A light-skinned Zaghawa Muslim in Darfur might be considered an African by a darkerJa'ali Muslim from the Nile and an Arab by a non-Arab Muslim Fur (see Prunier 2005). Such distinctions between "true," or elite, riverain Arabs (those who claim closeness to the Prophet's line, benefited most under the British, and are politically dominant today) and Muslims of outlying areas and Africans (with whom the former deny kinship), owe much to colonial strategies for fortifying "tribal" identities as a means to contain Islam and neutralize its political threat.

TRIMINGHAM'S CHRISTIAN APPROACH TO ISLAM IN THE SUDAN Earlier I noted an exception to restrictions on Christian missions operating in the Muslim north: they were allowed to open schools for girls and assured they would not face government competition if they did. But early in the 1920s, Sudan officials responding to pressures from parents and a general postwar push to raise local standards of living so as to make the colonies pay opened a handful of government pre-primary schools for northern girls. These were staffed by female graduates of private schools who had been trained to teach "literacy and domestic order" at the new Girls Training College in Omdurman (Beasley 1992: 359). Faced with this challenge to its interests, the CMS regrouped. It opened girls' pre-primary schools in major towns to rival the government's "proMoslem" efforts. It required that more subtlety be exercised in the Omdurman primary school, where attendance by Muslim girls fell off whenever mission teachers "succumbed to evangelical temptation" (Sharkey 2002: 62). Most notably, in 1928 it relaunched the original CMS facility in Khartoum as Unity High School, funded by all Christian denominations. Here English was the only language of instruction, and "great care was devoted to domestic training, for much was hoped from a new generation of wives and mothers" (Jackson i960: 204). The school was expected to make "a distinctively Christian contribution to the educational life of the Sudan: a qualitative contri-

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bution in character-forming and development of personality" that would impart "noble standards of life and culture for the women" (205).44 In 1948 Trimingham observed that in northern towns with CMS schools, the missionaries seek to reach and influence the home life of the children by visiting after school hours. Other out-of-school activities, especially amongst old girls, now mothers themselves, are well-developed and consist of old girls' meetings, girl guide companies, net-ball teams, Bible study classes, needlework classes, preparatory and revisionary classes for teachers, and social service activities through a "Guild of Help." (1948: 21)

Clearly the CMS envisioned lifelong domestic supervision under the aegis of the cross. Similarly, the evangelical American Mission mobilized Bible Women to give weekly lessons in reading and writing, with the Bible as the text-book, to Sudanese women in their own hashes [courtyards]. They know, of course, that the women can never become Christians, but they hope to influence their home life and bring some measure of hope to lives condemned otherwise to the narrow boundaries of the harim outlook. (Trimingham 1948: 22)

It might be supposed that learning to read would open horizons for Muslim girls. Not quite, for while CMS schools taught Arabic literacy, they did so in a peculiar way, using Roman characters adapted to Sudanese dialect sounds (Sharkey 2002). True, until the expulsions of 1924-25, schools attended by affluent expatriates and staffed by teachers from Egypt and the Levant held classes in standard Arabic. As Heather Sharkey notes, "missionaries apparently saved their romanized Arabic for the daughters of humble or poor Sudanese Muslims who may have had lower expectations for girls literacy in a period when it was so rare" (2002: 67). After the expulsions of 1924, however, romanized Arabic was normal fare in CMS schools. In areas such as the Nuba Hills where few were Muslim but Arabic was the common tongue, the method was approved for boys' education as well as girls'. The skills thus acquired gave students no access to the world of Arabic literature, including the Qur'an. Indeed, a significant effect of their anomalous literacy, acknowledged with approval by British officials, was to limit students' awareness of nationalist ideas and pan-Arab thought and discourage tribal dissolution (Ibrahim 1985:64-76; Sharkey 2002: 69). Since publications in romanized Arabic were not produced, reading was limited to the classroom and to correspondence with others who knew the code. It was unlikely to foster a sense of belonging to a wider, protonational community (see Anderson 1983), let alone to the umma, the Muslim world. Softly then, colonial officers and missionaries worked together and apart to—as one of them wrote—"bring nearer the downfall of Islam."45 Missionaries like Trimingham, who never despaired that northern Su-

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danese would one day reject Islam in favor of their ancient faith, nonetheless understood that Islam and Christianity had little in c o m m o n despite sharing monotheistic principles and historical ground. "To a Muslim," Trimingham wrote, "religion . . . implies a social order, having its own distinct culture" (1948: 27). Christianity's disappointing success among Muslim women and girls he considered the fault of "missionaries [who] have had a too individualist conception of religion" and were blind "to the communal conception of religion in the East," presenting "Christianity as a complete break from one cultural group to another" (47). Further: "Change of religion is much less a change of religious belief than of one's social system, and involves social ostracism and loss of cultural stability, economic security and life's safeguards. It is useless to speak of the richness of the new religious experience in Christ if it involves social discontinuity . . . [for then] Christian preaching falls on deaf ears" (47). Trimingham was convinced that the government's "Muslim policy" worked against its own interests. For despite its support of Islam, "no Muslim, literate or illiterate, ever regards it as anything other than a Christian government" (27-28). Because, on his view, Muslims see Christians as "an alien social group," "the Islamic social system has not been undermined, but rather intensified in face of [their] external threat" (48)." A n d so, the government lends "its influence to the spread of Islam amongst pagans . . . less by deliberate favouritism, as by administrative policies which play into the hands of Muslims": " T h e official recognition of Islam, the honouring of Muslim feasts, the adoption of Friday as a public holiday, give prestige to the Muslim in the eyes of pagans; whilst up-country Muslim government staff and traders, the adoption of Arabic as the official language in the Nuba mountains, the recruiting of pagans into Muslim regiments, are all accessories to the spread of Islam" (29). Trimingham proposed a way forward: thoroughly evangelize the south, then create Christian centers in all border zones "where Islam is in contact with paganism" and outposts in "the lands of entrenched Islam," so that when Christianity "flows northwards" it will have a place to pool (49). Hence once more the emphasis on educating Muslim girls, on imbuing future mothers with Christian values, yet without the name. Toward these ends Trimingham advised supporters to "study the patterns of Sudanese religious life"—his own Islam in the Sudan being a g o o d start 4 6 —so as "to encourage the growth of a Christian community in the Islamic Sudan that will be truly indigenous" (preface, 42, 51). Yet for all of their efforts, the CMS converted only one Sudanese Muslim in the entire fifty-seven years of colonial rule, and not without controversy. In April 1946 a twenty-two-year-old woman who had lived in the Omdurman mission since she was seven was baptized by Trimingham, against

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"agreed procedure" that required "prior reference" to a competent Islamic j u d g e . U p o n hearing of it, her mother, who had placed the girl in C M S care, "went about the O m d u r m a n market shouting that her daughter had been forcibly abducted and converted by the Christians." An irate crowd protested before the CMS building and police station. T h e daughter was placed in protective custody. 47 T h e next day "the mother again collected an angry and vociferous crowd . . . and proceeded to the District Commissioner's house, where it eventually dispersed without incident on the arrival of the police." 48 T h e civil secretary's office railed against the CMS for its "most unfortunate and ill considered" venture that had "profoundly embarrassed everyone concerned, including the [government-selected] Shari'a authorities." 49 Islamic scholars at Cairo's Al-Azhar University telegraphed the governor-general in protest. 50 Imams in O m d u r m a n mosques preached against "Church Missionary Society anti-Islamic intrigue." 51 But it was not without reason that people were c o n c e r n e d about British plans for the future mothers of Muslim Sudanese. 5 2

CONCLUSION

Gordon's death in 1885 at the hands of the Mahdi's supporters produced in twentieth-century Khartoum an embattled British community alert to any strengthening of Islamic zeal or possible unification of Muslims along the Nile and a government that ruled by dividing the population, fortifying "tribal" and religious hierarchies, and concentrating resources among Nile Valley Muslims at the expense of outlying groups. Moreover, Gordon's demise legitimated attempts by Christian missionaries to proselytize the south and by government officials to stop the spread of Islam beyond its existing bounds. More insidiously, it underwrote efforts to imbue Muslim girls with Christian ideals and visions of salvation, that they might influence their future daughters and sons and be disposed, under appropriate social conditions, to renounce the "false creed" of Islam. However distinct in practice the aims of missionaries and administrators may have been (itself a debatable point), they did not always appear as such to Sudanese; indeed, mission hospitals, clinics, even girls' schools in the north received subventions from government funds. 5 3 T h e insecurity of the British in Sudan was the legacy of a formidable precedent that became sedimented in colonial habits of action and thought. There the power dynamics of the transnational encounter, far from enabling a transcendence or convergence of spiritual traditions, enhanced religious divisions and even produced them. This is not to say that no exchange took place (Christian evangelists and colonial officers have been known to turn up as spirits in Sudanese possession rites, or zar). Only that in colonial Sudan, re-

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ligious, racial, and ethnic boundaries attained a material reality that precluded meaningful conversation and bred consequences for the present, sadly unforeseen. NOTES Abbreviations for the locations of primary sources CMS

Church Missionary Society Archives, University of Birmingham

FO

Foreign O f f i c e Archives, Public Record O f f i c e , L o n d o n

MECA

Middle East Archive, St. Anthony's College, O x f o r d

NRO

National Records Office, Khartoum

RH

Bodleian Library of C o m m o n w e a l t h & African Studies at Rhodes House,

SAD

Sudan Archive, Durham University

Oxford 1. Attendance held until at least World War II, after which it seems to have waned (Shinnie, pers. com.) 2. Local ceremonies were held in the provincial capitals (Jackson 1954). 3. A c c o r d i n g to Marlowe, " T h e Dean of Lichfield, preaching at a memorial service to G o r d o n , stated that, if he had been b o r n a Roman Catholic, he would have b e e n canonized," and in England he became a popular saint, "worshipped by a cult and c o m m e m o r a t e d by a growing legend, in a way which was less typical of England than of the land where G o r d o n died" (1969: 7). T h o u g h the legend tarnished over time, his probity and courage were not questioned. 4. Kirk-Greene, " T h e Sudan Political Service," SAD 6 2 4 / 1 2 / 8 ; D e n g and Daly 1985: 3; Cromer, introduction to Egypt in Transition (Low 1914). 5. Kirke-Greene, " T h e Sudan Political Service," SAD 6 2 4 / 1 2 / 3 3 . 6. T h e figure is supplied by Collins 1 9 7 1 : 301. T h e point was often remarked. In fact, the C M S received a great deal of support from SPS clerical offspring, several of w h o m acted as "friends" and advisers to the mission. 7. Robin Baily memoirs, SAD 5 3 3 / 4 / 3 2 . 8. Vidler, "Fallen Angels, 1 9 5 6 - 1 9 8 9 , T h e i r Story," SAD 7 4 5 / 1 0 . T h e club initially included the cohorts of 1 9 3 3 - 3 9 . T h e tenor of the service changed appreciably with recruits w h o signed o n after World War II. 9. This was c o m m o n in the British army as a whole. 10. See, e.g., Henty 1892, 1902; Mason [1902] 2002. 11. Wingate papers, SAD 2 7 5 / 2 / 2 2 - 2 5 . 12. Wingate papers, SAD 2 7 5 / 2 / 2 2 - 2 5 . 13. For Muslims, the Qur'an is the seal of the prophetic revelations also contained in Jewish and Christian texts, M o h a m m a d was the seal or last of the prophets, and Jesus was a prophet in the line of Moses and A b r a h a m . Hadiths (recorded sayings and acts of the Prophet M o h a m m a d ) and later Islamic traditions predict that Jesus will reappear after the reign of the Antichrist (al-Dajjal), which will follow the death of the Mahdi. See Esposito 2003. 14. Most Egyptian jurists followed the Hanafi school of religious jurisprudence (favored by the Ottomans); Malaki codes were c o m m o n in Sudan. 15. A n exception was Port Sudan, which c o n f o r m e d to the international ship-

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ping convention of keeping Sunday as a day of rest (Frost 1984: 87). For discussions of religious policy, see Daly 1986; Warburg 1971; Khalid 1990. 16. "Instructions delivered to missionaries proceeding to the field in the Autumn of 1897," CMS G3/E/L2, insert at p. 30. 17. Daly 1986: 246. Sharkey (2002: 58) notes that other missions were permitted to open schools in Khartoum under similar restrictions but concentrated on different populations: children of European Christian expatriates (the Austrian Catholic mission), and Sudanese former slave boys (the American Presbyterians). 18. Gwynne to Baylis, 24 February 1903, CMS G3 E/O/1903, No. 37. 19. "This great dying Sudan has not yet been given a chance. Flood it with girls schools in which is taught the pure word of God and you will be preparing a godly and peaceful future for it. Leave it for the Government to put girls schools and who knows what will follow?" McNeile to Manley, 16 March 1916, CMS G3 E/O/1916/ No. i g . See also Manley to Gairdner, 3 April 1918, CMS G3E/L4/ 1 7 6 - 7 7 ; and the report by Miss E. K. W. Maxwell, Omdurman Girls' Schools, Minutes of Annual Conference, 27 January 1940, CMS G3/SN2 / 1 9 3 5 - 4 9 . 20. Gwynne to Baylis, 5 February 1904, CMS G3/E/O/1904/N0. 17, 49. 21. Annual Report of the Department of Education, 1909, extract, S A D 6 5 7 / 1/14. 22. Manley to Jackson, 19 February 1917, CMS G3 E/L4/103. 23. Beshir's further suggestion that "the majority of pupils in the missionary schools were Sudanese Moslem girls," though intriguing, is belied by both government and CMS reports. It does, of course, reflect CMS designs. 24. Indeed, Gwynne, who negotiated a role for the CMS in northern Sudan, took inspiration in the face of his setbacks from reading passages of Gordon's diaries and contemplating his sufferings; he gave lectures to the troops in Sudan on Gordon's life and death that "were much appreciated" (Jackson i960: 58-59, 61). 25. From S.S. Butler, "The Egyptian Army, 1909-1915, SAD 422/12. 26. Citing H. C. Bowman diary, 10 November 1911, MECA. 27. Citing Wingate to Cecil, 6January 1905, SAD 276/1. See Daly 1986: 93-104; Warburg 1971: 22-23. 28. Citing Wingate to Clayton (private), 9 April 1916, SAD/470/1. 29. Gwynne memoirs, SAD 421/1/308. 30. Gwynne memoirs, SAD 421/1/308. 31. Gwynne memoirs, SAD 4 2 1 / 1 / 3 0 9 . 32. Butler to his family, 25 July 1912, SAD 304/6/35. 33. Archival documents show that the SPS had secretly planned the deportations long before, and the revolt provided a convenient excuse to carry them out. Schuster to MacMichael, 25 February 1929, MacMichael papers, MECA G B 1 6 5 - 0 1 9 6 . See also Daly 1986: 309-11. 34. "Minute by His Excellency the Governor General" (Sir John Maffey), 1 January 1927, SAD 4 0 3 / 9 / 5 - 6 (MacPhail). 35. "Feature No. 253, The Position of Tribal Leaders in the Life of the Sudan," Civil Secretary's Office, i6July 1953, SAD 5 1 9 / 5 / 2 0 (Robertson). 36. Balfour memoirs, S A D 7 5 g / 1 1 / 4 0 - 4 3 ; Daly 1991: 44. 37. SAD 7 2 3 / 5 / 4 5 - 4 8 , 5 1 - 5 2 (Gillan).

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38. "Memorandum: Arabic and the Southern Sudan," H. A. MacMichael, 1 o May 1928, RH Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 421 (2). 39. "Memorandum: Arabic and the Southern Sudan," H. A. MacMichael, i o May 1928, RH Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 421 (2). 40. "Memorandum: Arabic and the Southern Sudan," H. A. MacMichael, 1 o May ig28, RH Mss. Brit. Emp. s. 421(2). 41. On suppressing Arabic, see MacMichael to Loraine, 17 June 1930, FO 407/212. 42. "Female Circumcision in the Sudan," O. F. H. Atkey, Director, Sudan Medical Service, 7 April 1930, FO 3 7 1 / 4 1 4 3 3 a n d N R O CivSec 1 / 5 7 / 3 / 1 2 1 . See Daly 1991: 44. Those further along the road to Arabization arranged marriages among their offspring so as to preserve their hard-won rank. 43. O n this point, see Saha, Hamad, and Mohamed 1990. 44. The last is an unattributed quote from Gwynne. 45. Report of a conversation between Wingate and Gwynne, Gwynne to Baylis, 24 February 1903, CMS G3 E/O/1903, No. 37. 46. The reference is to Trimingham 1949 (rpt. 1965). 47. SPISNo. 56, January-April 1946, FO 371/53328. She was eventually released to the CMS hospital in Khartoum and resettled in Atbara. 48. SPIS No. 56, January-April 1946, FO 371/53328. 49. SPIS No. 56, January-April 1946, FO 371/53328. Robertson reported that Trimingham went deliberately against procedure in order to improve the rules by which conversions could take place. Robertson to Governors, 11 May 1946, RH Mss Perham 5 7 1 / 2 / 2 9 - 3 0 . 50. SPIS No. 56, January-April 1946, FO 371/53328. 51. Robertson to Governors, 9 June 1946, RH Mss Perham 571/2/38. 52. The conversion episode occurred the same year that the law against the practice of infibulation (a form of female genital cutting) was passed, and the first test of its enforcement led to anticolonial riots. The practice is widely if erroneously believed to be required by Islam; at the very least it is a cultural practice bound up with the production of moral persons in northern Sudanese thought. See Boddy 2007. 53. In his letter to CMS headquarters of 25 April 1927 (CMS G3 E/P4/27), Gwynne suggested that the reorganization might incline the government to increase its annual £500 grant to the CMS for girls' education in northern Sudan, clearly indicating official support for the venture. See also Gwynne to PC, 7 June 1927, CMS G3 E/P4/3.

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Anderson, Benedict 1983 Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Artin, Yacoub Pasha 1911

England in the Sudan. Translated by George Robb. London: Macmillan.

Beasley, Ina 1992 Before the Wind Changed. Edited by J. Starkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Beshir, M o h a m e d O m e r 1969

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Boddy, Janice 2007 Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Collins, Robert O . 1971 Land beyond the Rivers: The Southern Sudan, 1898—1918. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1983 Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1918—1956. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1984 Introduction to The British in the Sudan, 1898—1956: The Sweetness and the Sorrow, edited by Robert O . Collins and Francis M. Deng, 1 - 2 7 . L o n d o n : Macmillan. C o n n e r t o n , Paul 1989 How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coray, Michael S. 1984 "In the Beginning." In The British in the Sudan, 1898—1956: The Sweetness and the Sorrow, edited by Robert O . Collins and Francis M. Deng, 2 8 - 6 3 . London: Macmillan. Daly, M.W. 1986 Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, C a m b r i d g e University Press.

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Cambridge:

1991 Imperial Sudan: The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 1934-1956. Cambridge University Press.

Cambridge:

D e n g , Francis M., and M.W. Daly, eds. 198g Bonds of Silk: The Human Factor in the British Administration of the Sudan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Doyle, Arthur C o n a n 1898 The Tragedy of the Korosko. L o n d o n : Smith, Elder. Esposito, J o h n L., ed. 2003

The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. New York: O x f o r d University Press.

Frost, J o h n W. 1984 "Memories of the Sudan Civil Service." In The British in the Sudan, 18981956: The Sweetness and the Sorrow, edited by Robert O . Collins and Francis M. Deng, 6 5 - 1 0 3 . L o n d o n : Macmillan. Henty, G e o r g e A l f r e d 1892 1903

The Dash for Khartoum: A Tale of the Nik Expedition. L o n d o n : Blackie. With Kitchener in the Soudan: A Story ofAtbara and Omdurman. London: Blackie.

Hetherington, S.J. 1989 Katharine Atholl, 1874—1960: versity Press.

Against the Tide. A b e r d e e n : A b e r d e e n Uni-

Holt, P.M. 1970

The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881—1898.

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Holt, P.M., and M . W . D a l y 1979 The History of the Sudan. L o n d o n : Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Ibrahim, A h m e d U t h m a n M u h a m m a d 1985 The Dilemma of British Rule in the Nuba Mountains, 1898—194J. College Publications, no. 15. Khartoum: University of Khartoum.

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Jackson, H e n r y Cecil 1954 Sudan Days and Ways. L o n d o n : Macmillan. i 9 6 0 Pastor on the Nile. L o n d o n : S.P.C.K. Johnson, Peter 1985 Gordon of Khartoum. Wellingborough, U.K.: Patrick Stephens. Kenrick, Rosemary 1987 Sudan Tales: Recollections of Some Sudan Political Service Wives, 1926—56. Cambridge: O l e a n d e r Press. Khalid, Mansour 1990 The Government They Deserve: The Role of the Elite in Sudan's Political Evolution. L o n d o n : Kegan Paul. Kipling, Rudyard 1909

Actions and Reactions. Toronto: Macmillan.

Kirk-Greene, A n t h o n y 1982 " T h e Sudan Political Service: A Profile in the Sociology of Imperialism." International Journal of African Historical Studies 15 (1): 2 1 - 4 8 . Low, Sidney 1 9 1 4 Egypt in Transition. L o n d o n : Smith, Elder. Mangan, J. A. 1982 " T h e Education of an Elite Imperial Administration: T h e Sudan Political Service and the British Public School System." International Journal of African Historical Studies 15 (4): 6 7 1 - 9 9 . Marlowe, J o h n 1969

Mission to Khartum: The Apotheosis of General Gordon. L o n d o n : Gollancz.

Mason, A. E. W. 1902/2002

The Four Feathers. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Prunier, Gérard 2005 Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. L o n d o n : Hurst. Ranger, Terence 1983 " T h e Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa." In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 2 1 1 - 6 2 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saha, N., R. E. Hamad, and S. M o h a m e d 1990 "Inbreeding Effects on Reproductive O u t c o m e in a Sudanese Population." Human Heredity 40: 2 0 8 - 1 2 . Salomon, N o a h 2003 "Undoing the Mahdiyya:The Imposition of Orthodoxy and 'Indirect Da'wd in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1 8 9 8 - 1 9 1 4 . " http://marty-center.uchicago.edu.

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Sanderson, L. Passmore, and G. M. Sanderson 1981 Education, Religion and Politics in the Southern Sudan, 1899—1964. Ithaca.

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Sarsfield-Hall, E. G. 1 9 7 5 From Cork to Khartoum. Keswick: E. Sarsfield-Hall. Sharkey, Heather J. 2002 "Christians a m o n g Muslims: T h e Church Missionary Society in the Northern Sudan." Journal of African History 43 ( 1 ): 5 1 - 7 5 . Steele, David 1998 "Lord Salisbury, the 'False Religion' of Islam, and the Reconquest of the Sudan." In Sudan: The Reconquest Reappraised, edited by E. M. Spiers, 1 1 - 3 3 . London: Frank Cass. Trimingham,J. Spencer 1948 The Christian Approach to Islam in the Sudan. L o n d o n : O x f o r d University Press. [1949] 1965 Islam in the Sudan. L o n d o n : Frank Cass. Warburg, Gabriel 1971 The Sudan underWingate: Administration in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1916. L o n d o n : Frank Cass. Wingate, Ronald 1955

Wingate of the Sudan. L o n d o n : Murray.

Woodward, Peter 1990 Sudan, 1898—1989:

The Unstable State. Boulder, C O : Lynne Rienner.

1899-

Chapter 5

Beyond Integration and Recognition Diasporic Constructions of Alevi Muslim Identity between Germany and Turkey ESRA OZYUREK

More often than not, European policy makers and public intellectuals frame the problems Muslim residents of Europe face in terms of their lack of "integration" (Geis 2004; Merkel 2005; also see Klusmeyer 2001). A wide variety of events, from the killing of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch Muslim in the Netherlands to the low success rates of Muslim students in Britain (Fetzer and Soper 2005: 44; Korteweg 2006) and from the demands of Muslim female students to attend school in their headscarves in France (Bowen 2007; Joppke 2007) to the recent reaction to the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, are seen as related to fundamental beliefs and practices central to the Islamic religion that prevent them from being part of the new Europe that is in the making. In turn, European Muslims frequently frame their demands as an issue of the absence of recognition of their difference (Taylor 1994). Integration is an increasingly prevalent issue in the redefinition of postcold war Europe. When European leaders met at Maastricht in 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they agreed to transform the basis of the European Union from an economic alliance to a political confederation and hence changed the name of their organization from the European Economic Community to the European Union. They defined culture as one of the central issues of social cohesion that would incorporate the original members with the twelve new countries from the socialist bloc (Ozyürek 2005). As Europe stopped being the mediator between the U.S. and Soviet empires, Europeans turned inward to seek a common denominator that would define themselves and hence were faced with the "anxiety of a Europeanization" (Borneman 1997: 488). Post-cold war European identity is increasingly based on the idea of an "integral Europe" that "recasts European society as a moral framework, an121

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alytical construct, and empirical fact" (Holmes 2000: xi). Politicians on both the right and the left make a claim about what defines the basis of integral Europe, or its Spirit, in the Hegelian sense, as something larger than the institutional organization of the European Union (Borneman 1997). Rightwing politicians in many European countries increasingly state that there is a fundamental European culture based on a long history and that Christianity is one of its central pillars. 1 Following Vaclav Havel's call to the European Parliament on March 8, 1994, the first draft of charter of European identity was prepared by the European Union delegates in 1997. T h o u g h it never became the official charter, it is significant that this first draft attests to an essentialist understanding as it puts Christianity at the center of what constitutes European values today. It states, "Building on its historical roots in classical antiquity and Christianity, Europe further developed these values (i.e. tolerance, humanity, and fraternity) during the course of the renaissance, the Humanist movement, and the Enlightenment, which led in turn to the development of democracy, the recognition of fundamental and human rights, and the rule of law."2 Manifestations of this understanding, which sees certain values as fundamentally European and directly related to Christianity and post-Christian secularism, are abundant in relation to both the treatment of Muslim communities in Europe and objections raised against the possible integration of Turkey into the European Union. Most often Muslim minorities in Europe and Turkey, a Muslim-majority candidate for inclusion in the European Union, are principally defined through their religious affiliation, regardless of the fact that many European Muslims do not practice their religion and that Turkey is a militantly secular country where public expression of religion is strictly limited (Ozyurek 2006). Leftist liberals, on the other hand, argue that what make Europe special is its commitment to secular, democratic, and humanitarian values. Despite their universalistic approach, which ostensibly decentralizes Christianity, leftists are often the most vociferous in their critique of certain Islamic practices, such as veiling, circumcision, and the ritual slaughtering of animals. They believe such practices should be prevented not because they are nonChristian but because they represent a culture that promotes extreme submission to religion and hence does not allow individuals to subscribe to secularist values. Therefore, both the left and the right question the capacity of Muslims to be part of the new, integral Europe (Ozyurek 2005). T h e assumption underlying the so-called poor prospects for integration is that immigrant Muslims bring with them their alien beliefs, concerns, and practices. Based on my research on the transnational Alevi Muslim community in Berlin, Vienna, and Istanbul, however, I suggest that the Muslim identities and political agendas that seek recognition in Europe are largely made in Europe and hence are indigenous to Europe. In other words, it is

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the political, legal, and social context of the post-cold war European Union and the unique conditions of individual European countries that shape the way Muslim communities—and others—define themselves in that sociopolitical geography. 3 These new identities that come into being at the core of Europe, in turn, transform the debates and definitions of Islam in the Muslim-majority peripheries of Europe, such as Turkey, Morocco, and Egypt—rather than the process working the other way around. On the other side of the same coin, Muslim minorities develop parallel discursive strategies to legitimate their demands for recognition. Like their (post-) Christian counterparts, Muslim activists argue that Muslims come to Europe with already defined identities, priorities, and lifestyles that need to be recognized as different and respected. Yet the politics of recognition are themselves a post-cold war phenomenon, mostly developed in Europe and in European settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, and Australia (Povinelli 2002). As the welfare state is shrinking throughout Europe, the politics of recognition are replacing the politics of redistribution (Taylor 1994; Fraser 1997; Benhabib 2002). In Europe today official recognition of difference is one way to access material resources, as well as legal rights and political power. Thus the demand for recognition has a particular shape and meaning in the new legal and economic context of enlarged Europe, and when particular demands of recognition originally developed in Europe travel to other contexts, they often do not translate well or politically benefit the minority groups in the same way. One useful way to understand how Muslim immigrants in Europe increasingly make their political demands on the basis of the recognition of religious difference—as opposed to class or national origin—is to examine the transformations in the self-understanding of the heterodox Muslim community of Alevis in Europe. European Alevi organization is especially significant because it transformed the conceptualization of Alevi identity in Turkey, as well as debates on the issue of Muslim diversity in Turkey. Because diverse policies applied by different countries in the European Union lead to disparate results for the Muslim communities in Europe, 4 I discuss how the German government's relatively recent efforts to recognize religious minorities as independent units allowed Turkish- and Kurdish-descent Alevis in Germany to define their religion as a separate belief system. I suggest that the politicolegal conditions in Germany and the newly available resources that the European Parliament provides to Europe-wide immigrant groups have encouraged Alevis to define themselves as separate from Sunni Muslims and make demands based on the recognition of this difference. Simultaneously, because Turkey is in the process of integration with the European Union, European Alevis have found themselves in a position to demand specific group rights for Alevis in Turkey. Since in Turkey the poli-

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tics of redistribution are not based on recognition of difference, Alevi identity politics caused heated debates about the nature of religion and minority status. Some of the positions and demands developed in the German context have proved not easily transferable or always translatable to the Turkish context. Yet the level of transnational dialogue between Muslims in Europe and Turkey suggests that the very definition of Islam and what is acceptable in it is always under negotiation. In that sense this chapter aims to move our understanding of debates in Europe away from the themes of integration and recognition of already existing and well-defined minority religious systems that are treated as ill-fitting transplants. Instead, it advocates a globally contextualized understanding of religious identity and positioning based on the divergent social, political, and legal contexts in which these identities are continuously made and remade.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ALEVISM

It is difficult to articulate an easy description of Alevism that will be accepted by the majority of Alevi activists, scholars, and believers at a time when dozens of organizations across Turkey and Europe are struggling with it. Most scholars and Alevi spokespeople define Alevis as a heterodox Muslim g r o u p with roots in Turkey; a few Alevi activists identify it as a distinct belief system and lifestyle that is outside Islam. 5 Although practiced differently in various parts of Turkey, Alevi belief is marked by a mystical understanding of religion that emphasizes a deeper spiritual message of the Qur'an; an internalized sense of God that can be attained by following the Alevi path; an overwhelming love for Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and sonin-law, who is revered as the keeper of mystical knowledge; commemoration of the martyrdom of Hasan and Hussein, Ali's sons; and practice of a communal ritual named C e m (gathering) in which men and women participate. At first sight Alevism displays similarities with Shiite Islam. Yet a great majority of Alevis do not see their belief as affiliated with Shiism and feel distant from the Shiite regime in Iran. Historians of Alevism also argue that although influenced by Shiism, Alevi belief has distinct features that are f o r m e d through syncretistic integration of Central Asian Turkish shamanistic beliefs, mystical Islam, and local religions in Anatolia, including Christianity (Melikoff 2004). 6 T h e difficulty of conceptualizing Alevism is related in part to the fact that the word Alevi is a recent invention, at most one hundred years old. T h e word, which literally means "descendants of Ali," is a misnomer. A leading scholar of the community, Irene Melikoff, argues that Alevis today are the descendants of heterodox nomadic Turkish and Kurdish groups living in Anatolia that used to be called Kizilbash and of followers of the Bektashi dervish or-

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der who lived in western Turkey and the Balkans. The Ottomans treated these heterodox groups differently through its history. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries Ottomans embraced their mystic practices and made them central to the organization of the Janissaries, the elite Ottoman infantry. In 1826, however, the Janissaries were slaughtered, the Bektashi orders were made illegal, and the Kizilbash were massacred (Zürcher 1998). In the late nineteenth century Ottoman state officials systematically attempted to convert the heterodox groups to Sunni Islam (Deringil 2000). Because groups that constituted the Kizilbash were persecuted during the late Ottoman period, many of them welcomed the foundation in 1923 of the secular Turkish Republic (Schüller 1999; Kücük 2002). They hoped to live in peace in the new republic and be considered equal to Sunni citizens; they also hoped that a secular government would not interfere in their religious practices. The republic fulfilled their expectations to some degree but not fully. In the history of the Turkish Republic Alevis were not systematically persecuted. Granted, hundreds of Alevis were killed by Sunni Muslim and Turkish nationalist fanatics in Sivas (1978 and 1993), Kahramanmaras (1978), Qorum (1980), and Gazi in Istanbul in 1997 (Jongerden 2003). These events were different from the Ottoman massacres in the sense that none was openly organized by state officials. Early republican officials were sympathetic to Alevis because they considered them racially Turkish and admired their Turkish interpretation of Islam, supposedly uncontaminated by Arab influences. Moroever, because Alevis do not follow the five pillars of Islam and live an ostensibly more secular lifestyle they seemed ideal citizens for the new Turkish Republic. 7 Though Alevis live a relatively peaceful life in the Turkish Republic, compared to that of the Ottoman Empire, they still are not equal citizens. The republic's nationalist and secularist ideology has resulted in support of a homogeneously Sunni interpretation of Islam, strictly controlled and monitored by the Turkish state. In this new, strictly uniform interpretation of Islam, Alevis found themselves unsupported and unrecognized. When asked, Alevis say that they began to feel especially threatened in the 1990s when political Islam became increasingly powerful and Islamist parties became part of the government. 8 Today the Department of Religious Affairs, which promotes and serves Sunni Islam, has a larger budget than many other ministries: approximately $1 billion. For the year 2005, the department employed 60,000 imams in Turkey and abroad and funded 4,221 Qur'an schools.9 Yet Alevis, who constitute between 10 and 30 percent of Turkey's population of 70 million, receive none of these services. Their houses of worship are not recognized, nor are they provided the free water and property tax breaks that mosques, churches, and synagogues receive. Alevism is not taught in textbooks or in state divinity schools. Alevi prayer and community leaders are not trained or funded by state resources.

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ALEVI REVIVAL: FROM GERMANY T O TURKEY D e s p i t e t h e f a c t t h a t t h e y p r a c t i c e d t h e i r r e l i g i o n in f a r f r o m i d e a l c o n d i tions, A l e v i s d i d n o t m a k e p u b l i c d e m a n d s d u r i n g t h e first s e v e n t y y e a r s o f t h e T u r k i s h R e p u b l i c . M a n y o b s e r v e r s a s s u m e d that A l e v i s w o u l d assimilate as t h e y m i g r a t e d to t h e cities a n d lost t h e i r c o n t a c t s w i t h t h e i r l o c a l r e l i g i o u s l e a d e r s . H o w e v e r , t h e 1 9 9 0 s w i t n e s s e d a n u n e x p e c t e d l y lively A l e v i revival. A l e v i s b u i l t h u n d r e d s o f r e l i g i o u s g a t h e r i n g p l a c e s across E u r o p e a n d Turkey. T h e y w r o t e a n d r e a d h u n d r e d s o f b o o k s d e f i n i n g t h e h i s t o r y a n d basic features o f A l e v i s m . T h e y also e s t a b l i s h e d d o z e n s o f A l e v i I n t e r n e t sites a n d part i c i p a t e d in lively d e b a t e s a b o u t A l e v i s m . A s D a v i d S h a n k l a n d p u t it, "A rural, r e m o t e , diverse, private, l a r g e l y o r a l Islamic s o c i e t y h a s b e c o m e u r b a n , p u b l i c , active, secular, a n d t o a g r e a t e x t e n t , b e g u n t h e e x p r e s s p r o c e s s o f c o d i f i c a t i o n o f its p r e v i o u s l y diverse l a r g e l y u n r e c o r d e d c u l t u r e w i t h i n t h e m o d e r n city s e t t i n g " (2003: 13). T o d a y t h e A l e v i revival m o v e m e n t c o m p r i s e s a w i d e s p e c t r u m o f o r g a n i z a t i o n s , f r o m t h o s e t h a t s e e A l e v i s m as a socialist r e s i s t a n c e m o v e m e n t (Pir S u l t a n A b d a l A s s o c i a t i o n ) to t h o s e that s e e it as a T u r k i s h i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f Islam ( C e m F o u n d a t i o n ) a n d o t h e r s t h a t s e e it as a Shii i n t e r p r e t a t i o n (Ehl-i B e y t F o u n d a t i o n ) . 1 0 O n e o f t h e m o s t c o m m o n l y r e c o g n i z e d r e a s o n s f o r t h e A l e v i revival is t h e r e c e n t u r b a n i z a t i o n o f the A l e v i p o p u l a t i o n . R e s e a r c h e r s s u g g e s t that b e c a u s e A l e v i s w e r e m a s s a c r e d d u r i n g O t t o m a n times, m a n y m o v e d t o i s o l a t e d m o u n t a i n villages ( $ a h i n 2 0 0 1 ) . Or, f o r t h e s a m e r e a s o n , o n l y A l e v i s w h o lived in isolated m o u n t a i n villages w e r e a b l e to p r o t e c t t h e i r b e l i e f systems a n d rituals w i t h o u t b e i n g p e r s e c u t e d o r a s s i m i l a t e d i n t o t h e S u n n i c o m m u nity. T h e y w e r e n o t c o n n e c t e d to e a c h o t h e r a n d w e r e c o m m i t t e d t o t h e i r r e l i g i o u s i d e n t i t y t h r o u g h dede-talib. A l e v i r e l i g i o u s l e a d e r s (dedes)\\s\x.ed t h e i r f o l l o w e r s (talibs) o n c e a year, d u r i n g winter, in t h e i r villages to r e s o l v e disp u t e s a n d c o n d u c t t h e cem c e r e m o n y ( f i g u r e 5 . 1 ) . W h e n A l e v i s c a m e to t h e cities t h e y lost t h e i r c o n n e c t i o n s with t h e i r d e d e s . M o r e o v e r , t h o u g h t h e y m i g r a t e d to cities in l a r g e n u m b e r s , t h e y w e r e n o t a b l e t o c l a i m a n y p a r t o f t h e s e cities as distinctively A l e v i ( S h a k l a n d 2003). Yet t h e y m e t o t h e r A l e v i s w h o s h a r e d similar b e l i e f s b u t f o l l o w e d slightly d i f f e r e n t p r a c t i c e s o f worship. T h e cemevi (ritual g a t h e r i n g h o u s e ) , a u n i q u e l y u r b a n p h e n o m e n o n o f t h e 1 9 9 0 s , b e c a m e a n e w way f o r A l e v i s t o c l a i m t h e i r c o m m u n a l identity. In r u r a l settings m a n y A l e v i s c o n d u c t e d C e m g a t h e r i n g s in t h e l a r g e s t h o u s e s o f t h e i r villages r a t h e r t h a n set a s i d e a s e p a r a t e b u i l d i n g f o r this purp o s e . Later, c e m e v i s s t a r t e d to b e b u i l t in r u r a l a r e a s as well, t h a n k s t o rem i t t a n c e s t h a t A l e v i i m m i g r a n t s in W e s t e r n E u r o p e s e n t h o m e f o r this purpose (Rittersberger-Tihf 1998). Cemevis b e c a m e places where Alevis would m e e t a n d m a k e t h e i r r e l i g i o n a p p r o p r i a t e to its n e w u r b a n c o n t e x t . 1 1 A m o r e s i g n i f i c a n t f a c t o r t h a t l e d to t h e A l e v i revival, w h i c h is n o t as r e a d ily e x p r e s s e d , has b e e n t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n o f A l e v i s in E u r o p e ( N e y z i 2003;

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Figure 5.1. Cem ceremony in Karacaahmet Sultan Dergahi, Istanbul. Copyright Esra Ozyürek.

Rigoni 2003), especially in Germany (Kaya 1998). The massive migration of Turks and Kurds to Germany in the 1960s, on the invitation of the German government so as to overcome labor shortages, transformed the social, economic, and political terrains in Turkey (Qaglar 1 9 9 1 ; Mandel 1994). As new generations of Turks and Kurds grew up in Germany, they began to organize politically in ways that had not been possible in Turkey, especially in the politically oppressive atmosphere of the post-i 980 military coup (0stergaardNielsen 2003). These groups also sent ideas and remittances to their hometowns in Turkey and made it possible for parallel Alevi organizations to flourish there. Because Alevis lived in more rurally isolated parts of the country, they have been more willing than the Sunnis to move to Germany and other European countries (Sahin 2005), and they constitute about 3 0 percent of immigrants from Turkey. Soon after they settled, Alevis began to gather around political organizations they established, albeit not openly or exclusively Alevi ones. Alevi identity in Germany was quite latent until the 1980s (Kaya 1998); solely Alevi organizations came into being in Germany only in the late 1980s. As Riza A t a f , chairman of the Alevi cemevi in Berlin, told me in an in-

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terview in summer 2005, " T h e light of the Alevi [revival] fire was lit here and then spread to Turkey." W h e n I asked why this was the case, he responded, "After the early immigrants secured their bread, they became involved in social life and began engaging in politics to make this a better world." T h e Turkish Worker's Union (Turk Ameleler Birligi) was the first organization in which Alevis in Germany became politically active in the 1960s. T h e association was soon replaced by the Patriot's Union (Yurtseverler Birligi), affiliated with the Union Party (Birlik Partisi), an understatedly Alevi political party established in Turkey in 1969. Yet because in the 1970s the great majority of Alevis were influenced by socialist ideals, they chose to organize around nonsectarian leftist organizations, and the Alevi movement did not take off during that time either in Germany or in Turkey. After the military junta came to power in 1980, Turkey began to persecute leftist activists. As Germany began to accept immigrants as political refugees, newer and established Alevi activists organized exclusive Alevi organizations. T h e decision to shift the basis of political organization from socialism to Alevism was influenced in part by a legal change at the European level. In 1986 the European Parliament decided to subsidize associations that promote immigrant cultures and identities across Europe, and Alevis began to organize and coordinate activities at the European level as Alevis (Soysal 1994; §ahin 2005). 12 T h e organization of Alevis in Germany was also facilitated by the fact that the coalition of Socialists and Greens that started in 1989 emphasized antiracism and multiculturalism and hence encouraged alternative forms of immigrant organization that go beyond ethnic lines (Kaya 1998). As Alevis began to organize in Germany, they found that the same characteristics of their faith—such as not going to the mosque, not praying five times a day, men and women praying together, women not covering their h a i r — t h a t are frowned on by the Sunni majority in Turkey were favored by Germans as progressive and tolerant (Mandel 1989). Many Alevis I met in Germany, Austria, and Turkey pointed to these characteristics of their faith as what makes them similar to Christians and hence allows them to integrate easily in Christian Europe. 1 3 A sixty-year-old retired Alevi man I met at the Berlin cemevi took pride in the fact that as soon as Alevi women moved to Germany they adapted to its dress and lifestyle. A thirty-three-year-old woman who grew up in Germany and works as an assistant at a doctor's office quietly told me that as an Alevi she does not even mind eating pork. For similar reasons, the German government considered Alevis closer to the state and less alien than their Sunni counterparts (Kosnick 2004). O n e of the most concrete fruits of the Alevi revival facilitated by Germany's favorable economic, social, political, and legal conditions was the writing of the Alevi Manifesto in 1989 by mostly Alevi and some Sunni intellectuals in the Hamburg Alevi Association. T h e manifesto was published in the main left-wing newspaper in Turkey, Cumhuriyet, a year later. T h e document defined Alevism as

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a branch of Islam and aimed to make the demands of Alevis publicly known. It asked for recognition of Alevism as a different faith and culture, for equal representation and opportunity in education and in the media, and proportional assistance in religious services. 14 In 1994, after the Alevi Manifesto was published, Alevis organized across Europe under the umbrella of the Federation of European Alevi Unions. As of summer 2005 the federation was organized in nine countries and had 184 affiliated organizations. These organizations became spaces for Alevis to come together to discuss and define the nature of Alevi politics, but more significantly they allowed Alevis to define Alevism as a publicly expressed independent religion, an opportunity more readily available to them in Germany than in Turkey. It is important to note that this transformation from a political to a religious federation did not come easily to Alevis. When I talked to Mehmet Ali Gankaya, leader of the Austrian Alevi Association, in his bakery in Vienna I became acutely aware of the tensions among Alevis in terms of their organizational strategies. At the beginning of our conversation, Gankaya told me that he himself is not religious, yet he believes it is important for Alevis to organize as Alevis. He told me that his friends often complain to him about naming their organization as Alevi. Gankaya explained: They tell me that we are making ourselves a religious organization by calling it the Alevi Association. But I disagree with them. If we gather here as Alevis, we should say so. We are not here for religious purposes only. The struggle we engage in here for the recognition of Alevi rights is necessary for democracy and human rights both in Turkey and in Europe. Alevism is not only a matter of belief. It is an integral part of secularism and democracy in Turkey. We promote democracy, dialogue, and social peace. We are not a radical religious organization. Our primary goal is to provide a language to talk about differences and promote democracy in Turkey.

Alevis who organized in Europe supported their networks in Turkey financially and ideologically to build cemevis and organize as Alevis. When the German government encouraged immigrants to return to their home countries in the 1990s, the return migrants had a profound influence on Alevi identity formation and politics in Turkey. The returnees provided both leadership and monetary resources for the Alevi movement (RittersbergerTihg 1998). Another development that fundamentally transformed debates among Alevis was facilitated by another event that took place in Germany. In 2002 the local government in Berlin recognized Alevism as an official religion and gave the Alevi community the right to teach Alevism. This development followed on granting to the Islamic Federation in Berlin the right to teach Islam in public schools in 2000 (Engin 2004). Today in Berlin Alevi educators are teaching Alevism on a voluntary basis. Teachers' salaries are partly met

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by the German government and partly by the Alevi organization. W h e n I visited the Alevi Association in Berlin I saw that the education program faced many problems, especially because not all Alevi parents wanted their children to learn about Alevism, fearing that they would be scapegoated as being different from Sunni Turks. In addition, it proved difficult to transport sufficient numbers of students from schools located throughout the city for classes. Yet the idea of teaching Alevism as a separate faith has been revolutionary in the way the belief system is conceptualized or publicly expressed as an independent religion. T h e legal decisions of the German officials had two significant consequences. First, because Alevism has been an oral religion based on the esoteric knowledge of the dedes who lead their communities, Alevi intellectuals and religious leaders had to come together to create a written and standardized definition of their religion. Moreover, though the variation in Alevi practices in Turkey made writing a textbook difficult, this very process introduced the standardization of Alevi beliefs, rituals, and practices. Second, when German officials in Berlin granted the Alevi organization the right to teach religion, they also o p e n e d up the possibility for Alevism to be officially recognized as a separate religion from Islam in general. In Germany at the federal level, Islam has not yet received the formal status of an officially recognized religion, despite the fact that Sunnis have been seeking this status since the 1970s (Jonker 2000). Gaining this right is important because, according to Article 140 of the German constitution, recognition as a public religion ensures legal autonomy and allows the government to collect taxes from the members of the religious group for the use of the religious officials (Fetzer and Soper 2005: 108). Today both Sunni Muslims and Alevis are pursuing legal action in order to be recognized as an official religion in each state. 15 In Austria, where the same legal provision also exists, Islam has been recognized as an official religion since the Austro-Hungarian Empire heavily relied on Bosnian Muslim soldiers. 16 T h e Alevi association in Austria applied to the Austrian government in 2004 to be recognized as a separate religious community. Qankaya told me that the members of his organization believe Alevism is a belief system specific to Anatolia and hence independent from Islam. He said, "If Alevism was part of Islam, it would be just like Islam. Since it is not, it is a different belief. T h a t is why we applied to the Austrian state to be recognized as a different religion. Many German and Austrian scholars studied our religion. T h e y also concluded that it is an independent religion." This kind of official recognition of Alevism as a separate religion has become possible only because the German and Austrian political-legal systems allow religious groups to obtain independent legal status if they fulfill certain criteria. 17 When I met with the directors of the Islamic Federation in Berlin they complained that the German officials define religion based on

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their particular understanding of Christianity and that they had a hard time accepting their application because some of the characteristics of Christianity cannot be applied to Islam (Yurdakul 2005). T h e German constitution requires that official religious communities have a churchlike organization, which defines the boundaries of the religion, has the capacity to excommunicate members, and trains clergy (Engin 2004; Jonker 2005). In addition, because there is n o pope or archbishop in Islam, dozens of groups applied to be considered the representative of the Muslim community in a given state in Germany (Fetzer and Soper 2005). T h e federation had to seek the authority of experts and explain to the officials that no such power is available to any individual in Islam. Compared to Sunni Islam, Alevism has even fewer formal characteristics. Many of the Alevi sources are oral, and esoteric rituals and some basic beliefs show great variation across different communities. This window of opportunity presented to them by the German legal system prompts Alevi leaders to face the challenging task of defining their religion as different from Islam and in terms that fit mainly Christian-derived criteria.

BELIEF OR RELIGION: RECOGNITION OF ALEVISM IN TURKEY

W h e n the possibility of the recognition of Alevism as a separate religion was introduced in Germany and Austria, it put the nature of Alevism in question in Turkey as well. Yet in a different social, political, and legal context, the politics of recognition took on a different form. T h e issue quickly divided the Alevi organizations. Tensions surrounding the controversy were so high that in several nationwide television programs on which Alevi leaders were asked to debate the issue, their discussions concerning whether Alevism is within or outside Islam devolved into fisticuffs. Regardless of their different positions in relation to the issue, the public expression of Alevism brought with it a strong desire to define Alevism. An Alevi friend who works at a cemevi library in Istanbul told me about his frustration over the lack of a c o m m o n understanding of Alevism, saying, "We need a commonly accepted, systematic definition of Alevism." W h e n I challenged him by saying that Alevism seems to have survived well for a long time without a rigid definition, he responded, "We need to define things better in order to face Sunni Islam. T h e richness we have in Alevism is good, but it also leads to chaos. Diversity in relation to Alevism confuses people. It is especially a major problem when we have to defend ourselves against the state or Sunni Muslims. T h e fights we are having among ourselves are hurting Alevism." Similarly, Ali Riza G u l f i f e k , a politically active recent Alevi returnee from Germany and a former MP in the parliament with the opposition secular Republican Peoples Party, told me during an interview that one of the most important needs of Alevis today is a consultative committee to

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define Alevism. H e said, "The problem is that we do not have a written tradition. We need a committee to gather and define Alevism once and for all of us." T h o u g h the efforts of the Alevi Bektashi Union in Europe have been crucial to public recognition of Alevism as a separate belief system in Germany and Austria, their line of argumentation does not translate well into the Turkish context. T h e majority of Alevis in Turkey define Alevism within Islam, even though they recognize that it is different from Sunni Islam (Tugal 2004). Therefore, the Alevi Bektashi Union is not as popular in Turkey as it is in Europe. 1 8 When I met with the leader of the Okmeydani Cemevi, affiliated with the European federation, I was told that the majority of Alevis in Turkey do not approve of the position that Alevism is outside Islam. T h e leadership in Okmeydani believes this disapproval is shaped both by the fear that Alevis will be marginalized and the new political situation under the government of the Justice and Development Party, led by Islamist leaders. He claimed that Alevis in Turkey are in a double bind: "If we say we are Muslims, then the government officials will tell us to go to mosques and abolish our cemevis. But if we say we are not Muslims, then we will be subjected to discrimination and possibly persecution. Even though I believe that Alevism is i n d e p e n d e n t f r o m Islam, this view is not popular." H e added that for centuries Alevis have been subjected to persecution on the basis that they are not Muslims, and he thinks it is ironic that most Alevis today claim Alevism is the true Islam. T h e best-organized and most popular Alevi organization in Turkey today is the C e m Foundation, established by Izettin Dogan, a law professor from a dede lineage. He argues that Alevism is not a belief independent from Islam; rather it is the Turkish interpretation of Islam and in that sense it is the essence of Islam (Islamm ozii).19 As opposed to the Alevi Bektashi Union, the C e m Foundation demands that Alevis be recognized as a separate sect within Islam and seeks representation in the Department of Religious Affairs, as well as services in proportion to their demographic numbers. Supporters of other organizations find the C e m Foundation conservative and too closely connected to the Turkish government. A n administrator I interviewed at the C e m Foundation stated that the difference between Alevism and Sunnism lies only in interpretation: "We recite the Fatiha [the opening chapter of the Qur'an] in Turkish, and they recite it in Arabic. We pray only on Thursday evenings; they pray five times a day. Sunnism is based on fear. O u r understanding of God is based on love. We believe in peace and tolerance. We see everyone as our brothers. We accept Islam and its principles at its very foundation. We respect the family of the Prophet. We have extreme love towards it." A n d according to Ali Riza Ugurlu, head of the Alevi Islam Religious Services Department in the C e m Foundation, established in 2003, "People who say Alevism is not Islam are

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not aware of the nature of religion." During an interview, he told me that all religions are the same: What people perceive as separate religions are only different moments in the maturation of the same religion. People who do not know better think that every prophet invented a new religion. The duty of the prophet is just to declare and not to invent. We have all been Muslims since creation. As Alevis we believe in the Qur'an, but we do not see it as the words that constitute it. We try to understand the meaning of the Qur'an in its totality. Otherwise Islam is not only about the daughter getting one share of the inheritance and the son acquiring two shares of it. These rules are for the ignorant ones. The mature ones understand it at another level. With this view of religion, the C e m Foundation positions itself against the European Alevi Bektashi Union. T h e former accuses the latter of making the same argument as anti-Alevi S u n n i s — t h a t Alevis are not Muslims. T h e same administrator in the C e m Foundation headquarters in Istanbul defended his organization's position in the following words: "Organizations in Europe say that we are outside Islam. They argue that Alevism comes from shamanism. T h e n we ask them, what is your book, who is your prophet? All religions should have them. T h e n they cannot give us an answer." To provide answers to these questions that they pose for themselves, members of the C e m Foundation devote their energies to organizing and codifying Alevism single-handedly. Ali Riza Ugurlu told me that in order to guide Alevi religious leaders in the best possible way, they started dede training programs. H e claimed, "For generations dedes practiced what they had seen from their fathers. T h e leftist political organizations have not respected dedes, so they felt alienated. Alevis merging together from different regions into the cities brought conflicts into Alevism. So we decided that Alevi religious leaders also had to organize and define Alevism." To attain this goal the foundation established an organization of dedes, and now they have three thousand dedes affiliated with them throughout the world. In this way, the C e m Foundation aims to institutionalize Alevism. T h e hope is that its extensive dede organization will enable Alevis to receive resources from the Department of Religious Affairs in proportion to the Alevi population in Turkey. Yet Turkish officials are not willing to allocate special resources to Alevis. Rather, they promote the view that Alevis are equal citizens because they are not willing to recognize their difference.

TRANSFORMING THE MINORITY PARADIGM IN TURKEY

After Turkey became a full candidate for the European Union in 1999, Alevi leaders in Europe worked closely with European political leaders to draw attention to discrimination against Alevis in Turkey. Even though Alevis in

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Turkey were reluctant to get help from the European Union, efforts of the Alevi lobby in Europe resulted in the European Union's Regular Report on Turkey, dated October 6, 2004, which pointed to difficulties Alevis face in Turkey and defined them as a "non-Sunni Muslim minority." 20 T h e phrase generated much critique in the Turkish government and nationalist circles, with accusations thate European Union officials were undermining Turkey by aiming to divide and weaken the country. More interesting, Alevi leaders in Turkey resented being defined as a minority. To understand the controversy over the term minority, some background will be helpful. T h e definition of minorities in Turkey was established in the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, signed by the newly established Turkish Republic and the Allies after World War I. T h e treaty recognizes only Armenians, Greeks, and Jews as minorities. It grants these groups equal protection and freedom from discrimination, permits them to establish schools and provide education in their own languages and to settle family-related issues in accordance with own customs, and guarantees religious freedom (Kurban 2003). 21 These rights are reminiscent of the sociolegal order of the Ottoman Empire, which recognized the legal independence of non-Muslim groups while giving them a subordinate position. 22 T h e Lausanne Treaty, which acknowledges only non-Muslim groups numbered in the thousands as minorities, left unrecognized much larger ethnolinguistic groups whose populations number in the millions, such as the Kurds, the Laz, and the Circessians, and heterodox Muslim groups, such as the Alevi. Citizens who propagate the idea that any of these groups are minorities or aim to establish associations to promote their rights are imprisoned for challenging national unity and harming the country by being divisive. In fact, Article 216 (formerly 312) of the Turkish Penal Code states that it is a crime to "instigate a part of the people having different social class, race, religion, sect or region to hatred or hostility against another part of the people in a way that threatens public security," punishable up to three years; if committed by means of the media, punishment is to be increased by one-half. As Turkey became increasingly more committed to admission to the European Union, government officials took the necessary steps to fit the human rights criteria set at Copenhagen in 1993 (Muftuler-Bag 2005). Between 2001 and 2003 the Turkish Parliament adopted thirty-four constitutional amendments and a set of seven reform packages. 23 Although the Turkish Parliament took steps to improve its human rights record in order to achieve integration with the European Union, the penal code remained unchanged, and the recognition of Alevis' rights as a Muslim religious minority caused concern in Sunni-dominated political circles. T h e latter accused Alevi organizations in Europe of serving the interests of the European powers in dividing the country, which put Alevis in Turkey in a vulnerable position. Government officials, Sunni nationalists, and Alevi activists alike were dis-

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turbed by the use of the word minority to define the Alevi community. Many Sunni leaders, religious and nonreligious, saw this as a dangerous move on the part of Alevis. Soon after the report was released both the president and the prime minister gave powerful messages indicating that they do not recognize Alevis as a minority. President Necdet Sezer claimed that Alevis are "the elements of the majority," and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan dismissed their claim to be a minority by saying, "If Alevism means to love and follow Ali. . . then I am more Alevi [than the Alevis]."24 Both statements dismissed Alevi demands to be recognized as different, insisting that they belonged to the majority and hence did not qualify for special rights. The Sunni activist Miifit Yiiksel's statements in a right-wing daily in Turkey explain the Sunni nationalist position on the issue: "If the European Union recognizes Alevis as a minority, Alevism will inevitably be recognized as a religion outside Islam. In Turkey and in the Muslim world minority means nonMuslim. This society which associates minorities with non-Muslims cannot handle seeing Alevis as non-Muslims. This will lead to divisions and partitions in the country. These partitions may end up being bloody, such as the fights among Sunnis and Shiis in Pakistan." Yiiksel further argued that it is the Alevi organizations in Europe that take an active part in defining Alevis as a minority. In a veiled threat he warned Alevi organizations in Turkey against the dangerously divisive aims of the European Alevis.25 With regard to the view of Alevi organizations in Turkey, those not affiliated with the Alevi Bektashi Union were highly critical. In an interview, the chair of the Sahkulu Dergah Association, Mehmet f a m u r , accused the Alevi Bektashi Union of attempting to "prioritize the subidentities, divide the nation-state, and Balkanize Turkey."26 Many Alevi friends I talked to in Istanbul expressed similar dislike for the term minority because they assumed that if they accepted this position, it would consign them to a status lower than that of Sunni Turks. During a conversation with Alevis at the Yenibosna Cemevi in Istanbul, as we were waiting for the Cem ceremony to begin, Adnan, a thirty-five-year-old man who owns a modest electric supplies store in the neighborhood, said, "Alevis are not a minority, even if they have been isolated and oppressed. When you say a minority it feels like a group that is totally isolated. Jews, Armenians, or Greeks are minorities. I am not saying this in a negative sense. But if we call Alevis a minority it will be unfair to them." Feeling uncomfortable that Adnan considered it almost an insult to be considered a member of a minority, I asked him why he thinks that Alevis are different from the groups he mentioned. He answered, "I think being a minority is a bad thing in this country. We are not like Armenians or Jews. There is pressure on us, but we also have some freedom. I am afraid that the term minority in the European Union report can be used in a harmful manner. If they see us just like the way they see Armenians, it will be worse for us. You know, they may even see us in oppositional terms with nationalism."

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A d n a n thus recognizes that the Alevi religious position is already questionable in relation to the Sunni majority and hence what holds the Turkish nation together. He is afraid that if Alevis are recognized as a minority, their allegiance to the Turkish state will be questioned. Other Alevi friends emphasized that they did not like the fact that the European Union report puts them and Kurds in the same category, minorities. For example, the librarian I interviewed at the C e m Foundation stated during conversation, "There is a difference between having been exposed to injustice and being a minority. [Unlike Kurds,] Alevis do not want a separate land or a flag. All they want to do is to be able to practice their worship." In other words, for most Sunnis and Alevis alike, the term minority and the right to be recognized as a separate group indicate not belonging to the nation and even being in contradictory terms with it. 27 W h e n confronted with the reaction of their counterparts in Turkey, European Alevis met with the European officials who wrote the report and asked them to remove the word minority. Turgut Oker, leader of the Alevi organization in Europe, argued that because people were so focused on the word, other important issues cited in the r e p o r t — f o r example, the need for Alevis to have prayer houses and elimination of compulsory religious education that promotes Sunnism—have been overlooked. T h e European context of the late 1980s and 1990s that allowed Alevis to be recognized as a religious minority separate from Sunnis had profound influence on the way Alevis are conceptualized in Turkey. Yet, when transported to the Turkish context, the demand to be recognized as a minority meant something totally different and not necessarily something that Alevi activists considered beneficial to their political struggle in Turkey.

CONCLUSION

I have argued against the statement that Muslim residents in Europe have difficulty integrating into European society because of their alien beliefs and practices. Similarly, I have tried to show that Alevis' demand for recognition is not a natural extension of their unsurmountable difference. T h e interconnectedness of the Alevi movement in Europe and in Turkey demonstrates that the European context and sociopolitical forces shape the religious identities, beliefs, practices, and political agendas of its Muslim residents. T h e demand by both Sunni Muslims and Alevis to be defined and recognized as separate groups is shaped and motivated by the present social, political, and legal context of the enlarged Europe. W h e n new political positions and even theological reinterpretations of Islam develop in Europe, they are transported into the Muslim-majority peripheries of Europe and lead to quite divergent consequences. So the interaction among member states of the

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Christian majority European Union and its neighboring Muslim-majority countries is more complicated than many European observers acknowledge. Although here I have analyzed only the case of a marginal heterodox Muslim community, my findings show parallels with other mainstream Muslim communities and most likely with other religious minorities. Other researchers have demonstrated that the longer Muslims stay in Germany, the more religious they feel (Sen 2003). In other words, the religiosity of Muslims, who have been declared not to fit in European society, is actually produced in that geography and society. In a parallel vein, today if there is even conversation about the possibility of a transnational European Muslim identity politics, it is thanks to the sociohistorical conditions that brought different groups of Muslims to Europe and to the structure of the European Union bureaucracy. For example, because the European Parliament financially supports immigrant organizations that are active across Europe, Muslim organizations find it enticing to organize around Europe and establish links, despite the fact that they are divided along ethnic and national, class, and generation lines (Zubaida 2003). T h e European Union's legal structure allowing local Muslim groups to bring to Brussels grievances that have been unmet in their own countries encourages them to coordinate their needs and demands, which is crucial in the formation of a better-connected European Muslim movement (Parker 2005). It is such organizational frameworks, rather than the overemphasized concept of the umma—the global community of Muslims—that determine the everyday political strategies of Muslim activists. It is because of the particular structure of the social, political, and legal contexts that the European Union provides for Muslim communities that major cities in Europe, such as London, Paris, and Berlin, have become home to the most exciting intellectual and theological discussions among Muslim leaders representing different traditions (Lebor 1997; Mandaville 2001). If a "Euro-Islam" ever comes into being, it will owe its existence not only to recent waves of migration from the Muslim-majority colonies of Europe to the core but also to the historical and structural opportunities and limitations that the European Union provides Muslims (Nielsen and Allievi 2003). What will be more interesting to observe in the coming decades is if and how Muslim politics in Europe transform the way in which religion and secularism are conceptualized and practiced in the Muslim-majority contexts.

NOTES Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the University of Illinois at UrbanaC h a m p a i g n and the University of California, Irvine. I would like to thank the audiences in these two settings. I also want to thank Marc David Baer, Keith McNeal,

Iß8

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and Damani Patridge for their critical c o m m e n t s and Gökge Yurdakul for h e l p i n g m e give the chapter its final shape. Marc David Baer participated in countless C e m gatherings with me, and Alev K o r u n introduced me to Alevi leaders in Vienna. I am most grateful to Alevis in Berlin, Vienna, and Istanbul w h o w e l c o m e d me to their cemevis, generously shared their lokma, and patiently explained what it means to be an Alevi. 1. J o h n B o r n e m a n argues that "Europeanism, tied to values o f progress, liberty, and freedom did not extend throughout the continent until the end of the eighteenth century" (1997: 490). 2. "A Charter of European Identity." www.eur0pe-web.de/eur0pe/02wwswww/ 203chart/chout_gb.htm. 3. In his work on migrant youth culture in Berlin, Levent Soysal similarly argues against conceptualization of Turkish youth as lost in an in-between state. H e states, "Their cultural projects are not revivals of an essential Turkishness (or Islam) in response to alien formations of modernity. Rather . . . their projects contribute to the remapping, remaking of the new Europe, unsettling the conventional configurations and conceptions of belonging and otherness" (2003: 202). 4. For a discussion of different approaches to citizenship in Europe, see Brubaker i g g 2 ; Kastoryano 2002. 5. A c c o r d i n g to survey research conducted by Ali Aktas a m o n g the Alevis who visited the main Alevi Shrine in Haci Bektash in the 1990s, 43 percent d e f i n e d Alevism as a sect; 17 percent, as a way of life; 16 percent, as culture; and 10 percent, as religion (in Erdemir 2004: 31). 6. However, some scholars, such as Gunter Seufert (1997), identify Alevis as the Shi'a c o m m u n i t y in Turkey. 7. For an interesting comparison of the fate of the syncretistic Muslim-Jewish g r o u p called D ö n m e and the Alevis after the foundation of the Turkish Republic, see Baer (2004), w h o argues that because the D ö n m e were ostensibly Muslim, they were left undisturbed u n d e r the Islamic O t t o m a n Empire but suffered discrimination u n d e r the nationalist Turkish Republic because they were considered racially non-Turkish. T h e h e t e r o d o x Alevis, however, were at times persecuted by religious cleansing movements u n d e r the Ottomans but were e m b r a c e d by the Turkish Republic since they were considered racially Turkish. 8. T h e Islamist Welfare Party won major victories in the 1994 local elections and b e c a m e the first party in the 1995 general elections, receiving 21 percent of the vote, but it h a d to enter into a coalition with the center-right T r u e Path Party (DYP). T h e party resigned following the 1997 recommendations of the Turkish Army to the government. In 1998 the Welfare Party was disbanded on the basis of having violated the secularist principle of the Turkish Republic and was replaced by the Virtue Party (FP). This party was then replaced by thejustice and Development Party (AKP), which adopted a pro-capitalist and pro-Western policy and came to power in the 2002 elections, receiving 34 percent of the vote. 9. www.diyanet.gov.tr/turkish/tanitimistatistik.asp. 1 o. For different categorizations of the contemporary Alevi movement, see Erman and G ö k e r 2000; Bilici 1998; Qamuroglu 1992. 11. Some attribute the Alevi revival to the loss of popularity of the socialist ideals to which many Alevis subscribed (Schüller i g g g ; Vorhoff 2003). Erdemir (2004) sug-

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gests that it is attributed to neoliberalism, which promoted the shift of power to nongovernmental organizations that encouraged the Alevi organization in Turkey. When one asks Alevis in Turkey and in Europe about the Alevi revival, they immediately mention the 1993 massacre in Sivas of thirty-seven Alevi artists who were staying at a hotel to participate in a conference on Alevism by Sunni fanatics. Many Alevis I interviewed claimed that when this event happened, they realized that they needed to organize and have their voices heard. To this day, at the entrance of many cemevis one can see pictures of the victims of the massacre. 12. There have been attempts among Turkish citizens to organize collectively. Yet the depth of the political, ethnic, and religious cleavages have made this impossible (0stergaard-Nielsen 2003). 13. Many in Turkey also emphasized similar symbolism between Alevism and Christianity. The topic came up when Alevis I met assumed that my American husband is a Christian and wanted to show him there is not that much difference between their beliefs and—what they supposed to be—his beliefs. 14. The Alevi Manifesto can be found in Zelyut 1990. 15. German law requires religious groups to formally submit an application in their region and to show that they have existed for at least thirty years, that members of the group constitute at least 1 /1 oooth of the total population in that region, and that the group respects the law (Fetzer and Soper 2005: 108). 16. In my interviews, Sunni Muslim activists in Austria stated that this specific history works to their benefit, especially when there is a need to defend the needs and rights of Muslims. Practicing Muslims in Austria and German agree that today it is much easier to be a Muslim in Austria than in Germany. 17. It is likely that one of the reasons the Alevi movement and organization is not strong in France, despite the fact that France is second to Germany in the number of Turkish-origin residents, is the lack of such a law. 18. For discussion of different Alevi organizations, see Camuroglu 1992; Erman and Goker 2000; Sehriban 2001. 19. The Cem Foundation Web site (www.cemvakfi.org) states that Sunni Islam is the Arab interpretation of Islam and Shii Islam is the Persian interpretation. 20. The same report also for the first time defined Kurds as a "community" (48). 21. However, as many international human rights and international human rights watch reports indicate, Turkish governments have been inconsistent and often unwilling to provide these rights granted to non-Muslim minorities; see Kurban 2003. 22. For a critical discussion of the Ottoman administration of religious groups, also called the millet system, see Masters 2001. 23. Many of these changes were of major importance, such as the abolishment of the death penalty and other seemingly small but symbolically substantial changes, such as the granting of rights for broadcasting and education in ethnic languages. According to some observers, the members of the Turkish Parliament have been more open to granting these rights since the decade-long war between Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish Army seemed to have come to a conclusion with the victory of the latter and the imprisonment of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish guerrilla movement. However, though the implementation of the constitutional amendments granting these rights has been hesitant, the restrictions still apply and citizens often cannot practice these rights freely.

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Shankland, David 2003 The Alevis in Turkey: The Emergence ofa Secular Islamic Tradition. London: Routledge Curzon. Soy sal, Leven t 2003 "Europe and the Topography of Migrant Youth Culture in Berlin." In Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age, edited by Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain, 1 9 7 - 2 1 5 . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,. Taylor, Charles 1994 Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tugal, Cihan 2004 "islamciligin Dini Cogulluk Alanindaki Krizi: Alevi Agmazi Hakkinda Bazi Afihmlar" (The Crisis of Islamism in Religious Pluralism: Thoughts on the Alevi Paradox). In Modern Türkiye'de Siyasi Düsünce: Islamcilik, vol. 6, edited by Tanil Bora and Murat Gültekingil, 493-502. Istanbul: Birikim Yayinlari. Vorhoff, Karin 2003 "The Past in the Future: Discourses on the Alevis in Contemporary Turkey." In Turkey's Alevi Enigma: A Comprehensive Overview, edited by Paul J . White and Joost Jongerden, 94-109. Leiden: Brill. Yurdakul, Gökfe 2005 "Muslim Political Organization of Turks in Germany." Council ofEuropean Studies Newsletter 35 (1-2): 10. White, Jenny 1997 "Turks in the New Germany." American Anthropobgist gg (4): 754-69. Zelyut, Riza 1 ggo Oz Kaynaklanna GöreAlevilik (Alevism According to the Authentic Sources). Istanbul: Anadolu Kültür Yayinlari. Zubaida, Sami 2003 "Islam in Europe." Critical Quarterly 45 (1-2): 88-g8. Zürcher, Eric igg8 Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris.

Chapter 6

The Burning Finitude and the Political-Theological Imagination of Illegal Migration STEFANIA

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When you recall the Departed, count yourself as one of them. AL-GHAZALI

PREAMBLE

This chapter is written in critical counterpoint to the reflections of Arab psychoanalysts on the questions of subjectivity and political theology. It was born in contrastive dialogue with psychoanalysts and other scholars in Morocco during a time of heated and anxious public debate concerning the problematization of religious violence and the rise of the Islamic revivalist movement, in the aftermath of the May 2003 Casablanca bombings and on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when Morocco was shaken by a wave of antiwar demonstrations. From the standpoint of my ongoing research with Moroccan youth, as well as my investment in psychoanalysis and Islam and their respective ethical projects, I asked, what would it mean to pose the questions differently, engaging with contemporary forms of subjectivity in Islam without completely abandoning the legacy of Freudian thought? O n e of the challenges of the present moment is coming to terms with forms of life in which subjectivity is understood in terms of a theological law. T h e proceedings of a symposium titled "Psychoanalysis and Islam," held in Beirut in 2002, open with a five-point points statement concerning the difficulties of psychoanalysis in the Arab and Muslim world today. 1 T h e first point mentions the unshaken foundation, in the world of Islam, of human existence in divine will and the related impossibility of the Cogito, "for the act of thinking sanctions the end of religion." T h e second point mentions the absence of a scientific revolution in spite of the Aristotelian legacy, hence the impossibility of the subject of psychoanalysis. T h e third point stresses the absence of democracy and human rights and the presence of a climate of "subjective intimidation" that makes impossible the work of unconscious associations. T h e

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fourth point speaks to the hegemony of religious discourse: "religion is totalitarian, it rules over the realm of meaning, and it will treat as an intrusion any alternative secular interpretation of the meaning of life." T h e fifth point has to do with the abrupt passage to the nuclear family in Arab society and the dysfunctions it produced; the sixth, with the "heterogeneity of the concept of the Ego," which remains entangled in the social "We." Subjectivity and religion, at least in the specific context of Islam, are described in the proceedings volume as incompatible terms. According to Mustapha Safouan, a prominent Egyptian psychoanalyst who is also one of the founding members of the Association of Arab Psychoanalysis, 2 this incompatibility does not have to do with the religion of the Qur'an per se but with the way political p o w e r — t h e monarch—has come to occupy in Islam the transcendent place of God. In such a system there can be no subjects, only the monarch and the masses. Subjectivity is possible only in a democratic system, he writes, "a system where the place of the Third is not occupied by a person, but by a signifier" (Safouan 2004: 13) Safouan models his argument on Freud's text Massenpsychologie ([ 1921 ] 1959), in which the absolute power of the narcissistic chief is related to the depersonalized mass of the group. Contemporary Muslim societies, in his view, are that kind of authoritarian system, predicated on a "con-fusion" between theology and political coercion. T h e pervasive revival of religion in contemporary culture, particularly but not solely in the context of Islam, has been associated in public debates with the danger of religious communitarianism and the specter of religious wars. In recent psychoanalytic readings, departing from Safouan's position and directly addressing what is treated as the destructive potential of religious passions as such, the resurgence of religious identities, particularly in the context of contemporary Islamism, is understood as a psychopolitical malady and the revivalist recourse to the religious referent ("the torment of the origin"; Benslama 2002) as a form of psychotic delusion, bearing witness to a collapse of the symbolic order and opening up the prospect of collective violence. 3 Confronted with the rise of a theological imagination that visibly shifts the focus from a modernist ethos of individual creativity and reflexivity central to the project of European psychoanalysis to renewed forms of communitarian affiliation and religious modes of belonging where the subject is constituted by its surrender to a notion of divine justice, Middle Eastern psychoanalysts seem to encounter an impassable limit, foreclosing their ability to recognize the possibility of different forms of life. In the words of the psychoanalysts with whom I discussed the emergent question of Islam, at issue is a generalized mutation in subjectivity, of a psychotic nature, related to parallel mutations in late-capitalist societies, hinting that human society may be moving "off limits," in a trajectory of self-annihilation (Melman 2002). From this perspective, the Islamist p h e n o m e n o n and its radical vanguards can only be understood as a form of collective self-destruction—a general-

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ization of what Freud called the "death drive" ( [ 1 9 2 0 ] 1961)—epitomized by the figure of the suicide bomber. 4 Yet on the other side of this interpretive divide, the "return" of religion and spirituality (and the realization of their enduring presence) calls insistently for an understanding of subjectivity, alterity, politics, and hermeneutics that is no longer grounded in the Enlightenment prejudice against religion or in the theories of secularization that predicted the disappearance of religion in the process of rationalization understood as the essence of liberal modernity (Habermas 1985; Asad 1993; Vattimo 2000). Moving in that direction are some important attempts at restituting visibility and intelligibility to forms of life that are otherwise unrecognizable from the standpoint of the secular vocabularies naturalized in public debates (Asad 1993, 2003; Mahmood 2004). In their critical engagement with Euro-American philosophical notions of freedom, agency, intentionality, religion, and law, these works have stood as a corrective to the way the phenomenon of the Islamic revival has been treated in international scholarship and the media. They have documented religious practices that forcefully counter totalizing representations of "fundamentalism" and have revalorized theological argumentation, questioning the way the Islamic revival is systematically reduced to a sociopolitical and psychological phenomenon, disregarding its specific theological and ethical dimensions. In this sense, these works have opened a space of debate within which this chapter is located. Yet, in their attempt to restore intelligibility, they postulate the inherent rationality and coherence of religious discipline and practice and turn away from exploring the complexity and singularity of life-worlds. 5 Whether restoring intelligibility is necessary to postulate coherence remains a question for me, one I address indirectly here. It requires revisiting the classical anthropological problem of understanding different life-worlds. This is a problem that is discussed in the phenomenological and existential traditions but that I address here in terms of the Lacanian corpus, because of its specific emphasis on alterity.

In his 1945 article, "Le temps logique," Lacan discusses the question of understanding with reference to the experience of time. He addresses this by positing a logical riddle, which he demonstrates is insoluble from the standpoint of classical logic. Outlining the unfolding of a different solution, he distinguishes "a time for comprehending" from the advent of resolution and utterance, which he calls "the moment of concluding." Understanding, for Lacan, is inclusive of both registers. It is not just the fact of "comprehending" the other—assimilating it into a preexisting discourse and thus restoring coherence. It requires openness to alterity, a discontinuity of experience. The temporality of understanding is not linear and cannot be reckoned

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within the categories of classical logic. It a discontinuous space-time of structural positioning in relation to the Other, imaginary identifications and hesitations, which lead to the "leap" of performative affirmation: "the moment of concluding." Apprehending the possibility of different life-worlds calls for the conceptualization of a discontinuity, an incommensurability, which affirms subjectivity at the radical risk of alterity (Lacan [ 1 9 4 5 ] 1966). A temporality of understanding in the complex field of Islam today cannot spare the work of engaging the risk of alterity. It is opened by the anthropological realization of the contingency and limits of one's conceptual tools in approaching what is perceived as the unfamiliarity of other ways of life: whether expressed in an encompassing discursive form, as with revivalist Islamic pedagogies making a claim for a collective new life, or in the form of the fragment—the fragmented, painful, and sometimes original ways of inhabiting a world where none of the available vocabularies can be fully inhabited, even when they are invoked, and the attempt at reconstruction takes the form of a solitary self-creation, in a space of destruction that is also sometimes self-destruction. In conversation with a growing cohort of works in the anthropology of Islam (Asad 1993, 2003;j0hansen 1998; Mahmood 2004; Abu-Lughod 2005; Dakhlia 2005; Hammoudi 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Khan 2006), this chapter engages with some contemporary forms of the theological imagination and the modalities of the subject it makes possible, as this contributes to shaping the everyday existence of Moroccan youths. Following their accounts, I question the simple opposition of modernist fragmentation and religious belonging, exploring the complex and sometimes contradictory configurations of existence, the risks and the possibilities of critique, which can be apprehended from within an understanding of the subject as surrendered to the law and the mercy of God. In this process, I seek to displace two sets of related generalizations that shape the terms of current international debates on religion and politics. The first concerns the representations that have proliferated in Western media around the figure of death in the contemporary Muslim imagination, particularly with respect to martyrdom and suicide. The second has to do with the way recent debates on biopolitics and exceptionality, as well as psychoanalytic diagnoses of the present "civilizational malaise," have come to inform our understanding of life and death, rendering invisible and unintelligible other ways of imagining these terms. The generalization of a conceptual framework centered on the reduction of life to biological existence at the planetary level, in the production of abjection as in the deployment of humanitarian logics, is a case at hand (Agamben 1995). But what becomes of "bare life" when death is understood as "awakening," the beginning rather than the end, as is the case in Islam and in other religious traditions and is today openly discussed in innumerable chat rooms on the Internet?

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Rather than trace these representations genealogically, my mode of critique is ethnographic. In conversation with Moroccan youths from poor urban neighborhoods, candidates for clandestine migration, I attempt to conj u r e a style of argument and a form of life that resists inclusion in the ready-made conceptual cases of liberal debates. I engage with the specific way ethicopolitical conceptual configurations such as jihad an-nafs, "the struggle of/against the self" in a context of oppression, the risk of heresy (al-kufr, as-shirk) in the experience of despair, the "remembrance of death" (dhikralmawt) and the representation of the Last Day are mobilized by the youth in their own descriptions of their predicament, providing the framework and ethical horizon within which subjectivity and despair, the de facto exclusion from citizenship, and the experience of the end of social relations are understood and originally reconfigured. In their recourse to the ethicopolitical vocabularies and affective dimensions of Islamic concepts and practice, the youths situate their questions at the outset in an international space, or more precisely, in what in Arabic would be called a "general space" ('am,), beyond all sense of national or even cultural belonging, and in fact precisely stating the impossibility of belonging in what is experienced and described as an unjust social and order. It is in their recourse to the vocabularies of Islam that the youths can articulate the concrete experience of the end of social relations in the neighborhoods in which they l i v e — t h e space of physical and social death in which they dwell—as well as the Utopian possibility of new forms of connectedness. Such an Islamic "general space" of normative reference and debate is not just one o p e n e d by the pirated digital cards that in Morocco give access to the decoding of satellite television, or by the experience of virtual connectedness on the Internet. Unquestionably these are important. In the months preceding the Iraq war, young men would gather throughout the night to watch Al-Jazeera, preparing for their possible j o u r n e y to Iraq. Yet as argued by ethnographers of the "new media" in the Muslim world, contemporary Islam presupposes and creates the existence of a global public space of an ethical-political nature, which in. specific national contexts or in relation to the West function as a counterpublic (Hirschkind 2001; Bowen 2004). T h e use of language is itself affected; the youths I interviewed speak Arabic with a Moroccan accent, but their preferred idiom is a form of standard Arabic that is increasingly the lingua franca of a large section of postcolonial Moroccan society: one that no longer seeks recognition from the European former colonists, or even from the Moroccan postcolonial rulers.

My research on the practice and the imaginary of migration among Moroccan youths in poor neighborhoods in Rabat engages a fragmentary form of life. Migration—increasingly understood as the compelling yet often unre-

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alizable project of an illegal crossing to E u r o p e — h a s profoundly changed its connotation since the closure of European borders in the past decade. O n e says, "kanriski," "I'm taking the risk," in a mix of Arabic and French, to signify the clandestine departure, hidden in the bottom of a truck or by hazardous sea passage; a departure that is also called l-harg, "the burning" (from the verb haraqa, "to burn"). In the metaphor and the discourse of l-harg— clandestine migration, incineration, burning, transgression (in the sense that one also says hargt l-feu rouge, "I burned," that is, went through, a red l i g h t ) — and in the stories of the harraga with whom I spoke, there is reference to a heterogeneous configuration relating to the figure of a "burned" l i f e — a life without name and without legitimacy; a life of enclosure in physical, genealogical, and cultural spaces perceived as uninhabitable; and the search for a horizon in the practices of self-creation and experimentation drawing on an imaginary of the elsewhere and of exile. From our first encounters our conversations unfolded in a shifting realm between geography and theology, between a disenchanted sociopolitical description of exclusion and a moral account of banishment and transgression, between the violation of the law of states (by the illicit trespassing of frontiers) and the law of God, between a mode of personal narrative and one of moral admonition, between life and death, this world and the other. T h e shifting realm of our conversations is also a hesitation between orthodoxy and heresy, belief and unbelief, in the account of personal lives, as in the turn of theological discussions. By attempting to inhabit this rift and by elaborating a way of "remembering death" in their everyday life experience, the youths with whom I talked carve a possible critical space, by drawing on vocabularies and looking for answers in the Islamic tradition. As I follow the way they account for their experience in their own t e r m s — of becoming a nonperson, of daily violence and death, of the breaking of familial ties, of life "shrinking," of "despair," of the struggle for life and the risk of d e a t h — I trace the way their accounts open to an eschatological elsewhere, which, I argue, is not a closed hermeneutic horizon but an open imaginal space (Lowith 1957; Agamben 2000). 6 1 see there the work of a creative imagination, the fact of struggling and creating oneself, with and against the limits of one's cultural universe (Crapanzano 2002). 7 I note the parallelism between their experience of "exiting" social ties, their "separation" from a shared c o m m o n world, and a theological reading of the Hour, the Last Day, rooted in Islamic tradition and actively present in the popular imagination, vernacular and learned, as well as in the discourse of contemporary transnational Islamism.

T h e predicament of migration and "burning" has taken on a new urgency in the wake of the "suicide" bombings of May 16, 2003, in Casablanca, 8 which

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brought to the forefront of the Moroccan public debate, for better or for worse, a situation of social and political exclusion, the existence of vast zones of "nonrights" and social abandonment, the lack of horizon and the rage that characterize the predicament of the youth and are expressed in the attempt at migration, as well as, as it was increasingly argued in the press, in the turn to political Islam. In the days immediately following the events in Casablanca, an association was made in public discourse between underserved urban areas, shantytowns, Islamic radicalism, and international terrorism. 9 Journalists interviewing relatives and neighbors of the "kamikaze" at "Kamikaze-city," 10 as shantytowns started to be dubbed in the press, found themselves unwittingly contributing to the criminalization of the urban poor, which was accompanied by a call for urban reform but most fundamentally translated into a period of massive police repression. 1 1 A n article in the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique (Belaala 2004) 1 2 rehearsed this conflation for the international audience, arguing that the reality of dilapidated urban areas, zones of juridical exception ("hors-la-loi"), was related to the proliferation of radical Islamist groups, in fact small groups of desperadoes, issued of a situation of social disintegration in the new slums of the Moroccan cities: "Les takfiristes sont des aliénés issus de milieux sociaux désintégrées qui n ' o n t c o n n u que l'univers brutal et sordide des ghettos et ont été traité par la société c o m m e des bétes féroces. A u nom d ' u n e certaine conception sectaire de l'Islam, ils retournent cette férocité impitoyable contre l'ordre établi." 13 Current political theories of sovereignty and exceptionality contribute paradoxically to this representation of a violent and meaningless existence, comparable to the unqualified "bare life" of refugees in the camps (Agamben 1995, 2000). It is difficult to write in this context of overlapping referents. It requires clearing theoretical space. O n the one hand, there is the necessary work of theoretical retooling to be undertaken in conversation with psychoanalysis and political philosophy about the stakes of subjectivity at this time in history and its relation with political theologies. O n the other hand, it is crucial to question the set of associations that are presented as immediately self-evident and the tendency to represent the field of Islam without concern for its internal complexities, specific history, and hermeneutic possibilities. This chapter was born as an intervention in that Moroccan debate. Attempting to convey the life-world of the youth with whom I have been engaged in conversation, I have thus far argued for its intelligibility, its capacity for critical reflection, and for the peculiar way in which the questions of subjectivity and existence were raised in relation to a theological referent. To the psychoanalytic reading of delusional self-destruction, I have opposed Kamal's elaboration of the concept of self-struggles, jihad, al-nafs and his representation of the eschatological horizon, arguing for the possibility of a different reading from within the corpus of psychoanalysis itself.

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MGHAMAR B L-HAYAT: A DEBATE ON MIGRATION, TRANSGRESSION, THE LIMIT OF HERESY, AND THE LIMIT OF LIFE

We are discussing the question of risk—the risk to one's life, in the crossing— the sense of one's death, if one dies, and the moral conundrum this produces. The three of us, sitting in a public park under the eucalyptus trees that date back to the colonial period. Coming out of the neighborhoods to places where "nature," as they say, gives a sense of space, has become one of the rites of our encounters. Kamal and Jawad are forcefully disagreeing on the meaning and moral evaluation of the attempt at migration, a "crossing" Kamal has single-mindedly if unsuccessfully pursued for a long time. A theological dispute unfolds about the status and nature of death in the "attempt" at illegal migration, l-harg (or "the burning"), and of what they call al-qant (classical Arabic al-qanat), the condition of "despair"—the temptation of doing away with life, the loss of all hope, in the religious sense, as well as, in the vernacular sense, a feeling of oppression, rage, and absence of horizon. 14 Jawad: Just look at how many people die each day in the boats [lancia, the boats that attempt to cross illegally to Spain from the Moroccan shore]. Each day the news tells you how many, shows you the images. We say that the person who is risking the crossing is putting his life in danger, mkhatar b-hayatu, that is, mghamar b-hayatu, he embarks on a mortal journey—"gambling with his life." Each day, when you look at the news, you think that you could be one of those corpses floating on the water. They find themselves against a wall, have no perspective here, and when they get there, if they do arrive, have the problem of the papers and all that. For them there is no landing and no return. Kamal: Those who decide to go for the most part have a damen, a "guarantor," a protection, someone on the other side that tells them what they will find, will give them a "map" of the situation. Yet it is true that one who decides to leave is hayr, he's furious, in a state of bewilderment, and his feelings are flooded by exasperation with the present conditions of life. He's in a rage: blood has gone up his head, and [he] doesn't care whether he will live or die. Jawad: He will either die or ruin his life. Of a hundred that go, ninety will die; ten will survive and fall into the hands of the Spanish police. Stefania: How does one understand death in the crossing according to the teachings of Islam? Jawad: It is a suicide, intihar. Kamal: Why suicide? I disagree with you brother, it is not a suicide . . .

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Jawad: Ghadi mghamar b rasek —You go gambling with your life, in other words, you have chosen to die, in full awareness [katdir f-belek ghadi tmut]. The one who died at sea, we say, mghamar b-hayatu, he's taking a gamble with his life. Either he will live or he will die, and if he dies, he had already chosen death, without waiting for the time appointed (met bla khatar). He throws himself into a dream, an illusion, he is in Error. Kamal: What else could he do? Jawad: This is the problem, this is what happened to you and caused you [Kamal] to "burn" (hadi hia l-mushkila llyja'ala lek hetta hargti). Kamal: What else could I do, become a thief? The theological turn of our discussion is not a surprise. Since the earliest conversations about migration and "burning," I realized that as soon as the question of the decision to migrate is raised one finds oneself speaking on several registers at once, and the narrative conventions are blurred. There is first the project of migration as a concrete reality of "this" world, an individual and political response to a situation of closure and alienation and injustice, a departure from a nonlife toward the horizon of a life that might enable a claim to symbolic recognition. This worldly sense opens to the larger imagining of the migratory project as an adventure, a dangerous journey. It is the necessary risk to take if one is to cross over to the other side (of the Mediterranean), with all that this entails; the anticipation and fear but also the skills, knowledge, sheer ability, and, not last, fascination and excitement. This is the sense reckoned by the concept of al-rihla, which can be translated as a journey, as moving in space, and which defines a whole genre in classical Arab geography and travel narratives that are also, often, tales of marvelous encounters with the unknown and the uncanny (al-gharib). Awareness of a mortal risk in this endeavor is conveyed by the generalized use, in the language of clandestine immigration, of the verb ghamura (in the fragment above, ghadi mghamar b rasek, you go gambling with your life), "embarking on a hazardous adventure," risking one's life, connoting the potentiality of a destructive outcome. Both senses of worldly travel are intimately connected to a theological and moral dimension of "departing": the fact of severing familial ties, exiting, choosing exile, or crossing to another world. It is the meaning mobilized by the concept of hijra as discussed in the Qur'an and in the Hadith and up to its modernist interpretations in contemporary theologico-political debates. Hijra, literally the fact of "abandoning" or "severing the ties" (Khalid Masud 1990), 1 5 is a foundational concept in Islamic tradition. It sets the conditions of a specific ethics, no longer based on genealogical attachment but instead

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on an ethical community to come. 1 6 Modeled on the Prophet's departure from Mecca to Medina (622 C.E.) in a situation in which the new faith was under attack, it is the injunction to migrate from a land of injustice and oppression in order to "strive in the e f f o r t " — t h e literal sense of jihad,—on the path of God. Yet this ethical sense of "parting" and "departing" is also intimately related to another crossing, different in nature: the separation of death, which, in the words of A b u Hamid Al-Ghazali (twelfth century) is the "deprivation of a man's property consequent to his being pitched into another world which does not correspond to this" (Al-Ghazali 1989: 124). Departure in this sense is the crossing of the soul into a "different state," through the experience of physical death. T h e remembrance (dhikr) of that departure yet to come is for Al-Ghazali a crucial task of the believer. Remembering death, in his view, amounts to welcoming a temporality of the end in the time of the now, in the form of a sensory experience. At once vicarious and intimately personal, this experience of death is made possible by the imaginative faculty, which "imprints" it in the soul of the living through meditation on the physical death of familiar others, the loss of their worldly possessions, and the decaying of their bodies in the grave. This does not mean, Al-Ghazali says, that one should hope for a short life. To the contrary, "the longer a man's life extends, the more solid and complete will be his virtue" (Al-Ghazali 1995: 32-33). What is at issue in the remembrance of death is an apprenticeship of the other world in this world, which is a presupposition for what might be called, in the terms specific to that theological and ethical tradition, a practice of freedom. In this sense, explicitly echoed in the conversation with the youths I interviewed, the trope of Departure opens onto an eschatological vision.

Kamal and Jawad come from the same neighborhood, a former shantytown in the near periphery of Rabat, one of the neighborhoods that gathered population from the early rural exodus of the 1960s and 1970s and was later "consolidated" with concrete constructions (the "rehabilitation" was f u n d e d by a U.N. project in the late 1970s); narrow alleys numbered in red paint, crowded small houses perched on a hillside, where the most basic social and health services are lacking, and the state is tangibly felt in its sole prerogative of repressive force. People refer to it as l-huma, "the neighborhood," a term that conveys a sense of physical belonging that can turn into ambivalent rejection but cannot be anodyne. In its urban typology it contrasts somewhat with the new quarters that have come to constitute the majority of urban space, what in French is called "peri-urbain," now an essential quality of the city and the country as such (a quality not in any sense unique to Morocco but marking the aesthetics of the urban landscape throughout the Middle E a s t ) — a landscape made of informal housing settlements, often with-

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out infrastructure, unfinished cement buildings that are inhabited as such, large avenues bordered by terrains vagues where children play and people gather in the afternoon. Downhill from the neighborhood is a swampy area bordering the new freeway to Tangiers, the gateway to Europe, and an industrial zone with textile factories that get commissions from European companies—the sharikat— and employ an underpaid noncontractual, mainly female labor force from the surrounding areas. Each day long-distance trucks for international transport come to load and unload, and each day youths from the neighborhood hope to make an "attempt" (muhawala), as they call it, by hiding in the trucks all the way across the Spanish border. Neighborhoods such as these, which according to official estimates comprise about 30 percent of the housing stock in urban areas (Hamdouni Alami 2006; SNAT 2004), have come under the scrutiny of state security forces, as well as to the attention of the national and international media after the bombings of May 2003 in Casablanca. At the time of the Casablanca events I was doing fieldwork in Rabat. The political moment necessarily affected my research and the conversations I had. It also affected how I thought about writing: I hesitated between the responsibility I felt to convey the experiences and thoughts entrusted to me by my interlocutors and the concern that those same experiences and thoughts might reinforce the common figures of public debate, feeding the phantasm of an official discourse on violence. Later, as I was writing, reflecting on the transcripts of conversations, reading theological texts to understand references that eluded me, I realized that the conversations I had had with my interlocutors indexed a completely different set of realities and conceptual possibilities from those represented in public discourse. They demonstrated the presence of debate, in the strongest sense of "argumentation." They suggested the forms of a complex reflection on despair, dispossession, and depersonalization, as well as on the possibility and risk of those states, in an existential and a theological sense. And they were furrowed by questions insistently asked, in the lives of my interlocutors, about the meaning of it all; questions that in our conversations were formulated to a large extent in the ethical vocabularies of Islam.

Kamal is twenty-six. The first time we met he told me, as if to recapitulate his existential posture in a visual image, how he spent most nights on the hill overlooking the neighborhood and the textile factories, gazing at the freeway with his binoculars. He jokes about his posture as a night creature, one he shares with his close friends, each of whom had withdrawn from social life in the neighborhood and as much as possible from interaction with their families, at least at one level, each in his own way. After five years of

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waiting and attempting, he has perhaps lost faith in the possibility of actually getting across the border. Yet his position, like that of many others, remains one of self-imposed exile—a "refusal" born of disillusionment and of a lucid assessment of political realities. If only by a wish or aspiration, he refuses to participate in the "conviviality" of power relations—the blurring of "eating," and "being eaten," at the same table, in a mode of psychopolitical domination wherein symbolic recognition takes the form of voluntary servitude (Mbembe [2000] 2005). Kamal is unmarried, went to school until about the age of fifteen, and, after several failed efforts (he once worked at one of the factories as an office clerk and later unloading trucks), gave up on finding a j o b in Morocco and determined to leave at all cost. He introduced me to Jawad as his counterpoint, someone who had chosen to stay. Jawad remained in school longer, almost reaching the baccalaureate, but at sixteen lost his father to illness and had to leaveschool. No one in his family helped him. He shares with Kamal a critical awareness of exclusion and social inequality, of abusive power relations, and of the reality of social abandonment, but he has a different approach to life that relies, to a certain extent, on his understanding of Islamic ethics in terms of the virtue of patience. He is married and has a young daughter. He does not have a permanent j o b but each day sets out to seek temporary employment as a car mechanic, and on weekends he plays the violin at weddings and other social events. He is aware that in reformist circles sha'abi (popular music) is considered impious but is not disturbed by this judgment, which he considers too rigid. By contrast, he is inflexible on the question of risking one's life in the migratory attempt. In his view putting one's life at risk is a religious transgression (ma'siya), a sin, akin to suicide. Suicide, al-intihar, is prohibited in Islam; both the actual act of killing oneself and the act of just "hoping for death" (tamanni al-mawt). In this sense, Jawad argues, the attempt at illegal migration is an ultimate rebellion against God, equivalent, he argues, to an act of apostasy {shirk, denying the oneness of God). The person who gambles with life doesn't wait for the time chosen by God but pursues his or her own means of death, what Jawad glosses as an "improper" death. In his view, there is value in the fact of living as such, however unbearable its present condition; not because human life is inviolable (as posited by humanitarian logics) but because no one has access to the knowledge of God, the one who gives and takes life. Kamal disagrees. He counters that for someone like himself the attempt at crossing to Europe, and the risk of death this entails, is not a challenge to God but an ethical struggle for a better life. He argues this in terms of injustice, the notion of a life that has lost all value, has been humiliated and degraded, and in terms of the Islamic ethical concept of jihad an-nafs, the "effort" of the self, the "struggle," against one's worldly desires and toward

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a possible future in a situation in which all paths are barred. I will come back to Kamal's interpretation of this concept, a peculiar synthesis of quietist and activist attitudes, "work on the soul" and action against social injustice. Jawad argues for patience, the virtue of as-sabr; Kamal expresses and seeks to justify impatience as a moral struggle on the part of the self, a religiously granted exception in a time of oppression. Jawad is referring to the theological and ethical question of the "limit" of human freedom in despair. In different ways both Ibn Miskawayh (tenth century and Al-Ghazali, in their works on ethics, discuss the importance of containing anger and learning to lead a balanced life, both through discipline, moderation, and prayer and through trust or hope in the mercy of God (raja'). In particular, Ibn Miskawayh raises the issue of "false virtues," maladies of the soul that model themselves on virtues while instead perverting their nature—false courage and false generosity, for instance. True courage, he writes, is the opposite of taking unnecessary risks with one's life, even in battle. More courage is required to face the agony of death in one's bed, when death comes at its appointed time, than to expose oneself to enemy strike in misplaced acts of courage (Ibn Miskawayh 1969). Jawad has not read Ibn Miskawayh; he might have been introduced to Al-Ghazali's ideas in school or in the pamphlets that circulate as a popular religious pedagogical literature, cassette tapes of sermons, and television and radio programs, which host lectures on Islam and question-and-answer sessions with mufti'And scholars on a daily basis. Jawad's pronouncements, however, are also deeply rooted in the popular religious imagination, which is the terrain upon and against which further elaborations have developed. T h e virtue of patience and endurance, the recognition of the unfathomable knowledge of God and a structural blindness of the faithful, the value of leading a balanced existence, without giving in to anger and to the influence of unrestrained passions, are present in the vernacular as much as the literate understanding of what a good life might be. But Kamal disagrees, appealing to the appropriateness of the emotional surge, a passionate unrest, in the present situation (the feeling of hayr, fury, exasperation—a condition that shares a familiarity with anger and trance), and to the legitimacy of the "effort," which is also a struggle for life in a situation in which life is unlivable and a change of conditions is necessary. He opposes the attempt to migrate to the alternative of losing moral integrity— becoming a thief; and in the Qur'an it is clearly stated that an oppressed person has an obligation to migrate rather than risk losing moral integrity. Finally, he introduces the pivotal concept of despair, in both the existential and the theological sense. As becomes clear in the exchange below, Kamal's position is complex. In one sense, it is reminiscent of certain currents of the contemporary Islamic revival in Morocco and elsewhere that establish a close relationship between

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a denunciation of social injustice, of alienation and marginalization, and the ethical-theological project of living in the ways of God (fi sabil illahi)—if necessary, by choosing exile or e n g a g i n g in active rebellion. T h e writings of the Egyptian Siyyed Q u t b and the Iranian Ali Shariati in particular set forth the notion of individual agency and responsibility in the struggle, which is at once a struggle for this world and the other, and which may result in death, a death that can be understood as martyrdom. Perhaps most prominently in Kamal's position can be heard the intellectual influence of Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine, founder of the Moroccan revivalist movement al-'adl wa al-ihsan, 'Justice and Ethical Practice," which has an important and growing grassroots constituency in urban Morocco and increasingly in rural areas as well. In his writings, as in his teaching, Sheikh Yassine offered an original synthesis of, on the one hand, Sufi affective and prophetic registers, visionary experiences, and pedagogical practices (Yassine 1989, 1988; Darif 1995; Tozy 1999) and, on the other, the contemporary concerns and political critique of the modernist and revolutionary Islamic revival while explicitly drawing inspiration from the work and life of Al-Ghazali. 1 7 (It should be noted, however, that social critique and eschatological concerns as such are not unique to the contemporary Islamic revival. T h e y are an important dimension in classical Islam, from the formative period, and persist in a continuous way in vernacular practice, unquestionably in the Moroccan case. They are associated with the Quranic imperative, so variously understood, of alamrbi'l-ma'ruf wa nahy 'an al-munkar, "advocating good and denouncing evil," which, at least in the hagiographic recollection, has opposed the "fury" of contestation in the name of God's way to the unjust domination of rulers [Cook 2001].) In another sense, however, Kamal's position is yet more complex. Unlike an active member in a revivalist movement, with whom he might share a language and a vision, Kamal has no "title"—no stable place from which to speak or draw the grounds of his existential identity. He reflects, debates, and explores possibilities and the limits of his thought in the laboratory of his own bodily existence. A n d in that searching, which as such has an experimental character, he finds himself confronting the limits of belonging, as well as the limits of faith. (One could think in this context of Hammoudi's [2005] recent book on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, as a religious, cultural, and personal experience that exposes at once an attachment impossible to dissolve and ambivalence impossible to reduce to an unproblematic belonging. T h e experience of this conundrum, which in the book is the author's own, dispossesses the subject of the capacity to invoke the authority of the reference from which it draws its identity, all the while being seized in its matrix and its passion. To sum up this conundrum, that of a faith necessarily unfaithful, of a participant who is both included and excluded, Hammoudi coins the term sans titre.)18

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Jawad reiterates his point: Keyt'ate wahed l-hedd, imma ghadi ihya imma imut. He sets a limit for himself (while it is God who sets the limits in his law), he may live or he may die, he may succeed and reach his goal, as he may die. Stefania: Why is this wrong? Jawad: Because he sets a "limit" to his life on the basis of this alternative, he gambles with his life: he'll succeed in getting where he may find work, or he will die. On the other hand, if he had stayed home he might have eventually found work, and in any case he would be still alive (katbqa 'aysh). For life is a "work" (in the moral sense of doing good works [ma heddek 'aysh, nta 'andek wahed Vamal]). Kamal: I disagree. Jawad: I said it's a suicide! Kamal: No! It is not a suicide. We speak of suicide when a person can't stand it anymore, blood goes up his head, he's furious, and he throws his life off; but here you have someone who is striving to find a way to live, to make a life for himself, feed his brothers and sisters, and send money to his parents, so that they may have a life and find some strength, a way out this wretched existence: it is not suicide! I can't agree! Jawad: I'll explain it to you with a different example. If he dies, if he drowned, his family won't find out, they think he made it to Spain. I know kids [ddreri] who want to flee to Spain and take their cell phone to call their family when they arrive. Then they get in the boat, and the boat capsizes and they all die [because, he explains, the dealer doesn't care, the boats are old and not maintained]. They all die. For the most part, those who die don't die at their own time [makeymutush 'ala khatarhum]. I ask at this point what they mean by "1-mawt bla khatar," a death that is not one's own, the death of a person who doesn't take the time to die. Together, Kamal and Jawad reply with another example; the death of a taxi driver in Rabat, who after taking a passenger to his destination died at the wheel of his car. However suddenly, he died 'ala khatru, that is, they explain, 'ala khatar allah, at his proper time, at the time chosen by God, lahg l-'ajel dielu, he met "his" term, his deadline. Jawad: But there are those who can't wait to die that way, the death "assigned." Keyqtelrasu b rrasu, he is his own cause of death; his death is a transgression, a sin, an ultimate rebellion against God (ma'siya). He disobeys and doesn't wait for the time appointed; for example, he hangs himself. If he drowns at sea, or dies asphyxiated in a truck, he creates his own cause of death, and a person who died having created his own cause of death is like a person who doesn't recognize tauhid, the oneness of God (bhal ila sherk b-allah).19 That person is an apostate; he is equivalent to an unbeliever.

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Jawad raises the question of transgression in terms of shirk and kufr, heresy (lit., "polytheism") and unbelief. I will come back to this important point, for what is implied in Jawad's indictment, as in Kamal's reply, is that the "risk" to one's life in migration and to one's soul in the fury of despair is also the risk of losing faith. Kamal does not join in condemnation, understanding from his own experience how the life of a person can withdraw, shrink away, all the way to seeking death. He has friends who committed suicide. A couple of days before this conversation he told me about a close friend who hung himself in his room; when they found him his face was white, he said, and translucent, as if all the blood had left his body. Kamal sees this as surrender, a form of madness that slowly took over his friends' lives, and from which he doesn't consider himself immune. He gives a definition of despair: We say of that person, qnat. That person, we say, is a person who fell into despair, gnat. A human being, when he falls into despair, all doors close up for him, and he can no longer see or distinguish anything [mabqa ybeyinlih walu, connoting having no horizon] and abandons himself to drugs. That's it. Lahag wahed l-hedd, he has reached a limit. His mind [damagh dielu; his mind-brain] is full ['amar, "full," beyond what can be tolerated], he sees only one thing on the horizon, hanging himself, l-muhim, rruh dielu makatbqash, ruh dielu rah Seddrha b 11 hashish, in the end, his ruh, his soul, doesn't stay in place, is no longer there, his ruh, he sent it off, out, with the drugs. . . . And as for what is on his mind, he only wishes for one thing: death.

Jawad: This is what we call suicide. Kamal: This is despair, l-qant. [Kamal is using the term as a theological concept and explains.] Allah said, "La taqunatu minnu arrahumati allahi inna allah yaghufiru addunuba jami'an hwa alghafuru al-rahiyimu." Despair not of the Mercy of God: for God forgives all sins, He is all forgiving, most merciful (Qur'an 39:53). If you feel desperate, if you have lost all hope, trust your hope in God, perform your prayers, and see how your life will change . . . Stefania: But not all people have this kind of moral strength . . . Kamal refers me to a tape of sermons, one he had already mentioned as specifically addressing the malaise of the youth. 20 It is one of the several tapes he gave me as an introduction to the way in which contemporary piety and theological preoccupations came to inform his existential and intellectual world, at least at one level. Each sermon is composed of examples drawn from daily life and presented in the mode of a moral allegory. The point is to show that in their involvement with worldly pleasures and gains, including Western-style music, drugs, and the pursuit of wealth through abusive work relations and corruption, young people are "dispossessed" (al-muharramun, "The Dispossessed," is the title of the tape) from the way of God. (Ex-

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ampies of sudden impious deaths, intended to instill the fear of God in the faithful, and, by contrast, of sudden "awakenings" to the path of G o d are at the center of argument). At one level Kamal identifies with this lesson, which corresponds to an aspect of his life experience, when in a m o m e n t of straying and desperation he was able to find rest in prayer. H e did not tell me the story of that period in his l i f e — w h i c h he sees as having contributed to the person he is today and to his having come to a certain kind of awareness, l-wa'y,—until he showed me the place where he used to spend the night with his friends, an open green area at the edge of built space, where they drank and engaged in violent gang activities. He had lost all sense and taste for life, gave himself to drugs, what is colloquially called l-qarqubi—antipsychotic medications that one can buy in the street. 21 Drugs made him feel like a corpse, he says, and this is why he took them. Despair is a critical figure in his discourse, and in the context of this account, itself structured as an "example," it is a turning point. During that period, one day a man approached him with an exhortation to j o i n in prayer. Kamal did not listen. H e did not want to fall into the proselytism of the Islamiyin in his neighborhood, though he respected the charitable work they did to help people, providing social services neglected by public institutions. He was sunk in depression. But the man came back and gave him an illustrated booklet showing the positions of prayer (sala). Kamal tried out of boredom, he says, as a sheer physical exercise, and started feeling better. He began to pray and attend a mosque and j o i n e d the community in their activities and in their outdoor retreats, where he was able to regain a sense of community, even just in the fact of performing tasks together—gathering firewood for cooking, practicing sports, performing communal prayer. He j o i n e d with them for a while, until they opposed his decision to "burn" to Europe. He separated from the group and continued his search alone, in both a literal and a hermeneutic sense, or in the company of others with whom he shared the resolution to leave.

JIHAD AN-NAFS: T H E S T R U G G L E

I push Kamal to elaborate his position that death in the "burning" attempt would not be a suicide. Is he suggesting that death in the harg is comparable to death in war (harb, jihad)} He nods and explains: "Yes, there is a resemblance; I mean war in the sense of harb nefsek, "be at war with your self." O n e struggles against one's nafs, the worldly desires of one's soul or self. Kamal goes on to contrast the short-term desires of the nafs, in their whimsical immediacy, and the long-term hope represented by the migratory project. It is in this sense that death in the hargmay be compared with death in war: "l-harg; you want to go to find a way to support your family: this is the main idea, you want to help, they don't have anything, a single room for ten

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people, it is like being in prison, ten people in a single room. O n e has to do something with one's life; I will do something with my life. This can't be called suicide." Migration, in other words, is a work that pleases God. Its pursuit is a jihad, a struggle on the path of God. A n d if death were to occur, it would be like death in a religiously authorized war, for which the faithful finds reward in the Afterlife. Kamal's appeal to the notion of war is twofold and combines two different understandings of jihad, that in current debates are seldom considered side by side, though in classical literature they are shown to be closely related. 22 O n the one hand, jihad is a constant "war" with one's self, against an internal enemy, impossible to eliminate, and in fact also necessary for l i f e — a jihad that only ends at death. O n the other hand, it is a war against an external enemy who represents a threat for the community of Muslims. While in the first sense, of "self-war," Kamal's use of the concept is close to the classical understanding of the cultivation of virtue, the second sense situates the "enemy" as a f o r m of oppression internal to the society—poverty, injustice, humiliation—stressing the struggle toward a change in historical condition, which can take the form of rebellion or exile and which is based on a political assessment of the local and international political context. For Kamal the two meanings are closely related and are both at play in the predicament of migration. Jihad in the first sense is the effort to form and improve oneself, a work of poiesis in the Aristotelian tradition of ethics that was reformulated in the Islamic concept of tahdib al-akhlaq, the refinement of character. Jihad al-nafs is the shaping of character by developing its fortitude and by learning to restrain the nafs, the bodily soul or "self," and its natural dispositions. In Al-Ghazali's reading it is not so much a question of containing a demonic self, as in a struggle of reason and passions (an understanding that would be more specifically Christian), but rather—for those who so choose, for it is a question of "volition"—to re-create their character and natural dispositions in the direction of a virtuous life: "Were the traits of character not susceptible to change there would be n o value in counsels, sermons and discipline, and the Prophet would not have said, Improve your character" (Al-Ghazali 1995: 25). According to Al-Ghazali, certain forms in existence are "complete" and cannot be modified; others are "incomplete" and can be modified by volition: natural dispositions, among them anger and desire, can be rendered o b e d i e n t and docile by means of self-discipline and struggle. Reeducating dispositions does not mean abolishing them but reorienting them, restoring balance and moderation: for life needs desire, and the possibility of "struggle" needs the emotion of a n g e r — a s long as desire and anger do not take over the self. Dressing character is a matter of extirpating and re-creating traits, through the slow work of habit formation, which relies

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on "exercise"—bodily as well as spiritual, for the two are in a constant exchange—and on the imitation of virtuous behavior in others. This work can be painful at first; Al-Ghazali models it on weaning a baby or restraining a wild animal. And inasmuch as it is performed by the self on the self, it requires technique—limiting food and sleep until a new habit is created, avoiding contact with others for a time. But when a virtuous habit is acquired through daily exercise, it becomes second nature and the source of pleasure and delight. Al-Ghazali understands this work of reshaping as an effort toward "deliverance" (Arabic najâ, connoting being saved or rescued, delivered): deliverance from enslavement in the world in the pursuit of the desire for God, "deliverance" that can be translated as a practice of freedom, if we are prepared to conceive of "freedom" differently than the modern European term conveys. This in two senses. On the one hand, it is the deliverance of the self from the tyranny of appetites (shahwa) and the pursuit of pleasures (raghba, ladha) by refining the character and inculcating higher desires. On the other hand, it is the deliverance from worldly attachments and relations and the possibility of a different vision, an "awakening" to the reality of other pleasures and desires in the exposure to the alterity of God. Deliverance and awakening are made possible for Al-Ghazali by the coming to awareness in the experience of finitude—what he calls the remembrance of death. The two aspects are intimately related, for the ethics of "deliverance" he sets forth through self-discipline (riyadat) and the meditation on finitude (dhikr) could not be understood without the "departure" from this world into the other, in the fréquentation of death. Death, he writes, is the "spoiler of pleasures," a disturbance, interruption, which produces a sudden realization away from the numbness of everyday routine. 2 3 The possibility ofjustice and political critique in this world depends on the cultivation of that regard éloigné, a gaze that is not of this world. Only a vision of the Hereafter, through the familiarization with death, and the patient work of remembering death every day, in anticipation, in fear, and in the vicarious pain of separation, can free the believer from the preoccupations and greed of the soul (nafs). In this sense it can be said that eschatology and ethics are closely related, at least in the thought of Al-Ghazali. For some of these youths as well. 24 Kamal explains: Katharb nefsek, you struggle, you are at war with your self [nafs]. Your nafs wants this and that and can't wait, and you resist, you attempt to restrain it, "attach it" [katrbtha]. The soul/self can be understood with the example of a horse; if you don't restrain the horse with a bit it wanders around, can't find its way. That wandering is l-hawa, the whimsies of our desire. God tells us that l-hawa follows the random whimsies of the self, wants to drink, smoke hashish, wants girls, wants to wander about in the streets. The harg, instead, the desire to migrate, to "burn," is the precise opposite: you want to go in order to support

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your family, feed them, they are poor, don't have anything, live packed in a single room, a prison. In one's life a person has to do something. I will do something with my life, and this is not a suicide. T h e implicit assumption in what Kamal is saying is that dying in the e f f o r t of a jihad—a struggle for a better life, the ultimate scope o f m i g r a t i o n — i s n o t a suicide b u t a death in the way of G o d , for which there is reward in the Afterlife. T h o u g h h e may die in the endeavor, the "burner" o f international frontiers will not, in his interpretation, b u r n in Hell. Jawad's view is that there are n o g r o u n d s to consider illegal migration a war. T h e illicit migrant seeks only to resolve a personal p r o b l e m , to improve his life, obtain material gain; whereas in a war o n e fights in the collective interest: "In a war you fight f o r your country, in the hargyou fight for a dream, an illusion." Kamal puts an e n d to the debate: "We d o n ' t fight for an illusion but for s o m e t h i n g that will find realization, G o d willing. You make the first step. G o d makes the next. It is not suicide." Jawad's point is that a war must be authorized; and the project o f illegal migration is far f r o m b e i n g authorized as a collective endeavor. T h e r e is a l o n g tradition o f debates, in Islamic j u r i s p r u d e n c e as in political-theological arguments, about w h o is authorized to call for jihad, or simply to " c o n d e m n w r o n g " or declare s o m e o n e an apostate, and what kind of consensus is required. Kamal's approach suggests the possibility of authorizing oneself in a situation o f exceptional hardship. Such self-authorization, f r o m his friend's point of view, is a transgression a n d ultimately a sin. It is here that Kamal's position is closer to a modernist interpretation of the subject's responsibility (the believer understood as a subject o f consciousness), a responsibility that is at o n c e toward this world and the other. For Kamal, w h o is giving a theologicalpolitical reading o f the situation f r o m which he seeks to migrate, the "worldly benefit" to be gained in the endeavor is also, as h e attempts to show, a spiritual struggle. Sheikh Yassine, whose writings have greatly i n f l u e n c e d s o m e sectors o f the M o r o c c a n youth, locates that political-ethical struggle primarily in the "heart," on the basis of what he calls the "prophetic diagnosis" of a social a n d cultural crisis. Yet within the logic of Sheikh Yassine's m o v e m e n t today, self-authorization would not be an option. 2 5 O n e would have to rather look in direction of the Iranian theologian Ali Shariati, theorist o f the revolution, who, in explicit dia l o g u e with Fanon, Sartre, a n d Camus, speaks o f the e m e r g e n c e o f a "new self" w h o has c o m e to the awareness o f injustice through despair and can authorize himself or herself to think and act on the path of G o d for a c h a n g e of condition. Shariati describes the characteristics of such a new self in terms of awareness, sensitivity, boldness o f thought, loftiness o f spirit, and fortitude of the heart. T h e y are the characteristics o f the Ideal Man, "a man of jihad a n d ijtihad, of poetry and the sword, of solitude and commitment, o f emo-

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tion and genius, of strength and love, of faith and knowledge. He is a man uniting all the dimensions of true humanity," who is not one-dimensional and alienated from his own self but through submission to God has been summoned to rebellion against all forms of compulsion (Shariati 1979; Khosrokhavar 1995, 2003). Kamal, however, is not the "ideal man" of Shariati. Despite his resorting to the vocabularies of selfhood and effort on the path toward God, his approach, and that of his friends, is solitary and eclectic and fails, in an important sense, to live up to the "absolute"—Shariati's condition for the realization of the new self. However conscious of pain and horror, Kamal's posture is ironic. Each of these youths is engaged on a search, a solitary quest that is external to institutions and of which the migratory project, and the willful habitation/violation of boundaries, is but a metonymic image. That externality and that quest are values that some of them rediscover in their encounter with Islamic ethics, with their potential for self-transformation, political contestation, and the possibility of imagining a different world. It is not possible to apprehend the specific subjectivity these youths attempt to reconfigure outside of the debates, the possibilities, and the experiential and conceptual world of Islam. Yet, perhaps, it would be more appropriate to find a comparison with the imaginative and idiosyncratic millenarian politicaltheology of certain sixteenth-century European figures, treated as heretics in some cases by the Church (Ginzburg 1980). As we closely follow the implications of Kamal's argument about the reciprocal relation of the "war" against the self, the "war against poverty and injustice" (jihad al-fuqr), and the migratory project, we see the outline of a parallel between the "hope" of the desire for G o d and its eschatological realizations and the long-term project of migrating to Europe. At this level, the personal and the collective register, the private and the public, are intertwined. In both cases, the long-term horizon is made possible by the opening of a gap, a departure from one's "self" and one's attachments, or, to borrow Shariati's (1979) expression, a "migration from the self."

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L-HARG

In my conversations with these Moroccan youths I have tried to capture the state of mind of the harg, its figures and vocabularies, as a specific modality of being in relation to death, transgression, and the struggle for life. In attempting to follow their discourse from within, and in terms of the figures they themselves deploy, I would like to draw attention to its reflexivity, its capacity to produce new thought, in the modality of experiential narrative, as well as of intellectual debate. In this perspective, I now turn to a description of the conceptual and existential world that emerged from our conversations, focusing on a repertory of concepts or figures: "despair" and the pursuit of

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"limits," the degradation of life, the confrontation with death, the thought of migration, the paradoxical coming to "awareness," and the development of an eschatological vision of the Last Day in the everyday. I conclude with a reflection on the eschatological imagination, which I discuss with the help of Al-Ghazali, posing the question of the rearticulation of the subject in the remembrance of death: the fact of creating a "link," or, as Lacan (1997) says, "faire lien," when all connections are broken. In the structure of address—I am their interlocutor—there is a request for listening and for the validation of an experience that does not otherwise have a title to recognition. 26 The young men watch Moroccan and satellite TV (Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya), which give considerable space to social and political reportage, as well as roundtable debates on political and religious issues, and are familiar with the documentary genre and the mode of individual witnessing that throughout the world, and increasingly in the Arab world, is promoting a new style of testimonial authority. At some level, they seek to occupy the position of institutional "witness."27 At another, however, they speak from a place that cannot be appropriated, and in terms of a question that is singular and is the mark of their own painful quest. In this sense, they bear witness to the vulnerability of a form of life, which is also personally felt as the risk of one's own extinction; and to the encounter with a drive to life, born in the confrontation with the limit of death. 28 In conversation with me they moved between different "voices": the epic register of travel narrative, as a "geographic" exploration of limits; a mode of personal narrative with an implicit, and sometimes explicit, demand for a psychotherapeutic intervention (particularly in the context of traumatic experiences and relation with their families); and a mode of theological argumentation, from which they attempt to draw the elements of a possible reading. Inasmuch as the different "voices" are inseparable, overlapping, and developed in an internal counterpoint, I do not try to separate out the different registers and instead discuss them as they come up in the narrative accounts.

Al-qanat: Despair At issue is a sense of a withdrawal of life, of life shrinking. It is as if by the aftershock of an impact, human beings have been ejected from the space of life—the blood drawn out of their bodies, thrown into an Elsewhere that is also a different time, a temporality that is not of this world, and that, at the same time, is the bodily record of a zone of exclusion. This is expressed through the concept of al-qant, or qant dduniya, despairing of the world, extreme boredom, depression that becomes despair, loss of all hope. Or with the image of the ruh, the metaphysical soul, departing from the body, sending it off, or migrating, into a space of death. It is what happens in dreams,

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a c c o r d i n g to the Q u r a n i c a n d vernacular understanding o f dreaming. 2 9 But in the uncanny d o u b l i n g of melancholy, it h a p p e n s with drugs. Let's recall Kamal's definition: We say of a person qnat—he or she fell into despair. A human being, when he falls into despair, all doors are shut for him, he can no longer see or distinguish anything, and abandons himself to drugs. Lahg waked l-hedd, he has reached a Limit. His head is full; he sees only one thing, hanging himself; his ruh, his soul, doesn't stay in place, is no longer there, he sent it off with the drugs. . . . And as for what is on his mind, only one thing: death. Al-qont (classical Arabic al-qanat) is not despair as universal h u m a n experie n c e , as such immediately accessible a n d t r a n s l a t a b l e — e v e n t h o u g h it claims universality on its own a c c o u n t within a d i f f e r e n t tradition o f ethics. We m i g h t relate it to Kierkegaard's analytics o f despair, or William James's e x p e r i e n c e of melancholy (James 1994; Taylor 2002: 35); but we must also take seriously the fact that as these youths use it, despair despair is a theological concept, whose semantic configuration refers to the notion of a "trial" o f the believer. In its vernacular use in M o r o c c a n Arabic l-qant is an image o f imprisonm e n t , lack o f space, extreme b o r e d o m , and a cause o f madness or suicide. In this sense, w h e n m e n t i o n e d by a patient in a psychiatric e m e r g e n c y r o o m , it is u n d e r s t o o d by psychiatrists as a sign o f "depression" or "melancholy" (ikti'ab, in psychiatric language), which can take hold o f a person and r e d u c e h i m or her to a psychic a n d bodily quasi-death. Despair's relation to madness a n d migration was a r e c u r r e n t t h e m e in our conversations, in an intertwining o f medical, theological, a n d existential registers. Despair can lead to madness, losing a person's m i n d in the sense o f l-humq, madness without return, but can also lead the believer astray, e r r i n g away f r o m the path o f G o d . T h e two senses are both distinct and related, inasmuch as madness has a theological connotation c o n t i g u o u s with a medical one, in the vernacular understanding o f d e m o n i c invasion, as well as in the normative a p p r o a c h o f Sunni Islam. T h e t h o u g h t o f migration is an antidote to despair. Kamal explains this to m e with reference to his own malaise. H e sees himself as "knotted" or traumatized, ma 'aqqad, by an intimate w o u n d , an essential vulnerability that exposes h i m to the risk o f madness. This w o u n d , which h e traces to his early family life, is both the source o f his vulnerability and the source of a certain vision; a n d it is at the origin o f his desire to expatriate. T h e t h o u g h t o f the harg/bum'mg, he says, in spite o f the risk o f death, is for h i m an e f f o r t to seek health. H e explains the relationship o f clandestine migration to madness, l-harg u l-humq, by the vernacular etiology o f the "black dot," the theo r y o f a destructive potential in any o n e of us, which is kept at bay by leading a life o f ethical works:

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In the head of each human being there is a black dot [nuqta khela]. If you are active and involved in the things of life, if you practice l-'amal, the works that please God, you succeed in forgetting its presence inside your head, and its potential for destruction remains unrealized, the black dot remains contained, like a cyst, and does not harm you. But if you are not doing anything, if you are not working, just waiting in boredom, you start feeling its presence, become obsessive, and it is as if a wind blew through that black dot inside your head and shattered its content in a million fragments. The black dot turns then into dust, and you go mad, you are lost. T h e risk o f madness in despair is paralleled by a risk o f d o u b t i n g the foundation o f faith, or even challenging G o d , therefore entering heresy. Ibn Qayyim Jawziyya elaborates o n this in his " T r e a t m e n t of Calamity," stressing that "losing the reward of patience a n d submission is truly greater than the disaster" (1998: 1 4 2 - 4 7 ) . L-qont, in this sense, is close to the classical theological notion o f "losing h o p e " a n d "losing guidance," "errance" (dalal), as the e x p e r i e n c e o f feeling a b a n d o n e d by G o d . T h e person in despair has thoughts of b e i n g a b a n d o n e d by G o d . It is in this sense that despair shares in the semantic structure of the c o n c e p t o f kufr, usually translated as "unbelief," and the person in despair c o m e s to inhabit a border, a region o f normative instability: lahagwahed l-hedd—"he has r e a c h e d a Limit." O n that border, certainty is suspended, a n d the truth o f revelation can b e lost, or it can be discovered anew. T h e advent of questioning, f r o m the P r o p h e t Moh a m m e d ' s m o m e n t o f confusion as to nature o f his revelation (Benslama 1988), 3 0 to AI-Ghazali's ( 1 9 5 3 ) self-narrative o f a spiritual crisis, 31 is b o t h foundational o f the possibility o f belief and represents an essential risk. " W h o w o u l d despair o f the mercy o f his L o r d save those w h o are astray in Error [dalluna_/?" (Qur'an 15:56). In the debate with which I o p e n e d this chapter, Jawad sensed such potential transgression in the words o f Kamal, a n d in the spirit o f what h e u n d e r s t o o d as the law, a p p e a l e d to the language o f "sin," ma'siya, and c h a r g e d with heresy the position o f the illegal expatriate, a b u r n e r of political and theological borders. Kamal himself, j u s t as h e was describing the e x p e r i e n c e o f losing h o p e , an e x p e r i e n c e that is also his own, cited a Q u r a n i c exhortation n o t to fall pray of despair, not to f o r g e t the compassion of G o d — a l s o , perhaps, f o r its performative force. In his study of ethical concepts in the Q u r ' a n , Izutsu (2002) argues that the semantic configuration of the c o n c e p t of kufr comprises an array o f related yet d i f f e r e n t meanings, n o n e of w h i c h can be r e d u c e d to a simple notion o f disbelief in the m o d e r n English sense o f the word ( J o h a n s e n 2002, 2003). 32 All suggest that the possibility o f kufr is rooted in basic h u m a n dispositions, a n d h e n c e the position of belief can never be a given but an o p e n ethical w o r k — a work, o n e may add, that in its u n f o l d i n g can repeatedly enc o u n t e r the risk a n d possibility o f kufr. Despair is a trial, o n e of the trials o f f i t n a to discern the quality, a n d truth-

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fulness, of a person's faith. Al-fitna is a pivotal concept in the Qur'an, as also in the vernacular understanding. Reinterpreting a pre-Islamic notion of the immanence of harm and desire in the terms of a new ethics, al-fitna in the Qur'an is the "limit" or "trial" to ascertain the faith of the believer: "Everyone shall have a taste of death: and We test you through disaster and well being, by way offitna, and to Us you must return" (Qur'an 21 ¡35). Falling into despair and dwelling in that state amounts to losing trust in God, losing "hope," raja', in his compassion. Despair, then, is one of the "limits" that can transgress into apostasy, or establish the truth of God's law. One aspect of this trial is "the ordeal of affliction and torture" (fitna al-mihna), which subjects the faithful to suffering at the limit of the intolerable. It is comparable to a waswas, a whispering of the devil in the ear, and one of the widespread causes of madness: "Wa fitnat al-sadr al-waswas," the fitna of the heart is the waswas, obsession and internal delusion (al-Manzur 1988). Despair marks the failure of the virtue of endurance, as-sabr. And yet in certain Sufi readings it is seen as a state, a station (maqama) that is reached by the adept by way of a passage through a radical loss of self, which necessarily entails a risk of nonreturn. According to the revolutionary eschatology of Ali Shariati, on the other hand, who reads the Qur'an and the Traditions in light of Kierkegaard and Sartre, despair is the consciousness of injustice and suffering. Shariati sees a kernel of responsibility in despair, the responsibility of the oppressed (mazlum), who becomes a martyr in full awareness of his defeat in this world. In the debate with Jawad, Kamal's position pushes belief and personal-political engagement to a limit that is that of fitna—at the risk of impatience and arrogance, of overstepping the bounds (tagha), by assuming the experience of despair as a coming to consciousness. Al-Ghazali himself points out that sadness (al-huzn) is a state in which the soul/self is "softer," already distanced from the pleasures and ambitions of worldly attachments, hence more receptive to the work of remembrance of death and therefore to the possibility of vision, awareness (Al-Ghazali 1995: 63-64).

Al-mawt al-bati': The Slow Death The meditation on despair as an existential and theological risk gives way to a reflection on depersonalization, and on the end of connectedness in what is described as an aftermath of social life, and of life tout court. The words that keep coming to describe the event of becoming a nonperson, are al-mahgur, the "wretched," humiliated, reduced to the status of "scum," al-mqhur, the one who is overpowered and vanquished, subjugated, al-mqmu', the one who is despised, valueless, subjected. These words lend an image to the experience of what the youths call a "slow death" (al-mawt al-bati'), death by lack of place, a certain way of becoming an arwahh a "spirit," while still alive,

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a living dead, through the "shutting of all doors," the flattening of the horizon, metonymically embodied in the use of drugs, which "send off the soul," render the body insensitive, rigid like the limbs of a corpse. A n d in this context there would be so much to say about the frequentation of death, suicide, illness, violence, which engender a phantasmagoria of images, a world populated with spirits and regulated by the operations of magic, where the risk of the one who "gambles with his life" to cross over to Europe is also the risk of being "touched" by thejinns. We leave here the domain of the ethical struggle, at least in the prescriptive sense, to enter al-gharib, "the uncanny," strange, that which exceeds mundane reality. It is the encounter with the demonic (another dimension of al-fitna) as a pervasive dimension of everyday life, as well as an encounter with "harm" in the form of abandonment and oppression. In his writings Yassine makes reference to the condition o f f i t n a , humiliation and corruption, in which the society dwells. At some level these youths situate themselves within that perspective. Yet their position is not one of affirmative moral denunciation: they are also existentially dwelling in a space of fitna. T h e y are "standing on the cusp," in a precarious and uncomfortable position, fraught with ambivalence. 3 3 "Home," for them, has become unheimlisch (Freud 1919). 34 "So many of us have been struck in the attempt at migration" (tqasw; touched, implicit by thejinns): in their interpretation it is this "having been touched," exposed to the realm and the operations of death by the hand of thejinns, that causes the unleashing of the death drive and results for so many in suicide. Their reflection on the huma—the neighborhood but also the social community in which they were born, a sharing of assumptions and habits, rites, ways of being together, and which in its ideal representation would be based on a sense of closeness that persists—is aimed at showing that the space of familiarity is both unlivable and uncanny, "against nature." There is no transmission of a desire to live. Not, in any case, in the unreconstructed places of genealogical b e l o n g i n g — t h e relation with fathers and mothers, with sisters and brothers. Fathers are represented as participating in the "crushing" of the self, by the performance of their own weakness, as well as by the exercise of an empty authority that does not correspond to a symbolic "support" (damen): "You could have a university degree," saysjawad, elaborating on his sense of having been abandoned by his family at his father's death, "and in these neighborhoods several youths do have degrees, but if you don't have support when you need it, a person who can lean against, a guarantor, you will eventually surrender to drugs." This condition is characterized in their eyes by the fact of not having a damen, a g u a r a n t o r — a father, very often in their stories, but also a principle of legality, at the local and the international level. "These kids who kill each other with knives and swords in our neigh-

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borhood at night, you may find that they are educated and even have university degrees: thagrw, "they have been crushed." They tell me how the project of "burning" began, in school. They were about fifteen. People had started crossing to Europe and would come back in the summer and tell stories, or there were just stories told about them, on the other side. They had left illegally, in the long-distance trucks that would come and go, load and unload at the textile manufactures down the hill from their neighborhood (sharikat dyel export). The idea started entering their minds like a whispering, an obsessive whispering in their ear (waswas), and they could no longer concentrate in school: "Our minds flew away with those distance tracks"; "our bodies were here, our being over there, we were hayr, beside ourselves, until we dropped out of school." They describe their first smalljobs at the textile factories; only the girls had good jobs and brought home decent pay. They explain that girls are "submissive," accept being exploited, and the bosses prefer them, because they don't make trouble. (The same "submissive girls," however, who often don the headscarf, are also beginning to reverse established gender dynamics, asking the men to marry them and supporting them financially. This is hard for the men to accept, or even acknowledge.) For these youths there were only exhausting jobs, lifting heavy boxes and loading trucks, until the day they were able to climb unseen into a truck and depart. Afternoons spent remembering those first "attempts" (muhawla) With me, the excitement and the fear, long descriptions of r'muk (French remorque), the long-distance cargo trucks, in their technical and mechanical details: how the doors lock, how you elude control, what happens at the border with the customs police, how it feels to be in there, squeezed in the midst of piles of jeans in plastic bags, in the dark, with no oxygen, flattened against the walls and hardly breathing. And then, in most cases, the disappointment of being discovered, on the Spanish or the Moroccan side, being questioned and sent back, and often beaten up by the police (beatings on the legs, to break the bones, "so that we can't try again"). Kamal and Said made at least ten attempts. Said never made it to the other side. Kamal made it once, all the way to Algesiras, but when the police caught him in the street and addressed him in Spanish, he couldn't reply and was taken to the station and sent back. Only once they tried at sea. They speak about l-harg openly, the attempts, the fact of taking risks to go across. In the stories of crossing there is an adventurous dimension that makes them feel alive and creates a bond among those who live in this space of abandonment and self-exile. Other things are much harder to discuss: the sense of being crushed, the suicide of friends, the fear of going mad, the situation at home, with parents and siblings, the impossibility of relating to their fathers, and also, for different reasons (it has now become dangerous), their frequenting of Islamist mosques.

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They describe the state of mind of the harg in a language of addiction: l-hargkeyjri f-l-'aruq bhal ddim, ana mbli: burning flows in my veins like blood, I am addicted; mbli, a term that is used for drugs but also for being in love— I have lost all desire—reghba (desire, longing, for anything other than the burning itself). And in terms of rage, oppression: Ana hayr: I am beside myself (hayrais confusion, helplessness, extreme anguish); and by the image of an Elsewhere that becomes an obsession and produces a cleavage, a rift, somewhat comparable to what happens in the phenomenology of dreams: Ddati hna, khatry lehe, bhal l-wsuas fiya, "My body is here, my Being is over there [with a gesture of the hand, far away, over there, in Europe]," "as if with a constant whispering in my ear." 1-gharib: The Uncanny Ana qasit 'ala udd l-hariq, "I got myself exposed/touched by the jinns because of burning." Stories of demonic encounters were recurrent in our conversations, in counterpoint to the ethical register of jihad al-nafs. Because "burning" requires nightly waiting in forsaken places, or by the water, sites characteristically haunted by the jinns. But the exposure to "touching" and demonic possession has also to do with the emotional state of a person who is hayr, in a rage, or in the heat of despair. These stories are accounts of events of being seized into a space of death for those who are vulnerable and will end up losing their minds or committing suicide; they are told as cautionary tales but also offered as factual reports on the state of things, indexes of the withdrawal of life. But there are other narratives in which the person stands up to the jinns and tests the fortitude of his or her will. The "burner" is represented as cultivating the volition and skills of a healer, who develops the interior strength to encounter the demonic without being seized. As Said tells of his encounter with a feminine presence one night that he was "risking," he is narrating such a story: O n e night at Aswak Assalam [a supermarket] we were "risking" [kanriskiw], just by the freeway, there is a thicket, it is a haunted place [ghaba mskuna]. And a girl went by, she was beautiful, wore a long white dress, and was all covered with gold, and we were sitting there, waiting [waiting to see whether they could climb inside a cargo truck]. I got up, wanted to check out her beauty from close up, verify her true being [jinn or human], and my friends held me down. I am not afraid of them, even if they materialize right here in front of me. If you are afraid of them, they strike you. I am checking her out carefully, she is walking very slowly, I check her feet, she has camel feet—They don't have feet like us humans. T h e other kids were hiding or calling for help. I kept looking at her, and our gaze met, my eye met her eye, she made a sign, and I replied with a sign, she turned her face around, started walking very slowly, and I followed her. She put some distance between us, and I followed her at that distance, and

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kept looking at her. I had gone a long way from people. Then she disappeared, and I returned to my friends.

Said looks at the jinn, wants to stand up to her gaze; but humans cannot stand that gaze without losing their minds. At stake is the "testing" of his fear, fear of madness and death, by confronting the fitna of a she-demon, who is also a personification of Europe. Said is testing his capacity to resist, not being lost—in the theological sense of dalla as perdition and in the vernacular sense of becoming her prey; but he is also exploring his own fascination and desire. It is an art of danger (LePoulichet 1996).

World Ending Prompted by a violent happening the previous night, Kamal and Said start reflecting on death. Death as physical killing. Kamal recalls an event, a dispute between two youths, one stabbing the other with a knife. The victim grabbed Kamal's leg to make a shield with his body, and as Kamal freed himself the other was struck to death. It was the first time he witnessed a violent death, he says, a disfigured death (mwta meshuha), obscene, public, a death that, in itself, is a punishment from God. Kamal recalls his own astonishment: "The last rattle of a dying person is like the rattle of a sacrificed lamb" (debiha). In conversation, each recalls the event of a death. They visualize the corpse, the physicality of the body, bleeding until it becomes white and translucent, or rotting in a hole, where it will be found days later (Said says he showered for days without being able to get rid of the smell of death on his skin); or frozen in the refrigerators at the morgue: Said recalls having brought the frozen corpse of a little girl in his arms from the morgue all the way home for the funeral. To practice "good works," he says. The visualization of death in their recollection explodes the existential frames of daily life. It inscribes the objectlike quality of the corpse in the present as a "remembrance of death," which is not a cultivated attitude, in the sense in which Gnostics practice dhikr, or at least not explicitly, but something that befalls them, as death does. The experience of death, of the corpse, radically alters the coordinates of the real, tangibly producing a temporality of the Afterlife in the here and now of presence. In "The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife," Al-Ghazali (1989) provides a phenomenological description of the experience of death as the event of a cleavage, a radical dispossession that is a "lapse" into another, incommensurable state. He describes in a profusion of visual details the decomposition of the body in the grave, the fear of the soul, the darkness and smell of the grave, the worms, and the questioning by the angel of death, and invites the faithful to meditate on those images, producing them in the imagination and imprinting them in the soul as both an ethical and an existen-

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tial bodily e x p e r i e n c e . T h r o u g h dhikr the living learns to look at the world, a n d oneself, f r o m the outer-temporal standpoint o f the grave: " T h e d e a d man sits u p a n d hears the footsteps o f those w h o are present at his funeral, but n o n e addresses h i m save his tomb, which says, W o e betide you, son o f A d a m ! Did you not fear m e a n d my narrowness, my c o r r u p t i o n , terror a n d worms? W h a t have y o u prepared for me?" ( 1 3 5 ) . S e e i n g the world f r o m the standpoint o f the grave is a step toward "unveiling." Yet understanding death is impossible for h u m a n beings, "since death c a n n o t b e understood by those w h o d o not understand life, a n d life can only be understood through k n o w i n g the true nature o f the spirit itself" (Al-Ghazali 1989: 138). T h e themes o f Al-Ghazali's " r e m e m b r a n c e " have an e c h o in conversation with Kamal and Said. In the midst of their recollections o f death I asked them the question of the sense o f life, the worth o f life, if it still had a m e a n i n g , in their n e i g h b o r h o o d , in relation to the stories o f violence and abjection, and to their representation o f life as "crushed" and "violated." Kamal replied: You see the world, it is like a glass of tea, you drink it and it is empty. You ask me what life is, what the meaning of life is in this [lower] world, duniya. Life, you enter from one door, and come out from another, dkhalfbab u kharjfbbab. L-Akhera, the Afterlife, life on the side of death, is something else. It is an unveiling, you become aware. And the point is becoming aware of the Afterlife in this life. But in the banality o f everyday life, he c o n t i n u e d , in the n e i g h b o r h o o d , the first time he witnesses a death, a m u r d e r in the street, he c o u l d n ' t sleep for days. B u t then o n e b e c o m e s accustomed, a n d now h e is n o l o n g e r affected. O f course, h e isafraid o f dying, despite everything. But h e does accept dying in the attempt at migration, in a truck . . . Kamal continues, and the visualization o f death in this world lapses into a vision of the Last Day: " O n the Last Day, the day of resurrection, we will all c o m e o u t in the o p e n , a n d o n e person will know recognize another. T h e kings will c o m e out, Hassan II and M o h a m m e d V, they will c o m e o u t naked, and n o o n e will know them." T h e imagery is reminiscent o f Q u r a n i c reckonings of the Last Day, "the Hour." For in the landscape o f the Hour, a landscape flat and without a horizon, p e o p l e will be scattered like moths, baref o o t a n d naked, a n d n o o n e will recognize the other. It is the end of h u m a n connectedness, family, community, nation, and the radical aloneness of each person: in Al-Ghazali's words, it is "the day in which the secret things are rend e r e d public, the day in which n o soul shall aid another," "the day in which they are s u m m o n e d towards the infernal fire," "no father may assist his son," and "a man shall flee f r o m his brother, his m o t h e r and his father," even mothers will a b a n d o n their babies (Al-Ghazali 1989: 1 8 6 - 8 7 ) . T h e condition o f life at the "limit," as these youths describe it, in the aftermath of society, nec-

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essarily evokes f o r a person within this tradition the Quranic vision of the end of time. A n d how could the "passage" itself, the "crossing" of the geographic chasm between the continental fault lines of Africa and E u r o p e , not evoke the sirat, the traverse or narrow bridge over the chasm of Hell; the bridge thinner than a blade or a thread, which will widen as a highway to let across the saved, or instead shrink as a blade to make the d a m n e d fall, pushed down into eternal fire?35

NOTES

My grateful acknowledgment goes to the youths in Rabat and Casablanca who have been my interlocutors in these conversations. I have used pseudonyms in this chapter. I also would like to thank Mohammed Hamdouni Alami, Fouad Benchekroun, Veena Das, Pamela Reynolds, Achille Mbembe, Didier Fassin, Abdellah Hammoudi, Vincent Crapanzano, Baberjohansen, Maria Pia Di Bella, Saba Mahmood, M. Letizia Cravetto, Tahir Naqvi, Pete Skafish, Abdelhai Diouri, Jocelyne Dakhlia, Charles Hirschkind, Catherine David, Ito Barrada, Leila Kilani, Linda Pitcher, and Samera Esmeir. I thank Thomas J . Csordas for inviting me to contribute to this volume and for his multiple readings of the texts. The research was funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. I presented versions of this work at Johns Hopkins University, the EHESS in Paris, the Séminaire du Symbolique in Rabat, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Witte de Witt Museum for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam in conjunction with an exhibition of photographs of Tangiers by Ito Barrada. 1. "La psychanalyse et le monde arabe." La Célibataire (Spring 2004): 7 - 1 8 . 2. M. Safouan has been closely associated with Lacan. He translated Freud's Interpretation of Dreams into Arabic. 3. Fethi Benslama, La psychanalyse à l'épreuve de l'Islam (2002). 4. The Seminaire du Symbolique in Rabat has been a site for debate on these questions. Some of the ideas in this chapter were elaborated in constructive dialogue with the Rabat psychoanalysts Fouad Benchekroun, Farid Merini, and Abdallah Ouardini, who, unlike the psychoanalytic position I discuss here, do engage with the emergent question of Islam (see, for example, Benchekroun 2005). 5. It should be noted, however, that Asad discusses the way in which in a number of historical contexts "coherence" is the result of a struggle and the mark of a political claim for discursive dominance. 6. The question of whether eschatological reasoning and imagining presuppose the closure of hermeneutics in the certainty of the end of time, which is also the fulfillment of prophecy, is once again at the center of debate. Most secular interpretations argue in this direction, postulating a fundamental incompatibility between the "closed future" of eschatology and the "open future" of modernity. K. Lowith, however, whose reflection on eschatology and history shaped the early configuration of this debate (Lowith 1957), points out that eschatological time is hermeneutically open, more than the time of modern science understood as calculability and predictability, inasmuchas as human beings have no access to the designs of God. In II tempo che resta (2000), Agamben revisits this question through a close reading of Saint Paul's Letter to the Romans with W. Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of

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History"—Benjamin's visionary reflection on the experience oijetzteit, the messianic "now," in which time is interrupted, as a coming of the temporality of the End. In a chapter on the figure of the "apostle" (whose features Agamben recognizes in both Saint Paul and Benjamin), which is contrasted with the figure of the "prophet," Agamben distinguishes "eschatological time" from "messianic time." The first is static and incommensurably "distant" in the future, he argues, as the End of Time, whereas the second is dynamic and "near," immanent, and can be understood as "the time of the end," as experienced in the present moment. Messianic time, in his view, is an intermediate temporality—a "limit" and an "excess"—between sacred eschatological/ apocalyptic time and profane chronological time. In this chapter I implicitly engage with Agamben's discussion of messianic time (which is akin to Lacan's moment de conclure), but attempting, at least in the context of my ethnography, to overcome the dichotomy, through a reading of the eschatological writings of Al-Ghazali side by side with the eschatological visions of the youths with whom I talked—which are spoken at once in the future and the present. 7. As an engagement with the work of E. De Martino in La fine del mondo, Crapanzano contrasts "open" and "closed" millenarianisms and eschatological horizons in the last section of the book. 8. Forty-five people were killed in the bombings at five sites in the business center of downtown Casablanca. Most of the dead were Moroccan nationals. This includes thirteen suicide bombers and self-described martyrs. They were all from the same shantytown in Casablanca, Sidi Moumen (pop. 130,000). 9. The Moroccan press from this period is dedicated entirely to attempting to understand, document, and diagnose the situation that might have produced the bombings in Casablanca. See, in particular, Maroc Hebdo, la Gazette du Maroc, Aujourd'hui le Maroc, and As-Sahifa. Other weeklies such as Le Journal and Tel Quel tried to resist what they called "l'amalgame." 10. As done worldwide in the Euro-American press, the French and English terms used to describe the bombings emphasized "suicide" as the distinctive feature of the attack. The Moroccan press in French was no exception, with "attentat suicide," while the perpetrators were called kamikaze following the international press. The Moroccan press in Arabic, by contrast, and in this following the orientation of the Arab press in other parts of the Middle East, variously characterized the attacks as 'ameliyya irhabiyya, "terrorist operation," or 'ameliyya jihadiyya, 'jihad operation." From the point of view of those who committed the acts, the action was referred to as 'ameliyya istishahdiya, "martyr operation." There is little reference to the notion of suicide in the Arabic characterization. And in fact several articles published in the Moroccan press at the time, both in Arabic and in French, were written with the didactic intent of explaining the condemnation of suicide in Islamic theology and the error of those youths who think that their act could amount to an act of istishahad, or martyrdom. Thanks to Mohammed Zernine for clarification on this point. A discussion of the question of violence and its representation in the aftermath of the 2003 Casablanca attacks is found in a special issue of the review al-fikr wa naqd, edited by M. Zernine. 11. As documented in the Amnesty International report of May 2004 and later also in the Moroccan press. 12. Selma Belaala, "Fabrique de la violence. Misère et djihad au Maroc," Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2004, no. 608.

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13. Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2004, 16. Translation: "The takfiri (those who declare a portion of a Muslim society heretical—promoters of excommunication, takfir) are estranged and alienated youth (also 'mentally deranged'), from disintegrated social milieus, who in their lives have encountered nothing other than the sordid and brutal universe of the ghettos and have been treated by society as ferocious beasts. In the name of a certain sectarian interpretation of Islam, they return this heardess ferocity against the established order." 14. What follows is the transcript of a tape-recorded conversation in June 2003, in Rabat. 15. "Lo: as for those whom the angels take [in death] while the wrong themselves, the angels will ask: In what were you engaged? They will say 'We were oppressed [weak and humiliated].' The angels will say, 'Was not Allah's earth spacious that you could migrate therein?'" (Qur'an 4:97-100). 16. M. Hodgson (1997) clairvoyandy makes this point. 17. While the reference to Al-Ghazali remains foundational, today the sheikh and the movement as a whole reject any kinship with Sufism, choosing to be associated with modernist currents in the international Islamic revival. Abdessalam Yassine, however, had earlier been a disciple at an important Sufi zawya in northern Morocco. 18. In a different context, but with reference to a comparable conundrum of belonging, see Pandolfo 2006. 19. Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, Faysal al-Tafriqa Bayna al-Islam wa al-Zandaqa (2002). 20. In his book on the practice and the implications of Qur'an cassette listening, C. Hirschkind (2006) argues that the kind of listening associated with this modern and reproducible medium is not passive but instead constitutive of an ethical self. Listening-performing, or chanting, is an irresolvable couple, and it is in fact understood as such in the Arabic concept of sama', listening, which presupposes an active role and creative function. Hirschkind engages with the representation of physical death and the relation to eschatological time conjured by Quranic recitation, whether live or mechanically reproduced in cassette recordings. 2 1 . Literally, l-qarqubi indicates the agent by which one is turned over (qarqab, vernacular onomatopoeic), inside out, or upside down. 22. Their contiguity is reckoned by a much-cited Hadith, one Al-Ghazali brings to his discussion of the "exercises" of the self (riyadat al-nafs): "Our Prophet said to some people who had just returned from a jihad [war]: Welcome, you have come from the lesser to the greater jihad. Oh emissary of God, he was asked, and what is the greater jihad? The jihad against your soul, he replied. And he said, "The real mujahid is he that wars with himself for the sake of God" (Al-Ghazali 1989: 56). Al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi, commentary on the Hadith above, cited in T. W. Winter's introduction to Al-Ghazali. 23. yakaddar 'ala al-insan al-ladhat wa ash-shahwat, "[death] spoils for human beings pleasures and longings." 24. In Politics ofPiety (2004), Saba Mahmood provides a description of contemporary religious pedagogies and a world of practice that share a remarkable resemblance to Al-Ghazali's reflections on spiritual exercises, ryadat al-nafs, "disciplines of the soul." The book does not engage in a discussion of Al-Ghazali's theological-ethical universe per se but shows how that tradition is revived in contemporary pedagogical practices in the Egyptian female "Mosque movement." In the wake of recent problematizations

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of the questions of "tradition" and "religion," which she furthers in terms of a critique of liberal vocabularies of "freedom" and "agency," M a h m o o d ' s b o o k follows the pathways of a discursive tradition that is at o n c e old and new, continuous and discontinuous, and lives in the practices, affects, desire (for God), styles of argument, and bodily investments of the w o m e n who actively participate in it. She attempts to demonstrate the inherent c o h e r e n c e (and specific rationality) of these practices, arguments, and theological orientations. This methodological and textual strategy account for why Politics of Piety does not set as its primary task to explore the p h e n o m enological complexities of particular lives in their necessary open-endedness. For the work's chosen task is that of a p p r e h e n d i n g the c o h e r e n c e of an Islamic discourse, which is not "the women's discourse" but the discourse from which they draw orientation and reference, which is immanent in their practices, and in relation to which they articulate their subjectivity. A t a m o m e n t in which the very possibility of recognizing the e x i s t e n c e — a n d the right to continue to e x i s t — o f forms of life that draw their ethical and political reason from the theological universe of Islam, M a h m o o d ' s contribution is crucial. While clearly in dialogue with that work, my approach in this chapter also somewhat differs f r o m it, for two reasons: 1. Because of the specificity of the youths' experience I discuss in my article (solitary, fragmentary, outside of established affiliations to a collectivity or a religious movement), I don't focus on the c o h e r e n c e of a discourse, of which I assume both the theoretical c o h e r e n c e and the necessary incoherence, but on the way this ethical and theological tradition is articulated with and in the lives of particular people, w h o also, in the situation I describe, push that discourse to its "limit," entering a realm of indeterminacy that is beyond reason and cannot be accounted for even in terms o f a practical reason understood with Aristotle. I d o emphasize, however, that the experiences of Kamal and his friends acquire a certain c o h e r e n c e precisely by reference to the eschatological tradition articulated by Al-Ghazali, and that their reflections and existential explorations are made possible by that tradition's own formulation of indeterminacy, heresy, and the limits of reason. H e n c e , I argue, the youths' experience cannot be understood without seriously engaging with that theological tradition and exploring its conceptual and existential possibilities and its conceptualization of limits from within. (Thanks to Charles Hirschkind for our e x c h a n g e o n this point.) 2. O n the basis of a reading of Al-Ghazali, I suggest that it is possible to demonstrate that the apprenticeship of ryadat an-nafs, spiritual exercises, or disciplines of the soul, is predicated o n the experience of alterity and finitude that AlGhazali describes in his work o n death and eschatology. This requires a reflection on the limits of reason, and an exploration of what, in Willliam James's terms, might be called the existential edge of experience. Ethical practices, in the tradition of Al-Ghazali, are also, necessarily, a g u i d e d encounter with alterity. In this sense it seems to m e that a discussion of practices and of the crafting of virtues (as pursued by Asad in his writings on medieval European asceticism, as well as in his discussion of Islamic jurisprudence, and as developed and elaborated by M a h m o o d in her ethnography) could be c o m p l e m e n t e d by a reflection on the existential questioning of the lives that are invested in, and

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shaped by, that ethical project. A renewed reflection on the Weberian question of "theodicy" along with the "limit" nature of "religious experience" in James's terms seem to me possibilities to explore—in the aftermath of Talal Asad's poignant critique of the European category of religion. This is what I attempt to d o — a s a beginning—in my discussion of the concept of al-qanat, "despair," in the experiential accounts of the Moroccan youths. It is my position that the two sides of this discussion—on the apprehending and representing of ethical-theological practice, as well as on methodology, are related. The Lacanian "time of understanding/concluding" I referred to in the opening of this chapter is predicated on an encounter with alterity, the possibility of inhabiting a "limit," which is also the event of risking reason. 25. This, more precisely, outside of the person of the sheikh and few high-ranking members of the group. In 1974 Abdessalam Yassine wrote a letter to Hassan II in which he denounced the situation of the country and advocated reforms and a change of conditions in the name of Islam (al-Islam aw twfan). He subsequently was assigned to two years of psychiatric confinement in Marrakech for "prophetic delusions," and when he came out of confinement he created a j o u r n a i that later engendered the organization of al-'adl wa al-ihsan. Today this organization is still, technically, illegal but is increasingly considered ant important political opposition, treated as such by the press, and de facto included in the public debate. The possibility of inclusion in the Moroccan political scene is experienced by many of its members as a danger—losing vision and the possibility of critique. As witnessed by a corpus of visionary dreams of grassroots militants endorsed by the organization as truthful visions (rwya saliha wa assahiha) and recently published on the organization's Web site, there is a concern for not being enlisted in the political game. (Mohammed Tozy, pers. com.; and his unpublished presentation, "Les rêves visionnaires de al'adl wa al-ihsan," Colloque de Fes sur les Trois Monotheismes. As for the issue of hierarchy and authorization on the path to gnosis and in the relation with a sheikh, see Lings 1993.) 26. I speak Arabic, and to an extent Morocco is home for me. I am originally European, Italian, and this inscribes a doubling between our respective positions and the themes and questions of our conversations, a fact that is openly acknowledged and at times reflected on in our exchanges. I am conversant with questions of mental health because of my interest in psychiatry, mental illness, and the cures of the jinn and am therefore an interlocutor who can relate to that side of their experience. The book I plan to write is important to them, because it represents a public echo of our conversations. In this sense it could be said that the book I am planning to write functions as a third. 27. At the time I was conducting these interviews a truth commission was officially instituted in Morocco to investigate, document, and record human rights violations committed since the early years of independence and during the kingdom of the late king Hassan II ( 1956-99). L'Instance Equité et Reconciliation (1ER; in Arabic, Al-Insaf wa al-musalaha), created in April 2004 by royal decree, collected hundreds of testimonies of "victims" or relatives of victims and received over 20,000 victim's requests for reparation by the state. In spring 2005 a number of public hearings were organized by the 1ER in several cities; these were widely covered by the media

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and, at least the first time, broadcast on Moroccan television. This process stirred much debate and produced complex and sometimes unintended reactions. For several months it captured public attention, contributing to the feeling (already fostered by the growing importance of reportage and first-person accounts in the programming of Arabic satellite TV stations) that the posture of "witness" is a pivotal step in the claim for rights. In the Moroccan situation, however, the equation of witnessing, injury, and citizenship (based on human rights) is less obvious than in other international contexts. Among large unprivileged sectors of the Moroccan population, skepticism colored the perception of the IER's work and the notion of accessing citizenship through witnessing. 28. Cf. Hammoudi (2005: 286): "Chacun était donc parti à la découverte de la vie, dans le parcours qui nous séparait de la mort." 29. See my discussion of dreaming in Pandolfo 1997. 30. Benslama comments on a passage from Al-Tabari (ninth century) where it is said that the Prophet had a moment of doubt concerning the true nature of the revelation, for the voices he heard frightened him and made him fear he might be possessed. 31. One can also think comparatively of Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death. See also Cheddadi 2004 on the Qur'an and the fundamental paradox of truth in the Qur'an. 32. Discussing the historical configuration and transformation of notions of truth, belief, and unbelief in a number of different contexts, including recent Egyptian "apostasy trials," Baber Johansen suggests that it might be precisely the process of positivization of the law in Middle Eastern countries in the late colonial and postcolonial periods that rendered apostasy a crime objectively describable and punishable by the law of the state; see Johansen 2002, 2003. 33. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; cited in Taylor 2002: 59. 34. For an elaboration on this unhomely dimension of the "home," in a different context, see my articles "Le noeud de l'ame" (1999) and "Je veux chanter ici': Parole et témoignage en marge d'une rencontre psychiatrique" (2006). 35. AI-Ghazali, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife, 2nd pt.; J. Smith and Y. Haddad, The Islamic Understanding ofDeath and Resurrection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1981] 2002).

REFERENCES

Abu-Lughod, Lila 2005 Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Agamben, Giorgio 1995 Homo Sacer. Ilpotere sovrano e la nuda vita. Torino: Einaudi. English translation: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 2000 II tempo che resta. Milano: Bollati Boringhieri. English translation: The Time That Remains. Translated by P. Daily. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

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Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid 1953 Munqid wa Dalai (Deliverancefrom Error), The Faith and Practice ofAl-Ghazali. Translated by W. Montgomery Watt. Oxford: Oneworld. 1989 "Kitab Dhikr Al-mawt Wa-ma Ba 'Dahu" (The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife). In The Revival of Religious Sciences, vol. 40. Cambridge: Islamic Text Society. i g 9 5 "Kitab Riyadat al-nafs" (On Disciplining the Soul). In The Revival of Religious Sciences, vol. 22. Cambridge: Islamic Text Society 2002 Faysal al-Tafriqa Bayna al-Islam wa al-Zandaqa (On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam). Translated by Sherman Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Asad, Talal 1993 Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003 Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Belaala, Selma 2004 "Fabrique de la Violence. Misère et Djihad au Maroc." Le Monde Diplomatique, November, no. 608. Benchekroun, M. F. 2005 "De la Révélation," unpublished paper presented at the conference "Les Trois Monothéismes," Association Lacanienne Internationele, Fes, Morocco, 7 - 9 May. Benslama, Fethi 1988 La nuit brisée. Paris: Ramsay. 2002 La psychanalyse à l'épreuve de l'Islam. Paris: Aubier. Bowen,J. 2004 "Beyond Migration: Islam as Transnational Public Space." Journal of Ethnie and Migration Studies 30 (5): 879-94. Cheddadi, Abdesselam 2004 Les Arabes et l'appropriation de l'histoire. Paris: Sindbad Actes Sud. Cook, Michael 2001 Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crapanzano, Vincent 2002 Imaginative Horizons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dakhlio, Jocelyne 2005 Islamicités. Paris: PUF. Darif, M. 1995 Al-jama 'At Al-'adlWa l-Ihasan. Lectures et trajectoires. Casablanca. Freud, Sigmund 1919 The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche). Standard Edition, vol. 17. [1921 ] 1959 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated byJames Strachey. New York: Norton.

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Ginzburg, Carlo 1997 II Formaggio e I Vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del '500. Torino: Einaudi. Habermas, Jürgen 1985 The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1. New York: Beacon Press. Hamdouni Alami, M. 2006 "Gestion urbaine et accès au services de base." In Rapport sur le développement humain du cinquantenaire de l'indépendance du Maroc, www.rdh50.ma. Accessed February 2006. Hammoudi, Abdeliah 2005 Une saison a la Mecque; Récit de pèlerinage. Paris: Seuil. English translation: A Season in Mecca. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Hirschkind, Charles 2001 "Civic Virtue and Religious Reason: An Islamic Counterpublic." Cultural Anthropology 16 (1): 3-34. 2006 The Ethics ofListening: Affect, Media, and the Islamic Counterpublic. New York: Columbia University Press. Hodgson, Marshall 1997 The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ibn al-Manzur 1988 (A.H. 6 3 0 - 7 1 1 )

Lisan al-ârab. Beirut: Dar Ihya' al-Turath al-'Arabi.

Ibn Miskawayh 320-420 (tenth century) Tahdib al-akhlaq wa tahtir al-'araq. French translation: Traité d'Ethique. Translated by Mohammed Arkoun. Paris: Institut Français de Damas, ig6g. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 19g8 Medicine of the Prophet. Translated by P.Johnstone. Cambridge: Islamic Text Society. Izutsu, Toshihiko 2002 Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur'an. Montreal: McGill University Press. James, William 1994 The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Random House. Johansen, Baber 1998 Contingency in a Sacred Law. London: Brill. 2002 "Signs as Evidence: The Doctrine of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim alJawziyya on Proof." Islamic Law and Society 9 (2): 168-93. 2003 "Apostasy as Objective and Depersonalized Fact: Two Recent Egyptian Court Judgments." Social Research 70 (3): 687-710. Khalid Masud, M. 1990 "The Obligation to Migrate: The Doctrine of Hijra in Islamic Law." In Muslim Travelers, edited by D. Eickelman and J. P. Piscatori, 29-49. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Khan, Naveeda 2006 "Of Children and Jinn: An Inquiry into an Unexpected Friendship in Uncertain Times." Cultural Anthropology 21 (2): 234-64. Khosrokhavar, Farhad 1995 L'Islamisme et la mar: Le martyre révolutionnaire en Iran. Paris: l'Harmattan. 2003 Les nouveaux martyrs d'Allah. Paris: Flammarion. English translation: Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs. Translated by D. Macey. New York: Pluto Press, 2005. Kilani, L. 2003 Tanger, le rêve des brûleurs. Documentary film. Lacan, Jacques [ 1945] 1996 "Le temps logique et l'assertion de la certitude anticipée." In Ecrits. Paris: Seuil. 1997 Le Sinthome, Seminaire 1975—j6. Paris: Publications del'Association Freudienne Internationale. Le Poulichet 1996 L'art du danger: De la detresse a la création. Paris: Anthropos. Lings, Martin 1993 A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawi. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. Löwith, Karl 1957 Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mahmood, Saba 2004 Politics ofPiety: The Islamic Revival and the Islamist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mbembe, Achille [2000] 2005 Sur la postcolonie. Paris: Karthala. English translation: On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Melman, Charles 2002 L'Homme sans gravité: fouir a tout prix. Paris: Denoel. Pandolfo, Stefania 1997 Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999 "La Noeud de l'Ame." Rue Descartes 25: 107-24. 2000 "The Thin Line of Modernity: Reflections on Some Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity." In Questions of Modernity, edited by T. Mitchell, 1 1 5 - 4 7 . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2006 " J e veux chanter ici': Parole et témoignage en marge d'une rencontre psychiatrique." Arabica 53 (2): 232-80. Safouan, M. 2004 "La psychanalyse et le monde arabe." La Célibataire 1 (8): 1 1 - 1 8 .

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Shariati, Ali 1979 On the Sociology ofIslam: Lectures by Ali Shariati. Translated by Hamid Algar. New York: Mizan Press. Smith, J „ and Y. Haddad [ 1981 ] 2002 The Islamic Understanding ofDeath and Resurrection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SNAT 2004 Schema National d'Amenagement du Territoire. Bilan diagnostique. Rabat: Direction de l'Amenagement du Territoire. Taylor, Charles 2002 Varieties of Religion Today: W. James Revisited. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tozy, Mohamed 1999

Monarchie et Islam politique au Maroc. Paris: Presses de Sciences Politiques.

Vattimo, Gianni 2000

Belief. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Yassine, Abdessalam 1989 Al-minhaj An-nabawi. Rabat: Printed by the author. 1999 Islamiser la modernité. Rabat: Al-ofok Impressions. Zernine, ed. 2004 Mohammed, "Al-'unf (Violence)." Fikr wa Naqd 55.

Chapter 7

Trajectories, Frontiers, and Reparations in the Expansion of Santo Daime to Europe ALBERTO GROISMAN

This chapter was inspired by the contents of a booklet distributed at an event I was invited to attend in the Netherlands in 1998, a few months after I concluded my fieldwork among participants of Santo Daime, an ayahuasca-using religion. Almost one year earlier, I had been told that Ceu dos Ventos, the Santo Daime church of The Hague, was planning the visit of a medium from Brazil. This woman was known among Santo Daime participants as someone who could effectively articulate the knowledge and practice of an Umbanda Mae de Santo (Mother of Saints), an expression that refers to the high ritual position a person can achieve from the standpoint of Santo Daime ayahuascausing religious practice and ideocosmology. When I was told about this event, I was advised to be aware of its historic importance. My intention here is to describe ethnographically a phenomenon that began to emerge at that time and that reflects the ideology of the "politically correct." In this case it originates from a confessional and reparational "mea culpa" trend in which individuals and groups declare themselves directly or indirectly responsible for the errors of the colonial past and take the lead to do the "right thing" in the present. Therefore, moral motivation is also an important part of the discourse. By examining this motivation, this chapter also demonstrates a sophisticated form of establishing intrareligious, transreligious, and transnational alliances. In fact, the expansion of interest in "native" ideas and practices has been a critical theme for comprehending the contemporary social construction of human relations. It is also relevant for a consideration of how far the ideology of respecting and promoting cultural diversity has influenced and actually reinvigorated forms of reciprocity both in commercial terms and from the symbolic and moral standpoints. I will not be surprised if eventually a 185

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participant in my research tells me that he or she was inspired by extensive reading of Marcel Mauss. SANTO DAIME AND RELIGIOUS EXPANSION PROCESSES: "SALVATION," "CIVILIZATION"

Motivating Ideas and Antecedents The idea of "respecting the other"—so important for the construction of both legitimacy and consistency in anthropological methodology—is also relevant to what can be called "states of consciousness expansion." It has been considered part of the contemporary globalized flow of religious ideas and practices and may be seen not as a "new" phenomenon but as a particular historical configuration of the human propensity to search for diverse narrative and experiential forms to construct social and cosmic relationships, demonstrating the still-powerful metaphorical properties of religion in expressing human agency. The focus of my discussion is the expansion of a religious system popularly known as Santo Daime, 1 organized in Brazil and based on the ritual use of a psychoactive preparation known generically as ayahuasca. Santo Daime has been classified sociologically as a Brazilian Ayahuasca Religion. It emerged in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1920s and 1930s, founded by Raimundo Irineu Serra, a non-Indian immigrant descended from African ancestors. His experiences with ayahuasca were part of the pioneering experiences of migrants from other parts of Brazil and abroad with psychoactive plants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a consequence of their contact with Indian and non-Indian traditional users in Amazonia. A religious network developed from this first initiative, which until the 1970s was regional in character. However, beginning with foreigners who traveled to Amazonia in the 1960s and 1970s, and with the increasing of the visibility of ayahuasca practices in the Brazilian media, in the 1980s Santo Daime groups appeared in different regions of Brazil and then in other countries (Groisman 2000). The presence of daimista religious groups in Europe, and especially in the Netherlands, has been sustained by (1) an empirical interest in sharing/ appropriating the knowledge based in the experiences of "indigenous" populations—in particular, focusing on the exploration of modified states of consciousness and shamanism; and (2) a sense of revision and reparation for the exploitative forms of European expansion to the "New World" in the past five centuries. In this chapter I address the events, process, and especially the agenda of the transposition of Santo Daime to the Netherlands. I discuss the singularity and the implications of this process and briefly examine its transhistorical dimension as it has intersected two distinct salva-

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tion projects. My notions of trajectories and frontiers are employed as heuristic resources, as they are not part of the emic vocabulary. Their insertion into the analysis seeks to evoke the moments of displacement, stream, limit, and territorial detachment, as well as those of searching, meeting, and intersection between peculiar symbolic and geographic localities. It also aims to specify how these moments can be understood in terms of motivation and choice. Critical to this analysis is the p h e n o m e n o n of the expansion of religious systems and its Christian valence encapsulated in the verbs to save and to civilize. I take as inspiration Michael Taussig's (1993) view on the European approach to the "wild" in the second part of the second millennium as being a particularly narcissistic project. In contrast, in the first half of the twentieth century self-criticism of the conquest and colonizing initiatives intensified, becoming eloquently strong among Europeans. In the 1980s, under the flags "New A g e " and "globalization," a movement of cultural and material damage repairing began to be an important part of the Western agenda. O n e of the important steps for triggering this sociocultural movement of repairing was the 1960s countercultural movements that gave visibility to what was before considered "archaic," 2 such as the indigenous knowledge of ecstasy techniques based on psychoactive plant use. For example, following the publication of Gordon Wasson's experiences with Maria Sabino and psychoactive mushrooms and the phenomenonal worldwide popularity of Carlos Castaneda's books, educated Europeans and North Americans went to Asia, Amazonia, and Africa to search for the "sources" of this knowledge.

Transnational Santo Daime In the 1980s, with motivation that can be considered "Salvationist," Brazilian adepts of Santo Daime f o l l o w e d — i n an inverse s e n s e — t h e path of those who, in the colonial past, exported Christian ideas and practices to the Americas. This inverse m o v e m e n t was motivated not by "conquest" but by selffocused "spiritual searching," and the instrumentally efficacious devices were not swords or bullets but a "fair and modest understanding" of "others" in their symbolic and political contexts. These Brazilians found in Europe and the United States favorable contexts in which forms of perceiving and experiencing can be treated as exchange devices, and borders—territorial as well as symbolic—as limits to be transcended. U n d e r the social and symbolic conditions of this globalized conjuncture, "spiritual searching" becomes motivated by a search for an understanding of different cultural forms that both "respectfully" appropriates the knowledge produced in "native" settings and seeks acceptance in cosmopolitan settings where the use of psychoactive substances may be considered culturally unacceptable or illegal. O n e g o o d and

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recent example of this ethos has been the struggles of Brazilian Ayahuasca Religion representatives to legalize their organizations and religious practices in the United States. 3

AYAHUASCA STUDIES: P H A R M A C O L O G I C A L SIMILARITIES, SYMBOLIC FRONTIERS

T h e term ayahuasca has been adopted by researchers as a generic reference to a variety of conceptions, practices, and processes, and has come to identify those w h o use the beverage in oracular and/or therapeutic sessions Cayahuasqueros, vegetalistas) (Luna igg6). 4 T h e sociological classification of ayahuasca-using religious groups originating in Brazil as "Brazilian Ayahuasca Religions" (Araujo and Labate 2001) is useful for establishing and identifying analogous or similar ideas and practices. While a sort of logo to identify this field of studies, the category "ayahuasca" is not necessarily adequate as a definition of the religious systems and networks that have emerged from its use. T h e initiative for differentiation comes from the groups themselves. Their participants, while making the beverage with the same plants and with similar methods, insist that its use and effects assume different forms if used in different contexts. In this sense, it is not a generic biochemical composition that counts but the quality of the sacred that they seek to constitute in social and ritual terms. Different theological and ceremonial elaborations among these groups establish a plurality of acceptable trajectories and demarcate the symbolic frontiers for members, thus making these frontiers relevant to the construction and maintenance of social relationships. T h e sacramental attitude that different ritual acts and contexts endow the substance with distinct spiritual qualities and experiential consequences has led to distinct appellations in different Ayahuasca groups, such as daime a m o n g the adepts of Santo Daime and Barquinha, vegetal ("vegetable," in a literal English translation), or oasca among adepts of the Uniao do Vegetal. T h e existence of particular appellations signifies the explicit attempt to differentiate groups and demarcate symbolic borders, since the different names connote the idea that the beverage is ontologically and spiritually endowed unlike any other. In a further elaboration, it is assumed that these beverages actually may attract—by the form in which they are ritually and socially constituted—only those forces, values, and people spiritually suited to each group. "Ayahuasca" is less a thing or a commodity than a semantic icon that demarcates a broad field of possibilities (Velho 1999). T h e word ayahuasca evokes and gives meaning to diverse things, practices, ideas, and relations and constitutes a resource for the traversing of geographic, symbolic, and "spiritual" frontiers. Goulart (2004), analyzing the complex relationships between members of the Brazilian Ayahuasca Religions, has recorded the pro-

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fusion of statements and accusations that suggest radical ruptures among them along what is nonetheless a shared continuum of meaning. Given the complex dynamics of symbolic negotiations triggered since the sprouting of the first groups around the Christian-influenced use of ayahuasca, instead of emphasizing the "continuum" of practices I want to highlight that the formation of these groups obeys a dynamic process of searching for differentiation. This differentiation transcends both the elemental features of coexistence between distinct groups and the formation of "tendencies," or informally organized subgroups within these organizations. These "tendencies" (also understood here as emblems that associate ideas and people) define the range of choices, paths, and characteristics of the Santo Daime expansion process. In this brief outline of an approach to transcendence and transnational processes, it is fair to consider that the expansion of religious systems in contemporary society has been inserted into the process of resignification and reconceptualization of cultural and national frontiers, resulting from the dissemination of an "ideology" of globalization. 5 From this point of view, the phenomenon that has been called globalization may be considered, on the one hand, as motivation for the opening of new symbolic spaces or markets, 6 and, on the other, as a process of incorporation of a form of "globalized" life. The latter may include a tendency toward the homogenization of thoughts and daily life practices—what Csordas in the introduction to this volume refers to as universal culture. In this sense, conceptions and practices at the "local" or "traditional" level are not to be annihilated. Paradoxically, some of them are "rescued" and regain value, opening new possibilities to individual or collective creativity and transformation. There are, in this way, reactions to the idea that globalization is merely a mercantile process. Although we could contemplate and treat ideas and religious practices as commodities, or services and products to be commercially traded, their dissemination appears to provide more than that, inserting elements into the arena of a prosperous symbolically focused market. This symbolic market is trimmed by a process of segmentation, which articulates referential words, persons, and relations.

T R A J E C T O R I E S , T E N D E N C I E S , AND AGENDAS

The constitution of the Santo Daime religious network has been approached by diverse authors (Nakamaki 1994; Goulart 1996; Carioca 1999; Groisman 2000; Araujo and Labate 2002), with different foci. 7 According to these sources, the use of ayahuasca beverages in Brazil probably began in the early twentieth century in the Brazil-Bolivia-Peru borderland. During that period, migrants from other regions of Brazil heard about ayahuasca and came to use it for oracular, therapeutic, divinatory, and recreational purposes. 8 The

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experiences o f these migrants took place in what Hartmann (2004) has called a symbolically dense "culture o f frontiers" in which tensions, conflicts, a n d exploration o f personal a n d collective possibilities in the " u n k n o w n " territories intensify and provide extraordinary e x p e r i e n c e s a n d narratives about them. Until e n d o f the 1960s, the incorporation o f k n o w l e d g e acquired in the process r e m a i n e d regional in nature. 9 However, in the early 1970s a significant modification o c c u r r e d . O n e o f the principal events was the creation o f C o l o n i a C i n c o Mil, located o n the outskirts o f the city o f Rio B r a n c o , Acre, and f o u n d e d by the g r o u p led by Sebastiao Mota of Melo, known as P a d r i n h o (Godfather) Sebastiao. C o l o n i a C i n c o Mil attracted p e o p l e f r o m o t h e r regions o f Brazil a n d f r o m o t h e r countries. Its success stimulated the o p e n i n g o f centers o f Santo Daime in o t h e r localities. In the b e g i n n i n g o f the 1980s, the first centers o f Santo Daime were f o u n d e d in m o r e distant localities: C e u d o Mar, in Rio de Janeiro; C e u da M o n t a n h a , in the city o f Maua (state o f Rio de Janeiro); and C e u d o Planalto, in Brasilia, DF. T h e existence o f these c o m m u n i t i e s facilitated the increased flow o f visitors f r o m other countries. T h e process o f international expansion was thus based o n (1) the growing n u m b e r o f adherents f r o m a n d in other countries a n d (2) the circumstances of this expansion, which i n f l u e n c e d how the first groups were organized. T h e increasing c o n t i n g e n t of adepts created d e m a n d for "local" centers abroad, a n d the Brazilian organizations were solicited f o r aid in establishing these centers. A m o n g the factors that have maintained the impetus o f this expansion process is a proselytizing "Salvationist" ethos cultivated und e r the leadership o f R a i m u n d o Irineu Serra ( 1 8 9 2 - 1 9 7 1 ) , known as Mestre (Master) Irineu, regarded as the main f o u n d e r o f Santo Daime. This ethos is summarized in a verse f r o m a daimista hymn that r e c o m m e n d s "indoctrin a t i n g ] the entire world." 1 0 A final factor e n c o u r a g i n g expansion is conv e r g e n c e of the daimista ethos with other projects o f salvation, particularly the emphases o f spiritual d e v e l o p m e n t a n d spritiual teaching associated with the expansion in Brazil o f Kardecist spiritism a n d T h e o s o p h y (Groisman 2000).

PARADOXES OF AN EXPANSION: TRADITION AND C O U N T E R C U L T U R E

T h e first significant movements to e x p a n d the use o f daime in E u r o p e are attributed to the "pioneers." T h e s e pioneers were participants in a n d leaders o f Brazilian Santo Daime centers that were presented to Europeans as "receptive to invitation." T h e y started programs o f visitation at E u r o p e a n centers to l e a d — a n d to o r i e n t — t h e p e r f o r m a n c e of Santo Daime spiritual works. 1 1 T h e y also took the opportunity to supervise the administrative a n d financial organization o f existing groups. From the p o i n t o f view o f a significant n u m b e r o f these persons, there

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was an implicit conviction that they would be bringing a "spiritual treasure" to the Europeans, a treasure that some of them classified as the "true" El Dorado. 1 2 T h e circulation of these representatives occurred informally at the end of the 1980s. At that time, the Centro de Ecletico de Fluente Luz Universal Raimundo Irineu Serra (CEFLURIS; Eclectic Center of Fluent Universal Light Raimundo Irineu Serra), headquartered in Brazil, was created to organize the activities of Santo Daime, providing a process of "institutional" consolidation. 1 3 It is in this period that some bottles containing daime were shipped abroad from Ceu do Mapia. 1 4 These first expansion initiatives had antecedents in the bohemian and counterculture movements of the 1950s and 1960s. 15 Exploring remote regions of the planet in what became known as a spiritual search, this "community of interest" had such motivations as the promises of "transcendental" experiences, including those triggered by the use of substances regarded as consciousness expanding. It was in the course of this movement that Europeans and North Americans traveled to South America and heard about Raimundo Irineu Serra. 1 6 Accounts of the experience of Serra, and about the existence of centers of Santo Daime, fascinated the foreigners. Some remained in Amazonia, staying in daimista communities in Acre and its environs and participating in the rituals. In the wake of these events, an origin myth of the emergence of Santo Daime as a religious path has been eloquently elaborated. In the narratives, Irineu Serra is described as a "strong," "tall," and "extraordinary" black person, a descendant of African slaves, libertarian and charismatic, with an evident talent for political leadership. He uncovers a treasure from the "wild forest" but at the same time is considered by some of his followers the one w h o converted ayahuasca to Christianity. A t the end of the 1970s, the stream of foreigners to the Andes and along the borders between Brazil, Bolivia and Peru was intense. These foreigners, many of them reacting to materialism, the consequences of industrialization, and the consuming culture, went to South America motivated also by the idea of "self-knowledge." T h e ayahuasca-using centers, mainly in the region of the state of Acre, were receptive to these newcomers, whom they regarded as pilgrims called by daime itself. In the 1970s, with the creation of Colonia Cinco Mil, foreigners' interest in experiencing the beverage intensified, and it became c o m m o n for the local population to see persons from different countries coming to participate in the rituals. Fernandes's (1986) study of the Colonia Cinco Mil register book documents this stream. 17 By the end of 1980, it recorded at least twelve hundred people who signed the book, which registers the taking of daime for the first time. They were from many different countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Japan, Israel, and Canada. This movement increased in the 1980s and became consolidated as a constant stream in the 1980s and mainly in

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the 1990s, when daimista groups were formally created in the United States and Europe. Subsequently, these groups organized and extended their activities, attracting more participants and requiring a more effective infrastructure. Therefore, as an attempt to consolidate the daimista presence in Europe, the I Encuentro Europeo de Centros Daimistas (First European Daimista Centers Meeting) was organized in 1996, in Spain. 1 8

THE PRESENCE OF SANTO DAI ME IN EUROPE: ENCOUNTERS AND CIRCUMSTANCES

Until the first half of the 1980s, relations between the Brazilian and European daimistas were based in personal contact and participation in Santo Daime sessions in Brazil. T h e Europeans visited daimista communities, and after spending a period of time staying in families' homes and participating in the rituals, they returned to their countries with a small quantity of daime and the recommendation "to share with friends." This procedure was repeated as a ritual and established commitment, stimulating the organization of small groups in different countries. This pattern held through the 1980s and 1990s, and the relationships between European and Brazilian daimistas were amalgamated by relations of friendship, training, and reciprocity. In the second half of the 1980s, the aim of organizing more systematically led to an increasing number of invitations to Brazilian Santo Daime experts in order to train local participants in how to conduct daime rituals. In this period, therefore, groups of Brazilian daimistas traveled to other countries and used their knowledge, experience, and reputation to achieve standardization of the rituals. In 1989 this process became more formalized, and "official" rituals began to be organized. During Holy Week in 1989, a small group of daimistas was responsible for the coordination of rituals on the outskirts of Caravaca, Spain. This is considered the first "official" religious service of Santo Daime in Europe. These events in Spain created and consolidated an important alliance. T h e participants in this and subsequent supporting events actually created the infrastructure that would permit regular trips of daimista experts and leaders, musicians, and others members of CEFLURIS to Europe. At the end of 1990, an interview with Alex Polari of Alverga, a CEFLURIS board member, was published in the American magazine Shaman 'sDrum. T h e publication circulated among a group of Dutch former participants in the spiritualist movement led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who had an organized community in T h e Hague. This was an important moment for the constitution of a more consistent interest in Santo Daime. T h e Dutch were impressed with the Polari interview and with the peculiarity of what Polari described: a religion from the Amazon, founded by a black man at the beginning of the century, that uses a potent psychoactive beverage in its ritu-

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als, and which was considered influenced by shamanism. They soon initiated contact with the Brazilians to acquire a more accurate idea of the beverage and daimista doctrine. During the same period, in Amsterdam, a Dutch woman was diagnosed with a tumor considered incurable. After considering conventional therapeutic alternatives, she sought other forms of treatment by alternative therapists and in New A g e workshops. With some awareness of Santo Daime, she found a way to contact the group and use ayuhausca. Having established this preliminary contact, group members also went to other European countries to disseminate the beverage, as they knew that at that time Santo Daime rituals were already organized in Spain and Italy. After these first initiatives, in September 1993, Santo Daime sessions coordinated by Brazilian daimistas were organized in Amsterdam, attracting many participants. Then, in December 1993, people from T h e Hague group traveled for the first time to Ceu do Mapia. In the ritual celebration of the New Year, they became formal Santo Daime members. O n their return to the Netherlands, they started to organize Santo Daime rituals. Soon after, disagreements about how to conduct rituals stimulated the creation of two churches. T h e group in Amsterdam founded Ceu da Santa Maria (Heaven of Saint Mary) and the group in T h e Hague, Ceu dos Ventos (Heaven of the Winds). 19

THE C O N S O L I D A T I O N OF SANTO DAIME IN THE NETHERLANDS: ESTABLISHING "INTERNAL" FRONTIERS

In 1993 and 1994 the two existing churches in the Netherlands consolidated their ritual and institutional independence from one another, each group defining a particular style for the conduct of services, administrative organization and political relationships with CEFLURIS. However, they both observed what is called the "official calendar" of CEFLURIS, a condition for their official recognition as Santo Daime Churches. In 1995 a third recognized Santo Daime church was created in the Netherlands, Luz da Floresta (Light of the Forest). That church was established on the initiative of a Brazilian musician, originally an inhabitant of C e u do Mapia. Each Santo Daime church in the Netherlands has developed its own way to obtain daime, to organize and perform rituals, and to establish relationships with Brazilian Santo Daime leaders and ritual e x p e r t s — i n sum, to institutionalize its activities. This control would determine the authorized makeup and growth of each group, significantly constraining innovation and creativity on the part of the participants. T h e search for "orthodoxy" in ceremonial and doctrinal matters came to be highly valued in evaluations of the groups' performance. For Ceu dos Ventos and C e u da Santa Maria, this search for orthodoxy generated methodologies of ceremonial training, called Exercises, in which singing of the hymns and ceremonial procedures were practiced in preparation for

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the ritual calendar. At the same time, the establishment of local groups does not completely preclude connections and influences between the groups and their participants. To the contrary, the existence of unique groups appears to stimulate the shifting of participants, who may find the ceremonial style of one group more appealing than that of another. T h e notion of a religious project, in contrast to the idea of religious mission (Groisman 2003), more precisely characterizes the ethos and worldview of participants in these two churches. In this sense, participants are organized systematically around clear objectives, with all members involved in tasks concerned with short-, medium-, and long-term planning and financing. This contrasts with the missionary motivation of Brazilian daimistas who have traveled to Europe to "teach" Europeans and who are convinced that there is an occult spiritual force facilitating their activities. Each local church has organized itself from idiosyncratic experiences of interpretation and adaptation of the religion's ideas and practices. C e u dos Ventos had a previous collective organization, motivated by the creation of a community that used and exploited a significant range of therapeutic techniques linked to experimentation with altered states of consciousness. 20 T h e consumption of daime in rituals was precisely recorded, with meticulous accounting of the quantities consumed. A criterion of alliances established relationships with the Brazilian daimistas based on a system of reciprocities that were precisely observed. For example, C e u dos Ventos established an alliance on the basis of a criterion of symmetry with the Santo Daime religious network subgroup known as Umbandaime. 2 1 In Ceu da Santa Maria members assembled around the leadership of its main founder. 2 2 Reflecting a trend of the New A g e movement, in 1998, this church invoked a connection with the traditions of North American Indians. T h e place where the spiritual services were held, called Sitting Bull, in h o m a g e to the Sioux leader, was located on the outskirts of Amsterdam. In addition, in C e u da Santa Maria female leadership was cultivated and celebrated. In contrast to the more masculine emphasis in the Santo Daime movement as a whole, in which serving of daime has been an exclusively male task until recently, and even in contrast to indigenous ayahuasca use in South America, C e u da Santa Maria had women as daime servers. This innovative feature was frequently questioned by Brazilian experts visiting to supervise the church's activities; their response was to state that this practice was authorized by CEFLURIS's leader, Padrinho Alfredo. T h e third Santo Daime group active in the Netherlands at that time was Luz de Floresta, in Alkmaar, created in the late 1990s. 23 As mentioned above, it was founded by a Brazilian daimista from a family of musicians and singers that lived in C e u do Mapia. While on a trip to teach ritual skills in the Netherlands, he had the idea of forming a g r o u p with a Dutch woman with whom

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he associated. He constituted his group in the interior town of Alkmaar and assembled about twenty people. The main motive for the formation of the group was the participants' conviction that he was an authentic representative of traditional knowledge about the use of the daime. In contrast to the search for orthodoxy in the other Santo Daime churches, Luz da Floresta was based on being more traditional in its conduct of rituals. Yet in Luz da Floresta, the search for "tradition" and "orthodoxy" were synthesized in the belief that they practice the "real tradition" of Irineu Serra. In sum, an important part of the cosmological-ideological associations in the constitution of Santo Daime churches in the Netherlands is a search for accurate knowledge of the "traditional" use of ayahuasca in Brazil. At the same time, the trajectories of the three churches have shown the influence of the New Age movement in their different ways of emphasizing "alternative" therapy and revivalism (Heelas 2000). However, orthodoxy and the pursuit of traditional recognition are by no means innovative strategies for exchange but instead conventional forms of establishing reciprocal social and political relationships. This is revealed in the content and intent of the document I analyze below, which was published by the Ceu dos Ventos Board in 1999-

A "REPARATION PROJECT": T E X T AND INTENTION

In August 1998 Ceu dos Ventos sponsored what was considered by many of its participants a "historical event," the visit of a Brazilian medium and leader of Umbandaime. This medium, known as Baixinha, incorporates and is guided by the spirit Caboclo Tupinamba, an entity from the Umbanda tradition. The Dutch daimistas' decision to invite Baixinha was explained in a booklet, printed in intelligible but less than fluent English, that was distributed to participants at the meeting. In the booklet the leader of Ceu dos Ventos tells readers about an intention "to clean the heavy karma" Europeans acquired by violating and destroying Indian populations in Africa and, especially, South America in the "conquest of the New World." The author articulates the idea of recuperation of the "true history" of the conquest and the cultural slaughter of those populations: For as long as the memories of the people goes back to the past, the Indians have always been living in nature. Generation after generation some of the tribes have been living close to the river, some f o u n d their place in the mountains while others were moving and living in the large forests of this land. T h e i r lives were certainly not easy, they knew hunger and sickness and also there were conflicts between the moving tribes and the Indians who settled down in one place. But they also knew long periods of peace and happiness in which they could live their daily lives, spend many hours on their religious rituals and feel

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at peace with the spiritual beings, which they respected like Gods. Without understanding or even realizing their situation at that moment they were actually living simple and harmonious lives in close contact with the natural conditions. Nothing could ever be the same since the invaders came with their sailboats from the great sea. This elaboration and reiteration of the historical implications of the conquest in a religious context exhibit the influence of a nativist intellectual tradition that c o n d e m n s Europeans and their colonialist acts, emphasizing the religious forms that accompanied these acts: First there were only a few boats and they brought on their land a white man whose skin, so it looked to the Indians, had never seen the sun. Soon many more white man were to come in bigger and bigger boats. Not only did the boats carry the soldiers'with their smoking guns but they were always accompanied by their priests, the people in brown robes with their crosses. Always the guns and the crosses were together and it did not take long to realise that the arrival of the invaders would change the lives of the native people for ever. The men with the guns had come to take over the lands and force the Indians to work as slaves on the fields of the plantation, with products he had never cared for. To produce goods he did not need was a very alien idea to the man who had been living from the same earth for thousand of years, but for the white man it was all he was interested in. The ships who brought new soldiers to the coast wanted to return to the countries of their kings and queens with sugarcane, coffee, gold and emeralds. In these statements we see that adherence to Santo Daime is linked to a historical approach c o m b i n e d with recognition of an urgent n e e d for reparation. Historical reason feeds religious reason in the elaboration of a hermeneutics in which atrocities were transformed in "collective karma," to be "burned," placing the responsibility for reparation o n the shoulders of Europeans themselves. T h e cosmology-ideology of reparation is directly evoked when the author refers to "karmic interrelation" between the "native" and the "white races." These Dutch daimistas personally assume responsibility for d e n o u n c i n g colonialism and mobilizing p e o p l e who want to be e n g a g e d in a project of reparation through adherence to Santo Daime. In this way, a "religious project" b e c o m e s a "political project," and participation in the religious organization is motivated by moral as well as political concerns. Also within this hermeneutic, a passage in the booklet records the arrival and the expansion of Kardecism in Brazil, suggesting that dissemination of a spiritualistic doctrine systematized by the Europeans should also be part of this process of karmic reparation: From a long time the Christian Doctrine brought from Europe had been the only accepted official religious belief. With the law on their side the police was

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actively prosecuting the heretic persons who were participating in the strange 'possession-rituals' which were considered with suspicion, a trace of the 'primitive' beliefs which always made the 'civilised' man feel ill at ease. At the end of the last century, from an unexpected source, there arrived however a new quality in the religious life in Brazil. With the introduction of spiritism in middle and upper class European immigrants, the Catholic Church was confronted with the same fascination for life beyond the material dimension as the Indians and negroes had brought from their traditions. T h e followers of French born Allan Kardec and other European spiritists formed centres throughout Brazil, soon a strong spiritistic doctrine developed in the New World. To the uninformed it will look very surprisingly that the developments with the mediumistic aspects in Brazil were so much more pronounced and stable than in the countries in which the founders were born. In Brazil books from Allan Kardec are nowadays available in all busstation bookshops while in Europe hardly anybody knows his n a m e . . . . But here the voice of the earth was speaking and with the introduction of spiritism in the New World there was, now through white people, a new opening of the eternal astral realities. T h e Indians, the black and the white race living together on one continent. At first they were strictly separated by colour boundaries, social and economic status and their religious beliefs. But during the years to follow the races grew into an unique Brazilian 'meltingpot' in which most habitants had traces in their blood from the other races. Also on the spiritual level new forms were being prepared.

Projecting an agenda of spiritual duty, the text here incorporates Santo Daime participants in a project that transcends the exclusively individual and/or therapeutic and/or self-centered involvement typical of alternative therapy users and New Age movement participants. In their cosmic vision, there is an implicit expectation that joining Santo Daime is an act of politicalreligious motivation. Beyond that, the text implies that Europeans, despite having been the perpetrators of the "conquest," are capable of elaborating a redemptive spiritual doctrine such as Kardecism. This aspect of the text limits the possibility that Europeans will focus only on the therapeutic aspects of Santo Daime to the exclusion of its character as a fully developed religious path. The text thus functions, beyond its character as a religiouspolitical manifesto, to communicate the expectations and/or the limits of the symbolic negotiation for church participants and those interested in joining Santo Daime.

CONCLUSION

The consolidation of Santo Daime groups in the Netherlands has certainly been facilitated by the relative lack of legal constraints on the use of a psychoactive substance in a religious context. 24 The particular aspects of each

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g r o u p ' s trajectory, the f o r m s o f crossing borders, the "range" o f k n o w l e d g e shared by participants, the creation o f tradition and orthodoxy, as well as the implications a n d responsibilities summarized by the project o f reparation, can b e u n d e r s t o o d to typify N e w A g e r s interested in so-called shamanistic k n o w l e d g e . Part of the process involves putting forward, in a globalizing world, a repertoire o f social a n d symbolic resources that amalgamate these relations a n d their implications. In a c o n t e x t in which personal mobility and transborder m o v e m e n t intensify, the presence of these repertoires in institutionalized f o r m , c o m m i t t e d a n d controlled by a centralized organization with which it is possible to associate, is of considerable importance. T h i s expansionist m o v e m e n t stimulates personal a n d institutional c o m m u n i c a t i o n as p e o p l e f r o m different cultural b a c k g r o u n d s and speaking d i f f e r e n t lang u a g e s share the same social space. T h e r e are also setbacks, f o r e x a m p l e , in the media. A n article published in O c t o b e r o f 1994 in the G e r m a n magazine Der Spiegel, titled "Briider im S c h m e r z " (Brothers in Suffering), described Santo Daime ceremonial events e x p e r i e n c e d by a j o u r n a l i s t in Germany. His labeling o f the ayahuasca ritual as "risky" h a d negative repercussions for daimistas. In the late 1990s, daimistas were arrested simultaneously in Germany, Spain, France, and the Netherlands, accused o f "drug trafficking." O n the o t h e r hand, these arrests b e c a m e occasions f o r seeking legalization o f the ritual use o f the beverage. T h e s e initiatives have s u c c e e d e d in the Netherlands and Spain a n d partially in a recent decision in the U n i t e d States. My approach to the expansion o f Santo Daime has b e e n to articulate situated processes in a determinate epoch. T h e s e processes include a symbolic and transhistorical intersection o f Salvationist projects, in which persons "lighte n e d " or "touched" by the divine "good news" seek to share the benefits of their blessing and assume the implicated missionary responsibilities. T h e s e processes also include incorporation o f c o n t e m p o r a r y forms of religiosity, resignifying salvation in the New A g e performative field and in an attempt at cosmic and cultural reparation. In the contemporary project, the idea o f remission of sins is not a b a n d o n e d ; however; instead of sacrifice and charity, redemption is to b e f o u n d in a search for knowledge and for what Beyer (1994) has called adequate "eco-environmental" relationships. F u r t h e r m o r e , in the daimista project there is a fertile field for growth of a spirituality able to p e r m i t a "cultivation o f the self," a resistance to the initiatives regarded as destructive to the planet, a n d the p r o m o t i o n o f the idea o f "planetary citizenship," following the c o n t e m p o r a r y trend o f e c u m e n i s m a n d the u n f o l d i n g o f a theology based o n what has b e e n called meta-revelation. 2 5 This spirituality explicitly seeks to e x t e n d horizons o f k n o w l e d g e a n d e x p e r i e n c e a n d to create a "citizenship" that transcends national borders. In the spiritual relativization o f symbolic a n d national borders, globalization b e c o m e s less a sociological e c o n o m i c diagnostic category f o r clas-

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sifying population m o v e m e n t s a n d m o r e a propellant force, watchword, a n d motive f o r ideological a n d g e o g r a p h i c "dislocation." This facilitates the exploitation o f transcultural contacts a n d relationships, as well as stimulating "planetary m e a n d e r i n g . " This transcultural exploitation a n d m e a n d e r i n g is ethically mediated, at least in the circles o f Santo Daime adepts in E u r o p e as described here, by the ideology o f reparation. T h e focus o n European errors and ignominies became for these daimistas a way to express the morally motivated wish to r e d e e m these errors a n d to establish the ideological basis to provide legitimate forms of reciprocity. It is not accurate to describe these initiatives as "enlarging a market," as o n e c a n n o t ignore the extraordinary spiritual effects of ingesting daime or ayahuasca, particularly in a collective setting. It would b e naive a n d unjust to consider these impressive and transformative experiences the result o f an illegitimate motive toward "traditional knowledge appropriation," since any social practice is, strictly speaking, an appropriation of something else. T h e search for authenticity, tradition, and orthodoxy is, in this sense, an effort to establish frontiers and continuities both a m o n g Santo Daime groups in the Netherlands and Santo Daime groups transnationally.

NOTES My special thanks to Thomas J. Csordas for the opportunity of reflection and dialogue concerning this interesting issue; and to Michael Winkelman for time, trouble, and patience in reading the manuscript and making relevant suggestions. I would also like to thank Santo Daime participants who collaborated with my research, CAPES-Brazil, and my colleagues at the Departamento de Antropología at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina for their support. This chapter is an updated version of the preprint in Portuguese, published in Antropología em Primara Mao, no. 53, PPGAS-UFSC, Florianópolis, 2005. 1. The category "religious system" here permits an accurate approach to a symbolic/ ideologically articulated social network, which in spite of being regarded popularly as a "religion" may not be so called by its own followers. 2. That was the position of the historian Mircea Eliade (1964). 3. CEFLURIS and Uniáo do Vegetal, Brazilian Ayahuasca Religions, have been the subject of legal actions in the United States. On February 21, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the U.S. government the right to interfere in the activities of the Uniáo do Vegetal. 4. Ayahuasca is a term from Quechua. It has been translated as 'Vine of the souls," in reference to Banisteriopsis caapi, used to prepare beverages consumed by local populations. B. caapi is steamed with other plants to produce the beverage. Its effects have been considered psychointegrative (Winkelman 1996). 5. Which Csordas, in his introduction to this volume, considers a religious-like phenomenon. 6. See, e.g., Arizpe 2001; Bourdieu 2004.

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7. T h e category "religious network" may help in regard to genealogies, constitutions, and articulations, as well as distinctions (mainly self-attributed) that compose the "field of possibilities" (Velho 1999) for the existence and maintenance of a growing n u m b e r of groups and organizations united around the ritual-religious use of ayahuasca, generally referred to as a psychoactive substance. 8. T h e term recreationalhas been used precariously to evoke experiences that cannot be classified as motivated by a specific purpose, as the "religious" use has been regarded. T h e use of the term in this sense is actually problematic, since many contexts that would be able to be considered "recreational" in fact involve a series of motivations that involve the promotion of cognitive training processes and mechanisms of sociability. g. What I call here regional dynamics characterize the most usual way in which existing Santo Daime groups are f o r m e d : persons of the nearby regions (e.g., existing groups in the state of Rondónia) enter into contact with the existing groups and create affiliated centers in his localities, establishing though relations of camaraderie and maintaining small nuclei that follow the doctrinary parameters and ritual practices of the main centers. 10. Hymn no. 78, Das virtudes, from the set of hymns known as O Cruzeiro, considered received by Irineu Serra from the spiritual world. 11. In the daimista context, the term spiritual work refers to all religious services and practices. In this way, "work" evokes the collective and personal effort and commitment in the agency of initiation and spiritual transformation. 12. This is a metaphorical reference to what motivated expeditions o f conquest, mainly in the f o u r t e e n t h through fifteenth centuries: the search for a city of gold. Here the "true" El D o r a d o is the psychoactive beverage ayahuasca, reddish in color but sometimes approaching gold. 13. See Groisman 2000. 14. C é u d o Mapiá is a small town in the interior of the state of Amazonas, at the margins of the Igarapé Mapiá, an affluent of Rio Purus, headquarters of Santo Daime in Brazil. 15. B e g i n n i n g in the 1950s, and continuously thereafter, U.S. and European citizens traveled abroad in search of traditional knowledge o n the use of psychoactive plants. William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg went to South America in search of "telepatine," a c o m p o u n d thought to occur in ayahuasca. In the 1960s and 1970s Aldous Huxley published on his experiences with mescaline, and Timothy Leary and Carlos Castañeda wrote accounts o f visionary experiences with lysergic acid (LSD), peyote, and the m u s h r o o m psylociben. 16. Both non-native and native populations can be included here. 17. T h e r e are a m o n g Brazilian Ayahuasca Religions initiatives to formally register all people w h o takes the beverage. 18. For m o r e information on the meeting and the presence of Santo Daime groups in Europe, see Groisman 2000. 19. More could be said on ethnic-national differences in the daimista ritual ethos. For example, c o m p a r i n g rituals in Germany and in the Netherlands, Brazilian leaders often said that the rituals in Germany were "heavy"—which in the daimista idiom suggests "difficult to control," referring to "the energy" resulting from the extermination fields during World War II.

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20. See Groisman 2000: 1 2 4 - 5 1 . 21. U m b a n d a i m e is a contracted f o r m to self-define and nominate an organized trend in Santo Daime religious network. Its participants use daime ritually but include in their services elements from U m b a n d a , an Afro-Brazilian religion. 22. See Groisman 2000: 1 5 3 - 7 5 . 23. See Groisman 2000: 1 7 7 - 9 5 . 24. It is interesting to observe that in Western contemporary society, it seems that that paradoxical behavior is more attractive than before, perhaps because of its creative potential and more evident performative potentiality. 25. Carvalho ( 1 9 9 1 ) reported the development of the c o n c e p t meta-revelation. This c o n c e p t has been a way to reunite sociologically a variety of p h e n o m e n a associated with the contemporary u n f o l d i n g of ecumenism, as the assumption that all religions may have the same message but expressed in different ways.

REFERENCES Araujo, W. S, and B. C. Labate, eds. 2004

O uso ritual da ayahuasca. Campinas: Mercado das Letras/FAPESP.

Arizpe, Lourdes, ed. 2001 Av dimensóes culturáis da transformando global: Urna abordagem antropológica. Brasilia: U N E S C O . Beyer, Peter 1994

Religion and Globalization. L o n d o n : Sage.

Bourdieu, Pierre 2004

A economía das trocas simbólicas. Sáo Paulo: Perspectiva.

Carioca, J. S. 1 ggg Doutrina do Santo Daime: A filosofía do século— Um código de vida para o novo milenio, n.p.: n.p. Carvalho, J.J. de. 1991

"Características do f e n ó m e n o religioso na sociedade contemporánea." Serie

Antropología (114). Csordas, T h o m a s J. 1997 Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Rose, I. S. 2005 "Espiritualidade, terapia e cura: U m estudo sobre a expressáo da experiencia n o Santo Daime." Ph.D. dissertation, PPGAS-UFSC, Florianópolis. Eliade, Mircea 1964

Shamanism: The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press. Fernandes, V. F. 1986 Historia do Povo furamidam: A cultura do Santo Daime. Manaus: Suframa.

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Goulart, S. "As raizes culturáis do Santo Daime." Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade de 1996 Sào Paulo. 2004 "Contrastes e continuidades e m urna tradifào amazónica: As religiòes da ayahuasca." Ph.D. dissertation, PPGCS, Campinas. Groisman, A l b e r t o 2000 "Santo Daime in the Netherlands: A n Anthropological Study of a New World Religion in a European Setting." Ph.D. dissertation, Goldsmiths College, University of L o n d o n . 2002 " O lúdico e o cósmico: Rito e pensamento entre daimistas holandeses." Antropologia em Primeira Mao (53). 2003 "Missào e projeto: Motivos e contingencias ñas trajetórias dos agrupamentos d o Santo Daime na Holanda." Revista de Estudos da Religiào, PUC-SP. www.pucsp.br/rever/ index.html. Hartmann, L. 2004. '"Aqui nessa fronteira o n d e tu vè beira de linha tu vai ver c u e n t o . . .": Tradigòes oráis na fronteira entre Argentina, Brasil e Uruguai." Ph.D. dissertation, PPGAS-UFSC: Florianópolis. Heelas, Paul 1996 The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization ofModernity. L o n d o n : Blackwell. Luna, Luis E d u a r d o 1 gg6 Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Maluf, Sonia 2002 "Mitos coletivos e narrativas pessoais: C u r a ritual e trabalho terapèutico ñas culturas da Nova Era." Unpublished manuscript. Mauss, Marcel 1990 The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. L o n d o n : Routledge. M o d o o d , Tariq, and Pnina Werbner, eds. 1997 The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community. L o n d o n : Zed. Papastergiadis, Nikos 2000 The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nakamaki, H. 1994 " Q u e m nào toma o c h i nào tem Alucinagóes: Epidemiologia de Religiòes Alucinógenas n o Brasil." In Possessáo e Procissáo Religiosidade Popular no Brasil, edited by H Nakamaki and A. Pellegrini. Senri Ethnological. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. Ruck, C.A.P., et al. ig79

"Entheogens." Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 2 (1).

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20ß

Soares, L. E. 1990 "O Santo Daime n o contexto da nova consciéncia religiosa." Cadernos do ISER 2j. Taussig, Michael 1993 Xamanismo, colonialismo e o hörnern seivagem: Um estudo sobre o terror e a cura. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Velho, G.ilberto 1999 Projeto e metamorfose: Antropología das sociedades complexas. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Watling, T. 1999 "Negotiating Religious Pluralism: T h e Dialectical Development of Religious Identities in the Netherlands." Ph.D. dissertation, University College London, University o f L o n d o n . Winkelman, Michael 1 gg6 "Psychointegrator Plants: T h e i r Roles in H u m a n Culture and Health." In Sacred Plants, Consciousness and Healing: Yearbook of Cross-Cultural Medicine and Psychotherapy, vol. 6, edited by M. Winkelman and W. Andritzky, 9 - 5 3 . Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft u n d Bildung.

Chapter 8

The Orisha Atlantic Historicizing the Roots of a Global Religion PETER F. COHEN

In recent years the array of religious traditions associated with the West African divinities known as orisha (órisá) has largely transcended the category "African Traditional Religion" and gained recognition as a nascent world religion. 1 Historically rooted in southwestern Nigeria and the Republic of Benin, orisha worship is equally a part of several New World national cultures, such as Cuba and Brazil. More recently, it has spread throughout the Caribbean and as far south as Argentina, as well as to the major urban centers of Europe and the United States. Although a ready vehicle for the expression of Pan-African, feminist, and other transnational identities, orisha worship cuts across all boundaries of race, nationality, class, and gender. Today there are regular international pilgrimages to its temples and festivals, conferences uniting practitioners from several continents, books, recordings, and films. Orisha worship is, in sum, a textbook example of contemporary globalization. At the same time, the remarkable recent success of orisha worship must be understood as a product of its history, a history in which the diaspora of the Atlantic slave trade and a politically turbulent, rapidly changing, and profoundly multicultural homeland were linked in sometimes surprising ways. The focal point of this history is the area of the Bight of Benin, then known as the "Slave Coast," and a cluster of ethnic groups today collectively called the "Yoruba" (Yorubá). 2 This chapter outlines a brief historical sketch of the emergence of diverse orisha traditions around the Atlantic in the critical period from the British cessation of the slave trade to the colonial takeover of Africa. It is by no means comprehensive but rather evocative; intended to illustrate the importance of viewing these historically linked religions in their ensemble as an Atlantic system and of better understanding their similarities, differences, and poso 5

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tential points of convergence. 3 Such a synthetic approach has precedents. Verger's (1968) history of the "flux and reflux" between Bahia and the Bight of Benin was the first study to convey the richness and complexity of the cultural interactions that took place between the "Old" and "New" sides of what Thompson ([ 1968] 1984) has termed the "Black Atlantic World." Thornton's (1992) definition of an "Afro-Atlantic" region along Braudelian lines identifies an emergent "Afro-Atlantic culture." Gilroy's (1993) "Black Atlantic" applies a somewhat different approach but on a similar scale; and Matory's (1994) "Yoruba-Atlantic complex" emphasizes that the dialogue between the historically "coeval" (Fabian 1983) Yoruba cultures of Africa and America played a critical role in the making of its own alleged African "base line" (Matory 1999: 74; 2005). Finally, I suggest that such a global approach of the sociodemographic framework in which orisha traditions developed will make it possible to better investigate such historical theories as Verger's (1957, 1972) argument that the presence in certain locales of relatively small numbers of elite African religious specialists was a critical factor in the construction of orisha traditions there. 4

CAPTURE AND RECAPTURE

The spread of orisha traditions must be understood in conjunction with the spread of Yoruba identity. In 1830 the "Yoruba" did not exist. The peoples now known by that name considered themselves neither a political nor a cultural unity and instead identified with the city-states into which the region was organized (nor could they said to have had a single common language). By 1895, however, a British-educated, Christian, self-styled "Yoruba" intellectual could confidently state: "It is beyond doubt that the Egbas, Ketus, Oyos, with their subdivisions, etc., are of one stock; their manners and customs agree; what is held sacred in one town is held sacred by all of them without exception" (George, quoted in Doortmont 1990: 104). The very idea of a single "Yoruba" people, language, and religion, and its baptism with the Hausa term for the inhabitants of Oyo, was largely the work of Christianized, English-speaking liberated captives and their children returning from Sierra Leone (Peel 2001). What is truly remarkable about this process of ethnogenesis is that it took place simultaneously in a number of different locales around the Atlantic, employing a number of distinct ethnonyms to refer to similar claims of origin ("Yoruba" in Nigeria and Trinidad, "nago" in Brazil, "nago" in the present-day Republic of Benin and Haiti, "Nago" in Jamaica, "lucumi" in Cuba, "Aku" in Sierra Leone) emerged as meaningful categories in conditions of enslavement, exile—and, in some cases, of mutual contact. The "Yoruba" may thus be said to be a product of displacement and dispersion (Peel 1989; Doortmont 1990; Matory 2005).

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Before the late eighteenth century Yoruba speakers comprised a relatively small proportion of Africans sold into Atlantic slavery. This changed dramatically with the decline of the Oyo Empire after 1789. The Oyo slave revolt in 1817, the Owu war and Dahomey's secession from Oyo control in 1821, the revolt of Afonja in 1824, the Egba war in 1825, the Ife-Ondo war in 1829, the Ilorin Jihad, and the final collapse of Old Oyo around 1835 were all part of a regional disintegration, with direct cultural and religious repercussions in the New World. The increase in supply of captives from this geographic area coincided with an increase in New World demand. The elimination by the Haitian Revolution of the world's single largest sugar producer after 1791 catalyzed the Sugar Boom in Cuba and Brazil. The expansion of sugar production, along with the export trade in tobacco and cotton, brought some 416,000 captives to the Americas from the Bight of Benin between 1770 and 1851, with another 15,000 arriving clandestinely until as late as 1870. 5 A growing movement against the slave trade after the Haitian Revolution— particularly in industrialized Great Britain—culminated in 1808 in the policy known as "recapture," in which the British Royal Navy seized slave ships on the high seas and released their human cargoes in Freetown in Sierra Leone. While the policy resulted in the relocation of some 12,765 Africans to the new colony between 1814 and 18 24, it did little to reduce the demand for slaves—and in fact may have served as a stimulus in the slave trading centers of Yorubaland (Kopytoff 1965: 18-19; ! 9 7 2 : 77)The secondary migratory p h e n o m e n o n of recapture—itself a function of the demand for slaves in Brazil and Cuba—in turn spawned a tertiary migration of recaptives numbering in the tens of thousands. The recaptives in Sierra Leone had the choice of remaining in the colony, enlisting as soldiers, or emigrating to the West Indies. Those who remained were subjected to an active program of evangelization and mission education. Many became missionaries themselves, others learned crafts, and still others went into commerce. Hundreds pooled money to purchase some of the captured slave vessels and merchandise at auction and traded along the coast in direct competition with European traders. Their new commercial activities soon extended back to the ports from which they had once been sold. Those who joined the British West Indies Regiment were deployed throughout Africa and the Caribbean. Composed of emancipated West Indians and recaptured Africans, the regiment counted more than twelve thousand recaptives by 1840 (Cobley 1990: 61 ).6 Service in the regiment opened yet another channel of contact between Africans in Sierra Leone, the West Indies, and Yorubaland. In 1865 the regiment was sent to Abeokuta, and some soldiers made contact with their hometowns (56). Those who were sent to the Caribbean as indentured laborers replaced the emancipated slaves who had deserted the plantations after Abolition, pro-

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during sugar for sale in competition with their enslaved compatriots in Brazil and Cuba. A l t h o u g h liberated Africans had begun migrating to the British West Indies around 1834, with approximately 3,200 arrivals by 1840 (Asiegbu 1969: 190), it was the influx of 36,120 recaptives from Sierra L e o n e and St. Helena between 1841 and 1867 that brought a significant influx of Yoruba to Trinidad, British Guyana, and Jamaica, with smaller numbers going to St. Vincent, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Dominica, Tobago, and Grenada after 1848. Starting in 1808, the British captured slaving vessels in the Caribbean area and released their captives in Cuba. Only 1,056 recaptives had entered Cuba by 1846, yet nearly 11,000 more had arrived by i860. While some were reenslaved in Cuba, most blended into the urban population of free and enslaved Africans. Still others were sent from Cuba to the British West Indian colonies (Verger 1976: 494; Sarracino 1993: 196). T h e international antislaving courts (known as Mixed Commissions) in Rio and Havana sent 893 recaptives to British Guyana, 687 to Jamaica, and 879 to Trinidad (Asiegbu 1969: 189). After the 1835 Male revolt in Bahia, several hundred Africans were deported to the African coast, and after the 1844 Escalera Conspiracy in C u b a more than 100 Africans were deported to Africa and 1,207 more, including 978 freedpersons, to Trinidad and Grenada (Ortiz 1916: 327). T h r o u g h o u t this complex of migration through enslavement, recapture, deportation, and voluntary choice, Yoruba speakers were extremely prominent. In 1835 approximately 28.6 percent of enslaved Africans in Salvador, Bahia, were nago (Reis 1993: 146). In Cuba the lucumi (from the Yoruba greeting oloku mi, "my friend") were the single largest incoming group (34.5 percent ) after 1850. During the 1820s more than half of the recaptives in Sierra Leone were A k u (the local ethnonym for Yoruba speakers), and an 1848 census put the number at 54 percent. 7 This final wave of slave deportation—with its high volume, its high concentration of people from a single region of Africa, and its late date (1886 in C u b a and 1888 in Brazil), as well as decades of postslavery conditions for those recaptured by the British—created a very special set of conditions for the reconstruction of African institutions in exile. Not only did many deported Africans live to see Abolition, 8 but many of them were never even sent to the rural plantations so characteristic of Atlantic slavery and remained instead in coastal urban centers that afforded them far greater opportunities to organize in pursuit of economic, political, and religious goals.

C O N T A C T AND RETURN

While the j o u r n e y of the Middle Passage is well known, other journeys undertaken freely by Africans during the slave t r a d e — i n a variety of directions, for a multiplicity of reasons, at considerable expense and sometimes great personal risk—are less so. These voyages amounted to a veritable transmi-

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gration involving thousands of people among several points on both sides of the Atlantic. It is within this migratory complex broadly shaped by—but not limited t o — t h e routes of the slave ships that the contemporary orisha religions took form. Between 1835 and 1870, as the final wave of captives was being carried from the Bight of Benin to the Americas, thousands of Africans traveled from Bahia, Cuba, and Sierra Leone back to the Bight of Benin. 9 Some made one or more round trips; others went in yet more unexpected directions. One enslaved Ijebu man in Brazil was taken to Paris in the 1830s, freed, and offered a return trip to Yorubaland via Sierra Leone but chose instead to return to Brazil via Cuba. 10 Residing in the ports to which slaves were still being shipped enabled them to remain in direct contact with the places from which they had themselves come, and even in some cases to return home. This pattern of forced demographic movement fueled by the labor demand in the sugar producing centers of Bahia and Cuba and altered by the British efforts to thwart that trade was thus accompanied by a smaller, yet no less significant, component of voluntary contact and migration by Africans. Contact between both Bahia and Cuba and Africa was frequent during the mid-nineteenth century. Ships from the West African coast—known simply as "a Costa" (the Coast)—called at the port of Salvador on an average of one to three per week. 11 Africans in Bahia received news from others working on the ships and docks who knew which slaves were disembarking from their home regions. The 1854 Anti-Slavery Society interviews with liberated Africans returning from Cuba testify to a similar situation there. 12 In the wake of the 1835 deportations in Bahia and consequent repression, Africans began returning home by their own means and even hired their own ships. The same occurred after the deportations from Cuba following La Escalera, and the British consulate in Havana was periodically approached by liberated Africans seeking to return home via London and Sierra Leone (Perez de la Riva 1974: 167). There is also archival evidence of contact between liberated Africans in Brazil and Cuba, such as the Cuban-born "Nago" freedman and merchant and his manumitted African-born "Mina" wife who arrived in Rio from Havana in 1855 on their way to Africa via Bahia (Matory 2005: 305 n. 20). In Sierra Leone recaptives seem to have expected and even demanded a certain degree of contact and mobility in the Caribbean emigration. Many left with the understanding that they would eventually return to Africa, although this turned out to be more the exception than the rule (Schuler 1972). Their initial enthusiasm about migration cooled when no representatives from the first ships sent ("delegates") were seen on the returning ships. When delegates were finally sent, the emigration resumed (Wood 1968: 72). Although return passages from Trinidad were discouraged, except for those

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sent back as delegates, there is evidence that some did return from Trinidad to Sierra Leone and even Yorubaland. 1 3 At least 1,690 Africans returned from British Guyana at public e x p e n s e — o f t e n with considerable sums of m o n e y — and more may have left on their own (Trotman 1976: 15 n. 3). Repatriation was relatively easy for recaptives in Jamaica in the early 1840s (Schuler 1972: 88). After British assistance for repatriation ended, Africans themselves hired ships—as others were doing simultaneously in Brazil, Sierra Leone, and Cuba. T h e 253 Africans known to have returned to Sierra Leone from Jamaica by the end of the immigration period included freedpersons from Cuba and West India Regiment pensioners (Schuler 1972: 89). A final repatriation was sponsored by the government in 1857 following pleas by immigrants' families in Sierra Leone. 1 4 There was also voluntary intra-West Indian migration throughout the period (Wood ig68: 66; Warner-Lewis 1991: 14). These events were paralleled by profound changes in Yorubaland itself, culminating in outright annexation at the century's close. It was to this changing coast that the first sizable groups of African repatriates arrived in 1835 from Brazil, in 1838 from Sierra Leone, and in 1840 from Cuba. By the end of the century, between 3,000 and 8,000 Africans had returned to the Bight of Benin from Brazil and 1,000 to 2,000 from Cuba, with the Saros (as those returned from Sierra L e o n e were known) probably outnumbering both groups combined. 1 5 While some returned to their places of origin and mixed back into the local population, 1 6 the majority remained in the coastal cities where they worked as import-export traders, artisans, clerks in the British administration, and employees in European firms. They soon came to occupy a powerful position as cultural brokers and middlemen between locals and Europeans, as well as between the coast and the interior. 17 T h e repatriates from Brazil maintained active contacts with Bahia, including a profitable import-export trade that lasted from the 1830s until World War I. 18 Some sent their children back to Brazil to be educated; others in Brazil had their children educated in Africa (Turner 1942: 59). As late as 1 9 1 4 Africans were returning from Brazil to Lagos to spend their last days, even as their Brazilian-born children were returning to Bahia. Matory has identified "hundreds of free Africans traveling from Lagos to Bahia or through Bahia to Rio or Pernambuco . . . between 1855 and 18g8," as well as "the repeated journeys of another score of African-Brazilian travelers u p to the 1930s" (2005:65; original emphasis). 19 Many articles from West Africa could be purchased in Bahia in the 1930s, and some of the vendors were children of returned Africans. 20 Several influential families practiced multigenerational transmigration, leaving branches on both sides of the Atlantic. 21 O n the African coast the first Aku (from the Yoruba greeting "eku") traders reached Lagos, Badagry, and Abeokuta in 1838. A few months later leading A k u merchants petitioned the queen for a missionary colony to be started in Badagry. 22 By the time the first Christian Mission Society (CMS) expedition

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arrived in 1845, there were at least four African-owned ships shuttling between Freetown and Badagry. Aku traders and missionaries traveled extensively in Yorubaland and often reestablished contact with their hometowns. 23 Missionaries courted local rulers by writing letters of invitation to subjects in Sierra Leone. The continuous contact between Freetown and Lagos included an African-run import-export trade, two-way movement of people, and monthly mail ships.24 Wrote one Englishman of Lagos in 1881, "It is well known that the most important men there are Sierra Leone men" (Fyfe 1964: 213). Sierra Leone thus became a hub connecting Yorubaland and the British West Indies—as well as London, where children of wealthy Yoruba from throughout the diaspora were sent to study. At least one Cuban-born son of repatriated Africans is known to have returned to Cuba after receiving his B.A. in England, 25 and the Ijebu-born Saro (a shortening of "Sierra Leonian") J. A. Otonba Payne traveled with his wife to Brazil and England in 1886.26

URBAN SETTINGS

In spite of the primarily agricultural nature of the labor demand that brought people from the Yoruba area to the Americas, slavery in Bahia and Cuba had a significant urban component. The urban context allowed for possibilities of autonomy, access to resources, and collective organization well beyond the scope of classic "Plantation Complex" models of Atlantic slavery. Yorubaland boasts a millennial history of urbanism, travel, and trade, and there are indications that Yoruba speakers found the environments of Salvador, Havana, Freetown, and Port of Spain relatively familiar. Mid-nineteenthcentury observers in all these places recorded strikingly similar stereotypes of local Yoruba-speaking'communities as effectively organized and economically savvy. Writes a British observer in Sierra Leone in 1843: T h e Akoos who form a great proportion of the liberated Africans, are pre-eminently distinguished for their love of trading, and occasionally amass large sums. . . . From their frugal and industrious habits, the A k o o are called the African Jews. They club together their money to purchase European commodities, which they most perseveringly hawk around the streets of Free Town and in the villages. Many of them have settled beyond the colonial territory, and have formed a thriving settlement. Many Akoos have lately returned to their native country, in vessels freighted by themselves, having obtained from Government passports to that effect. I understand they landed at Badagry. Many of these individuals were zealous followers of Christianity, and will doubtless carry with them the doctrines and rules of civilized life. May civilization and religion mark their footsteps! 27

A Frenchman similarly states in Trinidad fifteen years later:

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The Yarribas or Yarrabas deserve a particular notice. They are a fine race . . . and seeming to enjoy the benefits of civilization and Christianity. .. . They are besides guided in a marked degree by the sense of association, and the principle of combination for the common weal has been fully sustained wherever they have settled in numbers. In fact, the whole Yarraba race of the colony may be said to form a sort of social league for mutual support and protection. 28

T h e use of similar stereotypes in Bahia has b e e n traced back to at least the 1860s (Graden 1998: 69). T h o s e Africans w h o r e m a i n e d in Salvador and nearby towns w o r k e d mainly as domestic servants or w a g e - e a r n i n g slaves (escravos de ganho) w h o gave their masters a fixed part o f their earnings. Escravos de ganho organized into ethnically d e f i n e d work g r o u p s called cantos, of which the majority were nagó (Rodrigues [1896] 1932: 173). In mid-nineteenth-century C u b a , 20 to 50 p e r c e n t o f all African slaves were e n g a g e d in urban occupations (Klein 1967: 158). Like their counterparts in Bahia, many were skilled workers w h o lived o n their own a n d e a r n e d m o n e y in their spare time. Many bars a n d clubs in Havana were o w n e d by slaves ( 1 5 9 - 6 4 ) . Manumission was c o m m o n in both Bahia a n d C u b a , a n d increasingly so as Abolition a p p r o a c h e d . Slaves h a d the possibility o f "coartation," or emancipation t h r o u g h self-purchase. In Bahia many j o i n e d credit unions (juntas de alforria) that required them to save half the required price, with the o t h e r half supplied by a c o m m o n f u n d . Africans took particular advantage o f such options, and, between 1831 and 1852, the African-born free population o f Salvador surpassed that o f free Creoles. Between 1808 a n d 1842 an average o f 3 1 . 3 p e r c e n t o f African-born freedpersons were nagó, and between 1851 and 1884 the n u m b e r was 73.9 p e r c e n t (Nishida 1993: 3 7 3 - 7 5 ) U r b a n n e i g h b o r h o o d s such as rúa N a g ó (Nagó Street) in Salvador (Rodrigues [1896] 1 9 3 2 : 1 7 3 ) a n d rural villages such as Yarriba Village in Montserrat (Wood 1968: 240) represented, in Butler's words, "a parallel world in which p e o p l e could speak their native tongue, worship their own deities, a n d otherwise preserve such elements o f culture as games, crafts a n d cuisine" (1998: 144). T h e A k u villages in Sierra L e o n e were g o v e r n e d by chiefs a n d united u n d e r a c o m m o n king (Fyfe 1964: 149). Closed ethnically d e f i n e d c o m m u n i t i e s were f o r m e d by recaptive immigrants in Trinidad t h r o u g h the purchasing or squatting o f u n u s e d land, the latter practice actively discouraged by the g o v e r n m e n t until its acquiescence in 1846 (Wood 1968: 2 3 9 - 4 0 ) . By 1858 there were least two Yoruba-speaking villages on the island. T h e village o f A b e o k u t a , f o u n d e d in Jamaica by Egba recaptives, was r u l e d by a g r o u p o f "deacon-elder-judges." O n e o f them, Douglas Stewart, was the son o f a '"Jesha" king. Another, Mr. A n d e r s o n , was called "King" f o r his wealth a n d authority as a local j u d g e (Schuler 1972: 82). Similar traditions o f autonomous local g o v e r n m e n t and justice have been noted in N a g o

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communities in Jamaica and British Guyana (Schuler 1972: 14, 8 1 - 8 2 ; Warner-Lewis 1991: 22). T h e Abeokuta settlers' adoption of certain Baptist institutions served, according to Schuler, the same needs of social organization as Yoruba institutions such as Ogboni. 2 9 O n both sides of the Atlantic a wide range of clubs, associations, and secret societies formed a network of patronage and overlapping organizational affiliations that functioned as a veritable underground society of free and slave Africans and their children. 3 0 T h e Nago settlers in Abeokuta, Jamaica, were remembered by their second- and third-generation descendants for the solidarity of their social clubs. 31 Like the cantos in Bahia and similar associations in British Guyana, these clubs also functioned as work groups (Schuler 1972: 81). Other organizations were primarily economic in character, resembling the Yoruba esúsú rotating credit organization. T h e most conspicuous claims to continuity with a "Yoruba" past today are undoubtedly to be found in the area of religion. T h e diverse "friendly societies" reported in the Yoruba villages of Montserrat included church groups, professional guilds, and "secret brotherhoods with their own rituals," such as that mentioned in a Yoruba squatters' settlement in 1867 (Wood 1968: 242). In Bahia religious fraternities called irmandades served as centers for the concentration of wealth and power, as well as the preservation, practice, and promotion of African religions. T h e famed Irmandade da Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte, which is said to have initially restricted its membership to women from the kingdom of Ketu, counted many of the most powerful figures in Candomblé (the local Afro-Brazilian religion) a m o n g its members. 32 Africans in C u b a similarly organized by nation (nación) into Catholic fraternities called cabildos, each headed by a "king." Originally f o r m e d with the encouragement of the Church, the cabildos developed into vital structures for the maintenance of African religious forms. 3 3 T h e Cabildo Africano Lucumí, for example, existed from at least 1839. Its patron saint was Santa Barbara, the syncretic equivalent of C h a n g ó (Shango). 3 4 In Lagos wealthy repatriates from Sierra Leone, Brazil, and the Caribbean joined a variety of secret societies, ranging from O g b o n i to Freemasonry. 35 T h e St. Joseph's Society, which missionaries suspected of being a secret society similar to Ogboni, was open only to the wealthy (Cunha 1978: 144), and many Saros—including some Protestant missionaries;—became members of O g b o n i itself. 36 Rodrigues suggests that patterns of organization associated with such African elite groups as O g b o n i may have influenced the 1909 rebellion in Bahia, although by his own time no comparable organization existed. 37

T R A N S A T L A N T I C DIVINITIES

It is within this larger sociodemographic framework of forced and free migration, the creation of autonomous organizational structures, and mutual

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contact and exchange that we must try to situate the historical emergence of the diverse orisha religious traditions around the Atlantic Basin. A l o n g with the movement of people went a movement of divinities that are today worshiped in many of these places in recognizably similar ways. There is evidence of a circulation of religious goods, specialists, and ideas among these various locales during the nineteenth century. T h e transatlantic trade operated by Africans and Afro-Brazilians was, according to Cunha, "truly motivated by ethnic and religious values": "The religion of the orishas was a powerful pillar of identity in Brazil. It seems that any substitution of ritual ingredients of the cults for Brazilian equivalents was made only as a last resort. African objects, on the other hand, including the most secular, seem to have acquired a virtue that qualified them for the cult" ( 1978: 119). T h e nature of articles imported to Bahia underscores the strong relationship of that trade to the practice of Candomblé. 3 8 T h e presence in Brazil of certain species of African plants, such as akoko (Newbouldia laevis) and ogbo (Paraquetina nigrescens), suggests their voluntary introduction during this period in connection with Yoruba herbal practice (Ming, Lûnhing, and Verger 1995: 128). There is also evidence of religious articles on the African side of the Atlantic. José Filipe Meffre practiced Ifà divination in Lagos in the 1850s with ritual objects he had brought back from Brazil (Peel 1990:

353)A number of repatriates and their children who returned to Brazil became both prominent figures in Candomblé and successful importers of African religious goods. M i e Aninha o p e n e d the Ile A x é O p ô Afonjâ in 1 9 1 0 with money she earned selling African products in the Mercado Modelo (Butler 1998: 157, 196). African-born Tia Giulia, who traded in commodities apparently supplied by family members on the African coast, was a member of both Boa Morte and an important local terreiro.39 Turner wrote in the early 1940s: "Those Brazilians and their African-born children who lived in Nigeria for so many years and who are now living in Brazil not only speak Yoruba fluently, but, as leaders of the fetish cults, they used their influence to keep the form of worship as genuinely African as possible" (1942: 66). There is evidence of religious specialists among the repatriates in Africa as well. Some had been expelled from Brazil for such practices as healing and divination. 40 According to the archival writings of Samuel Pearse, Meffre, son of a babalâwo and a practicing babalâwo himself, returned from Brazil to become "notable and unparalleled both [in Badagry] and at Lagos." 41 After his conversion to Protestantism, he and a fellow converted babalâwo used their professional clout to win more converts, including "a great idolatress," also returned from Brazil, whom Meffre reduced to tears by insisting that Eshu "is the bitterest enemy of God and our souls." 42 Meffre mentioned the large number of Saros "who are known as believers and who in seasons of distress return to consult the Ifa and do sacrifice." Pearse reported that "many such

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resort to [Meffre] in Lagos." 4 3 Isadora Maria H a m u s was b o r n in C a c h o e i r a in 1888 a n d went with a relative at the age o f six to Lagos, w h e r e she spent eight years. Fluent in Portuguese, Yoruba, a n d English, she returned to Sao Felix a n d b e c a m e a leading m e m b e r o f the local C a n d o m b l e c o m m u n i t y (Turner 1942: 64). A celebrated e x a m p l e is Martiniano Eliseu d o B o m f i m . Son o f a freed E g b a import-export trader w h o himself h a d m a d e the transatlantic r o u n d trip several times, B o m f i m traveled to L a g o s at the a g e o f f o u r t e e n a n d r e m a i n e d f o r eleven years. A f t e r receiving a mission education a n d studying Ifa, h e r e t u r n e d to Bahia to b e c o m e a m a j o r figure in local Candomble.44 A n u m b e r o f writers have insisted on the religious dimension o f this voluntary transmigration. "Priests and priestesses also b e g a n a round-trip movem e n t to Africa," writes Augras, " d e e p e n i n g their religious k n o w l e d g e a n d bringing back objects necessary to the cult" ( i g 8 i : 34). Costa L i m a also underscores both the financial and religious dimensions o f these journeys: "At the e n d o f the n i n e t e e n t h century, the trip to Africa by free Africans a n d their children was an important legitimizing e l e m e n t o f prestige a n d generator o f k n o w l e d g e a n d e c o n o m i c power. Even as they traded in a wide variety o f merchandise b r o u g h t f r o m the Coast to Brazil, they also, in today's language, 'recycled' the k n o w l e d g e of the religious tradition learned f r o m 'the elders,' in the terreiros of Bahia" (1987: 52). T h e most f a m o u s o f these stories is u n d o u b t e d l y that o f Iya Nasso, the lege n d a r y f o u n d e r o f Bahia's p r e m i e r house of C a n d o m b l e , the Casa Branca, a n d said to be the d a u g h t e r of an African w o m a n w h o had r e t u r n e d to precolonial Nigeria. Iya Nasso is said to have traveled freely to Bahia, a c c o m panied by an orisha priest, a n d to have subsequently traveled back to Africa, where she sent h e r spiritual daughter for seven years o f initiation. 4 5 A l t h o u g h c o r r o b o r a t i n g such claims is o f t e n extremely difficult, Costa Lima's ( 1 9 7 7 ) confirmation o f the identity o f the f o u n d e r o f O t a m p e O j a r o , r e p u t e d f o u n d e r o f a n o t h e r influential Bahian terreiro, the lie Maroialaje Ala-Ketu, is impressive. Yet a n o t h e r e x a m p l e is Verger's ( 1 9 5 3 b , 1992) c o m p e l l i n g research o n the deportation o f D a h o m e y a n King G h e z o ' s mother, A g o t i m e , to Sao Luis de M a r a n h a o a n d her possible role in the creation o f the domin a n t mina religious institution there. W h i l e C u b a h a d n e i t h e r the d e g r e e n o r the intensity o f c o n t a c t with the A f r i c a n coast as Bahia, the late date o f cession o f the slave trade there (some two decades after Brazil) a n d the presence of thousands of recaptives may h e l p to explain the presence o f a n u m b e r of institutions n o t f o u n d in Bahia, such as Ifa divination and the bata d r u m consecrated to C h a n g o . T h e African-born f r e e d m a n A d e c h i n a is said to have traveled f r o m C u b a back to Africa f o r initiation in Ifa a n d later r e t u r n e d to Cuba. 4 6 T h e African-born w o m a n E f u n c h e (or Efunsetan) is also said to have voluntarily traveled to C u b a b e f o r e Abolition, and there to have h a d a major impact o n the local

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orisha institutions (known as Santería L u c u m i or a Regla d e Ocha). 4 7 A letter f r o m F e r n a n d o Ortiz to R o g e r Bastide suggests that Hilario C a m p o s , o n e o f the most p o w e r f u l C u b a n repatriates in Lagos, was a babaláwo (Sarracino 1993 : 7o). In Sierra L e o n e there were also religious specialists a m o n g the A k u , such as O j u Oriare ("Daddy O j o " ) o f O y o , w h o practiced "his profession as a Native D o c t o r w h i c h h e h a d acquired in the Y o r u b a c o u n t r y b e f o r e his capture." 48 Particularly strong were E g u n a n d Shango. 4 9 O f the "worshipers o f thunder a n d lightning," A c t i n g G o v e r n o r Pine wrote in 1848: The followers of this superstition are principally Akoos, a portion of which tribe are addicted to it in their own country. . . . Not a few persons in the community, and some of them professing Christianity, believe that these thunder worshippers, and indeed the Akoo generally, hold some mysterious communion with the lightning by which they are enabled to direct its course against their enemies, and upon a recent occasion, when the house of a Maroon was struck by the fluid and the man himself killed on the spot, I heard several persons attributing the disaster to "those bad Akoo men." (Quoted in Fyfe 1964: 152-53) T h e d e v e l o p m e n t o f Orisha traditions in the British West Indies, a l t h o u g h c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s with that in Brazil and C u b a , w a s — d u e to the comparatively early cessation of the British slave t r a d e — a n essentially postslavery phen o m e n o n , and o n e in which recaptive settlers, migrant workers, and Africanb o r n traders with British passports all may have played a part. T h e r e voyages may b e seen as part o f a larger pattern o f m o v e m e n t at the time linking the British West Indies, Sierra L e o n e , a n d Nigeria through the single growing infrastructure o f the British Empire. To what extent Y o r u b a speakers m a d e use of that infrastructure to e x c h a n g e religious g o o d s a n d information with A f r i c a — a s did the nagó o f B a h i a — i s not clear, but W o o d notes that those w h o traveled between Trinidad a n d Sierra L e o n e "as a sideline started u p a profitable trade in palm oil a n d o t h e r West African products to the West Indies" (1968: 74). In Jamaica, N a g o settlers arrived between 1848 a n d 1869 by the h u n d r e d s in specific parishes, which r e m a i n e d in mutual contact for years (Schuler 1972: 69). While the N a g o o f A b e o k u t a Jamaica largely a b a n d o n e d orisha worship in favor o f the Baptist church, extant songs testify to the f o r m e r prese n c e o f orisha worship (81). S h a n g o is today a deity in the Jamaican religion o f K u m i n a and the "Yoruba" a spiritual nation. 5 0 In St. L u c i a Yoruba-speaking i n d e n t u r e d laborers i n t r o d u c e d the Kele cult. (This cult was n a m e d after the red-and-white ikele beads associated with S h a n g o worship in Africa. O n St. Lucia the beads are alternately referred to as "Chango"). In Montserrat the Yoruba-speaking villages f o u n d e d in 1866 remain to this day important centers o f orisha worship. O n the island o f G r e n a d a m o r e than o n e thousand recaptives arrived f r o m

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Ijesha in 1849. They settled in closed communities in which "the Yoruba language was spoken, and many aspects of Yoruba culture were preserved, including elements of the kinship system and concepts and rites basic to Yoruba polytheism." T h e religious influence of these communities spread as people progressively migrated out until Shango became "the representative form of African ritual among the Grenadians" (Smith 1965: 33-34). Many of their descendants still live in the town of Munich today where, according to PollackEltz, "locals fear them as powerful sorcerers" (1993: 12). Elements of orisha worship may found in other localities as well, including Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Santa Margarita, and Belize. Their ongoing presence is not always congruent with the existence of Yoruba-speaking populations, as we see in the case of British Guyana, where some fourteen thousand recaptives were sent and where there is today no orisha tradition comparable to that in, say, nearby Trinidad (Trotman 1976: 1, 7, 9, 14). T h e relatively limited influence of orisha traditions in Haiti, on the other hand, is a counterexample that serves to strengthen the case made here. For while the first "Lucumies" arrived in Santo Domingo as early as 1547, the Haitian Revolution spared that country the final phase of slave importation in which Yoruba speakers were so prominent. 5 1

CONCLUSION

A l o n g lines broadly traced by the Atlantic slave t r a d e — b u t inflected as well by African political, social, economic, and religious factors—patterns of organization, movement, and contact were established and utilized by Africans in the nineteenth century, often in association with the worship of the orisha. This history describes the existence of a true spcioreligious complex: an Atlantic world in which people with certain shared geographic, linguistic, and religious commonalities were simultaneously reproducing their institutions, values, and bodies of knowledge in distinct, yet related, contexts of foreign domination, and particularly in the critical years that saw the end of the slave trade, Abolition, and the colonial takeover of Africa. This history is marked by (1) a major demographic transfer in the space of a few decades of populations from a particular region of Africa to specific points in the New World and (in the case of Sierra Leone) to other parts of Africa; (2) urban environments facilitating the constitution of ethnically defined African institutions; (3) varying degrees of contact among virtually all of these points; (4) religions that today claim mutual kinship and historical roots in Yorubaland. Within these basic parameters, a critical variable in the formation of orisha religions would have been the level of ritual knowledge of the individuals involved. T h e city-states of precolonial Yorubaland were highly stratified societies in which religious and political power were deeply intertwined and concentrated in what Peel has called "a class of reli-

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gious intellectuals" (1990: 362). According to Verger, Africans disembarking in Havana, Salvador, and Freetown in the nineteenth century included "numerous prisoners of war of an elevated social class, and priests conscious of the value of their institutions and firmly attached to the precepts of their religion" (1962: 12-13). 5 2 O n the nineteenth-century Slave Coast, with its incessant local warfare and slave raiding, deportation was a relatively common way of dealing with defeated political and religious leaders. 53 In nineteenth-century Bahia, Cuba, and Sierra L e o n e such arriving elite members would have been surrounded by people cognizant of their statuses in their homelands (Costa Lima 1977: 24). Thus it is that the impact of such individuals on the shaping of Afro-American religious institutions may well have been far out of proportion to their actual numbers. 5 4 T h e literature on the transmission of African religions to the New World has largely bracketed the knowledge possessed by displaced Africans and its role in the formation of new institutions. Beyond the recognition of ethnic differences, African arrivals in the New World have in this sense been portrayed as an undifferentiated mass. When studying people from societies in which the differential distribution of knowledge is a fundamental principle of social stratification, we would do well not to ignore the variable of knowledge and the social statuses associated with it. N o matter how disarticulated the "rather heterogeneous crowds" (Mintz and Price 1985) of enslaved Africans may have been, their members carried with them not only their divinities and religious practices but also shared criteria for evaluating ritual knowledge and legitimacy. As Costa Lima ( 1 9 7 7 : 24) has argued, the presences of important African priests would not likely go unrecognized among exiled African populations. With the question of social class and knowledge comes that of the role of individuals in processes of "globalization" that are often portrayed as faceless. Whether or not the stories of diasporic temple founders such as Iya Nasso, Agotime, or Otampe Ojaro are literally true in all of their details, we do know that comparatively small religious institutions founded in the nineteenth century by small numbers of key individuals have seen their influence expand through the fissioning of houses, the initiation of priests who later traveled elsewhere, and the winning of powerful allies—to the point where they have today become the central nodes of global networks. Such examples encourage us to bear in mind the importance of individuals in what are often considered mass translocal processes. They also caution us not to underestimate the importance of ritual knowledge and status in our attempts to understand religious history. Finally, the historical development of what we might term "the Atlantic Orisha Complex" reminds us to read contemporary processes of globalization against the older local, regional, and global processes out of which they have grown and whose traces they bear.

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NOTES This chapter is based on the article "Orishajourneys: T h e Role of Travel in the Birth of Yorubá-Atlantic Religions," Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 117 (2002): 1 7 36, itself based on a paper presented at the 1999 meeting of the Société Internationale de la Sociologie des Religions. I would like to thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Ford Foundation, and the C o l u m b i a University Institute of Latin American Studies for supporting my 1999-2000 field research in Bahia. T h a n k s also toJean-Loup Amselle, Ibéa Atondi, Marion A u b r é e , G e o r g e C. Brandon, Barbara L. C o h e n , Erwan Dianteill, Lisa Earl, Ivor L. Miller, Luis Nicolau Parés, BarbaraJ. Price, and Nancy Silva de Souza for their invaluable critiques and suggestions. Many thanks also to the Fundaf ao Pierre Verger. 1. T h e Yoruba term órisá—orisha in the British Caribbean, orixá in Brazil, and oricha 'm C u b a — d e n o t e s entities often characterized as "divinities," "gods," or "saints," as well as the traditions devoted to their worship. See Verger 1957; Apter 1992; Matory 1994; Barnes [1988] 1998. (In this chapter I use as a general rule the English spellings of Yoruba terms, place-names, and p r o p e r nouns where these terms exist in English and Yoruba spellings where they d o not.) 2. I refer in this chapter to the "Yoruba" or "Yoruba speakers" as a useful if somewhat dangerous shorthand for a range of distinct groups that only came to perceive themselves as a single "nation" through the very historical processes here described. 3. T h e original version of this chapter, prepared in 1999, represents a fairly comprehensive review of the literature u p to that point. Since then, an enormous amount of new data has been published, as well as a g o o d deal of theoretical production on the questions discussed here. To take satisfactory account of all this material would require a book. It has overall only served to strengthen and extend the case presented here. 4. For a brief biography of Verger and some of the reasons for the importance I place o n his historical theories, see C o h e n 1999. 5. M a n n i n g 1979: 137. People from this region comprised a significant portion of the estimated 450,000 Africans transported to Bahia and C u b a between 1800 and 1865 (Eltis 1987: 1 1 4 - 1 5 ) . 6. O n e British official stated in 1837 that "the whole of o u r African corps, and a great part of our West India regiments that serve in the West Indies, are supplied from the liberated Africans at Sierra L e o n e " (Warner-Lewis 1991: 11). 7. T h e total may have reached 68 percent (Curtin 1969: 1 8 9 - 2 0 1 ) . 8. Rodrigues ([1906] 1977: 100) estimated the African-born population of Bahia at around 2,000 in 1 8 9 6 and 500 in 1903. T h e r e were approximately 9,000 Africans in C u b a in 1907 (Brandon 1 9 9 3 : 5 5 ) . In Trinidad there were 4,240 Africans in 1876, with 164 still alive in 1931 (Simpson 1965: 9). 9. A French ship captain wrote of the Benin Coast in 1864: " T h e Blacks from Brazil are f o r m e r slaves originally from the Gulf of G u i n e a who, having been freed or having b o u g h t their own f r e e d o m ; came to live in Porto Novo. Almost all of them have passports that are regularly stamped by the Bahian authorities. T h a t province, which always d e m a n d e d many workers from the traffic, has obliged these freed slaves

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to return to their country. T h e r e is not a ship landing from Bahia that does not repatriate a few of t h e m " (quoted in Verger 1969: 21). 1 o. His name was Osifekunde, and we know his story mainly because the French ethnologist d'Azevac hired him as the sole informant for the first ethnography of the Ijebu ( M. A. P. d'Azevac de Castera-Maya, "Notice sur le pays et le peuple des Yébous en Afrique," Mémoires de la Société Ethnologique 2, no. 2 [1845]: i - i g 6 ) . See Lloyd 1968: 2 1 7 - 8 9 ; Verger 1992: 1 7 - 1 8 n. 8. 11. Verger 1 9 8 1 : 229. T h e s e included regular mail ships (Matory 1999: 95). 12. A c c o r d i n g to the society's report, such contact was "not infrequent," and the freed slaves who were "constantly returning to their country" often carried letters from Africans in C u b a to their friends in Africa ( The Anti-Slavery Reporter: Under the Sanction of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society [London: Peter Jones Bolton, 1854], vol. 2, 3d ser., 2 3 4 - 3 9 ) ; translated in Perez de la Riva 1974). 13. Warner-Lewis 1991: 15, 55. West Indian returnees are m e n t i o n e d along with Brazilians and C u b a n s as having helped f u n d the construction of the first Catholic church in Nigeria (Turner 1942: 61). 14. Schuler 1972: 8 9 - 9 0 . "Your excellency's petitioners have received several letters of late from their children and other relatives in the West Indies," reads o n e letter, "and they are full of anxiety to return h o m e " (90). 15. Turner i g 7 5 , C u n h a 1978: 134, 2 1 0 - 2 1 6 ; Verger 1953: 24. While estimated n u m b e r s for these returnees vary (see Ajayi 1965: 40, 50), contemporary accounts clearly show their m o v e m e n t was significant and steady. See, e.g., Verger 1968: 21, 38; C u n h a 1978: 214. Authorities in Lagos counted 1,237 Amaros (as Brazilians and Cubans were known) in 1872, 2,732 in 1881, and 3 , 1 4 4 in 1886 (Ajayi 1965: 5 1 ; Sarracino 1988: 222). In i 8 g g one in seven Lagosians had lived in C u b a or Brazil (Matory i g 9 g : 84; Lindsay i g g 4 : 27, 47 n. 31). While there were only 1,533 Saros in Lagos in 18 7 2, as many as 3,000 were estimated to be living in A b e o k u t a in the 1840s and 1850s (Ajayi igÔ5: 40; Kopytoff 1965: 51). 16. C u n h a i g 7 8 : 107, 145, 203; Verger i g 6 8 : 4 0 , 125; Kopytoff i g 7 2 : 8 o - g 8 ; Peel 199°: 350-5117. Turner i g 7 5 : 85; C u n h a i g 7 8 : 2 1 0 - 1 6 . A n 1882 French report shows a third of the businessmen and half of the merchants in Dahomey were brésilien ( C u n h a 1 g78: 137)18. Pierson ( ^ 4 8 : 2 3 8 ) mentions reports of small black-owned ships traveling between Bahia and the West African coast until around 1905. 1 g. T h e wealthy African slave trader Bello A k r a o is said to have visited Brazil before Abolition and on his return converted to Catholicism, changed his name to Siffre, and r e n o u n c e d his position in the local E g ù n society ( C u n h a 1978: 210). For a collection of similar examples, see Verger 1992. 20. Turner i g 4 2 : 60,65. See also Pierson ig48; Verger 1968; Turner 1975; Bastide [ig6o] ig78; Cunha ig78. 21. Some, such as the Alakijas and the Bamboxés, have remained in transatlantic contact to this day (Matory 2005: 4 6 - 4 g ) . 22. Ajayi i g 6 5 : 27. T h e petitioners included at least three Yoruba "kings" in the colony (Fyfe igÔ4: 148). 23. T h e famous Yoruba recaptive cleric Samuel Ajayi Crowther reported in 1 8 4 1 : "Some f o u n d their children, others their brothers and sisters, by w h o m they

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were entreated not to return to Sierra Leone. One of the traders had brought to Sierra Leone two of his grandchildren from Badagri to receive instruction. Several of them had gone into the interior altogether, Others in this colony have messages to send by their parents and relations whom the traders met in Badagri" (Ajayi 1965: 27). 24. Ajayi 1965: 4 0 - 4 1 . Literate recaptives were regularly engaged in letter writing (Kopytoff 1965: 50). For example, the Saro catechist Samuel Cole reports being (Ifa diviner) in Abeokuta in 1871 to translate a letter from his asked by a babaláwo nephew in Sierra Leone (Peel 1990: 346-47). 25. Sarracino 1993: 68-70. Most of the one hundred "Brazilians" appearing on official lists in Lagos in 1896 were children of wealthy merchants who had received their education in England (Sarracino 1988: 239). 26. Kopytoff 1965: 296. Chief Registrar of the Lagos Supreme Court, historian, Freemason, and staunch Yoruba cultural nationalist, Payne wrote the following year: "The unanimous opinion of intelligent Africans is that health in West Africa is impaired, and lives shortened by the adoption of European tastes, customs, habits, materials and forms of dress" (Kopytoff 1972: 75-98). 27. Fyfe 1964: 149. For other similar statements, see Verger 1976: 490-92 n. 60; Kopytoff 1965: 22. 28. Warner-Lewis 1991: 22. See also Trotman 1976: 7. 29. Schuler 1972: 82. Ogboni is a powerful Yoruba secret society of elders associated with government (see Morton-Williams i960). 30. Butler speaks of "extensive African networks" involving free and slave Africans and their families, their slaves, Creoles and even whites (1998: 144). See also Reis 1993; Oliveira 1988. 31. Schuler (1972: 81) identifies these groups with égbé, or Yoruba age-set associations. 32. Wimberly discusses the "interweaving of religious power, economic prosperity, and local prominence" in 19th-century Cachoeira and claims that the Boa Morte sisterhood "only recruited members from local candomblés, carefully selecting the elite of the hidden Afro-Bahian religious community" (1998: 82), thus uniting "many prominent and prosperous members of the Afro-Bahian community" (85-86). Candomblé is a general term for Afro-Brazilian religion and may also refer to an individual temple, or "house" (candomblé). 33. According to Brandon, "The cabildos were centers where the practice of Yoruba religion could have continued with a minimum of interference. The people who frequented them would have had, at least in the early period, direct connections with Yoruba culture from birth. Many of them would have been freedmen, urban slaves, or Africans freed by the British" (1993: 73-74)34. In Bahia, it is Xangó's wife, Iansá, who is equated with Santa Barbara. 35. Cunha 1978: 169; Matory 2005. The first Masonic lodge in Lagos was founded in 1868 and included "nearly all the African leaders" (Ayandele 1966: 268). 36. Kopytoff 1965: 126-27; 182-83; 1972: 86 n. 17. 37. "The admirable secrecy with which the exodus of the insurgents was planned and executed caused general surprise. But it would be considered natural if those concerned at the time had had a better knowledge of the people enslaved. For they should have known that a powerful secret society, [known as] Ogboni or Ohogbo, a veritable Masonic institution, governed the Yoruba peoples, with far greater effec-

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tiveness than the law. A n d in all acts this association d e m a n d e d the most absolute secrecy" (1932: 87; 1977: 235). 38. These articles typically included (and still include) kola nuts, palm oil, black soap, pepper, beads, baskets, straw, dippers, parrot feathers, beans, skin cream, mats, cowries, drums, and ornamental cloth known as asoke in Nigeria and pano da Costa in Bahia (Turner 1942: 60; Rodrigues [1906] 1977: 101). A c c o r d i n g to o n e 19th century ship's record: "A Brazilian merchant of Ijesha origin, Felicidade Maria de Santa Ana, consigned to a certain Luciano Crispim da Silva in Bahia, the following merchandise: soap, kola nuts, lengths of traditional cloth known as panos da Costa, cuias and aguidabas (strings o f beads dedicated to the orixa Nana B u r u k u and her son O b a l u a y e ) " (cited in C u n h a 1978: 125). 39. Wimberly 1998: 86. A terreiro is a C a n d o m b l e temple (or "house"), also referred to as a rofa or candomble. 40. " T h e fetisher Grato," reports the Journal da Bahia in 1959, "African w h o was arrested by the police in a house in C o n f e i g a o de B o q u e r a o in the midst of his laboratory for telling fortunes, and who was father of terreiro of his candomble, was deported by police for the coast o f Africa, in the Portuguese barge D. Fransisca" (Verger 1976: 472). T h e i 8 6 0 Bahia police records contain a plea for a similar deportation: "Arrested today and taken to the A l g u b e jail, freed African G o n c a l o Paraiso, sorcerer . . . I c o m e to solicit of your Excellency the necessary authorization to have him d e p o r t e d to o n e o f the ports o n the African coast" (Butler 1998: 192). 4 1 . A c c o r d i n g to Samuel Pearse (a Saro o f Egba descent w h o ministered at Badagry f r o m 1859 to 1875), "even senior babalawos resort to him in cases of d i f f i c u l t y . . . . [H]is Ifa never failed him." T h e f a m e d Saro minister and historian James J o h n s o n was also impressed with Meffre's knowledge (Peel 1990: 2 5 2 - 5 3 ) . A babalawo (lit., "father of the secret") is a practitioner of the Yoruba divination system known as Ifa (Ifa). 42. Eshu (Esu) is a c o m p l e x and ambiguous orisa unfortunately equated by adherents o f revealed religions with the Christian Devil. 43. Peel 1990: 352. T h e writings of contemporary missionaries unwittingly testify to the strength of orisha worship and practices such as healing and divination a m o n g exiles and repatriates alike. See Verger 1953: 1 6 - 1 9 , 4 6 ; 1968: i o ; F y f e 1964: 213; Kopytoff 1965: 59; C u n h a 1978: 153, 158, 1 6 1 - 6 2 . 44. B o m f i m is also said to have traded in African goods (Costa Lima 1987: 52). For more o n his story, see Frazier 1942; Landes 1947; Pierson 1948; Butler 1998; Matory 2005. 45. T h e r e are several variants to this story. See Bastide [ i 9 6 0 ] 1978: 165; Carneiro [1948] 1961: 6 3 - 6 5 ; Santos 1962: 9; Verger 1992: 89; Costa Lima 1984: 7 8 - 8 2 ; Murphy [1988] 1993: 213; Butler 1998: 193, 256 n. 78, 262 n. 96. 46. Brown 1989:94; Cabrera [ 1954] 1 9 7 1 : 4 2 . Iyalocha is from the Yoruba iydlorisa (mother of the orisha), translated literally in Brazil as mae-de-santo (iyalorixa). 47. Matory 2005: 65. T h e r e is mention of at least one other babalawo w h o traveled to C u b a as a f r e e person and b e c a m e i m p o r t a n t in the local practice of Ifa. His name, O b a Dimeji, means "twice crowned" (with Ifa; both in C u b a and Nigeria [Ivor L. Miller, pers. com., Sept. 3, 2000]). 48. His son, T h o m a s Babington Macaulay, returned to Nigeria as a missionary, and his grandson, Herbert Samuel Heelas Macaulay, earned a d e g r e e in civil engi-

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neering in England and became an influential cultural nationalist in Lagos (Thomas 1946: 1). 49. Egun (Egun) is a Yoruba masking society linked with ancestrality. Shango (Sango) is an orisha associated with lightning. Traditionally considered Nupe-born from across the Niger w h o rose to become the fourth king of Oyo and died a tragic death, Shango's worship throughout the Yoruba Diaspora testifies to the violent splintering of that kingdom at a time when the Atlantic slave trade from the region was at its peak. His name has come to stand as the denomination for the ensemble of orisha religion in a number of distinct locales in the Americas today. 50. Schuler attributes the relatively small impact of orisha religion on the island to the early cessation of the immigration of Yoruba speakers and their relatively small numbers compared with the far more successful Central Africans who simultaneously migrated from St. Helena (1972: 83,.6g). 5 1 . We might note here the 4,000 free Dahomeyans brought to Haiti after slavery by C h r i s t o p h e — w h o , according to Smith, may "have contributed to the present persistence of Dahomeyan patterns in Haiti in a degree disproportionate to their relative numbers"—as a suggestive parallel (Smith 1965: 34; Metraux [ 1959] 1972: 360). 52. Verger 1962: 1 2 - 1 3 . Yai states in a similar vein, "Among the slaves there were diviners, priests and priestesses, sculptors, doctors, etc., in short, the intelligentsia" (1992: 262); and Reis concurs: "Many slaves coming to Bahia had been leaders in Africa" (1993: 141)- See also Matory 1994: 227; 2005: 44. 53. Law 1987: 322, 341 n. 29; Yai 1992: 259. 54. See, e.g., Wimberly 1998: 78, 87. Verger gives the specific example of Ketu, a small kingdom that was ravaged and finally destroyed by aggressive Dahomeyan slave raiding. Verger notes the prevalence of certain liturgical practices associated with Ketu, such as the worship of the divinity Osoosi, in both Cuba and Bahia, while stating that they are virtually extinct in contemporary Ketu. Furthermore, "the orisha are evoked in both places in exacdy the same order and the Nago songs in their honor follow the same sequence, while in Ketu itself nothing comparable exists, the intelligentsia of the "nation" having been dispersed and transported to the New World" (1970:176). See also Verger 1957: 25. Matory traces the rise of Queto in Bahia to a somewhat later g e n e r a t i o n — a n d notably, Mae Aninha and Martiniano do Bomfim, both traveler-trader-priests and children of Africans (2005: 120-22).

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Aubrée, Marion 1988 "Multiplicité et socialisation cohérente dans les cultes afro-brésiliens." Cahiers du Brésil Contemporain 5: 49-57. Augras, Monique 1981 O ser da compreensäo. Petrôpolis, Brazil: Editora Vocês. Ayandele, A. E. 1966 The Missionary Impact on Modem Nigeria, 1842—1914: A Social and Political Analysis. London: Longman. Barnes, Sandra T., ed. [1988] 1998 Africa's Ogun: Old World and New. 2d ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bastide, Roger [ 1960] 1978 African Religions ofBrazil. Translated by H. Sebba. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Brandon, George C. 1993 The Dead Sell Memories: Santeria from Africa to the New World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brown, David H. 1989 "Garden in the Machine: Afro-Cuban Sacred Art and Performance in Urban New Jersey and New York." Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University. Butler, Kim D. 1998 Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition Säo Paulo and Salvador. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cabrera, Lydia [1954] 1971

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Carneiro, Edison [1948] 1961 Candomblés da Bahia. Salvador: Museo do Estado. Carr, Andrew T. 1953 "A Rada Community in Trinidad." Caribbean Quarterly 3: 3 5 - 4 1 • Cobbly, Alan Gregor 1990 "Migration and Remigration between the Caribbean and Africa." In The African Caribbean Connection: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Alan Gregor Cobley and Alvin Thompson, 49-68. Barbados: University of the West Indies. Cohen, Peter F. 1999 "Pierre Fatumbi Verger as Social Scientist." Cahiers du Brésil Contemporain 38-39: 127-52. 2002 "Orisà Journeys: The Role of Travel in the Birth of Yorùbâ-Atlantic Reli. gions." Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 1 1 7 : 1 7 - 3 6 . Costa Lima, Vivaldo da 1 g77 "A Familia-de-Santo nos CandomblésJeje-Nagôs da Bahia: Um estudo de relaçôes intra-grupais." Master's thesis, UFBA.

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1984 "Nagòes-de-Candomblé." In Encontro de nagoes-de-candomblé, 1 1 - 2 6 . Salvador, Bahia: CEAO. 1987 "O candomblé da Bahia na década de trinta." In Cartas de Edison Carneiro a Arthur Ramos, edited by Waldir Freitas Oliveira and Vivaldo da Costa Lima, 3 9 - 7 3 . Sào Paulo: Corrùpio. Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da 1978 Negros, estrangeiros: Os escravos libertos e sua volta à Africa. Sào Paulo: Editora Brasiliense. Curtin, Philip D. 1969 The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Dantas, Beatriz Goias 1988 Vovó Nagó e Papai Branco: Usos e abusos da Africa no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Graal. Doortmont, Michael R. 1990 "The Invention of the Yorùbàs: Regional and Pan-African Nationalism versus Ethnic Provincialism." In Self Assertion and Brokerage: Early Cultural Nationalism in West Africa, edited by Moräes P. de Farias and Karin Barber, 1 0 1 - 8 . Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press. Eltis, David 1987 Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New York: Oxford University Press. Fabian, Johannes 1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Frazier, E. Franklin 1942 "The Negro Family in Bahia, Brazil." American Sociological Review 7(4): 4 6 5 78. Fyfe, Christopher 1964 Sierra Leone Inheritance. London: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Graden, Dale T. 1998 '"So Much Superstition among These People!': Candomblé and the Dilemmas of Afro-Brazilian Intellectuals." In Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics: Bahia, ijgos to i^c/os, edited by Hendrick Kraay, 5 7 - 7 3 . Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Klein, Herbert S. 1967 Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kopytoff, Jean Herskovits 1965 A Preface to Modern Nigeria: The "Sierra Leoneans" in Yorubaland. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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1972 "The Sierra Leoneans of Yorubaland." In Africa and the West: Intellectual Responses to European Culture, edited by Philip D. Curtin, 7 5 - 9 2 . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Landes, Ruth 1947 City of Women. New York: Macmillan. Law, Robin 1987 "Ideologies of Royal Power: The Dissolution and Reconstruction of Political Authority on the 'Slave Coast.'" Africa 57 (3): 321-44. Lindsey, Lisa A. 1 994 'To Return to the Bosom of Their Fatherland': Brazilian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Lagos." Slavery and Aboliton 15 (1): 22-50. Lloyd, P. C. 1968 "Osifekunde of Ijebu." In Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, edited by Philip D. Curtin, 217-89. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Manning, Patrick 1979 "The Slave Trade in the Bight of Benin, 1640-1890." In The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, edited by H. A. Gemery andJ.S. Hogendorn, 1 0 7 - 4 1 . Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Matory, J. Lorand 1994 Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and Politics ofMetaphor in Oyo Yorùbâ Religion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1999 "The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbâ Nation." Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1): 7 2 - 1 0 3 . 2005 Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro—Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Métraux, Alfred [1959] 1972

Voodoo in Haiti. New York: Schocken Books.

Ming, Anthony, Angela Lünhing, and Pierre Verger 1995 "A la recherche des plantes perdues: Les plantes retrouvées par les descendants culturels des Yorùbâ au Brésil." Revue dEthnolinguistique, Cahiers du Lacito*]\ 1 1 3 - 4 0 . Mintz, Sidney, and Sally Price 1985 Caribbean Contours. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mischel, Frances i g 5 7 "African Powers in Trinidad: The Shango Cult." Anthropological Quarterly 30 (2): 4-59. Morton-Williams, Peter i960 "The Yorùbâ Ogboni Cult in Oyo." Africa 30 (4): 362-74. Murphy, Joseph M. [1988] 1993 Santeria: African Spirits in the Americas. Boston: Beacon.

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Nishida, Mieko 1993 "Manumission and Ethnicity in Urban Slavery, Brazil 1808-1888." Hispanic American History Review 73 (3): 3 6 1 - 9 1 . Oliveira, Maria Inés Cortes de 1988 O Liberto: O seu mundo e os otros. Salvador: Corrûpio. Ortiz, F e r n a n d o [ 1906] 1973 Hampa Afro-Cubana: Los negros brujos. Miami: Ediciones Universal. 1916 Los negros esclavos. Havana: Revista Bimestre Cubana. Parés, Luis Nicolau 2001 "Agudá: Aspects of Afro-Brazilian Heritage in the Bight o f Benin." Paper presented at the International Conference "Agudá: Aspects of the Afro-Brazilian Heritage in the Bight of Benin," Porto Novo, Republic o f Benin, N o v e m b e r 26-30. Peel, J. D. Y. 1989 " T h e Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis." In History and Ethnicity, edited by Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm C h a p m a n , 1 9 8 2 1 5 . L o n d o n : Routledge. 1990 " T h e Pastor and the Babalawo: T h e Interaction of Religions in NineteenthCentury Yorubaland." Africa 60 (3): 3 3 8 - 6 9 . 2001 Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Perez d e la Riva, Juan, and Pedro Deschamps C h a p e a u x 1974 Contribución à la historia de la gente sin historia. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Pierson, Donald 1948 Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact at Bahia. Chicago: University of C h i c a g o Press. Pollack-Eltz, A n g e l i n a 1993 " T h e S h a n g o Cult and O t h e r African Rituals in Trinidad, Grenada and Carriacou and Their Possible Influence on the Spiritual Baptist Faith." Caribbean Quarterly 39 ( 3 - 4 ) : 1 2 - 2 5 . Reis,JoaoJ. 1993 Slave Rebellion in Brazil. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rodrigues, R a i m u n d o Nina [1896] 1932 O animismo fetichista dos negros baianos. Sao Paulo: Brasiliana. [1906] 1977 Os Africanos no Brasil. Sao Paulo: C o m p a n h i a Editora National. Santos, Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos [1962] 1988

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Sarracino, Rodolfo 1988 Los que volvieron à Africa. Havana: Ciencias Sociales. 1993 "Back to Africa." In Afro-Cuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture, edited by Pedro Perez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, 6 7 - 7 5 . London: O c e a n Press.

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SS8

Schuler, Monica 1972 "Alas, Alas, Kongo": A Social History ofIndentured Aßrican Immigration into Jamaica, 1841—1865. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Simpson, George Eaton ) 965 The Shango Cult in Trinidad. San Juan: Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto Rico. 1978 Black Religions in the New World. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, M. G. 1965 "A Framework for Caribbean Studies." In The Plural Society in the British West Indies, 3 3 - 3 4 . Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomas, Isaac B. 1946 Life History of Herbert Macaulay. 3d ed. Lagos: C.R. Thompson, Robert Farris [ 1968] 1984 The Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books. Thornton, John 1992 Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World: 1400—1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trotman, David V. 1976 "The Yorùbâ and Orisha Worship in Trinidad and British Guiana: 1 8 3 8 1870." African Studies Review 19 (2): 1 - 1 7 . Turner, J . Michael 1975 "Les Brésiliens: The impact of Former Brazilian Slaves on Dahomey?" Ph.D. dissertation, Boston: Boston University. Turner, Lorenzo D. 1942 "Some Contacts of Brazilian Ex-Slaves with Nigeria, West Africa "Journal of Negro History 27 (1): 55-67. Verger, Pierre Fatumbi 1953a "L'influence du Brésil au Golf du Bénin." In Les Afro-Américains, Mémoires del'IFAN27, 157-60. Dakar: IFAN. 1953b "Le culte des Voduns d'Abomey, aurait-il été apporté à Saint Louis de Maranhon par la mère du roi Ghezo?" In Les Afro-Américains, Mémoires de l'IFAN 27, 157-60. Dakar: IFAN. 1

9 5 7 "Notes sur le culte des Orisha et Vodoun à Bahia la Baie de Tous les Saints au Brésil et à l'ancienne Côte des Esclaves." In Mémoires de l'IFAN. Dakar: IFAN, 1962. Introduction to Deoscredes Maximiliano dos Santos, Histâria de um Terreiro Nagô. Sào Paulo: Max Limonad. 1968 Flux et Reflux de la Traite des Esclaves entre le Golfe du Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos, du Dix-septième au Dix-neuvième Siècle. Paris: Mouton. 1972 "Raisons de la survie des religions africaines au Brésil." In Les Religions Africaines Comme Source de Valeur de Civilisation, 172-85. Paris: Présence Africaine. [ 1968] 1976 Trade Relations between the Bight ofBenin and Bahia from the 1 yth Century to the ic/th Century. Translated by Evelyn Crawford. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press.

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1981 Noticias da Bahia: 1850. Salvador: Corrûpio. 1992 Os Libertos: Sete caminhos na libertade de esvravos da Bahia no sècolo XIX. Säo Paulo: Corrûpio. Warner-Lewis, Maureen 1991 Guinea 's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. Dover: Majority Press. Wimberly, Fayette 1998 "The Expansion of Afro-Bahian Religious Practices in Nineteenth-Century Cachoeira." In Hendrick Kraay, ed. Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics: Bahia, 1 y 90s to 1990s, edited by Hendrick Kraay, 3-29. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Wood, Daniel 1968 Trinidad in Transition: The Years after Slavery. London: Oxford University Press. Yai, Olabiyi Babalola 1992 "From Vodun to Mahu: Monotheism and History in the Fon Cultural Area." In L'invention religieuse en Afrique: Histoire et religion en Afrique Noire, edited by Jean-Pierre Chrétien, 242-63. Paris: Karthala. 1997 "Les 'Agudâ' (Afro-Brésiliens) du Golfe du Bénin: Identité, apports, idéologie, essai de réinterprétation." Lusotopie: 275-84.

Chapter g

The Many Who Dance in Me Afro-Atlantic Ontology and the Problem with "Transnationalism" J. LORAND MATORY

In her memoir, The Altar ofMy Soul, the Santería priestess Marta Moreno Vega describes the multinational score of beings whose convergence—as much within her body as upon her domestic altars—makes up her soul. "Among my ancestral spirit angels," she reports, "are the Native Indians of the Caribbean, the Moors, Kongos, and Yoruba of Africa, Gypsies and Europeans from Spain and the Caribbean" (Vega 2000: 17). Though Vega herself is a New York-born Afro-Puerto Rican, her main form of devotion—Santería, or Ocha—originated as a specifically Cuban style of devotion to the gods, or órisá, of what is now Yorubaland in West Africa. Brazil hosts similar religions called Umbanda and Candomblé. Haiti has Vodou, Trinidad and Tobago has Shango, and Cuba hosts not only Santería but also Palo Mayombe and Abakuá. Immigrants have brought these religions to the U.S. mainland as well. However, even some domestic forms of Protestantism embody the same African-inspired conceptions of personhood that are the focus of this argument. In ways that long preceded the phenomena fashionably described as "transnationalism" and "globalism," Afro-Atlantic sacred ontologies boldly exemplify a characteristic that they share with most religions: they belie both the isomorphism of the body with the person and, concomitantly, the isomorphism of territory with community. What the Afro-Atlantic religions share is the articulate consciousness that multiple beings, who usually originate in faraway places, inhabit, hover around, and periodically take control over the body, displacing the consciousness of the worshiper. In sum, these are religions of spirit possession, and they assume a logic of personhood, geography, and history at odds with the recent conviction in the academy and the mass media that transnationalism is new and is driven primarily by the Invisible Hand of capitalism. With 231

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regard to the antiquity of translocalism and the inherently translocal nature of religion, the Afro-Atlantic religions are exemplary rather than unique. This chapter makes four points, the first three of which are prefatory. First, transnationalism is not n e w — a s a material p h e n o m e n o n or as a way of imagining c o m m u n i t i e s — a n d the term globalization is an exaggeration (Matory 2005a: 7 3 - 1 1 4 ) . Second, religions are typically and perhaps essentially transnational. This fact, if it is so, may result from the nature of religions generally. However, it is also indebted to the definitions and institutional constraints that have shaped the p h e n o m e n a that have come to be called "religions" since the seventeenth century and to the political and economic circumstances of the people who most rely on these phenomena. Third, much current theorizing about transnationalism and globalization is itself religious in its conceptualization and its language. However, its main inspiration seems to derive from eschatological religions, which understand the entire universe as a single cosmological field forever on the verge of unprecedented, cataclysmic change. These religions hardly represent the full scope of human subjectivity in the production or experience of the translocal movement of people, ideas, goods, and gods. Yet the eschatology of these religions does not nullify but merely overshadows a translocalism deep within their roots. Fourth, at the ethnographic and disciplinary heart of this chapter, I argue that a careful consideration of religion—particularly of noneschatological religions and religions of spirit possession—demands a major rethinking of the dominant notions of transnationalism. That is, we must understand the shape of nationalism and transnationalism not just in terms of the material technologies that make them possible but also in terms of the culturespecific ontologies and cartographies that make them thinkable and also shape the situational choice of any given contemporary class of people to act in terms of either.

THE T R A N S A T L A N T I C "NATIONS"

In Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and their extensive spheres of spiritual influence across the Americas, worshipers expressly identify each of their African gods and spirits as members of one or another "nation"—such as Lucumí, Quéto, Nagó, Ijexá, Efa, Carabalí, Congo, Jeje, Rada, and Arará. Each of these nations unites an African ethnic group and its spirit beings with their American-born descendants and counterparts. These spirit beings, their worshipers, and their masters have sustained such transatlantic nations for the century and a half since the end of the slave trade. Moreover, it is with no apology, expectation of correction, or rivalry that devotees call these diasporic religious networks "nations." Devotees' defiance of the nation-state's pretensions of monopoly over that term, and over the loyalties of the citizenry, is entirely casual. Hence, it is not that Afro-Cubans devote themselves to the Lucumí nation instead of

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the Cuban nation, or that Afro-Brazilians love the Quéto nation rather than Brazil. Instead, devotees have—since about the same time that a transnational inspiration drove the proliferation of territorial nation-states—understood themselves as the simultaneous inhabitants of multiple nations, some territorial and some transoceanic. Or, in terms more faithful to Afro-Atlantic ontology, they have understood that beings of multiple nations inhabit the worshiper and that adequate communication with the distant heartlands of both the African diasporic nations and the American host nation is a precondition to the worshiper's health, good fortune, and personal integrity. We are asked in this volume to offer our thoughts on religion and globalization. My reply proceeds from the observation that social scientists w h o specialize in studying the Bongo-Bongos and those who specialize in the Zunga-Zungas often generate very different generalizations about what the whole world is like and where it is going. T h e social class, race, and religion of the observer also influence the generalizations that he or she is inclined to make. To put it bluntly, a decade and a half of hoopla over what theorists describe as a qualitatively unprecedented transnationalism or globalization has often left m e — l i k e the Caribbeanist anthropologist Sidney Mintz (1998) and the Africanist historian Frederick Cooper ( 2 0 0 1 ) — w o n d e r i n g what all the fuss is about (see also Matory í g g g a , 2005a). 1 My own subject of study— the Afro-Atlantic spirit possession religions—recommends a more careful look at the relationship among ontology, consciousness, and geography than current Euro-Americanist and Asianist theorists of the transnational have so far demonstrated. My objective is a revised sense of transnationalism and globalization—one that is more attentive not only to the African diaspora but also to the culture- and class-specific notions of personhood, geography, and history that inform all such theories.

T O D A Y ' S TRANSNATIONALISM AND "GLOBALIZATION" ARE INSTANCES OF AN OLD, BUT STILL FINITE, PHENOMENON

Millennia before the terms transnationalism and globalization took the academy by storm, Buddhist missionaries dispersed Buddhism across South Asia, the Greeks carried their gods around the Mediterranean and central Europe, and the Romans established correlations between their gods and those of the colonized. For millennia, Christians and Muslims have spread their faiths through conquest, trade, and neighborliness. A n d for as long as these religions have existed, the world has been crisscrossed with pilgrimage routes and the more individual pathways of priests and supplicants, all of which simultaneously channeled the flow of commerce, texts, and technology. From the seventeenth century onward, the Oyo-Yoruba people spread their órisá gods through the imperial conquest of the multiethnic savannahs around the Bight of Benin in West Africa. A n d since the beginning of the nineteenth

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century, those same gods have massively colonized Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, and Haiti through the efforts of African captives—as well as free indentured laborers, pilgrims, and traders who have, by the thousands, crisscrossed the Atlantic up until the present (Matory 2005a, 1999a; C o h e n 2002). Since the mid-twentieth century, Cuban labor migrants and political exiles have carried what they call the michas to the United States and Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and beyond. Such Afro-Atlantic worshipers have created translocal pilgrimage routes and translocal communities, few of which respected the emergent boundaries of territorial nation-states. Yet these transatlantic and Pan-American routes and communities follow a history of precedents in the long-distance movements of priests, pilgrims, supplicants, and patients. T h e sacred communities constituted by these movements have crisscrossed continents, deserts, and oceans since time immemorial. Perhaps more than scholars of, say, state politics or business management, scholars of religion must be tempted to ask whether the theorists of "transnationalism" and "globalization" have discovered a qualitatively new phenomenon or simply a new term for an old phenomenon that they had not noticed before. Or, to put it another way, to whom are these transnational p h e n o m e n a and ways of thinking a new discovery? T h e recent discovery of "transnationalism" and of what has, with great exaggeration, been called "globalization" actually turns o u t — l i k e the so-called discovery of the A m e r i c a s — t o be a rediscovery. Long before the terms transnationalism and globalization became shibboleths in the academy, we had "diaspora," "pilgrimage," "colonialism and imperialism," "cultural imperialism," "acculturation," "syncretism," Fernando Ortiz's "transculturation," Braudel's "circum-Mediterranean world," Sidney Mintz and Richard Price's "creolization," Robert Farris Thompson's "Black Atlantic" world, and so forth. Indeed, the Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre was the one who, in the 1940s, first coined the term transnational ([ 1945] 1959: 154). He employed it to describe the transoceanic and supraterritorial nature of Portuguese culture since the fifteenth century. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities ([1983] 1991) laid the foundations for the transnationalist wave in the social sciences and the humanities. Anderson argues that print capitalism and vernacular print media enabled citizens of a territorial nation-state—a new p h e n o m e n o n in the eighteenth c e n t u r y — t o "imagine" themselves as a face-to-face community. What I doubt is the Andersonian view that the territorially nationalist imagination replaced other kinds of imagination and is now giving way to others still.2 Theorists of the nation as an "imagined community" and of what is represented as its transnational sequel (e.g., Harvey 1989; Appadurai 1996; Sassen 1998; Verdery 1998; also Anderson 1998: 6 6 - 6 7 ) tend to imagine world history in stages driven by the advance of capitalism, particularly in terms of the speedup in transportation, migration, and communication that capitalism requires for its continued profitability and enables through technological in-

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novation. In one stage, empires or religions allegedly monopolized or dominated our imagination of the communities to which we belonged. In the next stage, territorial nations monopolized or dominated our sense of community, and these imaginations are now giving way to transnational imagined communities. Such "stagism" (Buck-Morss 2000) and the single "engine of history" model are also the stock-in-trade of nineteenth-century evolutionisms (including the grand historical schemata of Maine, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber), which often render sensitive portraits of the authors' "present" but falter as analyses of the past and of the contemporary peoples mislabeled as "primitives." Likewise, in today's writings about "transnationalism," apocalyptic announcements of a recent historical "break" or "rupture" often preface insightful and surprising accounts of translocal commerce, migration, and communication in our time. These works hail the recent disruption of an old Eurocentric order but simultaneously adopt the same orientalizing narratives about the temporal Other. T h e reader is led to assume, rather than being shown any evidence, that the past was devoid of such colossal types and degrees of translocalism and/or that history has been a linear march toward ever-increasing degrees of interaction among everybody everywhere. T h e rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the Silk Road, Islamic civilization, and the globalized African civilization that has flourished since the sixteenth-century takeoff of the Atlantic slave trade disappear into a homogeneous past of cultural localism and social stasis. Conversely, the nation-state, until its recent disruption, is credited with a degree of autonomy, control over its territory, and completeness of citizen loyalty that was in fact rare even among the most exemplary nation-states—France, England, and the United States. T h e transnationalism theorists' recognition that not all imagined communities and flows of people, ideas, and money are isomorphic with territories of governance is indispensable (e.g., Appadurai i g g o ) . However, they do a deep disservice to history by implying that such nonisomorphism is radically or qualitatively new. Neither was such isomorphism equally absent in all places in the past, nor is it equally present in all places today. Even if it is quantitatively greater in many places than it was before, the qualitative novelty of this p h e n o m e n o n will not be evident to all groups of people. In sum, the newness of transnationalism is a matter of perspective. Different nations have, to different degrees, always been permeable by various translocal forces, and the permeability of each nation to any given translocal force has changed over time, often in nonlinear, vacillating ways. Territorially indexed barriers to the free flow of people, ideas, and goods have always fallen and risen over t i m e — n o less along the Silk Road than on the borders of the United States. Different nations have always provided different degrees of service and inspired different degrees of loyalty and dependency from their citizens. Likewise, dif-

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f e r e n t races, g e n d e r s , classes, e t h n i c g r o u p s , a n d r e l i g i o n s w i t h i n a n y g i v e n nation-state h a v e l o n g v a r i e d in t h e d e g r e e to w h i c h t h e t e r r i t o r i a l n a t i o n is, for t h e m , a central constituent o f personal identity a n d a reliable source o f m a t e r i a l s u p p o r t a n d e m o t i o n a l a f f i r m a t i o n . C o n t r a r y to A n d e r s o n i a n a n d p o s t - A n d e r s o n i a n historical t e l e o l o g i e s , it is n o t c l e a r t h a t i m a g i n e d c o m munities of religious a n d imperial inspiration withered into insignificance with t h e rise o f t h e nation-state, o r that t h e n a t i o n - s t a t e is, in t u r n , withering amid the reported proliferation of transnational communities. C h a r t e d across r e g i o n s a n d o v e r t i m e , t h e relative p r e v a l e n c e o f t h e s e diverse i m a g i n a t i o n s o f c o m m u n i t y has b e e n less s t a g e l i k e t h a n " l u m p y " ( C o o p e r 2 0 0 1 ) . T h a t is n o t to say that n o t h i n g c h a n g e s w h e n r e l i g i o n s a r e d i s p e r s e d across w i d e r t r a n s l o c a l spaces, o r t h a t t h e c u r r e n t state o f t h e w o r l d e c o n o m y h a s l e f t t h e r e l i g i o n s I study u n a f f e c t e d . It is, i n s t e a d , to assert t h a t w e h a v e m o r e to lose t h a n to g a i n by a s s u m i n g t h a t s o m e r e c e n t historical b r e a k o r r u p t u r e r e n d e r s t h e lessons o f t o d a y ' s t r a n s n a t i o n a l c o n n e c t i o n s i n a p p l i c a b l e to t h e l o n g c u l t u r a l h i s t o r y t h a t p r e c e d e d t h e m , a n d v i c e - v e r s a — t h a t t h e less o n s o f y e s t e r d a y a r e i n a p p l i c a b l e today. It is n o t t h e case t h a t c o l l e c t i v e i d e n tities w e r e o n c e all a n d e n t i r e l y territorial a n d a r e n o w all a n d e n t i r e l y d e t e r r i t o r i a l i z e d , o r t h a t t h e two p r i n c i p l e s a r e n o w e n g a g e d in a d u e l to t h e d e a t h . N o r is it o b v i o u s t h a t t h e class- a n d r e g i o n - s p e c i f i c ways in w h i c h t i m e a n d s p a c e a r e b e i n g " c o m p r e s s e d " ( H a r v e y 1 9 8 9 ) are m o r e i n t e r e s t i n g t h a n t h e ways, t h e p l a c e s , a n d t h e m o m e n t s in w h i c h t h e m o v e m e n t o f p e o p l e , ideas, g o o d s , a n d m o n e y is b e i n g b l o c k e d , b o u n d e d , a n d r e g u l a t e d m o r e e f f i c i e n t l y t h a n they w e r e twenty, t h i r t y - t h r e e , o r five h u n d r e d years a g o .

IS RELIGION INHERENTLY TRANSNATIONAL? In a w o r d , m y a n s w e r is yes. B u t I await w o r d f r o m t h e s t u d e n t s o f t h e Z u n g a Z u n g a s . H o w e v e r , t h e p o i n t is b o t h d e f i n i t i o n a l a n d e m p i r i c a l . Or, rather, it m a n i f e s t s t h e d i a l e c t i c a l r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n t h e d e f i n i t i o n s c r e a t e d by int e l l e c t u a l s a n d t h e realities t h a t p o w e r f u l institutions p r o d u c e as t h e y a c t in r e s p o n s e to t h o s e d e f i n i t i o n s . F o r e x a m p l e , T a l a l A s a d says t h e r e is n o t h i n g s e l f - e v i d e n t o r u n i v e r s a l a b o u t t h e c a t e g o r y " r e l i g i o n " ( A s a d 1 9 9 3 : 40; see also B e y e r 2006: 7 3 - 7 4 ) . Its c u r r e n t m e a n i n g in t h e a c a d e m y is, h e a r g u e s , a s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y artifact o f t h e E u r o p e a n s e p a r a t i o n o f c h u r c h a n d state. T h e g e n e s i s o f t h e "rel i g i o n " c o n c e p t , as w e k n o w it today, also c o i n c i d e d with t h e E u r o p e a n A g e o f E x p l o r a t i o n , i n s p i r i n g t h e systematic c o m p a r i s o n a m o n g diverse p e o p l e s ' b e l i e f s a b o u t a s u p r e m e p o w e r , t h e i r p r o t o c o l s o f w o r s h i p , t h e i r ethics, a n d t h e i r c o n c e p t i o n s o f t h e p o s t h u m o u s c o n s e q u e n c e s o f living p e o p l e ' s b e havior. O w i n g t o t h e c u l t u r a l biases o f t h e E u r o p e a n e x p l o r e r s , missionaries, a n d s c h o l a r s w h o s u b s i d i z e d t h e " r e l i g i o n " c o n c e p t , c o n t e m p o r a r y Weste r n s c h o l a r s o f r e l i g i o n t e n d to f o c u s m o r e o n t h e beliefs a n d moods a s s o c i a t e d

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with our object of study than with, for example, the criminal laws or rules of commerce that non-Western religious practitioners might regard as equally essential to their sacred commitments. Yet, as Peter Beyer (2006) argues, no matter how recently made-up the category, it has become part of a global logic according to which political systems, educational systems, and science confine the purview of the institutions that we call religions. Beyer is correct, except for the fact that most of this confinement is, in fact, occurring at the hands of nation-states rather than at the hands of some location-free global system, and different nationstates treat religions differently. For example, Christianity does not take shape in the same political, economic, and educational environment in Nigeria as in Germany or the United States. Moreover, few nation-states behave toward all the religions under their authority in the same way. For example, American politicians these days make obligatory references to the centrality and preeminence of "the God that all of us—Christian, Muslims and J e w s — worship," as though Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans, and santeros do not really count as part of "us." Propaganda against gay marriage tends to begin with the pseudo-ecumenical premise that "all religions condemn homosexuality," which says more about how mainstream politicians define religion than about the demonstrable history of religions. Beyer adds that the recent interaction a m o n g religions has caused them to define themselves and each other in comparable terms. Again, Beyer is demonstrably correct in many cases. However, to the extent that religions have come to define themselves as comparable, the p h e n o m e n o n did not begin in 1500, 1974, the 1980s, or any of the various dates that have been designated as the beginning of globalization. Why, for example, would Beyer's insights not equally illuminate the structure of religious interaction and mutual transformation in the Greco-Roman world, or in any other translocal context where specialists in the sacred compete with each other, imitate each other, and conduct themselves in a larger, shared political, economic, and educational environment? Moreover, many religions are still selective with regard to which other practices they find worthy of definition as comparable. For example, the Abrahamic faiths tend to regard each other as comparable in ways that they deny the comparability of, say, ancient Canaanite religion, pre-Islamic Arab religion, Wicca, or the African spirit possession religions. Despite these caveats, Asad and Beyer leave me with a question that I have tried to pursue seriously: How have the dispersion of any given religion, its interaction with the priorities of diverse nation-states, its interaction with an increasing array of other religions, and the enforcement of certain seventeenth-century definitions affected its practice? A few general points might be made. First, the self-definitions of all of these religions have tended toward ab-

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stract statements of worldview—one in which, furthermore, a declaration of belief in a high god is de rigueur. Particularly in the places where they are subject to state regulation, the leaders of these religions must learn how to explain their beliefs abstractly through the mass media. Moreover, if they wish to retain or gain followers, they must offer explanations of life that not only refer to the distinctive experience of their followers but also encompass and redefine the same real-world material and social realities that all the religions, polities, and economies share in any given locale. This demand to articulate an abstract worldview presents an especially transformative challenge to religions that prioritize devotional practice and secrecy, for example, as opposed to those with long traditions of textuality, exegesis, and proselytizing (e.g., Johnson 2002). Still, it must be remembered that this challenge arises less from globalization per se than from the diverse degrees to which different nation-states wish to regulate citizens' religious activities. Second, mutual recognition among religions can lead to rather opposite reactions. That is, to put it oversimply, some practitioners will seek to differentiate their religion from others, while other practitioners will deliberately absorb neighboring practices. Not all religions see other religions as mutually exclusive rivals. Some religions endeavor to encompass not only the shared real-world circumstances but also the other religions themselves. With exceptions, Yoruba religion and Hinduism tend to fit this pattern, appropriating the personae, signs, and ritual techniques of multiple neighboring religions. By contrast, evangelical Christianity tends to define other religions as unworthy of imitation. In an interstitial case, Islam defines a role for Abraham, Jesus, Jews, and Christians in its history, cosmology, and legal system. Third, it must be added that these processes of mutual transformation through imitation or exclusion are by no means confined to the period following the European maritime revolution, European colonialism, World War II, or the oil crisis. Missionaries, traders, wives, soldiers, hunters, captives, and voluntary immigrants have long engaged in mutually transformative religious discourse and practice with their far-flung hosts. Religious and magical services of long-distance origin have long been among the most salable commercial products within and around diasporic ethnoreligious enclaves. Indeed, religions are among the most widespread and institutionalized ways in which people employ the image and reality of faraway places and times as models of underlying, ideal, or super-powered realities. The populations that share a commitment to any such faraway place and time form cultic communities that subdivide, cross-cut, or encompass the nation-state and other territorial communities. Indeed, the mythically charted distance between the Other Place and the worshipers' Present Place tends to be the main road and central axis of a spiritual map that encompasses the whole known, supralocal world.

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T h e O t h e r Place might be the Olympus of the ancient Greeks, the Ginen of Haitian vodouisants, the Israel and the Heaven of Abraham's followers (which, in its visualization by American Christians, tends to feature GrecoRoman imagery), the Mecca of the Muslims, or the "Africa" of Brazilian candomblecistas and Cuban santeros. Thus, the imagery of the O t h e r Place is not merely geographic. It regularly conflates Otherness of Place with Otherness in Time and with an Otherness of Horizontal Plane. In most religions, Otherness of Place, Time, and Horizontal Plane are mixed metaphors, as it were, in a single symbolic geography, furnished with the alien language, landscape, sartorial style, currencies, bodily gestures, houses, and interior decoration that distinguish this world from the Other. While the supreme agents in this encompassing order are, in many religions, regarded as immanent within us, they usually wear their difference from us on their archaic, foreign-tailored sleeves. As Godfrey Lienhardt ( 1 9 6 1 ) and Fritz Kramer [1987] 1993) have observed, what contemporary Westerners tend to regard as feelings, or mere temporary temperatures of the self, are represented in many African religions as passiones, as immaterial but visibly foreign beings penetrating the body. Health and ritual order, then, depend not simply on the existence of the faraway O t h e r Place, but on the management of the arrival, presence, and departure of its personnel and powers. O n these matters, I suspect that the foreignness of African passiones is simply more explicit than the foreignness of their European counterparts, as in the Euro-Christian imagery of "epiphany," "filling with the Holy Spirit," "descent of the Spirit," being "lifted up," "calling," "conscience," "looking up to the hills," and so forth T h e ontology of any given religion is closely connected to an implicit geography and to its real-world geopolitics. Whereas the Abrahamic faiths name highly precise geographic territories, territorial promises, and covenants of territorial ownership in their construction of the Other Place, even those religions with a vaguer cartography of the O t h e r Place describe transactions with the divine in terms of the "paths," "roads," "journeys," and other transterritorial conduits that connect us, collectively or individually, to the divine O t h e r Place. In many religions, those paths are literally transterritorial pilgrimage routes that cross-cut numerous political boundaries. T h e Yorubaaffiliated religions of the Americas are as vague about landed territory and its ownership as they are explicit and obsessive about paths, roads, and journeys. 3 Even at the height of what Anderson (1988) calls the "classical nationalist" project, the adherents of Afro-Atlantic religions gave absolute priority to metaphors of translocal flow and to the daily conduct that made those metaphors real. Indeed, the idiom and reality of translocalism are intrinsic to most religions. 4 T h a t is not to say, however, that locality and proximity have lost o r — e v e n amid the oft-mentioned proliferation of religious communities on the In-

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t e r n e t (e.g., V a s q u e z a n d M a r q u a r d t 2 0 0 3 ) — w i l l lose t h e i r c e n t r a l i t y in religious practice. For example, the Yoruba-Atlantic religions and many others richly e m p l o y smells a n d t a s t e s — t h r o u g h i n c e n s e , c a n d l e s , h e r b s , b e v e r a g e s , a n d f o o d s — i n t h e e v o c a t i o n o f divinity a n d s a c r e d c o m m u n i t y . 5 T h e religious transaction between the O t h e r Place and the Present Place c a n n o t d o w i t h o u t t h e reality o f t h e P r e s e n t P l a c e . H o w e v e r , as w e shall s e e b e l o w , n o t all r e l i g i o n s a r e a l i k e in t h e i r c o n c e p tion o f t h e transactions b e t w e e n t h e P r e s e n t P l a c e a n d t h e O t h e r Place. In the A f r o - A t l a n t i c religions, w o r s h i p e r s f o c u s f a r less o n t h e literal o r m e t a p h o r i c a l j o u r n e y to t h e O t h e r P l a c e a n d f a r m o r e o n t h e c o n t i n u a l m o v e m e n t o f b e i n g s between P l a c e s t h a n d o t h e A b r a h a m i c r e l i g i o n s .

WHAT MIGHT THE YORUBA-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS TEACH US ABOUT TRANSNATIONALISM? T h i s is m y c e n t r a l e t h n o g r a p h i c q u e s t i o n . W h a t w o u l d a t h e o r y o f transnat i o n a l i s m a n d g l o b a l i z a t i o n l o o k like if e q u a l l y i n s p i r e d b y t h e o n t o l o g y , hist o r i c a l c o n s c i o u s n e s s , a n d g e o g r a p h y i m p l i c i t in spirit p o s s e s s i o n a n d polyt h e i s m r a t h e r t h a n by t h e o n t o l o g i e s a n d e s c h a t o l o g i e s o f t h e A b r a h a m i c and the karmic religions? W h a t m i g h t the Yoruba-Atlantic religions teach u s — t o p u t it in A n d e r s o n i a n t e r m s — a b o u t t h e i m a g i n a t i o n o f c o m m u n i t y ? T h e A b r a h a m i c a n d the k a r m i c r e l i g i o n s are d e e p l y i n s c r i b e d with translocal realities a n d i d i o m s o f e x p e r i e n c e . H o w e v e r , t h e e l e m e n t s o f t h e s e relig i o n s t h a t h a v e b e e n i n t e g r a t e d m o s t d e e p l y i n t o t h e W e s t e r n social s c i e n c e s a r e a n i n d i v i d u a l i s t n o t i o n o f p e r s o n h o o d a n d a linear, d e s t i n a t i o n - f o c u s e d c o n c e p t i o n o f history. T h e s e d i m e n s i o n s o f C h r i s t i a n i t y a n d J u d a i s m little c o n t r a d i c t Islam, B u d d h i s m , a n d H i n d u i s m . A l l t h e s e r e l i g i o n s f o c u s o n t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n a n i n d i v i d u a l ' s a c t i o n s a n d his o r h e r p o s t h u m o u s a n d still-individual destiny. T h e A b r a h a m i c f a i t h s a d d a c o n c e p t i o n t h a t a single h i s t o r i c a l d e s t i n y — a s w e l l as s p e c i f i a b l e i n t e r m e d i a t e stages o f a p p r o a c h — await t h e e n t i r e w o r l d . M u c h o f n i n e t e e n t h - a n d p o s t - n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y W e s t e r n social s c i e n c e rests o n t h e s e v e r y a s s u m p t i o n s . T h e l a c k o f c i r c u m s p e c t i o n a b o u t these c u l t u r e - s p e c i f i c a s s u m p t i o n s gives t r a n s n a t i o n a l i s m t h e o r y itself a r e l i g i o u s tenor, like t h e r e t u r n o f t h e r e p r e s s e d . C o n v e n t i o n a l t h e o r i e s o f t r a n s n a t i o n a l i s m a r e r e l i g i o u s n o t simply b e c a u s e o f t h e i r i n t e n s e c o n c e r n a b o u t r e l a t i o n s a m o n g faraway p l a c e s b u t also b e c a u s e o f t h e i r eschatological assumptions, their apocalyptic language, a n d their conviction that a single force rules the course o f history a n d the m i n d s o f m e n . Transn a t i o n a l i s m t h e o r y is t h e m o s t r e c e n t in a l o n g h i s t o r y o f m i l l e n n i a l p r o p h e cies h e r a l d i n g t h e i m m i n e n t e n d o f e v e r y t h i n g as w e k n o w it. A m i d its f o r e g o n e c o n c l u s i o n s , e v e r y p a g e o f t h e New York Times o v e r f l o w s with signs a n d o m e n s o f u n a m b i g u o u s p o r t e n t . T h e a u d i e n c e o f t h e s e p r o g n o s t i c a t i o n s is w a r n e d in c h a r i s m a t i c t e r m s a n d t o n e s t h a t s o m e superlatively n e w trans-

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localism is on the verge of transmogrifying the world into something hitherto unrecognizable and unimaginable. The millennial language of this augury—"What we are witnessing is..."—mimics the preaching of visionary prophets. We are led by a drumbeat of "New! New! New!" to believe that the momentum of "time-space compression" (Harvey ig8g) is ever-increasing everywhere, rather than sometimes up and sometimes down, sometimes here and sometimes there, and punctuated by a chain of failed predictions about its conclusion. The end is near, we are told, and its conditions will be absolute. History will be transcended. The dominant theories of transnationalism and globalization also tend to be monothetic, if not monotheistic, in the autonomous and transcendent power they attribute to capitalism. On the contrary, Al-Qaeda's expanding holy war shows that the major threat to the nation-state is not transnational capitalism. Indeed, the consequent resurrection of the national security state shows that the juggernaut of capitalism is hardly the single engine of history. Current theories manifest an exaggerated faith in the unidirectionality and predictability of human history. Like the prophets ofjudaism, Christianity, Islam, and Marxism, the prophets of transnationalism and globalization preach of a progression of eras, of a historical march toward an explosive end never before seen by humankind— a linear, rather than, say, cyclical, vision of how the world changes over time. These models propose that only one order of communal imagination—in effect, one god, to extrapolate from Durkheim—can reign at a time, in contrast to the view that people can, opportunistically, imagine and enact several different sacred communities over the course of any given day. Also like the av owed prophets of monotheism, the prophets of globalization and transnationalism imagine a force that will ultimately encompass everything and every place. Such prophets assume that the world is a single, united cosmological field, ordered by a single, omnipresent spirit. Yet, like expressly religious prophecies, the world-changes predicted by our academic prophets often address a region-, class-, race-, and religion-specific fraction of the universe far narrower than their audiences realize. My observations about transnationalism and religion arise from a different religious inspiration—not one uninfluenced by the Abrahamic traditions, but one focused on the victims of Abrahamic imperialism and on those who articulate alternative self-understandings in environments of Judeo-Christian or Islamic political dominance. "Yoruba religion" is a product of a vibrant interaction among the populations of the Gulf of Guinea, among their dispersed kin and admirers around the Atlantic perimeter, and among the university scholars and nationalist folklorists who have interpreted this set of traditions in the service of their own projects. Like Hinduism, Yoruba religion did not have a unitary name for itself until transnational traders, travelers, and scholars chose to identify it as a single religion comparable to and

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in contrast with the Abrahamic religions. Certainly the gods worshiped and the protocols of their worship continue to vary across what is now called Yorubaland. However, the rapid expansion of the Oyo Empire, starting in the late seventeenth century, and its use of certain categories of priest as provincial viceroys spread a relatively homogeneous set of gods and practices across approximately half of present-day Yorubaland, in Nigeria, as well as the kingdom of Dahomey in present-day Benin Republic. The Atlantic slave trade carried tens of thousands of drisa worshipers to Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, and the United States. But then thousands of African captives and freedmen in the New World went back to Africa or traveled back and forth for various reasons. Some engaged in transatlantic pilgrimage, the subsequent "legitimate" circum-Atlantic trade in palm oil, religious goods, and other goods attractive to immigrants, or international conferences of drisa worshipers. All these movements have increased the contacts among drisa worshipers from these various countries and engaged them in an ongoing mutual transformation since the early nineteenth century. West Africans represent the drisa variously as lineage ancestral spirits, local spirits, city-state founders, heroes, and masters of particular substances (such as iron) or natural phenomena (such as thunder and lightning). The Brazilian orixas, the Spanish American orichas, and the Anglo-American orishas have much in common with their West African counterparts. In the Americas, the gods remain larger-than-life, anthropomorphic beings who personify the virtues and deficits, the problem-solving and the problem-causing dispositions of particular types of people. On both sides of the Atlantic, these divinities are the focus of magnificent religions of music, blood sacrifice, divination, healing, and dance. Dances, rhythms, and songs induce the worshiper to embody the feelings and complexities of the multiple beings who personify aspects of the social and physical universe. Deftly executed, the right sequences of songs and percussive rhythms can induce one of those beings to come to the fore and take over the dancer's body and displace her consciousness for a time. Yet the radical bodily transformations that occur at the height of ritual dance also underline the fact that these spirit beings coexist and subtly interact in every healthy and prosperous life. The history and logic of the Yoruba-Atlantic religions differ in many ways from those inspired by Abraham. Suffice it to mention just a few of those differences here. First, the Yoruba-affiliated religions are noneschatological and nonteleological. They do not represent social dynamics as a form of temporal progress toward sacrality or as the predictable and sequential transcendence of one social order after another. Second, the Other Place of the YorubaAtlantic religions is less a place to long for, or an ideal Other Place to aspire to, than an Other Place from which the gods cyclically arrive, conveying a powerful influence that human beings must nourish, use, and recycle with care.

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T h e gods are a raw power that must be called to the Present Place, contained, and organized by people and then returned to the Other Place. When that power does not circulate between the Other and the Present Place, or when it does not, in turn, circulate through the social networks of the Present Place, it dies, ineffective (see also Matory 1986, 2005b; Johnson 2002). Third, the Yoruba-Atlantic religions dramatize not the individuality of the person—individuality of the sort suggested by the Abrahamic Judgment Day, the karmic cycle of reincarnation, and Social Security (and other features of Bentham and Foucault's Panopticon)—but the multipleness of the person (see Foucault 1977). Multiple conscious beings are co-present in and around the Yoruba-Atlantic human body. T h e self is the convergence of multiple b e i n g s — a manifestation of the ritually engineered balance among those beings. Equally explicit in these religions is the view that these beings are normally exogenous to the body and, most often, literally foreign to the worshiper's place of residence. Consequently, the territory taken for granted in YorubaAtlantic ritual is not land and land claims, as is the case in the Abrahamic religions, from the Book of Genesis to the latest Crusade. T h e taken-for-granted territory in the Afro-Atlantic religions is the worshiper's body itself. Fourth, it must be assumed that every religion is shaped deeply by the historically changing role of its adherents in a local and translocal political economy. Therefore, the fourth general difference between the Yoruba-Atlantic religions and those that apparently inspired current theories of globalization and transnationalism is that the Yoruba-Atlantic religions are, at least partly, the products of Africans' role in the post-sixteenth-century Atlantic economy. T h e economically and politically central mobility of people that has characterized African history since time immemorial reached a crescendo during the Atlantic slave t r a d e — a crescendo as great as Africa's earlier engagement with Islamic trade and imperialism (eighth-sixteenth century C.E.) and almost as great as the Bantu colonization of subequatorial Africa since the first millennium C.E. T h e multiplication of the self in the religions of the Yoruba diaspora reveals what is probably the latest intensification of the ongoing intercommunal struggle for the control of African bodies. T h e control over people, rather than the ownership of land, has long been the cultural priority and the limiting factor in African political power (Thornton 2006), a fact that may lie at the roots of the African religious formula that the spiritual colonization of the person matters more than the battle over land. A n d the fact that elaborate spirit possession religions proliferate at the slavery-ridden borderlands between Africa and the Islamic world suggests a pattern equally applicable to the Yoruba-Atlantic religions. Spirit possession by multiple beings is a vivid idiom in the management of social marginality at cultural crossroads. T h e following comparison of Oyo-Yoruba religion in West Africa with its Brazilian and Cuban counterparts suggests the ironic hypothesis that n o re-

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ligion is ever in its homeland. Even at their putative geographic origins, religions imagine in what I have called Other Places their indispensable partners in the sacred exchange that generates health, prosperity, and power. In the Afro-Atlantic religions at home and abroad, exile is not an abnormal and lamentable condition but a precondition to the empowering transaction with the sacred Other Place. Yet some differences of emphasis between West African Yoruba religion and its American counterparts seem to flow from the scale and rapidity of the latest displacement. In the diaspora, the number of self-conscious religious groups interacting is larger. Still other differences appear to flow less from the objective fact of transoceanic dispersion than from the forms of political subordination that Africans in the Americas had to manage with their complex ritual wherewithal. OYO RELIGION West African Yoruba language and rituals suggest that multiple beings make up the self. A person is a vessel containing and surrounded by multiple spirit beings, some of whom help to guarantee the subject's proper progress through life. Other spirit beings interfere in that progress. Moreover, virtually all of those beings are described as exogenous to the body and as geographically alien to the Present Place of the subject. The most important among these alien beings is called ori, or head. This head embodies one's intelligence, perceptiveness, personal strengths and weaknesses, and, in a word, destiny. Before birth, each of us stands in the Other World (orun) and selects one among the available heads. A person who chooses a bad head suffers numerous misfortunes due to his or her poverty of instinct, wisdom, coolness, and fortitude against malevolent human beings (such as aje, or witches) and spirit beings (ajogun, or warriors) in an essentially adversarial world. These "warriors" are personifications of death, illness, paralysis, and loss (Abimbola 1976: 1 5 2 ) . T h e head is said to have been made byapotter,whose products are sometimes sturdy and sometimes flawed. The head chosen in heaven is a spiritual one, called the inner head (ori inun), which, upon one's birth, occupies the physical, or outer, head (ori ode). Yet the inner head is not the only spirit that occupies the body. Knowledgeable Oyo-Yoruba people speak of a spirit that occupies the back of one's head (ipako) and, when alert, sees dangers coming from behind, as well as a spirit (ipori) that dwells in one's large toe and, when alert, guides us around the dangers ahead. Moreover, one's inner head is not confined to one's body. For example, Yoruba people who wish me well might pray that my mother's "head" accompany me wherever I go fOri iya e aa sin e lo). Similarly, the spirit animating a witch is described as a bird that can invisibly fly out of her body and eat of her victim's body before returning to its abode in the witch's guts.

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"Legs" (ese) too are living beings, irreducible to the mere physical legs. According to Abimbola, the spirit "legs" are a "symbol of power and activity which enables a man to struggle and function adequately in life so that he may bring to realization whatever has been marked out for him by the choice of ori [head]" (1971: 85). Some of the most African-influenced forms of African American Christianity also avow the presence of multiple innate agents within the person. For example, though they are Protestants, the Gullah people of the 1930s in the South Carolina Lowcountry spoke of two spirits that exited the body of a deceased person—the "heaven-going spirit" and the "traveling spirit," the second of which, when ritually neglected, sometimes remained on earth to haunt the living (Creel 1988: 317). The Yoruba case vividly illustrates Csordas's argument (2004) that bodily anatomy itself—such as the separability of the two lips, the detachability of a limb, and the simultaneous ability of the hand to feel things and to be felt by the other hand—is a foundational experience of the Other within, and is thus the experiential foundation of religious consciousness itself. Indeed, Yoruba sacrificial religion—and particularly its initiations—mime the separability of the worshiper's head through the proxy of the animal victims. The proxy head appears—like that of the novice—as both a choosing agent and the object of forcible recruitment (Matory 2005b: 202-7). When affliction or hereditary recruitment requires a person to be initiated as a possession priest of, say, Sango—deceased Oyo emperor, god of thunder and lightning, and tutelary divinity of the Oyo Empire—the god is surgically inserted through one's scalp and fed with the blood of sacrificial animals. At the same time, the head-shaped stones that also embody the god's power and sit in a wooden altar vessel are fed with blood. Orisa altars are covered with calabashes, pots, and mortars that mime the hollow head and its availability for ritually mediated penetration by spirit beings. The newly initiated priest is called a "bride" (iyawo) of the god, and mature possession priests are called "horses" (esin) or "mounts" (elegun) of the god. During spirit possession, the god is said to "mount" (gun) the priest, just as a male animal or brutish man mounts his female partner or a rider mounts a horse. At periodic festivals intended to display the power of the god and offer healing to noninitiates, the possession priest's own inner head gives way to the god, whose consciousness and power take over the priest. The god's entry fills the priest's head to the point of bursting. To dramatize this conception, the hairline of possession priests is often shaved back, and wooden carvings show possessed priests with closed but monstrously bulging eyes. Though the priests are personally unconscious, their heads are literally filled to the bursting point with the power and consciousness of the god. In turn, supplicants faced with the god-filled medium bow down and uncover their heads to await the empowering touch of the manifest god. Blessings applied through a touch to the head also bless and eventually fill other pro-

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ductive vessels of the body—particularly the womb and the breasts. Scholars since Herskovits ( [ 1 9 4 1 ] 1958) have suggested that the prominence of "shouting," or "filling with the Holy Spirit" in African American Protestantism is indebted to similarly African cultural dispositions. Hence, African American Protestantism entails an implicit hollowness of the self that parallels that in the Yoruba-Atlantic religions. Well until the middle of the colonial period, possessed Sango priests served as viceroys and delegates of the Oyo monarch. Sango priests were and are also responsible for preparing another category of royal delegate, known as ilari, each of whom embodies a particular order or decision on the part of the monarch. Sent by the monarch to a subordinate chief or neighboring monarch, the messenger's body itself became the message and his or her name an order, such as "Bring-Me-Money," "The-King-Is-Not-Ready," "ThereIs-No-Fight," and "No-Compromise" (Matory 2005b: 11). So thoroughgoing is this logic of authority as a materially and technologically embodied spirit that the Oyo monarch himself is initiated as a wife and vessel of the dynastic g o d Sango. N o t all West African orisa are so closely identified with the monarchy, though most are associated with some hierarchical social group (such as a lineage or guild) whose divine personification can, periodically, displace a person's consciousness and act directly through the person's body. Sango's priesthood and ritual complex, however, have influenced the American religions more than those of any other West African god. Nowadays, most Oyo-Yoruba are Muslim, and many are Christian. In this religiously plural environment, orisa worship is now lumped together with the Egungun and Gelede masquerades and called esin ibile (lit., "native worship"). Nevertheless, the gods are typically described as foreign. For example, Sango is said to be Muslim and to have come from the neighboring Tapa, or Nupe, ethnic group. In most places where any orisa is worshiped, that god is said to have come or been brought from another town, ethnic group, or even religion. This construction of the divine as foreign parallels the premise, f o u n d in societies all over the world, that great rulers and royal dynasties originate from outside the society and are not of the people they rule. As Sahlins observes, folk histories in many polities around the world represent monarchs and sovereign power as foreign, even in places where the literal geographic foreignness of the sovereign dynasty is not empirically demonstrable (1985: 76). T h e myths of the drisa, like those of other Oyo-Yoruba culture heroes, tend to report the sequence of their arrival from some Other Place, their making of a mutually beneficial pact with someone or some community in the Present Place (where the god becomes a ruler, a spouse, or a savior from some danger to the collective), and, finally, the god's flight back to the Other Place when the contract is somehow violated. It is when the gods depart that they

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turn into the rivers, wild animals, wind, lightning, and or other force of extrasocial nature with which they continue to be associated. Other myths and, above all, rituals dramatize the successful efforts of supplicants—who are sometimes other gods—to bring the fugitive divinity in from the wild and harness him or her for the social good. Hence, West African órisá rituals typically involve the pouring out, washing in ritually empowered herbs, and feeding of the gods' stone icons with cooked food and sacrificial blood, as well as various methods of recontaining the gods' replenished power in the ritual vessels, which—in parallel fashion—include pots, wooden mortar bases, calabashes, and human heads. For example, priestesses of the river goddesses—such as Yemoja, osun, and Oba—place pots of river water on their heads, inducing possession by the goddess, and bring those pots of water into the goddess's shrine room in the palace. With similar implications, in some towns the priests of Sango, the god of thunder and lightning, carry pots of fire on their heads. Oyo-Yoruba sacred dance dramatizes the hollowness of the person and the multiplicity of the self. Polyrhythmic music, its crescendos, and its breaks, or sharp disruptions of its rhythmic patterns, are used to induce spirit possession (Thompson 1983). Such breaks induce and dramatize both the discreteness of the body's various denizens and the proper nature of their interaction. The baseline of metarhythms that unite the diverse rhythms of the sacred drum corps already suggest a form of sociality—as much among people as among spirit beings—quite different from what is implied by Western music and dance. In Yoruba sacred dance, the shoulders might respond to one drum and the legs to another. More often, the whole body movement adds an additional layer of syncopation that answers an already syncopated palimpsest of drum rhythms. As John Chernoff (1979) argues, this type of music mimes a conception of social life in which the skilled actor does not follow a preestablished protocol but negotiates a pattern of living in dialogue with the multiple idiosyncratic patterns of others' lives. The rhythmic breaks that further unsettle the emergent patterns of this musical negotiation are what induces possession, inviting the dramatic display of a rhythm and personality from the Other Place in interaction with the head and body of the priest (see also Barber 1981; Brown 1987). At the end of the sacred festival, the gods' reenergized stones are returned to their wooden, ceramic, or calabash vessels and shut in their shrine rooms, where priests and monarchs can tap their power until the next festival. The containment of the gods' being and power in shrine pots, mortars, and calabashes mimes the containment of the gods' being and power in the heads of the priests, monarchs, and royal messengers as well. Palace shrine rooms gather up the power—personified in the god—that results from the sacred transaction between the Other Place and the Present Place. These cycles of containment within and release from human heads and their vessel coun-

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terparts lead to mutually empowering social relationships between the Other Place and the Present Place. T h e n , monarchs, royal messengers, and priests carry that power out into the sociopolitical world. Except for the shrines of Sango, the shrines of gods and palaces gather up the power of not just one god, but multiple g o d s — e i t h e r gods who are mythologically related to the main god of the temple or gods inherited by the priest from deceased elders. Thus, in sum, personal well-being and political order depend on careful transactions with multiple Other Places. Furthermore, the iconography of the gods is rich in the accretions of literal transactions with Other Places—interregional and transoceanic trade. For example, American corn is the favorite food of the river goddess Yemoja. Cowries are the imported, archaic money found on the altars of virtually every god. They were originally brought by the Portuguese from the Maldive Islands. Dane guns are a preeminent symbol of the hunter gods O g u n and Osoosi and are among the symbols of other gods as well. Dutch Schnapps, along with chickens, is the standard offering when one solicits the aid of the gods. T h e other omnipresent symbol of the gods is beads, which, in Yorubaland, are closely associated with commercial ties to Europe, Asia, and faraway African locales (e.g., Drewal and Mason 1997: 39). T h e diverse colors of the beads allow an intricate display of the gods' diversity. For example, priests of the hot god Sango wear necklaces with a combination of red and white beads; white beads identify the presence of cool gods like Osun and the lord of purity, Obatala. T h e diviner-priests of Orunmila, or Ifa, wear a combination of yellow and green beads. Like Oyo polyrhythms, polytheism, and the embrace of Islam within the bosom of "native religion," Oyo beadwork manifests an aesthetic of assemblage: combinations of rhythms, of foods, and of beads from diverse origins are arranged into locally evocative patterns, just as the diverse religions, gods, and spirits are delicately balanced in the translocal dance that makes up human selves and kingdoms. 6 Oyo ritual arts reinscribe the signs and citizens of multiple Other Places within an Oyo ontology and cosmology. Translocalism is perhaps the most enduring premise of this technology of fashioning the self, the priesthood, and the monarch's political domain. Yet royalism is not the only social project that the orisa have served or the only Yoruba project deeply imbued with a translocal consciousness. For example, in the 1880s and 1890s, Western-educated Yoruba w h o had staffed the British colonial project in coastal West Africa faced increasing racial discrimination, as improved tropical medicine enabled white British physicians, clergy, and administrators to replace them. In response—like many a European or Latin American cultural nationalist during the same e r a — t h e s e newly alienated subjects of imperialism resurrected and published accounts of their people's ancient gods and traditions as evidence of the national distinctiveness and dignity of the colonized. These Yoruba cultural nationalists

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in the British colony of Lagos often bolstered their argument with the assertion that their ancestral culture had origins in the prestigious and faraway Middle East. It was through these same processes that the diverse practices of their ancestors and kin came to be called a religion, comparable in dignity to Christianity and conceptually detachable from both British and Oyo state administration (Matory 1999a). Yet, the Lagosian Cultural Renaissance of the 1890s was probably as influential on New World Candomblé and Santería as it was in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria.

HOW TRANSNATIONALISM HAS TRANSFORMED ÓRÍ$Á WORSHIP IN THE AMERICAS

T h e slave trade was a form of transnationalism with such distinctive and intergenerational consequences that it has been easy for most theorists of globalization and transnationalism to overlook. American slavery and r a c i s m — both direct products of a half millennium of translocalism, transimperialism, and transnationalism—have indelibly colored Candomblé and Santería, which entered into an unprecedently complex struggle for the consciousness, subjectivity and imagination of the New World. In the idioms of Oyo royalist spirit possession, Santería and Candomblé dramatize the multipleness of the communities in terms of which every African diaspora p e r s o n — and many a white c r e ó l e — i s ambivalently forced to consider herself. Yet these religions empower the priests to master the outcome of this negotiation and to articulate a model for white creóle nationalists to follow as well. T h e Oyo-Yoruba sacred technology of managing the multiple exogenous beings who make up the self is equally evident in Candomblé and Santería. Yet, rather than construct the sacred as coming from the bush (igbo), the sky (orun), the North, the Near East, the Nupe, Ile-Ife, or some other town of lineage origin, the New World worshipers of the órisá construct the sacred as arising from transactions with Other Places known as the forest (el monte [Cuban Spanish]), the sky (o céu [Brazilian Portuguese]), "Africa," "Yorubaland," "Quéto," and "the Coast" (in Brazilian parlance), "Ginen" or underwater (in Haitian parlance), "Lucumi" (in Cuban parlance), and "Cuba" (in the parlance of Cuban labor migrants and exiles). Yet in the Americas the Other Places available for sacred transaction have multiplied. Further Other Places have become available through the imagery of Roman Catholicism, French Spiritism, Judaism, Freemasonry, and the Indianist lore of Euro-American nationalists. T h e Chinese g o d s — G u a n Yin, Guan Gung, and the B u d d h a — a r e available in Cuba, as are the caboclo Indian spirits and the King of Turkey (O Rei daTurquia) in Brazil. In the Americas generally, an additional plethora of African "nations" becomes available

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as Other Places—for example, Congo, Angola, andjejes (for Yoruba-affiliated Brazilians) and Congo, Carabali, and Arará (for Yoruba-descended Cubans). With the multiplication of O t h e r Places in the Americas has also come a greater systematization of the pantheon and iconography associated with each African Other Place. O n the one hand, Candomblé and Santería have each reduced the number of acknowledged drisá to a far smaller set than the proverbial count of "201" or "401" given by West African Yoruba. Each of these American traditions actively engages fewer than twenty gods each. O n the other hand, because they are all worshiped in close proximity to each other, the colors, numbers, herbs, foods, and problem-solving powers distinctly associated with each god have been differentiated far more meticulously than in Yorubaland. Moreover, in the Americas great care is taken to correlate each non-Yoruba g o d or spirit with a specific drisá counterpart. In other words, each C o n g o nkisi god, each Dahomean vodun god, each locally important Catholic saint, and each spirit of the dead is also identified as an avatar or ward of a Yoruba-Atlantic drisá. In a related diasporic shift of emphasis, the West African assemblage aesthetic has hypertrophied in the Americas. In each of the American traditions, the number of vessel altars, the diversity of vessel types, the variety of objects required in the altars, the quantity and variety of beadwork and clothing ensembles, and the variety of iconic objects associated with each god have multiplied to include symbolically charged machetes, bows and arrows, beaded baseball bats, crowns for altars, shields, crowns, Roman Catholic saint statues, garabatos (sugar-harvesting hooks), canes, flags, maracas of diverse materials, costumes, cloth arrangements, bead necklaces, symbolic tools, and so forth, all marked with the correct colors and numbers. 7 O n the personal altars of the New World, these items accumulate alongside other evocative items—like mementos in a scrapbook—chosen by or gifted to priests according to more intuitive principles. In Santería and Vodou, even more than in Candomblé, each person's body, set of vessel altars, and sacred paraphernalia thus embody the accumulating presence of a dozen or more gods, spirits of the nonkin dead, and ancestors w h o have been materially represented, nourished, and ritually inserted in or tied to the body of the priest. Yet the most distinctive circumstance of the transatlantic diaspora is equally evident in Santería and Candomblé. This distinctive circumstance does a great deal to explain the American intensification of the ritual effort to link the person to multiple personifications of nonkin, non-nation-state, and nonguild communities. T h e foundational forms of orixá and onc/ia worship in the Americas emerged among populations separated from their lineages, marginalized politically in their host nation-states, and battered into low-status roles in the Present Place. T h e people w h o first brought the drisá to the Americas were slaves.

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However, African captives in the Americas often reconfigured the imagery of slavery in their most sacred rites. T h e African diaspora gods are in some ways configured as beneficent masters, who punish the initiate harshly for disobedience. T h e solidarity of the captives in the same ship's hold is named and reenacted during Candomblé initiations: a group of people initiated together is called a barco, or boat, and must undergo all subsequent rites of priestly promotion as a team (Matory 2007). A bell called a xaoró is tied to a Candomblé novice's ankle to sound an alarm if she should try to escape. T h e spirit slave too plays an important role in the spiritual ensemble of each Cuban or Brazilian priest. For example, in Kardecist-inspired "spiritual masses," many priests of Santería and U m b a n d a channel the spirits of elderly deceased slaves, particularly house servants, who are regarded as gentle and wise but effective. In the Cuban Palo Mayombe tradition, the spirits of the dead (muertos) are usually identified as people from "Congo," and they are literally chained down in their iron cauldron altars and forced to work for the priest. Each prendarías is said to contain an enslaved congo, who himself enslaves a team of subordinate spirits, ultimately in the service of the priest. Perhaps reflecting the insecurity of connubial partnerships a m o n g New World captives, marriage symbolism has declined in the representation of the god-possession priest relationship, while the symbolism of sexuality, birth, childhood, and slavery has become more prominent. 8 Santería and Candomblé rituals have not, however, been the prerogative of the poorest and least connected. These sacred practices require free time, space, privacy, and the money to purchase numerous sacrificial animals and much ritual paraphernalia. T h e skills and resources of professional cooks, butchers, and seamstresses are plainly evident in the elaborate clothing and the elaborate, specialized cuisine of the New World gods (see e.g., Brown 2003; Omari 1984; Matory 2005a: 1 1 8 - 1 9 ) . Satisfactory service to the gods requires enormous competency at domestic service generally. Most of the vessels on santero and candomblecista altars are China food service vessels that either contain the sacred stones of the gods or are reserved for the service of their sacrificial foods. Hence, the year-round altars in these religions look like China closets or cabinets. T h e festival altars of santeros look like banquets, and the sacred postfestival meals are actual banquets. Equally suggestive of the domestic skills by which people without people could establish ties of mutual dependency is the fact that, during most of the year, santero altars sit in a style of glass-front cabinet that elite Cubans once used to hold baby c l o t h e s — t h e canastillero. This fact is consistent with the symbolism that the orichas of any given priest are born from those of the priest who initiated her. But it is also suggestive evidence that many nineteenthcentury priestesses were probably also nannies and wet nurses to elite Cuban families. O n c e their juvenile wards grew up, the canastillero cabinets could have no better use than as display cases for the African gods.

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T h e servile conditions of the African captives who cultivated Candomblé and Santería have thus had at least two consequences. First, these religions have turned the tools of domestic servitude into instruments of empowerment through the establishment of relationships with the mighty denizens of an Other Place. Second, Afro-Cubans and Afro-Brazilians needed to balance the expectations and exploit the alliances available to them in multiple communities that accorded them a lowly status. These communities included elite white households, Euro-American empires, emergent American republics that reserved the best jobs and highest political posts for whites, and an international community of nation-states where primary producers and non-English speakers were, and remain, marginalized. Such a world was often disorienting to white Latin Americans as well. A f r o - L a t i n Americans ritualized the understanding that one is not the citizen of but one nation a l o n e — i n my view, partly because none of the available nations was adequate to their material or psychological needs. T h e racist American nation-state did not provide a sufficiently satisfying definition of the black or mulatto person, though one could not ignore one's relationship to it. Thus, like black North Americans, A f r o - L a t i n Americans engaged in an intense struggle for respect. In one of the most characteristic of African American responses, candomblecistas and santeros ritually proclaimed themselves royalty in the iconography of two O t h e r Places—Europe and Africa (for an excellent visual history of these iconographic transformations, see Brown 2003; Omari 1984). At moments of possession by the gods, they are O l d World monarchs. Whereas possessed Brazilian priests wear European-shaped royal crowns festooned with Yoruba royalist-inspired veils of beads, Cuban priests mount European-style crowns on new initiates and a crown with a veil of pendant sacred tools atop the soup tureen altar that mimes the spirit-filled head of the mature devotee. Indeed, santeros call the initiation itself a "coronation." Thus each priest is crowned the sovereign of an interior, embodied kingdom, where a dozen or more in-dwelling or nearby-hovering spirits affirm the divinity of the priest and her empowerment through transactions with multiple Other Places. T h e territory of this sovereignty is not land but the body, and particularly the head. For this reason, santeros and candomblecistas are very careful about who touches their heads. Terrible misfortune is attributed to the improper permeability or the ritual mismanagement of the body's boundaries. That misfortune is described in terms of the closure or blockage of one's roads and paths. A closed body and an open road are the ideal state of the body's transactions with the adversarial Present Place. Conversely, the body's properly management of openness to spirits is the ideal state of the body's transaction with multiple but selected Other Places. 9 Despite the transnational ontology, sense of geography, and practice at their

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core, these religions of the translocal self have been highly useful in the projects of territorial nationalists in the Americas, just as their African counterparts were in nineteenth-century Lagos. In Haiti, northeastern Brazil, and Cuba, nationalist folklorists have publicized the local Afro-Atlantic possession religions as major evidence of the cultural distinctiveness of their territorial nations and therefore as a primordial affirmation of their political autonomy from imperialist powers. For example, the Haitian physician Jean Price-Mars made Vodou into the foremost living proof of Haitian cultural integrity and autonomy from the cultural and political system of the U.S. invaders of his island. President François Duvalier turned the symbolism of the Haitian gods and the grassroots organizational networks of the priests into instruments of rule (e.g., Matory 2005a: 167; Rotberg 1976: 362-65). T h e Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz focused his seminal cultural history of a recently independent Cuba on the religion and the sacred music of Afro-Cubans. In Brazil the psychiatrist Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, the journalist Edison Carneiro, and the anthropologist Gilbert Freyre employed the beauty and dignity of northeastern Brazil's African-inspired religions—as well as the dignity and intelligence of its black transatlantic travelers—as bulwarks against the Europhile cultural pretensions and economic dominance of Rio and Sâo Paulo. In pursuit of respect for themselves, the regionalist and nationalist admirers of Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou argued that the preeminence of Yoruba and Fon religion in northeastern Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti made these places culturally superior to regions where West Central African captives had predominated, such as the United States and Rio de Janeiro. Their evidence for Yoruba and Fon superiority derived significantly from the Lagosian Cultural Renaissance, the writings from which appear to have reached Latin America by the hand of transatlantic Afro-Brazilian pilgrims and transmigratory black merchants. Thus transnationalism is not only a mythological and ontological premise of the Yoruba-Atlantic religions but also a centuriesold material reality—based on the relatively minimal technological requirements of nineteenth-century oceanic travel and, more important, the sacred and mythological motivation to transact. However, the transnational material realities of these religions did not exempt them from effective use by territorial nationalists. Technology can open up opportunities, but neither technology nor capitalism is sufficient to determine what real historically and culturally positioned actors use them to imagine. We might still ask what transformations emerge as actors in any given field encounter new technological opportunities and confront others' uses of those technologies.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE FOREIGN OTHER IS ALIVE AND PRESENT?

When technology enables faster and easier material transactions between the sacred Other Place and the Present Place, does the character of those trans-

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actions change qualitatively, as the transnationalism theorists have suggested, or merely quantitatively? Certain fascinating qualitative challenges to the leadership and changes of perspective among leaders have indeed transformed the Yoruba-Atlantic religions since the early 1980s, in a way that might be correlated convincingly with post-ig74 changes in global capitalism. Yet the teleologists of transnationalism will be surprised by the uneven response of different classes of priest, and by the similarity of these qualitative transformations to events that beset these religions in the early twentieth century. In 1980 the Afro-Nuyorican santera Marta Vega led an international committee of priests and scholars in organizing the First International Conference of OrishaTradition and Culture (Vega 2000: 204). With the special collaboration of Nigerian babalawo diviner and University of Ife Vice-Chancellor ' Wande Abimbola, the first conference took place in 1981 in the West African city of Ile-Ife—the mythical origin of humanity, the mythical dynastic origin of Yoruba monarchs, and the preeminent Other Place a m o n g West African O t h e r Places. T h e potential for this event to happen indeed rested partly on the Invisible Hand of capitalism. T h e technologically advanced state of air travel gready facilitated the gathering. A n d the 1973 O P E C oil embargo, which is often named as a watershed in the deterritorialization of capitalism (e.g., Harvey 1989), did affect Nigeria but not by forcing Nigerian capitalism to become more efficient. It is a sign of "globalization" theory's parochialism that it narrates history with exclusive reference to how such watersheds affect countries like the United States or England and not how they affected the economies and cultures of, for example, O P E C members. T h e 1978 Airline Deregulation Act in the United States probably did reduce the cost of travel to Africa for U.S.-based oricha and orisha worshipers. However, capitalist teleology hardly explains the choice of the oil-rich Nigerian government to fund both universities and celebrations of international black cultural unity, U.S. foundations' post-sixties support of research on the cultures of the oppressed, or the Brazilian government's sponsorship of activities that enhanced its leadership in the "nonaligned world," all of which surpassed impersonal capitalist market forces in their influence on the new circuit of International Conferences of Orisha Tradition and Culture. O n their 1981 arrival in the most sacred Other Place, priestly delegations from Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, the United States, and other countries found n o sacred idyll. Instead they encountered fundamentalist Christian protests against their presence and factional warfare in the town. They witnessed the advanced state of the Nigerian ansa's impoverishment and marginalization, due to massive conversion to Islam and Christianity, as well as the persecution of drisa worshipers by Muslims and Christians. Yet the vivacity of the American traditions demonstrated the historical importance of this

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circum-Atlantic, transnational family of practices. Worshipers could see e n o u g h commonalities among their geographically divergent branches to believe that they shared a single tradition worthy of the title "world religion." However, as in other world religions, diversity became no less a concern than unity. In the years after the first International Conference, the foremost controversies ultimately concerned the degree of authority that would be given to the real-life Other Place and its priests in the emergent world religion. For example, some leaders demanded the rejection of all syncretism with Roman Catholicism (see, e.g., Azevedo 1986), while others embraced syncretism as a worthy element of their distinctive national and hybrid ancestral traditions. T h e other controversy concerned the ecclesiastical preeminence of Ile-Ife itself. Should every other International Conference take place in Ile-Ife, in affirmation of its originary, foundational, and supreme status among the sites of órisá worship, or should the gatherings take place in six other important locales of w o r s h i p — i n recognition of both the sacredness of the number 7 and the equality of all national "branches" of this world religion—before returning to Ile-Ife? T h e answer to this question would, in effect, also stipulate the relative rank of priests from the diverse national capitals of órisá worship. Would 'Wande Abimbola become the "pope" of this new world religion, or would Marta Vega and other celebrated New World priests—such as Bahia's Stella de A z e v e d o — r e t a i n equal authority, or even acquire the authority to speak for and define orthodoxy within their own national branches of the tradition? Subsequent International Conferences of Orisha Tradition and Culture took place in Salvador, Brazil, and New York City. But disagreements over the centrality of Ile-Ife and its priestly spokesperson—once they became live actors in Present Place politics—fractured the International Conferences into several rival circuits. Initiates with the institutional power to claim nationalterritorial leadership within one or another New World branch of this world religion—such as membership in an old and nationally esteemed t e m p l e — tended to favor the independence of and equality among national branches. Initiates without esteemed institutional affiliations and those without the right skin color to claim hereditary authority—such as Italian-Brazilian devotees in Sao P a u l o — h a v e tended to follow Nigerian priests and models. Their direct appeal to Africa circumvents time-honored hierarchies of authority and esteem among the age-ranked temples of Brazil or a m o n g the Cubanpedigreed houses of Santería in the United States. As a black scion of a respected Cuba oricha lineage and the foundationf u n d e d director of the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York, Marta Vega would have much to lose through vassalage to the Nigerian priesthood. Thus, whereas more marginally positioned priests in the United States are especially likely to call their practice "Yoruba religion," Vega is careful to name her practice with respect for the legitimacy of its non-African roots and

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Caribbean distinctiveness. Contrary to the growing trend, Vega still calls her religion Santería, meaning the "Way of the [Roman Catholic] Saints." Concomitantly, Vega has seceded from the circuit of conferences that she f o u n d e d with Abimbola and now leads a separate one. Hence, it is true that newer technologies of transportation—albeit ones that were useful primarily because of the nonteleological politics of foundation funding and cold war politics—were among the preconditions of ôrisà worship's emergencé as a world religion, with its fairly typical fights over unity and diversity. T h e n again, such fights over unity and diversity have also always occurred within otherwise local religions as well. Moreover, the use of the direct, physical contact with the African Other Place in order to j u m p the local queue to authority and esteem did not originate in any recent "break" from the antecedent stage of capitalism or depend on the latest stage of technological efficiency. Founded in 1 9 1 1 , the Brazilian Candomblé known as lié A x é O p ô Afonjá was the newest and therefore the lowest ranking of the main three temples of the Q u ê t o nation. However, from 1911 to 1938 the leader of that temple, Mâe Aninha, enlisted the help of transatlantic Afro-Brazilian travelers—such as the diviner, pilgrim, and writer Martiniano do Bonfim and the merchant Joaquim Devodê B r a n c o — i n "restoring" to her then-new temple to the supposedly primordial African practices that she claimed had been "forgotten" in the senior temple from which she and her followers had seceded. T h e dissemination of this claim of "restoration" and this temple's subsequent longterm pursuit of "African purity" have helped make O p ô Afonjá, despite its relative youth, the preeminent Candomblé temple in Brazil and the most prestigious ôrisà temple in the world. O p ô Afonjá's "African purity" is celebrated and financially supported as living proof that the Brazilian nation, the northeastern region, the Q u ê t o nation, and the transnational black race all possess a standard that exempts them from incorporation into and subordination to the northern, white empires. Ironically, while such sacred purism is consistent with the principle that the inner self is foreign, such sacred purism counters the generalization that, in the Afro-Atlantic religions, the self is the convergence of multiple foreign beings. T h e current leader of the purist O p ô Afonjá temple, Mâe Stella, insists militantly on the deportation of the Catholic saints and the caboclo Indians' spirits—not to mention the boiadeiro cowboy spirits, the King of Turkey, and the Gypsy spirits—from her kingdom of the transnational self. Across the Afro-Atlantic w o r l d — a n d perhaps the whole political and religious world—limiting the number of exogenous beings that inhabit the initiate's body favors authoritarian interests. O n the other hand, the internal multiplication of the self seems to serve the interests of upstart priests and of initiates seeking independence from authoritarian temples. Hence, as motive forces behind the repeated qualitative transformations and synchronic vari-

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ations in the relations between New World orîsà worship and its Other Place, class-specific strategy towers over any ostensibly inevitable trajectory of capitalism. Even within the class of nationally ranked priests, bargaining positions vary. Mâe Stella's O p ô Afonjâ temple has already secured such national power based on the African purity strategy of the 1930s that it is too late for any recently arriving Nigerian to offer symbolic resources greater than her own.

CONCLUSION

T h e biggest differences between the West African and the American branches of this long-transnational religion relate to ( 1 ) the quantitatively greater religious pluralism and (2) the oppression of the African in the Americas. First, while the qualitative protocol of constructing the self in transaction with the foreign is fundamental to all the Yoruba-Atlantic traditions, the Other Places and the sacred technology of transaction with them have been meticulously elaborated and synthesized in the American traditions of àrisà worship. Thus the difference between these West African religions and their American counterparts strikes me not as qualitative—as recent transnationalist models might lead us to suspect—but as quantitative. T h e New World devotees construct themselves at the convergence of a quantitatively far more diverse set of nations and, quantitatively, a far more plural sense of the self than do the West African devotees. Second, and also quantitatively, the number of people who dramatize their penetration by multiple nations has increased exponentially, and the imagery of its involuntarism has grown. T h e insertion of the Afro-Atlantic religions into the transnationalist historical analysis recently popularized by Europeanists and Asianists pushes me toward several theoretical revisions. First, transnationalism seems new only if the observer and/or the observed belong to a class of people who could once afford exclusive faith in the nation-state in the first place. Second, capitalism and technology by themselves are insufficient to determine how people imagine themselves, their communities, or the geographic and cosmological context of their lives. Third, the premise that people's imaginations of community proceed in a consistent linear s e q u e n c e — a n d that a single form of community dominates all collective life within any given historical p e r i o d — i s perhaps more an artifact of the observer's monotheistic thinking than a considered product of social science. Fourth, and finally, I offer for the reader's reflection the hypothesis that all religion is transnational and that what distinguishes Afro-Atlantic religion is its elaborate ritual and verbal reflection on the translocal constitution of all communities and persons. T h e Afro-Atlantic religions (perhaps more explicitly than most religions) and the study of religion (perhaps more explicitly than the study of material culture or political organization) suggest that all

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human groupings are constituted not only by the technology but also by the ontology and ethnogeography of their relations to Other Places. What remains a question is why religions are so transnational, and why AfroAtlantic religions—in Africa and the Americas—are especially translocal in their orientation. Is translocalism inherent in "the religious imagination"— in the anatomical reality of the self as both perceiver and perceived and both subject and object? Is Africa inherently more religious than other places? Or have the seventeenth-century conditions that defined "religion" as a category focused the attention of religious studies scholars on only Otherworldly aspects of these diverse and complex worldviews? Or have numerous formerly complex and diverse phenomena now brought themselves into conformity with the institutional space that governments, scientists, and educational systems have designed for religion? I am inclined to believe that all the above hypotheses are partially true, but I would add another, based on the observation that religious activity tends to be most concentrated among some of the genders, classes, and countries with the least power to demand help from territorial authorities: according to the Afro-Atlantic example—as well as today's worldwide explosion of religiosity among the poor and displaced—it is the oppressed and marginalized who are the most likely to seek help from Other Places. However, it is not the materially poorest but the most psychically and socially marginalized actors who seek transaction with the greatest number of Other Places. In the Yoruba-Atlantic family of religions, these actors are the priests in the wealthiest nations but the least centralized and less nationally celebrated temples. After all, the knowledge of multiple Other Places requires time, money, education, and independence. Perhaps to the same degree that "transnationalism" and "globalization" nickname a set of very high class positions surprised by their suddenly increased mobility, "religion" nicknames the class positions that could never fully depend on the nation-state but also have the resources to invest in—and the moderate hope of profits from—its long-distance alternatives.

NOTES i . O n e is reminded of instances in which the study of African arts reveals clear and ancient parallels to aesthetic sensibilities that theorists typically attribute to a novel postmodernism. For example, Barber ( 1 9 9 1 ) recognizes parallels between the multivocal pastiche aesthetic of Yoruba oral poetry and "postmodern" Euro-American literary tastes. Similarly, the forms of "bio-power," which Foucault attributes to novel, capitalism-driven developments in the European state during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are similar to the Oyo kingdom's disciplining of bodies and regulation of fertility through the ritual technology of omnipresent delegates' "marriage" to the king and the gods, as well as their powers to make women fertile. A similar "bio-power," linking political authorities' fertility technology to the administra-

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tion of the polity is common among sub-Saharan African peoples but is not necessarily dependent on capitalism (see, e.g., Matory 2005b). 2. On the contrary, the hierarchical logic of race, the phenomenon of political "dynasties" (such as the Kennedys), and other hereditary modes of authority (such as the British House of Lords and monarchy) have endured at the heart of the territorial nation-state, as have religious definitions of citizenship. It is clear that the territorial nation-state was a new idea in the late eighteenth century, but we must not exaggerate the purity of the religious forms of community that Anderson says preceded it or the purity of the nationalist forms that followed its invention. Pace Anderson, it is difficult for me to imagine a time or place in prenationalist Europe, where Christendom's contrast to paganism, Judaism, and/or Islam was not central to its own conscious imagination of community, and the nationalist period is notoriously fraught with programs that defined citizenship by explicit contrast to the Jewish Other in the midst of the nation-state. Officially Anglican, Catholic, Islamic, and Jewish nation-states have been more the norm than the exception. 3. For example, even in some of the most Western-acculturated African-diaspora religious forms, such as southern U.S. Protestantism, one finds the conversion experience of embracing Christ described as "travel" (Creel 1988: 286). 4. Hence the comfort and ease with which many religious institutions have taken to the Internet is less a sea change in the way those communities function than a minor instance of the inveterately translocal modus operandi and geographic consciousness of religions. For example, Boston's Roman Catholic Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, who literally wears archaism on his sleeve, in the form of a friar's habit, sees no contradiction in filing daily reports on a blog about his ten-day trip to Rome (Paulson 2006). 5. Aromatic herb baths and tobacco smoke powerfully symbolize readiness for divine intervention in the Yoruba-Atlantic religions, while foods powerfully specify which gods are intervening. 6. Yoruba attributive poetry (oriki) also embodies an assemblage aesthetic (Barber 1991). In poetically evoking the character of one substance, person, family, kingdom, or god, the composers of oriki might string together verses from the poetry of numerous other substances, beings, or collectives. 7. Conversely, the West African Yoruba tradition of wood carving—which is, in my view, based far less on the assemblage aesthetic—has virtually died out in Candomblé and Santería. 8. The white lovers of enslaved African women were, in Latin America, potential instruments of manumission and sponsors of religious activities, perhaps explaining the increased relevance of literal sexuality in the reputation of possession priests. Yet some of the most detailed sexual symbolism surrounds the assumption in Brazil that any male possession priest is also the sort of man who allows himself to be penetrated sexually. This category of men is also said to enjoy special favor by the Afro-Cuban goddess Yemayá. In Brazil Oxum is often spontaneously identified as such men's tutelary god (Matory 2003). 9. The centrality of transactions with these sacred Other Places is equally evident in the other profession that earned Afro-Brazilians a major livelihood in the nineteenth and early twentieth century—the transatlantic trade in religious goods from Africa. These goods remain indispensable in Candomblé initiations (Matory 1999a, 2005a).

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Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, no. 544 ("La notion de la personne"): 73-891976 Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus. Ibadan: O x f o r d University Press. Anderson, Benedict [1983] 1991 Imagined Communities. Rev. ed. L o n d o n : Verso. 1998 The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun iggo "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy." Public Cultures (2): 1 - 2 4 . 1 gg6 Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Asad, Talal 1993 Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. A z e v e d o Santos, Maria Stella d e 1986 "Sincretismo e Branqueamento." Lecture presented at the Third International Congress of Orisa Tradition and Culture, New York City, October 6 - 1 0 . Barber, Karin ig8i "How Man Makes G o d in West Africa." Africa 51 (3): 7 2 4 - 4 5 . 1991 I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Beyer, Peter 2006

Religions in Global Society. L o n d o n : Routledge.

Boserup, Ester 1970 Women's Role in Economic Development. New York: St. Martin's Press. Brown, David Hilary 2003 Santeria Enthroned. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Karen McCarthy 1987 "Alourdes: A Case Study in Moral Leadership in Haitian Vodun." In Saints and Virtues, edited by J o h n S. Hawley, 1 4 4 - 6 7 . Berkeley: University of California Press. Buck-Morss, Susan 2000 "Hegel and Haiti." Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer): 8 2 1 - 6 5 . C h e r n o f f , J o h n Miller 1 9 7 9 African Rhythm and African Sensibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clarke, Kamari Maxine 2004 Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. C o h e n , Peter F. 2002 "Orisha Journeys: T h e Role of Travel in the Birth o f the Yoruba-Atlantic Religions." Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 1 1 7 : 1 7 - 3 5 .

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Cooper, Frederick 2001 "What Is the C o n c e p t o f Globalization G o o d For? A n African Historian's Perspective." African Affairs 100: 1 6 9 - 2 1 3 . Creel, Margaret Washington ig88 "A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs. New York: New York University Press. Csordas, T h o m a s J. 2004 "Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and the T h e o r y o f Religion." Current Anthropology 45 (2): 1 6 3 - 8 5 . Daniel, Yvonne 2005 Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Drewal, H e n r y John, and J o h n Mason (with a contribution by Pravina Shukla) 1997 Beads Body and Soul. Los Angeles: U C L A Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Freyre, Gilberto [ 1945] 1959

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Harvey, David 1989 Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Herskovits, Melville J. [ 1 9 4 1 ] 1958

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Johnson, Paul Christopher 2002 Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomble. O x f o r d : O x f o r d University Press. Kramer, Fritz [1987] 1993 The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa. Translated by Malcom R. Green. L o n d o n : Verso. Lienhardt, Godfrey 1961 Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. O x f o r d : O x f o r d University Press. Matory,J. Lorand 1999a "English Professors of Brazil: O n the Diasporic Roots o f the Yoruba Nation." Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1): 7 2 - 1 0 3 . 1999b 'Jeje: Repensando nacoes e transnacionalismo." Mana: Estuddes deAntropologia Social 5 ( 1 ) : 5 7 - 8 0 . 2003 "Gendered Agendas: T h e Secrets Scholars K e e p about Yoruba-Atlantic Religion." Gender and History 15: 408-38.

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2005a Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the AfroBrazilian Candomblé. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2005b Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics ofMetaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion. 2d ed. New York: Berghahn. 2007 "Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions." Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (3): 398-425. Mintz, Sidney 1998 "The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From Area Studies to Transnationalism." Critique of Anthropology 18 (2): 1 1 7 - 3 3 . Omari, Mikelle Smith 1984 From the Inside to the Outside: The Art and Ritual of Bahian Candomblé. Monograph Series, 24. Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, UCLA. Palmié, Stephan 2002 Wizards and Scientists. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Paulson, Michael 2006 "To Reach out, O'Malley Turns to Blogging." Boston Globe, September 2 1 , B i , B4. Rotberg, Robert 1976 "Vodun and the Politics of Haiti." In The African Diaspora, edited by Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg, 342-65. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sahlins, Marshall 1985 Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sassen, Saskia 1998 Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility ofPeople and Money. New York: New Press. Thompson, Robert Farris 1983 Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House. Thornton, John 2006 Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400—1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vasquez, Manuel A., and Marie Friedmann Marquardt 2003 Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Vega, Marta Moreno 2000 The Altar of My Soul: The Living Traditions of Santería. New York: One World/Ballantine. Verdery, Katherine 1998 "Transnationalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, and Property: Eastern Europe since 1989." American Ethnologist 25 (2): 291-306.

Chapter 10

Global Breathing Religious Utopias in India and China P E T E R VAN D E R V E E R

In the current phase o f globalization there is a rapid spread o f forms o f evangelical and charismatic Christianity, as well as pietistic Islam. While much attention is given to the rise o f these so-called fundamentalist forms o f world religion, the globalization o f Asian forms o f spirituality escapes analytic scrutiny. O n e reason for this is the false assumption that the spiritual entails a withdrawal from social and political life and derives its authority precisely from that withdrawal. This assumption is operative in the idea that "spiritual masters" live in the mountains but ignores the possibility o f these masters coming down onto the plains. In China one finds, for instance, the idea that the Daoist or Buddhist master lives on a mountain, but there also exists the possibility o f his leaving the mountain as an accomplished master (chusanle) and serving a purpose in society. 1 Moreover, Eastern spirituality is often perceived as transcending secular reality. Here I want to argue that, in fact, the spiritual is political and the secular turns out to be spiritual. In most places in the world, o n e can take courses in Yoga and Qigong. These forms o f Indian and Chinese spirituality have gone global but are still connected to national identities. T h e r e is no contradiction between the global and the national, since the national is directly connected to a global system o f nation-states. They are often described in the literature that accompanies such training courses as Indian or Chinese "gifts to the world," but that does not mean that the givers have lost them. They are complex products o f the national construction of "civilization" and are at the same time aspects o f cosmopolitan modernity. However transcendent they claim to be as forms o f spirituality, they are deeply embedded in political and economic history. Historically, yoga is an ancient system o f breathing and body exercises that was reformulated at the end o f the nineteenth century as part o f Hindu nationalism but simultaneously as a form o f Eastern spirituality 263

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that was an alternative to Western society's colonial materialism. Today it is e m b e d d e d in global ideas of health and g o o d living, as well as in m o d e r n management practices and corporate culture. Historically, in China there are several forms of exercise, including breathing, that are called Qigong, which develop skills (gong) to use the vital energy (qi) present in the body to connect it to the natural world of which it is a part. Like Yoga, these exercises are part of ancient systems of thought and practice but have been reformulated in recent history and made part of national heritage. Whatever the connections of these exercises in Yoga or Q i g o n g with theologies, cosmologies, and broader discursive traditions, the central issue for those who participate in them is to learn what the exact practice is and what its benefits are. Much of the study of such practices, such as Eliade's (1958) classical treatise, is therefore devoted to their phenomenology and historical connection to textual traditions. T h e differences between breathing techniques and their mental and physical effects are also the subject of much debate among the different schools that propagate certain styles. This is not, however, my approach here, as I want to compare Yoga and Q i g o n g not as breathing techniques or spiritual exercises but as historical and political p h e n o m e n a that are intimately related to the construction of modernity. That religious movements dealing with spiritual matters and body exercises (in short, with spiritual transcendence attained through the body) are a central part of modern political and economic history may confound those who believe in a sharp division between the religious and the secular. Such a secularist view of modernity can be f o u n d in India and China as much a s — and perhaps more t h a n — i n other parts of the world. For example, in January 2001 I saw in one of India's English-language newspapers a photograph of an Indian holy man who had taken a bath in the sacred confluence of the Yamuna and the Ganges at Allahabad during the Kumbh Mela, a bathing festival occurring once every twelve years and attracting more than 20 million pilgrims. T h e caption read, "This sadhu has taken his bath at the Kumbh and now he is o f f again to the Himalayas." At one level this can be taken to express the essence of renunciation—namely, that its proper place is outside normal society, in a cave in the Himalayas. At another level one can take this also to express the normative view of modern, English-reading Indians: renouncers do not belong to modern, secular society and thus should be confined to their Himalayan caves. These oppositions between the world and the transcendent also haunt the sociological theory of renunciation. Dumont (1966), in his influential essay on world renunciation, posits the caste society of the householder as a holistic universe, squarely opposed to the world of the renouncer, who is conceived as the individual outside society. O f course, Weber (1925) emphasizes a transition from tradition to modernity when, in his analysis of the emergence of Protestant modernity, he makes a famous distinction between inner-worldly and outer-worldly asceticism. T h e

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latter belongs to the grand religious systems of ancient civilizations, such as Hinduism and Buddhism; the former is central to the emergence of capitalist modernity. In contrast to these views focusing on the internal development of these civilizations and their essential differences, I would argue for an interactional perspective, focusing on the interaction of Indian and Chinese nationalisms with imperial modernity (van der Veer 2001). These great traditions of renunciation and spiritual exercise in India and China are transformed and reformulated in various political, economic, and cultural encounters with Western powers. Such interactions are a major element in the formulation of global and national modernities in Asia and Europe that simultaneously resemble and differ from each other. Basic to these imaginaries is the opposition between Eastern spirituality and Western materialism. This opposition is part of an exceptionalism on both sides of the equation. It explains the exceptional material success of Western modernity and the material defeat of the colonized societies in the East, as well as the philosophical shallowness of that success in the face of the exceptional richness of Eastern traditions. Ideological movements such as anti-imperialism, nationalism, PanAsianism, spiritualism and also scholarly developments such as Orientalist philology and comparative religions all partook in this basic opposition. It is in this broad context that the place of Indian and Chinese spiritual movements in global and national modernity can be understood. This entails an awareness that terms like religion and spirituality are not simple categories that can be innocently used for translating Indian and Chinese terms but are deeply embedded in the genealogies of modernity that one is trying to grasp. It is precisely spirituality's participation in secular, modernist culture that produces its traditional authenticity. In this contribution I want to juxtapose and compare contemporary Indian and Chinese spiritual movements. Since I believe that these forms of spirituality cannot be understood without taking the imperial encounter and the nationalist response into account, I have to start by sketching some of the relevant historical background.

SPIRITUAL NATIONALISM

Yoga has a long history and a foundational Sanskrit text in Patanjali's "Yoga Sutras," which was probably composed around the fifth century c.E. Breathing techniques and other bodily exercises were developed as part of religious disciplines that also entailed image worship or asceticism. Spiritual masters or gurus who, more often than not, had taken a vow of celibacy were connected to spiritual lineages in which knowledge was transmitted to these religious disciplines. Celibacy in connection with other forms of renunciation has a number of sociological consequences. It replaces ideas of natural kin-

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ship and reproduction with those of spiritual kinship and reproduction. This is quite immediate in the case of the Ramanandi ascetics, among w h o m I have done fieldwork and who use kinship terms such as parivar (family) and bhai (brother) to refer to the ties between celibate initiates of one guru. They refer to the initiation formula as the seed-mantra (bija-mantra), mimicking natural reproduction rather closely. In such a way an alternative social network emerges that can be used for all kinds of purposes. Such a network is a reasonable conduit for pooling resources over a longer time, which explains the active role of Hindu ascetics in moneylending over a long historical period. Since the status considerations, which are central to marriage practices in hierarchical societies, are of less relevance to the ascetic networks, they tend to be more open, more m o b i l e — b o t h spatially and socially—and thus quite amenable to particular economic activities, such as long-distance trading and soldiering, in which a sedentary, agrarian population finds more difficult to engage. I have argued in earlier work that the opportunities for Hindu ascetics to engage in long-distance trade, moneylending, and soldiering drastically declined during the eighteenth century due to the transformations brought about by the colonial regime (van der Veer 1988). T h e famous Sannyasi rebellions of the end of the eighteenth century are a clear expression of this changing landscape. In precolonial India military groups of ascetics developed ascetic practices and techniques of breathing, as well as fighting techniques. T h e colonial state banished all marauding groups that could challenge its monopoly of violence and consequently warrior asceticism came to end, especially after the conquest of the Sikhs in the Punjab. Ascetic violence has never been totally eradicated from the Indian religious scene, as shown by the Khalistan movement, for example, but it definitely became more marginal to it in the colonial period. In nineteenth-century century urban religiosity, a number of new elements come into play. First, there was the challenge of Christian missionaries who claimed not only that Christianity was the true religion but also that Hinduism was a backward religion. A number of movements responded to this challenge by arguing that Hinduism was not only spiritually more true than Christianity but also modern (as opposed to backward), though in dire need of reform. It is in this context that traditional practices such as yoga and martial arts became part of an urban religious lifestyle. Indian religious movements in the second half of the nineteenth century reappropriated Western discourse on "Eastern spirituality." 2 1 would not quite know how to translate spirituality into Sanskrit, but it is a fact that Hindu religious discourses are now captured under that term. To be useful in the contestation of Christian colonialism, the translation of Hindu discursive traditions into "spirituality" meant a significant transformation of these traditions. This process can be closely followed by examining the way in which one of the most important reformers, Vivekananda, made a mod-

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ern, sanitized version of the religious ideas and practices of his guru, Ramakrishna (a practitioner of tantric Yoga), for a modernizing middle class in Calcutta. While we can still interpret most of Ramakrishna's beliefs and practices in terms of Hindu discursive traditions, with Vivekananda we enter into the terrain of colonial translation. Vivekananda's translation of Ramakrishna's message in terms of "spirituality" was literally transferred to the West during his trip to the United States after Ramakrishna's death. He visited the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, a sideshow of the Columbian Exposition, celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the New World, but perhaps more important Chicago's recovery from the Great Fire of 1871. Religions represented in this show of religious universalism included Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Islam, Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, and various others (Ziolkowski 1993). But the show was stolen by the representative of Hinduism, Swami Vivekananda. In his speech to the Parliament, Vivekananda claimed that "he was proud to belong to a religion which had taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance" (Mullick 1993: 221). Vivekananda's spirituality was not modest or meek; it was forceful, polemical, and proud. As the response in the Parliament and in his further lecture tours in the United States indicates, this was a message that resonated powerfully among American audiences. His writings in English often compare the lack of spirituality in the West with its abundance in India. Vivekananda was probably the first major Indian advocate of a "Hindu spirituality," and his Ramakrishna Mission, the first Hindu missionary movement, following principles set out in modern Protestant evangelism. 3 A major achievement was Vivekananda's creation of Yoga as the Indian science of supra-consciousness. Yoga was now made into the unifying sign of the Indian nation, not only for national consumption, but for the entire world. This was a new doctrine, although Vivekananda emphasized that it was ancient "wisdom." This was especially true of the body exercises of Hatha Yoga, underpinned by a metaphysics of mind-body unity, which continue to be a major article of the health industry, especially in the United States. What I find important in Vivekananda's construction of Yoga as the core of Hindu "spirituality" is that it is devoid of any specific devotional content that would involve, for example, temple worship and thus a theological and ritual position in sectarian debates. This lack of religious specificity, together with the claim to be scientific, is crucial for the nationalist appeal of Vivekananda's message. From Vivekananda's viewpoint, religion is based on reason, not belief. Yoga is legitimized as a scientific tradition in terms of rational criteria. An offshoot of this is that health issues could be addressed in terms of a national science of Yoga. I would suggest that Vivekananda has developed a translation of Hindu

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traditions in terms that are remarkably similar to what is cobbled together in theosophy and its later offshoot, Steiner's anthroposophy. Vivekananda's construction of spirituality and its relation with nationalism has had enormous impact on a whole range of thinkers and movements. It has influenced thinkers on India as different as Savarkar, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Nehru, but it also had a huge impact on a great variety of Western "spiritual" movements, including the current New A g e one. It is a construction crucial to Hindu nationalism. McKean (1996) has shown the extent to which the idea of spirituality is even used in promoting national products, such as Indian handlooms and handicrafts. T h e r e seems to be no escape from the relentless marketing of India's spirituality today. China doe's not have a cultural translator like Vivekananda, which can be at least partly explained by the fact that English language and literature was not a "mask of conquest" as it was in British India (Viswanathan 1989). But there are interesting parallels between the transformation of Yoga and the emergence of Qigong in the twentieth century. Qigong consists of skills to exercise qi: to cultivate and temper mind and body along their paths to enlightenment. These bodily exercises are connected to conceptions of cosmology, of bodily health, of concentration of the mind, of meditation and quietness. Together they form part of religious traditions that date back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (or the middle of the Ming dynasty). As in the case of Yoga, these conceptions are very variable, and in fact, one can say that we have here traditions of bodily exercise that can be connected to all kinds of understandings of spirituality and cosmic order. Moreover, as in Yoga, there is a direct connection with health. Traditional Chinese medicine used qi exercises to improve the health of the sick and the weak. Thus qi exercises were practiced in the name of a religion, a school of medicine, or even martial arts. That is why these exercises were practiced, developed, and passed on by religious specialists who, as in the Indian case, were organized in religious networks of training and socialization, such as monasteries and other religious institutions. Again, similar to the situation in India, these networks also developed martial arts, and the bodily exercises were part of "internal boxing," which was seen as excellent preparation for "external boxing." Taiji is the name of a form of internal boxing and is now commonly associated with Qigong. Spiritual and bodily exercises belonged to groups that, in their very organization, could be seen as militant. However, it seems that the imperial state in China regarded them as being far more of a threat to state control than was the case in India: the official documents of the Chinese state refer to them as "heterodox cults" and forms of "White Lotus" opposition. There is therefore a long Chinese tradition that sees these activities as threatening the order imposed by the state and its heavenly mandate. Historically, White Lotus was the name of a set of folk Buddhists' lay practices, which date back to the Song dynasty (ter Haar 1992). They entailed

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certain breathing practices that often went with meditation, and magical means to cure illness and maintain health. This is connected with notions of universal salvation, the idea that most people, if not everyone, should be saved. Groups that sometimes rebelled against felt injustices perpetrated by central authority or landowners carried these traditions forward, and such protests tended to be messianic in nature. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century there were dozens of such groups. T h e r e were probably millions if not tens of millions of people enrolled at one time or another in these sorts of religions. In the Republican period, in some instances, they borrowed from the White Lotus complex the ideas of the end of the world and of universal salvation. Many of these groups also added to their practices all sorts of charity works, famine relief, education, opium-addiction cures, and the education of women. While these movements were originally part of peasant culture in the nineteeth century, responding to the rise of the bourgeoisie, middle-class participation soon emerged. To this changing world there also belonged secret societies, such as the Heaven and Earth Society, which arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Ownby 1995). These groups were significantly transformed, in the context of imperialism, into movements that were deeply influenced by Christianity and that became messianic, such as the Taiping movement, and others that saw themselves as defending traditional Chinese religion against Christianity and imperialism (for example, the Boxer movement). T h e imperial context is immediately clear in the religious uprisings of the mid-nineteenth century. China had seen the failure of two major religious movements that had tried to transform society after the O p i u m Wars. T h e Taiping Heavenly Kingdom m o v e m e n t — a huge group that had a death toll far exceeding 10 million people before it was put down by the Q i n g g o v e r n m e n t — w a s heavily influenced by Christianity (Weller 1994). T h e Taiping believed in one god and thatJesus had died for their sins. Their leader projected himself as the younger brother of Jesus. They used the Bible but gradually connected their beliefs with traditional concepts of spirit possession. They attacked and destroyed the shrines of other religions and showed in that way that their God was superior to the many local gods of the Chinese rural pantheon. At the same time, the uprising was a peasant rebellion against landlords and injustice. T h e other major religious movement was the Boxer movement at the end of the nineteenth century, which, in contrast, responded violently against the expansion of Christianity and imperialism. In the Boxer riots secret societies were involved that used their martial techniques in attacks on Christian converts. Christian missionaries were seen as agents of imperialism. T h e Boxers saw themselves as defending Chinese civilization against the West. T h e failure of these religious movements to transform Chinese society and expel the foreign powers may have helped to pave the way for the strongly secularist movements that followed them. It is certainly true that these move-

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ments have continued to fuel the nationalist imagination in many ways, inspiring such films as Zhang Yimou's House ofFlying Daggers (2004), based on the female counterparts of the B o x e r s — t h e Red Lanterns (Cohen 1992). As I mentioned earlier, China had known a long tradition of statist distrust of folk traditions. Consequently, all the variants of Chinese nationalism took an antireligious, scientist stance. W h e n the Enlightenment category of religion moved into China, "folk religion" was c o n d e m n e d as "feudal superstition" (funjian mixin), while clerical traditions like Buddhism and Daoism came to be recognized as "religions" that should be brought under the control of political authority. Christianity, which had considerable success in China, was essentially seen as foreign and imperialist. All this is quite similar to the Indian case, but a major difference is that Chinese nationalism did not focus on religious identity and difference as its main marker. O n the contrary, it was the attack on folk religion as feudal superstition that marked Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century. T h e modernist attack on magic and superstition is also f o u n d in India, but it is part of reformist strategies within the world religions. In China it was intellectuals w h o had absorbed a scientific worldview who led the campaigns against popular religion in the early twentieth century. In India, however, clerics and intellectuals who wanted to reform their religions by removing superstition and embracing more scripturalist versions led the campaigns. I would suggest that both in China and in India nationalism was confronted with an aggressive Christian missionary project but that in India that project was directly supported by a central colonial state while in China imperialism, however important in the O p i u m Wars and the attacks on the Q i n g government, was never fully in control of the state. In India, nationalists felt that within the colonial state they had to defend their religious institutions through reform. This produced the nationalization of Yoga or the making of Yoga as a national symbol of true Indianness. In China intellectuals, building on the long statist distrust of folk traditions, chose to become truly secular nationalists. This is borne out by the May Fourth Movement and by the attacks on religious institutions and practices during the Republican period. O n the other hand, there was an efflorescence of religious movements and uprisings connected to warlords who were fighting each other in this period.

THE C O N T E M P O R A R Y SCENE

In China, both in the Republican period and in the Communist regime that followed it, science was the sign under which the nation and modernity were conceived. Historically, this is first expressed clearly in the May Fourth Movement of 1 9 1 9 that saw itself as "already enlightened" and on the way to bring secular enlightenment to the people of China. This gave rise to a number

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of campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s against religion. T h e Kuomintang government appropriated temple land, and activists destroyed images and attacked temples and other religious institutions. All of this resembles the Boxer Uprising of the nineteenth century in its iconoclasm (although this similarity would be completely lost on the participants), but the main difference was that it was supported by a state that embraced Western science and rationalism. Where in India nationalists often saw it as their duty to protect religion against imperialism, in China nationalists saw religion as an obstacle to the modernization of Chinese society. Religion was seen as superstition, not as a traditional essence of Chinese culture. This attitude derived partly from a Confucian tradition of disdain for the popular, partly from Christian attacks against Chinese traditions, and largely from the great unifying power of the idea of science in modernity. According to Duara (1991), religious groups and secret societies increasingly resisted these attacks in the late 1920s and 1930s, and the Nationalist Party responded to this by trying to distinguish between moral religion and superstition. In that way, the modern ideal of freedom of religion was maintained while traditionalism (often seen as connected to feudalism) was attacked. What Duara may neglect is the importance of a new urban consumer culture in which popular cinema was filled with so-called martial arts/magical spirit films. Film spectators burned incense in the cinema halls and some spectators went to learn Daoism or martial arts from teachers in the mountains (Pang 2004). After the victory of the Communists, all the religious groups and movements that had been present in the Republican period were gradually marginalized and subsequently violently suppressed in the 1950s. T h e spirituality of consumer culture was also repressed until the 1980s. A l t h o u g h in 1 9 1 7 Mao Z e d o n g had written negatively about qi exercises as promoting tranquillity and passivity in contrast to his concern for promoting activity as essential for the survival of China, qi exercises did survive the attacks on traditionalism and feudalism by being aligned to science (Xu 1999). In the 1950s qi exercises were more and more part of a state-sanctioned medical science. In this way qi exercises came to be practiced by spiritual masters who were simultaneously acknowledged physicians. Q i g o n g therapy was thus taken out of the realm of superstition into the realm of scientific clinics. Not only medical science but also physics and biology produced experiments focusing on the existence of qi. However, this scientific sanctification and purification of Q i g o n g did not result in total state control. This is partly inherent in the fact that traditional Chinese medicine, while claiming to be scientific, simultaneously claims to transcend the limitations of "Western" science. At the same time it is a nationalist claim of a superiority of "Chineseness" that is difficult to attack by a state that promotes "socialism with Chinese characteristics," as Deng Xiaopeng called it in 1978. Palmer (2007) has

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shown how much the spread of Q i g o n g d e p e n d e d on networks within the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Personal belief in Q i g o n g by some Chinese leaders helped the growth of interest in these techniques, despite constant attacks by skeptics. Outside state control, however, was the spontaneous Q i g o n g craze of the ig8os in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. People started to do qi exercises everywhere, and to some extent this can be read as setting the body free from the constraints imposed by the state and signifying a transition to greater individual freedom and interaction (see Ots 1994). T h e state tried to channel this spontaneous outburst of Q i g o n g activities into Q i g o n g institutions and movements, but some of them, most notably the Falun G o n g or Falun Dafa, as it was called later, turned out to be a real challenge for state control. O n April 25, 1999, more than ten thousand Falun G o n g adherents from all over China gathered around Zhongnanhai, the capital's political heart, setting the stage for the most serious political case since the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. T h e reason for this gathering was to request from the government the official recognition of the Falun Dafa Research Association, the lifting of the ban on Li Hongzhi's latest publications, and the release of Falun G o n g practitioners detained during previous demonstrations. According to the People's Daily, the government had never forbidden the practice of normal exercises: "People have the freedom to believe in and practice any kind of Q i g o n g method, unless when people . . . use the banner of exercises . . . to spread superstition, create chaos and organize large-scale gatherings which disturb social order and influence social stability" (June 15, 2000). T h r e e months after the demonstration in Beijing, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued a circular that forbade members of the Communist Party to practice the Falun Dafa. T h r e e days later, on July 22, the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued the decision to outlaw the Falun Dafa Research Association (Chang 2004). 4 Falun G o n g was founded by Li Hongzhi, born, according to the authorities, on July 7, 1952, but according to his own autobiography on May 13, 1 9 5 1 , which would be the date of birth of Sakyamuni, the Buddha, and thus allow him to claim that he is a reincarnation of the Buddha. In 1991 he started Q i g o n g activities. In 1992 he began giving lectures to a growing audience, and in the following years he registered his Falun G o n g association with the official China Society for Research on Q i g o n g Science. This association is quite typical in its claim to be scientific and connected to health, but it seems to go further in its moral teachings and connection to Buddhist and Daoist cosmology. It connects to the ancient idea that through physical qi exercises one also cultivates one's moral character. T h e r e is a messianic streak in the teachings of Li Hongzhi, with an emphasis on all kinds of evils that threaten the world (now including the Communist Party) and the position of Li Hongzhi as savior. When the state cracked down on the Falun

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Gong it claimed that it had outnumbered the 5 5 million-strong Communist Party in April, but this was revised down to a mere 2 million in November 1999. It is impossible to say how many followers have gone underground, but it is probably a substantial number. Moreover, the Falun Gong has become very active transnationally among diasporic Chinese communities, especially since its founder has fled China and lives in New York. However, it is hard to say how important the Falun Gong has become, since it is only one movement in a global spread of taiji, Qigong, and forms of martial arts under the rubric of Wushu, such as Qiaolin and Kung fu. Although the practitioners emphasize the differences between these practices and traditions, from a historical and sociological viewpoint they form one tradition with a number of variations. In India modernity is also understood under the label of science. However, already in the nineteenth century the Indian discussions emphasized the scientific nature of indigenous traditions. Secularist attacks on traditional religion were rare, while attempts to purify religion from so-called superstition and show the scientific foundations of religion were taken up by reformers in a number of protonationalist and nationalist movements. Rational religion, as a major current in these reform movements, offered a home to intellectuals who wanted to reflect on developments in science from Hindu traditions. A good example is J . C. Bose ( 1 8 5 3 - 1 9 3 7 ) , a renowned physicist and plant physiologist, whose work on electrical waves and on plant consciousness was animated by attempts to understand the unity of nature from the perspective of the Hindu philosophical school of Advaita Vedanta in which Bengali intellectuals had been trained. In this regard, the intellectual projects of Hindu scientists remind one of those of British scientists like Edmund Gosse Sr. The social network formed by such scientists and Hindu reformers like Swami Vivekananda shows how the development of scientific and religious thought was interwoven. Philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Aurobindo embraced Bose's vitalistic science eagerly (Nandy 1995). Traditions of rational religion show a familiar fight against superstition and popular religion. Common Hindu practices, such as image worship, are rejected as recent accretions of the pristine faith. We can find similar rejections and active repressions of popular religion in contemporary Buddhist and Islamic reform movements, and also Chinese "scientism." In the early twentieth century Chinese nationalist intellectuals supported campaigns for destroying popular religion because they saw it as an unnecessary anachronism and an obstacle to progress. Their view was called scientism—placing all reality within the natural order and deeming it knowable by the methods of science (Duara 1995). Modernization is seen as a scientific project, but not only by secularists or by the colonial state. Active repression of popular religion is shared by secularist and fundamentalist movements and legitimized under the sign of science and rationality. Secular nationalists like Jawa-

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harlal Nehru, who became India's first prime minister, were convinced that the spirit of science had to be harnessed to the project of reindustrializing India. They did not see technoscience as, in itself, solving the basic needs of life. It could only do so if supported by a morality superior to that available in colonialism. In The Discovery of India (1946), N e h r u argued that Indian civilization possessed great moral resources that could help it to appropriate m o d e r n science for the c o m m o n good. 5 T h e great dissenting voice here was Mahatma Gandhi, who was, in my view, both a political and a religious leader. In his Hind Swaraj (1947), Gandhi launched a fundamental critique of m o d e r n civilization. In Gandhi's view, India could only be truly (i.e., spiritually) independent if it rejected the violence of technoscience and instead located "industry" within the tradition of artisanship. A strong element in this was the notion of inner-worldly asceticism—a spiritual rejection of the materialism ofWestern (colonial) civilization. It is not that such voices do not exist in China, but they are quite marginal. Gandhi called himself a karmayogi—a man w h o practices the Yoga of activity—and in this way combined Mao's revolutionary spirit and the ancient spiritual tradition of inner tranquillity. Gandhi modernized and nationalized Yoga by calling it "experiments with Truth." From Vivekananda's pioneering work in the nineteenth century, many offshoots have emerged. O n e clear direction is the same as that taken by the Chinese: namely, Yoga as primarily a physical exercise (Hatha Yoga) and a health practice that can be experimented with by medical science. Yoga is seen to be extremely healthy for the body and for the mind. Another clear direction is the creation of healthy, strong masculinity for the Hindu nation. This is primarily the field of martial arts to which Yoga practices can be linked. Like the Falun G o n g in China, the religious organization of bodily disciplines in India can gain a political meaning. This is true for organizations like the Rasthriya Swayamsevak Sangh (a militant nationalist organization in which bodily discipline is central) and the related Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which is organizing the various spiritual leaders and their movements under a common nationalist platform. These organizations are antisecular and, since India is a democracy (unlike China), they are, politically, part of a nationalist p a r t y — t h e Bharatiya Janata Party—that was able to rule India for ten years before the elections of 2004. Clearly, the democratic system in India is able to give a wide berth to nationalist movements that promote traditional practices together with a political agenda. At the same time, one needs to observe that such H i n d u nationalist movements strive for an Indian Utopia that leaves little space for Muslims and Christians and are deeply involved in widespread violence against minorities. It is this kind of violence in civil society that the Communist Party in general has been able to control by repression. A particularly interesting development in Yoga is its alignment with the development of global capital. Since Yoga was never seen as subversive by

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the powers that be, it became a recognized element in middle-class religiosity. As such, it followed the trajectories of this class that became more and more transnational in its orientation during the 1960s. Its older connection with nationalism was not thereby forgotten or marginalized but utilized in identity politics in the countries of immigration, especially the United States. Indian spirituality is something to be proud of since many non-Indians are also attracted to it. The global reach of Yoga was stimulated by groups, such as the Divine Life Society, founded by Sivananda but can be best understood by the fact that its origins lie in an imperial modernity mediated by the English language. From the English-speaking world Yoga, however, has spread to the rest, making for 4 million Yoga practitioners in Germany and 13 million in the United States (Strauss 2005). In the 1960s Yoga became part of the youth revolution that shook Western culture. Promoted by popular music groups like the Beatles, Indian spirituality became a lifestyle element that could be commodified and marketed in a variety of ways. In the West it became part of a complex of alternative therapies based on lifestyle and bodily exercise. In light of the therapeutic worldview that is part of global capitalism, it has now also come back to India in the new perceptions of the urban middle class of Indian tradition. Due to the opening up of the market for Eastern spirituality not only Yoga has benefited; a variety of Chinese spiritual exercises such Taiji Quan and Qigong have also gained a transnational market.

CONCLUSION

The transformation in Asia of ancient disciplines of the body or disciplines of the self, as Mauss and Foucault called them, under the influence of the imperial encounter and nationalism has made Yoga and Qigong signs of Indian and Chinese tradition and modernity. One element of this complex story is that enlightened secular reason has not become hegemonic. Attacks on religious traditions that are the discursive foundations of these disciplines of the self have been mounted with varying success both in India and in China. But in both cases, a politics of difference emerged that had to assert a historical pride in one's national civilization against imperial projects. The claim that traditions were forms of superstition and signs of backwardness and that modernity had to be scientific could be responded to by a counterclaim that these traditions were, in fact, scientific when brought down to their very essence. Especially in the human encounter with the frailties of the flesh, such as disease and death, medical science clearly showed its limitations. It is thus particularly in concern for health that these practices came to compete with other (often Western) forms of medicine. In both India and China movements that propagate religious traditions and especially alternative Utopias can have a political impact. While in India

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such movements became part of, in principle, a legitimate nationalist project (although some offshoots were quickly delegitimized as extremist), in China such movements were under constant attack from both the Kuomintang and the Communists. T h e reasons for this significant divergence can perhaps be f o u n d in both precolonial and colonial histories of the Chinese and Indian polities. T h e Chinese imperial state constantly fought peasant rebellions that were inspired by a religious cosmology, and Chinese intellectuals were brought up in a framework of Confucian distrust of popular religion. T h e failure and bloodshed of two major religious rebellions against Christianity and imperialism in the nineteenth century further promoted the idea of secular science as an answer to China's backwardness. In India, however, religious movements seem to have become gradually part of a spiritual resistance against imperial power and, as such, a major element in the formulation of anticolonial nationalism. In the postcolonial period it is really the liberalization of the Indian and Chinese economies under the impact of global capitalism that has freed the energies of spiritual movements to organize civil society. This is very clear in the Chinese case, where liberalization first gave space to a spontaneous Q i g o n g fever and later to the rise of movements such as Falun G o n g that connect Q i g o n g to older ideas of a moral and political nature. In India one can see this especially in the rise of a Hindu nationalism that rejects an earlier secular and multicultural project of the state by emphasizing Hindu traditions as the basis of Indian civilization, thereby excluding other contributions by religious minorities. It is especially a newfangled urban religiosity that is interested in both Yoga and a strong nation that supports this kind of politics. Indian spirituality was formulated by Vivekananda during a trip to Chicago and has been further developed in constant interaction with the rest of the world. A political figure like Mahatma Gandhi fits seamlessly in this history. When, from the 1970s and 1980s and continuing to the present day, highly educated members of the Indian middle class migrate to the United States for medical and engineeringjobs, they are confronted with an aggressive marketing of Indian spirituality in the markets for health, exercise, and management practices. This, in turn, is brought back to India, where especially successful new movements such as the Bangalore-based Art of Living with G u r u Ravi Shankar cater to a mobile, transnational class of business entrepreneurs. China's isolation between 1950 and 1980 has ensured a belated entry of Chinese spirituality into this market, but nevertheless it is quickly catching up with products like Taiji Q u a n and Qigong. In the Chinese case, this is enhanced by the strong link with sports and especially martial arts, which are also promoted by the globally popular H o n g K o n g and mainland movies.

GLOBAL BREATHING

2JJ

NOTES

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the New School for Social Research in New York and at the Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. I thank Carol Breckenridge and Mayfair Yang for their invitations. 1. This idea is important in the spread of Qigong; see Chen 2003. 2. See, for a more detailed analysis, the third chapter of my Imperial Encounters (2001). 3. See van der Veer 1994. 4. See David Palmer's excellent discussion in Qigong Fever and the references in Barend ter Haar's Web site: http://website.leidenuniv.nl/~haarbjter/falun.htm. 5. I take here Gyan Prakash's reading of this text in his Another Reason (1999).

REFERENCES

Chang, Maria Hsia 2004

Falungong, Secte Chinoise: Un defi aupouvoir. Paris: Editions Autrement.

Chen, Nancy 2003

Breathing Spaces, Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China. New York: Co-

lumbia University Press. Cohen, Paul 1992 "The Contested Past: The Boxers as History and Myth." Journal of Asian Studies 51 (1): 82-113. Duara, Prasenjit 1991 "Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns Against Popular religion in Early Twentieth-Century China." Journal of Asian Studies 50 (1): 6 7 - 8 1 . 1995

Rescuing History from the Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dumont, Louis 1966

Homo Hierarchicus. Paris: Gallimard.

Eliade, Mircea 1958

Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

ter Haar, Barend 1992

The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History. Leiden: Brill.

McKean, Lise igg6

Divine Enterprise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mullick, Sunrit 1993 "Protap Chandra Majumdar and Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament of Religions. Two Interpretations of Hinduism and Universal Religion." In A Museum ofFaiths: Histories and Legacies of the 1893 World's Parliament ofReligions, edited by Eric Ziolkowski, 221-36. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Nandy, Ashis 1995 Alternative Sciences. Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

2J8

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VEER

Ots, Thomas i g g 4 "The Silenced Body—the Expressive Leib: On the Dialectic of Mind and Life in Chinese Cathartic Healing." In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, edited by ThomasJ. Csordas, 116-38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ownby, David 1995 "The Heaven and Earth Society as Popular Religion." Journal ofAsian Studies 54 (4): 1023-47. Palmer, David 2007 Qigong Fever, Body, Science and the Politics of Religion in China, 194g—1999. London: Hurst. Originally published as Lefievre du qigong, Guerison, Religion et Politique en Chine, 1949—1999. Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2005. Pang, Lakwan. 2004 "Magic and Modernity in China." Positions 12 (2): 299-327. Prakash, Gyan 1999 Another Reason: Science and the Imagination ofModern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Strauss, Sarah 2005 Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts Across Cultures. Oxford: Berg. van der Veer, Peter 1988 Gods on Earth. London: Athlone. i g g 4 Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2001 Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Viswanathan, Gauri ig8g Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Weber, Max 1925 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Vol. 1. Tübingen: Mohr. Weller, Robert i g g 4 Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts, and Tiananmen. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Xu, Jian 199g "Body, Discourse and the Cultural Politics of Contemporary Qigong." Journal of Asian Studies 58 (3): 972. Ziolkowski, Eric, ed. 1993 A Museum ofFaiths: Histories and Legacies of the 1893 World's Parliament ofReligions. Atlanta: Scholars Press.

Chapter 11

The Return Path Anthropology of a Western Yogi KATHINKAFR0YSTAD

In November 2003 Swami Kriyananda (born J. Donald Walters), leader of an American spiritual community named Ananda Sangha (Bliss Society), moved to India with more than a dozen close associates to begin to teach their guru's meditation techniques "back" to India, where they once originated. The presence of American meditation teachers in India represents religious globalization of a very particular kind. It is not merely a case of a religious practice that is brought from the metropolis to the margins or vice versa due to accelerated travel, migration, and communication. It is just as much a case of a transplanted religious practice that finds its way back to its country of origin, a phenomenon I refer to as return globalization. It could also be seen as an instance of what Agehananda Bharati (1970, 1976) terms "the pizza effect," whereby a phenomenon gathers momentum after having gained fame abroad. 1 True, the representatives of Ananda Sangha (or Ananda for short) were not the first foreign disseminators of Hindu-derived practices in India. As early as the beginning of the 1950s Bharati himself (formerly Leopold Fischer) gave numerous religious talks when touring the country as a wandering monk (Bharati 1962). Kriyananda too taught Kriya Yoga in India between 1958 and 1962 (Walters 2001), followed by Western Hare Krishna devotees (Brooks 1989; Narayan 1993) and Transcendental Meditation teachers in the 1970s. 2 Yet Ananda institutionalized return globalization as never before due to their close-knit organization, foreign funding, and high media profile. With Ananda's arrival, Western meditation instruction became a well-known phenomenon among metropolitan middle-class seekers in India. To what extent can models and metaphors from the anthropology of globalization throw light on Ananda's efforts to bring Kriya Yoga back to India? And what contribution can the case of Ananda make to the anthropology 2

79

280

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FR0YSTAD

o f globalization? I w a n t to m a k e two d i f f e r e n t a n d p e r h a p s c o n t r a d i c t o r y arg u m e n t s . First a n d most obviously, I provide an e x a m p l e o f return globalization. A n d s e c o n d , I illustrate the limit o f e m p l o y i n g m e t a p h o r s a n d m o d els f r o m globalization s t u d i e s — n o t only the all-pervasive "flow" t r o p e b u t also A n n a Tsing's reformative "friction" m e t a p h o r (2000, 2 0 0 5 ) — a s analytic prisms f o r u n d e r s t a n d i n g transnational t r a n s c e n d e n c e . T h o u g h b o t h c o n c e p t s are p o w e r f u l analytic tools with indisputable merits, n e i t h e r is o f m u c h h e l p in c a p t u r i n g characteristics that are particular to the religious tradition a n d a p p r o p r i a t i n g society in q u e s t i o n b u t nevertheless essential in e x p a n d i n g o r limiting its g e o g r a p h i c extent. T h e case o f A n a n d a S a n g h a , f o r instance, c a n n o t b e adequately u n d e r s t o o d unless we e x a m i n e the H i n d u n o t i o n o f spiritual lineages, w i t h o u t w h i c h A n a n d a ' s e f f o r t s to b r i n g their g u r u ' s m e d i t a t i o n t e c h n i q u e s b a c k to India w o u l d have b e e n futile. As a n o n spatial c o n c e p t u a l i z a t i o n o f religious transmission, I f u r t h e r a r g u e , the line a g e m o d e l is an emic m o d e l that straightens o u t and b a c k g r o u n d s w h a t looks like a return f l o w f r o m the p o i n t o f view o f globalization theory, the implication b e i n g that the study o f religious globalization must b e equally inf o r m e d by religious a n d social particulars as by analytic f r a m e w o r k s develo p e d within the study o f globalization. M o s t o f the observations I draw o n to sustain these a r g u m e n t s w e r e m a d e d u r i n g the last half o f A n a n d a ' s first year in India. A n a n d a h a d n o t b e e n part o f my original research plan. Until midway in my fieldwork I d i d n o t even k n o w a b o u t this m o v e m e n t , despite my familiarity with Y o g a n a n d a a n d his m e d i t a t i o n t e c h n i q u e , Kriya Yoga. B u t since my fieldwork c o n c e r n e d the u p s u r g e o f N e w A g e spirituality in I n d i a a n d the transnational e x c h a n g e it involved, I i n c l u d e d A n a n d a S a n g h a in my study as s o o n as its n e w s p a p e r ann o u n c e m e n t s m a d e m e aware o f its existence. T h i s was in A p r i l 2004, a n d f r o m t h e n until I left the c o u n t r y in S e p t e m b e r I a t t e n d e d several o f the retreats, m e d i t a t i o n classes, a n d satsangp (devotee gatherings) they a r r a n g e d in N e w D e l h i a n d G u r g a o n , south o f D e l h i . In addition, I draw o n conversations with I n d i a n participants, as well as with the n e x t - i n - c o m m a n d o f A n a n d a ' s b r a n c h in India, Y o g a c h a r y a D h a r m a d a s S c h u p p e , w h o g e n e r o u s l y let m e take part in their a r r a n g e m e n t s . U n f o r t u n a t e l y I was n o t able to talk to Swami K r i y a n a n d a himself, as h e was ill with p n e u m o n i a d u r i n g my first visits a n d too busy with T V r e c o r d i n g , public lectures, a n d writing o n c e h e r e c o v e r e d . B u t fortunately his activities g e n e r a t e d several texts, books, a n d r e c o r d i n g s , m a n y o f w h i c h were m a d e available o n the Internet. H e n c e I was able to follow A n a n d a ' s activities f r o m a distance l o n g after finishing fieldw o r k , as befits a study o f a religious practice u n d e r g o i n g its s e c o n d m a j o r reterritorialization. I b e g i n by e x a m i n i n g A n a n d a ' s e n d e a v o r in I n d i a as transnational flow, or, m o r e precisely, as a r e t u r n flow, a perspective that also u n d e r p i n n e d my

THE RETURN PATH

2: 651-69. Lipner, Julius 1994 Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. London: Routledge. Moore, David J . 2005 "Three in Four Americans Believe in Paranormal." In Gallup Poll News Service. Washington, DC: Gallup Organization. Nanda, Meera 2003 Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Narayan, Kirin 1993 "Refractions of the Field at Home: American Representations of Hindu Holy Men in the 19th and 20th Centuries." Cultural Anthropology 8 (4): 476-509. Nordquist, Ted 1978 Ananda Cooperative Village: A Study of the Values and Attitudes of a New Age Religious Community. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Norsk Telegrambyra 2007 "En av fire nordmenn tror pa reinkarnasjon" (One of Four Norwegians Believe in Reincarnation). Aftenposten, February 5. Openshaw, Jeanne igg8 "Killing the Guru: Anti-hierarchical Tendencies of Bauls of Bengal." Contributions to Indian Sociology 32 (1): 1 - 1 9 . Pedersen, Poul 1995 "Nature, Religion and Cultural Identity: The Religious Environmentalist Paradigm." In Asian Perceptions ofNature: A Critical Approach, edited by O. Bruun and A. Kalland, 258-76. Surrey: NIAS/Curzon Press.

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Platts J o h n T. i960 A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English. London: Oxford University Press. Rawlinson, Andrew 1997 The Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions. Chicago: Open Court. Strauss, Sarah 2000 "Locating Yoga: Ethnography and Transnational Practice." In Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World, edited by V. Amit, 162-94. London: Routledge. 2002 "The Master's Narrative: Swami Sivananda and the Transnational Production of Yoga." Journal of Folklore Research 39 (2-3): 2 1 7 - 4 2 . 2005 Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts across Cultures. Oxford: Berg. Sullivan, Kevin 2007 "Foreign Missionaries Find Fertile Ground in Europe." Washington Post, June 1 1 . Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 2000 "The Global Situation." Cultural Anthropology 1 5 (3): 327-60. 2005 Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Van Houten, Catherine n.d. "Ananda Answers Charges of Financial Misconduct: How 2,000 Devotees Paid Off $6 Million in Legal Fees (and Still Counting) and How We Think about Money at Ananda." www.anandaanswers.com/pages/aaaanFin.html. Walter, Tony, and Helen Waterhouse 199g "A Very Private Belief: Reincarnation in Contemporary England." Sociology of Religion 60 (2): 187-97. Walters, J . Donald [Swami Kriyananda] 2001 A Place Called Ananda: The Trial by Fire That Forged One of the Most Successful Cooperative Communities in the World Today. Nevada City, CA: Crystal Clarity. Weiner, Annette B. igg2 Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Woodroffe, Sir John George 1 g 1 g The Serpent Power; being the Sat-chakra-nirupana and paduka-pancaka. London: Luzak. Yogananda, Paramhansa 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship. Zoller, Claus Peter 2004 "Kabir and Ritualized Language." Acta Orientalia 65: 33-68.

Chapter 12

The Global Reach of Gods and the Travels of Korean Shamans LAUREL KENDALL

Thirty years ago studies of Korean shamans evoked bucolic settings, with gods resident in village households or associated with the trees and rocks of a local landscape. Nostalgia for the vanished world of village rituals infuses much contemporary South Korean folklore. 1 1 remember the ethnographic present of thirty years past as something different from this: the children of village clients had moved to town, a few worked in the Gulf, most knew people who had immigrated to the United States, and some client households were refugees from the north or migrants from points farther south. T h e shamans themselves ranged widely in their work; I accompanied my closest informants on journeys that took us from a village house to the then-northernmost point on the new Seoul subway to a satellite city at its then-southernmost extension. Even so, in the 1970s it would have been difficult to imagine that these same shamans would become international tourists, visiting China, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand on trips organized by their village elders' clubs and that one of them would become the mother-in-law of a Korean Chinese and a Mongolian bride. Korean shamans captured my anthropological curiosity with the ways that they and their spirits conceptualize and c o m m e n t on other dimensions of South Korean life (Kendall 1985, 1996a). Today, amid an urban, mobile, and globally peripatetic population, contemporary shamans and their gods traverse new landscapes, claiming pilgrimage destinations that articulate with unprecedented routes of travel and geopolitics. That they do so through a familiar logic of gods and sacred sites challenges temporally restricted notions of "local religion" with transnational maps. In this discussion of mountains, shamans, and transnational journeys, I use the terms map and landscape in their emergent anthropological sense as "the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical sur3°5

S 3 1 . 233. 239, 242-43, 24849. 25 2 . 254-55. 258, 259ng. See also specific countries Agamben, Giorgio, 175-76116 agency, 3, 7, 4 1 , 147, 158, 1 7 8 ^ 4 , 186, 200m 1, 292 aggiornamento, 35 Aktaj, Ali, 138ns Aladura churches, 83 Aldred, Lisa, 285

Baer, Marc, 1 3 8 ^ Baixinha, 195 Barber, Karin, 2 5 8 m Barquinha, 188 Barth, Karl, 37 Bastian, Misty, 83, 84, 85, 86 Bastide, Roger, 216 Benchekroun, Fouad, I75n4 Benjamin, Walter, i 7 5 - 7 6 n 6 Benkirane, Reda, 5 0 - 5 1 Benslama, Fethi, i8on30 Berger, Peter, 1 Bergson, Henri, 273 Beyer, Peter, 50, 198, 237 Bhabha, Homi, 78 Bhagavad Gita, 2g 1 - 9 2 Bharati, Agehananda, 279 Bharatiya Janata Party, 274 biopolitics, 148

Alevi Bektashi Union, 132-33, 135 Alevi Manifesto, 129, 1 3 9 m 4 Alevism, 1 4 - 1 5 , 1 2 1 - 4 0 Al-Ghazali, A b u Hamid, 15, 145, 154, 157, 158, 162-63, 166, 169, 1 7 3 - 7 5 , I76n6, I 7 7 n i 7 , I77n22, I77~78n24 AI-Qaeda, 241 alterity, 2, 4, 7, 10, 13, 15, 58-59, 61, 68, 69-70111, 9_i, 147-48, 163, i 7 8 - 7 9 n 2 4 Alvarsson, Jan Ake, 47 anachronism, productive, 12, 31, 34, 35, 45 Ananda Sangha, 18, 279-301 Anderson, Benedict, 234, 239, 25gn2 anthropology, io, 12, 33, 38, 42, 46, 59-60, 148, 279, 285, 298, 306 Appadurai, Arjun, 9, 61

33 1

INDEX

Black Atlantic, 1 6 Boddy, Janice, 14, 16 body, 7 7 - 7 8 , g i , 167, 1 7 0 , 1 7 2 , 1 7 3 , 2 3 1 , 239. 2 4 2 - 4 7 . 250. 2 5 2 , 256, 2 6 3 - 6 4 , 2 6 7 - 6 8 , 272, 274, 2 7 5 , 289, 296, 300m 5 Bomfim, Martiniano do, 2 1 5 , 2 2 2n44, 2 2 3 n 5 4 , 256 Borneman, J o h n , 1 3 8 m B o s e . J . C., 2 7 3 Boxer movement, 2 6 9 - 7 0 Brahminic tradition, 293 Braudel, Fernand, 234 Brazil, 1 2 , 1 3 , 16, 38, 4 0 - 4 3 , 4 9 - 5 0 , 5 1 , 78-82,87, 1 8 5 - 2 0 1 , 259ns Britain, 14, 98, 1 0 5 , 107, 1 2 1 , 207, 297. See also England Brown, Michael, 285 Browne, Sylvia, 290 Buddhism, 8 - 9 , 6 1 , 2 3 3 , 240, 265, 267, 270, 297'313 Burroughs, William, 2 0 0 1 1 1 5 Bushmen, 6 cabildos, 2 1 3 , 2 2 i n 3 3 Cachoeira, 2 1 5 , 2 2 i n 3 2 (Jamur, Mehmet, 1 3 5 Canada, 87 C a n f a o Nova Media System of Communication, 7 9 - 8 0 Candomblé, 17, 2 1 3 - 1 5 , 2 2 i n 3 2 , 2 2 2 n n 3 g 40, 2 3 1 , 2 4 9 - 5 7 , 259n7, 259ng (Jankaya, Mehmet Ali, 1 2 9 capitalism, 1 5 , 17, 18, 2 3 1 , 234, 2 4 1 , 2 5 3 54. 257. 2 5 8 n l . 2 7 5 - 7 6 capoeira, 1 2 , 50 cargo cults, 5, 44 Carneiro, Edison, 2 5 3 Carvalho,J.J., 2 0 i n 2 5 Castañeda, Carlos, 187, 2 0 0 1 1 1 5 Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities and Fellowships, 74, 79 Catholicism, Roman, 1 2 , 1 3 - 1 4 , 18, 36, 49, 7 3 - 9 1 , 2 2 o n i 3 , 255 CEFLURIS, 1 9 1 - 9 4 , I99n3 Cem Foundation, 1 3 2 - 3 3 , 1 3 6 , 1 3 9 m g cemevis, 1 2 6 Charismatic Christianity, 6 4 - 6 8 , 263; renewal, 9, 1 2 , 1 3 - 1 4 , 7 3 - 9 1 C h e r n o f f , J o h n , 247 Cherokee, 285

Chiapas, 8 Chicano, 8 Chile, 87 China, 1 7 - 1 8 , 44, 59, 2 6 3 - 7 6 Chirot, Daniel, 86 Choi, Chungmoo, 3 1 7 Chopra, Parveen, 29gn2 Chosön Kingdom, 3 1 4 Christian Mission Society, 2 1 0 - 1 1 Christianity, 1 4 , 3 1 - 5 1 , 5 5 - 7 0 , 9 7 - 1 1 4 , 1 2 2 , i 3 g n i 3 , 2 3 3 , 237, 238, 266, 270, 3 1 3 ; Charismatic, 6 4 - 6 8 , 7 3 - 9 1 , 263; paganized, 1 2 , 14, 4 4 - 4 5 , 48; southern, 40. See also specific denominations Church Missionary Society, 1 0 3 - 4 , 1 1 0 - 1 3 , ii4n6, 2 1 0 - 1 1 citizenship, i g 8 class consciousness, 90 Coelho, Paulo, 50 Cohen, Andrew, 296 Cohen, Peter, 1 6 colonialism, 57 colonization, 45 Congo, 88 conquest, 1 9 6 conversion, 3 2 , 34, 44, 47 Cooper, Frederick, 2 3 3 cosmology, 64, 68 Costa Lima, Vivaldo da, 2 1 5 , 2 1 8 Costa Rica, 7 5 covenant communities, 7 3 - 7 5 Crowther, Samuel Ajayi, 2 2 0 - 2 i n 2 3 Crusades, 3 1 Csordas, Thomas, 48, 58, 60, 6 g - 7 o m , 187, 1 8 9 , i 9 g n 5 , 245, 3 1 0 Cuba, 17, 49, 2 0 5 - 2 3 , 2 3 1 - 3 2 , 234, 242, 249. 2 5 3 - 5 5 cultic milieu, 3 cultural imperialism, 3 culture, 3, 5, 7, 9 - 1 1 , 19, 36, 39, 4 1 , 4 2 43- 44-45> 4 6 . 5 ° . 69, 78, 86, 1 0 7 9, 1 1 1 - 1 2 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 2 , 126, 1 2 9 , 1 3 8 ^ 3 , I 3 8 n 5 , 1 4 6 , 190, 1 9 1 , 206, 2 1 2 , 2 1 7 , 2 2 i n 3 3 , 2 3 3 , 234, 240, 246, 249, 254, 257, 264, 265, 26g, 2 7 1 , 2 7 5 , 2 8 1 , 3 1 4 - 1 5 ; globablization of, 57, 6 1 62; universal, 10, 1 3 , 18, i g , 78, 8 8 90, 1 8 9 Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da, 2 1 4 Cursillo, 7 3 , 88 cyberspace, 1 0

INDEX

Da Vinci Code, The, 45 Dalai Lama, 8 dance, 242, 247-48 De Abreu, Maria José Alves, 79-80 de Coppet, Daniel, 5g De Martino, E., I76n7 de Oliveira, Pedro A. Ribeiro, 79 de-alienation, i g death, 169-70, 1 7 3 - 7 5 Dempsey, Corinne, 78 Deng Xiaopeng, 271 dependency theory, 87 despair, 165-69 development, 65, 67 Dharmadas, Yogacharya, 283, 288, 28g, 293, 296, 2ggn5 diaspora, 11, 19, 205, 211, 233, 234, 24344, 249-51, 2 5 9 n 3 discourse, 1 7 8 ^ 4 Divine Life Society, 284, 289 Divine Providence Community, 89 Dogan, izettin, 132 Dönme, I38n7 dreams, 48, 167, 172, 179 Duara, Prasenjit, 271 Durkheim, Emile, 6 9 m , 241 Duvalier, François, 253 Eastern patristic tradition, 36-37 economic theory, 2 ecumenism, 36-38, 90, 198, 20in25 Edeh, Father, 84-86 Egun (Egùn, Egungun), 216, 220mg, 222n38, 246 Egypt, 14, g8, i77n24 Eisenstadt, S. N., 5 9 - 6 1 , 292 Eliade, Mircea, iggn2, 264 England, 76, g i , 102, 104, H4n3, 22in25, 235, 254. See also Britain Erdemir, Aykan, 1 3 8 m l Erdogan, Tayyip, 135 eschatology, i75-76nn6~7 eugenics, l o g Europe, 2, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 16, 39, 43, 50, 51, 74, 76, 81, 90, 111, 121-24, 126, 128, 12g, 132-37. i 3 8 n n 3 - 4 . i 3 9 n l 1 . ! 5 ° . 155-56, 161, 165, 1 7 0 - 7 5 , 185-86, 190, 192. 194. 1 95~97' !99> 205, 233, 248, 252, 25gn2, 265, 281, 297. See also specific countries European Union, 121-22, 133-34, 137

3

3 3

Eusebius of Caesarea, 37 exorcism, 9 experience, 1, 3-4, 14, 33, 36, 47-48, 58, 66, 6 9 m , 79, 81, 82, 86-89, 9 1 ' 99' 1 1 2 , H 7 . i 4 9 - 5 ( ) . 154. ! 5 8 . 160-61, 163, 166-68, 170, 173-74, I76n7, I78n24, I7gn26, 191, 198, 19g, 232, 238, 240, 245. 2 5 9 n 3 . 290, 307, 319 Fabian, Johannes, 75 Falun Gong, 272-73, 274, 276 Federation of European Alevi Unions, 129 feng shui, 4 Ferguson, James, 285 Fernandes, V. F., 191 fetish, 35 fitna, 168-70, 173 Foucault, Michel, 2 5 8 m , 275 France, 8 - 9 , 50, 87, 121, 139m7, ig8, 235 freedom, 15,47, 49. !34-35. '47- 154. 163, I78n24, 2 i g n g ; of religion, 3, 134, 2 7 1 - 7 2 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 146-47 Freyre, Gilberto, 234, 253 Froystad, Kathinka, 15, 18 fundamentalism, 47 Gandhi, Mahatma, 274, 276 Gelede, 246 geomancy, 3 1 3 - 1 5 Germany, 14-15, 123, 126-32, 137, i 3 g m 6 , 198, 200mg, 275 Ghana, 47, 62, 83 Gilroy, Paul, 206 Ginsberg, Allen, 200m 5 globalization, 1-20, 31, 34, 38, 39, 46, 48, 50, 58, 61, 63-65, 68-69, 73> 75> 8a, 86-87,90, 187, 189, 198-99, 205, 218, 232-38, 240-43, 249, 254, 258, 263, 279-81, 285-86, 298, 306-7, 310, 319; cultural, 57, 61-62; economic, 2-3, 12, 18, 19, 57, 63; neoliberal, 69; "newness" of, 8; reglobalization, 9, 12, 13, 17, 18, 73; religious, 6, 8, 17-18, 27g-8o, 288, 297-99; return, 15, 18, 279-301; reverse, 8,9, 1 5 - 1 6 glyphomancy, 44 Gnosis, 45 Godelier, Maurice, 86 Gods Must Be Crazy, The, 6

INDEX

G o r d o n , Charles, 9 7 - 1 0 0 , 1 0 3 - 4 ,

113.

114113, i i 5 n 2 4 Gosse, E d m u n d , 273 Great Britain. See Britain Greece, 59 Groisman, Alberto, 1 5 - 1 6 Grotius, H u g o , 10 Giilçiçek, Ali Riza, 1 3 1 - 3 2 Gullah, 245 Gwynne, Llewellyn, 1 0 1 - 2 Haiti, 206, 217, 2 2 3 n 5 i , 231, 232, 253 Hall, Thomas, 86 Halliburton, Murphy, 76 Hammoudi, Abdellah, 158 Hanafi, 1 1 4 m 4 Hannerz, Ulf, 281 Hassan II (king o f Morocco), 174, 1 7 9 ^ 5 , 179n27 Hausa, 206 Havel, Vaclav, 122 healing, 13, 4 7 - 4 9 , 7 3 - 7 4 . 76, 77- 8 0 - 8 2 , 8 3 - 8 9 , 91, 214, 222n43, 242, 245, 320n6 heaven, 5 6 - 5 7 , 6 3 - 6 4 , 6 4 - 6 8 Herskovits, Melville, 246 Hindusim, 6 1 , 7 7 - 7 8 , 238, 241, 2 6 5 - 6 7 , 291, 2 9 2 - 9 3 , 297, 3 0 0 n i 0 Hirsch, Eric, 297 Hirschkind, Charles, 6, I 7 7 n 2 0 Hodgson, Marshall, 1 7 7 m 6 Holy Spirit, 62, 6 5 - 6 6 , 82, 91, 246 homosexual practices, 41 Hopi, 7 - 8 Hopkins, Dwight, 10 Hungary, 88 Huxley, Aldous, 2 0 o n i 5 Hyondae Asan Corporation, 3 1 3 Ibn Miskawayh, 157 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, 168 identity, 2, 3, 14, 15, 16, 18, 48, 49, 108, 1 2 1 - 4 0 , 158, 206, 214, 236, 270, 275, 285, 306, 308, 3 1 1 1ER (L'Instance Equité et Reconciliation), i7g-8on27 Ifà, 214, 2 1 5 , 2 2 2 n 4 i , 222n47 Igbo, 8 4 - 8 6 imaginary, 2, 4 immanence, 2, 58 inculturation, 12, 3 5 - 3 9 , 4 1 - 4 2

India, 13, 1 7 - 1 8 , 7 5 - 7 8 , 87, 2 6 3 - 7 6 , 2 7 9 301 Indonesia, 8 Ingold, Tim, 297 Instance Equité et Reconciliation, L' (1ER), i79-8on27 intellectuals, 60 International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services, 7 4 - 7 5 International Society for Krishna Consciousness, 290 Internet, 2, 6, 15, 19, 80, 126, 148, 149, 2 3 9 - 4 0 , 25gn4, 280, 287-88, 3 0 i n 2 i , 3°7 intersubjectivity, 1, 6 - 1 1 , 82 Ipili, 5 6 - 5 7 , 68 Iran, 59, 124 irmandades, 213 Islam, 1 4 - 5 , 1 8 , 4 3 , 4 6 , 5 0 - 5 1 , 5 9 , 6 1 , 9 7 114, 1 2 1 - 4 0 , 1 4 5 - 8 0 , 233, 238, 248, 263, 3 0 0 m 6 Israel, 59 Italy, 88, 8 9 - 9 0 , 193 Iteanu, Andre, 59 Iyâ Nassô, 2 1 5 Izutsu, Toshihiko, 168 Jacka, Jerry, 57, 68 Jakobsh, Doris, 288 Jamaa, 88 Jamaica, 205, 208, 210, 212, 2 1 7 James, William, 1 7 8 - 7 9 ^ 4 Japan, 50, 60 Jaspers, Karl, 5 9 Jenkins, Philip, 39—43 Jerusalem, 57 Jesuits, 37 Jesus, 56, 62, 6 5 - 6 6 , 102-3, 1 1 4 n l 3 jihad, 154, 1 6 1 - 6 4 , 1T2' 1761110, I 7 7 n 2 2 jinns, 1 7 2 - 7 3 Johansen, Baber, i 8 0 n 3 0 J o h n Paul II (pope), 7 4 Judaism, 32-33, 6 1 , 2 4 0 - 4 1 , 249, 2 5 g n i o , 267 Justin Martyr, 36, 42 Kardecism, i g o , 196, 251 Kate, Sister, 8 4 - 8 6 Keane, Webb, 5 Kendall, Laurel, 1 8 - 1 9 Kennedy, J o h n F.,Jr., 7

INDEX

Kim Geum-hwa, 3 1 7 - 1 8 Kipling, Rudyard, 1 0 1 Kogyuryö Kingdom, 313—14, 3 1 6 Korea, 6, 18-19, 3 ° 5 - 2 1 Kramer, Fritz, 239 Kratz, Corinne, 292 Kriyananda, 279-301 Kurds, 127, 136, I39n20, i4on27 kul, 3 0 6 - 1 0 , 3 1 7 , 32onn3-5, 3 2 i n n i 6 - i 7 Lacan,Jacques, 147-48, I7gn24 Lakota, 4, 8 Latin America, 32, 40, 42, 49, 6 1 , 88, 90, 253, 25gn8. See also specific countries Latour, Bruno, 3 4 - 3 5 , 43 Lausanne Treaty, 134 Leary, Timothy, 2001115 liberation theology, 7 9 - 8 1 , g 1 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 239 Logos, 36 Low, Setha, 75 Lowith, Karl, I76n6 Lund, Sarah, 300n8 MacMichael, H. A., 108 MacNutt, Francis, 76, 83 Mäe Aninha, 214, 223n54, 256 Mäe Stella, 256-57 Maffey, Sir J o h n , 107 Mafra, Clara, 4g Mahdi, 98, 1 0 2 - 3 , n 3 Mahmood, Saba, 1 7 7 - 7 9 ^ 4 Malaki, 1141114 Mami Wata, 83, 96 Mao Zedong, 271 marginality, 65 Martin, Ralph, 87 Mary, Virgin, 50, 79, 81-82 master narrative, 3, 10, 90 Matory,J. Lorand, 17, 223n54 Maues, Raymundo, 79 Mauss, Marcel, 275 McKean, Lise, 268 meaning, 10, 32, 46, 48, 50, 64, go, 1 2 3 , 133. H 6 ' '53- 155> 174. 188-89, 236, 274, 305 mediatization, 5, 13, 18, ig, 79-80, 87 meditation, 154, 169, 268-69, 279-80, 283, 288-92, 296-97, 3 0 0 n n i 8 - i g Medjugorje, 50 Merini, Farid, I 7 5 n 4

3 3 5

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 58 Methodism, g i Meyer, Birgit, 47, 62 Middle Passage, 208 migration, 5, 15, 16, 1 4 5 - 8 0 , 207-g, 2 1 3 , 234-35- 279 Milingo, Emmanuel, 14, 75, 8 g - g o millenarianism, 62, 66, 103, 165, I76n7, 240-41 mining, 67 Mintz, Sidney, 233, 234 missionization, 5, 12, 13, 18, 3 1 - 5 1 mobility, 5, 13, 16, 18 modernity, 17, 3 1 , 34, 43-46, 57, 60, 64, 67, 84-85, i38n3, 147, i75n6, 263-65, 273, 275. 3»4 Mohammad Ali, 98 Moon, Sun Myung, 89-90 morality, 66 Morocco, 15, 1 4 5 - 8 0 Mosher, Roberto, 42, 47 Mota, Sebastiao, 190 multiculturalism, 42 music, 10, 160, 242, 247, 275, 306 Muslim. See Islam Naickomparambil, Mathew, 76 nationalism, 14, 1 7 - 1 8 , 1 0 7 - 8 , 1 3 5 , 232, 263, 265, 268, 270, 2 7 5 - 7 6 nations, 2 3 2 - 3 3 , 235, 249-50 nation-states, 17, 20, 2 3 3 - 3 5 , 237-38, 250, 252. 25gn2, 263 Navajo, 4, 7, 48-49 Nehru,Jawaharlal, 274 Netherlands, 16, 50, 1 2 1 , 185-86, 192-99 New Age, 3, 4, 16, 50, 88, 187, 193, 1 9 4 - 9 5 , 197, ig8, 268, 280, 285, 288, 2g2, 295 New Guinea, 5, 12, 17, 5 5 - 7 0 Nguyen, Hien, 307, 32on5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 44 Nigeria, 13, 75, 83-86, 87, 205-6, 2 1 4 - 1 6 , 2 2 o n i 3 , 222n38, 222-23nn47~48, 237, 242, 2 4 g , 254 Nina Rodrigues, Raymundo, 253 Nock, Arthur D., 32-34, 3 7 - 3 8 North America, 8, 76. See also specific countries Notre Dame Cathedral, g Ocalan, Abdullah, I 3 g n 2 3 Oceania, 61 Ogboni, 2 2 i n 2 g , 2 2 i - 2 2 n 3 7

INDEX

O ' H a n l o n , Michael, 297 Ojo, Matthews, 83 Oker, Turgut, 136 O'Malley, Sean P., 259114 Openshaw, Jeanne, 294 orisha (èrisà), 8, 205-23, 2 3 1 - 5 9 orthopraxis, 37 Ortiz, Fernando, 234, 253 Otto, Rudolph, 7

Prandi, Reginaldo, 79 prayer, 66 Price, Richard, 234 Price-Mars,Jean, 253 productive anachronism, 12, 3 1 , 34, 35, 45 prosperity gospel, 5 Protestantism, 10, 14, 36-37, 73, 77, 79, 84, 85, 88, 91, 2 1 3 - 1 4 , 246, 259n3, 264, 267 psychoanalysis, 15, 1 4 5 - 4 8 , 1 5 1

Ottoman Empire, 14, 98, 105, H 4 n i 4 , 1 2 5 - 2 6 , 134, i38n7, i3gn22 Ouardini, Abdallah, 175n4 Oyo Empire, 207, 223n4g, 242, 2 5 8 m Ozyurek, Esra, 14—15

Qigong, 17-18, 2 6 3 - 7 6 Quechua, i g g n 4 Qur'an, 114m 3, 157, 1 6 8 - 6 9 Qutb, Siyyed, 158

Paektu, Mount, 1 8 - 1 9 , 3°6> 3 1 0 _ 1 9 - 3 2 o n i o Palikur, 48 Palmer, David, 2 7 1 - 7 2 , 277n4 Palo Mayombe, 2 4 1 , 261 Pandolfo, Stefania, 15 pan-indigenous, 7, 9, ig Paul, Saint, J 75-76116 Pearse, Samuel, 2 1 4 , 222n4i Peel, J. D. Y., 8 3 , 2 1 7 - 1 8 Pentecostalism, 1 1 , 1 2 - 1 3 , 18, 3 9 , 4 2 - 4 3 , 47-49,61-64, 73-91 Philippines, 44, 48 philosophy, 60; political, 151 Piedade de Gérais, 81 Pierucci, Antonio, 79 pilgrimage, 6, 1 1 , 1 8 - 1 9 , 89, 103, 158, 233, 234. 239. 242. 299, 3 0 5 - 6 , 3 1 0 , 3 1 1 - 3 , 32 i n i 7 place, 63-64, 68 planetarization, 19, 73. See also globalization Plantation Complex, 211 Polari, Alex, 192 politics, 17, 146-48; political philosophy, 1 5 1 portable practice, 4 - 5 , 13, 18 Portugal, 49 possession, 17, 48, 66, 82, 1 1 3 , 172, 197, 2 1_ 3 3 3 > 237, 240-47, 249, 2 5 1 - 5 3 , 25gn8, 269, 306, 307 postcolonialism, 3 1 , 68-69 postmodernism, 68—69, 88-90 Potta Retreat Center, 76 power, 47, 62-64, 66, 73, 75, 102, 106, 108, 1 1 3 , 1 2 3 , 128, 1 3 1 , I38n8, 1 3 8 m l , 146, 156, 2 1 3 , 2 1 5 , 217, 2 2 i n 3 2 , 236, 2 4 1 , 243-48, 255, 257, 258, 2 5 8 m , 2 7 1 , 276, 313,317,318,319

Rafael, Vicente, 44, 48 Rajneesh, Bhagwan Shree, 192 Ramakrishna, 267 Ranger, Terence, 34, 43 rationalism, 1 reenchantment, 2, g, 13, 15, i g reglobalization, g, 12, 13, 17, 18, 73 Reis,Joao, 223n52 religion, 1-12, ig, 32, 36, 46, 47, 5 0 - 5 1 , 58, 68, 75, 78, 82, 86, go, 97, 102, 107, 109, 1 1 2 , 1 2 1 - 2 4 , 126, 1 2 g ~ 3 1 , 1 3 3 - 3 5 , 137. i 3 8 n 5 > 1 4 5 - 4 8 . 1781124, 185, 186, 192, i 9 g n i , 205-6, 2 1 1 , 2 1 3 - 1 4 , 218, 2 2 i n n 3 2 - 3 3 , 223nn49-so, 2 3 1 - 4 3 , 244-49, 253, 257-58, 2 6 6 - 7 1 , 273, 276, 287, 2g8, 300ni6, 3 0 5 - 8 , 3 1 0 - 1 1 ; Abrahamic, 17, 2 4 0 - 4 1 , 243; Afro-Atlantic, 17, 2 3 1 - 3 3 , 2 3 g - 4 4 , 253, 256-58; freedom of, 3, 134, 2 7 1 - 7 2 ; globalization of, 6, 8, 17-18, 27g-8o, 288, 2g7~ gg; karmic, 17, 240; prophetic, 3 3 - 3 5 ; of tradition, 3 3 - 3 5 ; world, 13, 17, 34, 6 1 - 6 2 , 73, 205, 255-56, 263, 307. See also specific religions religious studies, 11 religious tourism, 1 1 , 1 8 - 1 9 remystification, 19 resacralization, 13, 1 9 , 9 1 risk, 1 5 2 - 5 4 , 160 Robbins,Joel, 5, 12, 14, 17 Robertson, Roland, 50 Roman CathQlicism. See Catholicism, Roman Rossi, Marcelo, 80 Sabino, Maria, 187 sacred, 1 , 6 2

INDEX

3 3

S a f o u a n , M u s t a p h a , 1 4 6 , 175112

Strenski, Ivan, 1 0

Sahlins, M a r s h a l l , 2 4 6

subjectivity, 2, 15, 58, 7 9 , 82, 9 1 , 1 4 5 - 4 9 . 1 5 1 , 165, i 7 8 n 2 4 , 232, 249

Sai B a b a , 2 g 1 salvation, 4 9 , 6 5 , 1 9 0 ; salvation history, g o

Sudan,14,97-113

San P a s q u a l R e s e r v a t i o n , g o o n g

S u d a n Political S e r v i c e , 1 0 0 - 1 0 2

S a n t e r í a , 17, 2 1 6 , 2 3 1 , 2 4 9 - 5 3 , 2 5 5 - 5 6 ,

Suenens, Leon Joseph, 74

2

7

59 n 7

Sufism, 1 0 2 - 3 ,

S a n t o D a i m e , 6, 8, 16, 1 8 5 - 2 0 1 S c h m a l z , M a t t h e w N., 7 7 Schmid, Andre, 3 1 4

158.

1 7 7 1 1 1 7 , 287, 2 9 3

suicide, 156, 1 5 9 - 6 2 ,

i76nio

Sun Dance, 8 S w o r d o f t h e Spirit, 7 4 , 7 9

Schüler, Monica, 2 2 3 n 5 0 Scientific Revolution, 46

Tagalog, 44, 48

scientism, 2 7 3 - 7 4

takfiri, 1 7 7 m 3

S e c o n d Vatican C o u n c i l , 3 5

Taussig, M i c h a e l , 1 8 7

s e c u l a r i s m , 1, 1 2 2

theology, 15, 44, 74, 1 4 5 - 4 6 , 150, 158, 165,

secularization,

m

i 7 6 n i o , 198; l i b e r a t i o n t h e o l o g y , 7 9 - 8 1 ,

self, 9, 7 0 m , 80, 82, 9 1 , 1 4 9 , 1 5 1 , 1 5 6 - 5 7 , 1 6 2 - 6 5 , 169, 170, I 7 7 n 2 0 , i 7 7 n 2 2 , i g 8 , 239. 243.

244.

2 4 6 - 4 7 , 24g, 253, 256,

257-58, 275 Serra, R a i m u n d o Irineu, i g o - g i Sezer, N e c d e t , 1 3 5

91 Theosophy, i g o T h o m p s o n , R o b e r t Farris, 206, 2 3 4 T h o r n t o n , J o h n , 206 time, I 7 5 ~ 7 6 n 6 t o u r i s m , religious, 1 1 , 1 8 - 1 9

s h a m a n i s m , 6, 1 6 , 1 8 - 1 9 , 4®. 1 8 6 , 3 0 5 - 2 1

trade, 2 1 4 - 1 7

S h a n k a r , Ravi, 2 7 6

transcendence, l, 59, 62, 6 8 - 6 9

S h a n k l a n d , David, 1 2 6

translocal, 232, 239, 248

Shariati, A l i , 1 5 8

t r a n s n a t i o n a l i s m , 1, 1 1 , 17, 6 8 - 6 9 , 231—59,

Sharkey, H e a t h e r , 111 Shoshoni, 285

298-99 t r a n s p o s a b l e m e s s a g e , 5, 1 3 , 1 6 , 1 8

Sierra L e o n e , 2 0 6 - 8

tribalism, 1 0 9 - 1 0

Sikhs, 2 8 8 - 8 g , 2 9 4 , 3 0 0 m 7

Trimingham.J. Spencer, 1 1 1 - 1 3

S i v a n a n d a , 284

T r i n i d a d , 206, 208, 2 1 0 - 1 2 , 2 1 6 , 2 1 7 ,

S k y l a b , 6, 9 slavery, 8, 2 0 7 - 9 , 2 1 1 , 2 i g - 2 0 n 9 , 2 2 o n i 2 , 2 2 3 n 5 1 > 243. 249. 2 5 1 slave t r a d e , 5, 1 6 , 98, 109, 2 0 4 - 8 , 2 1 5 - 1 6 ,

219118, 2 3 1 , 2 3 4 , 2 4 2 , 2 5 4 T s i n g , A n n a , 18, 280, 2 8 5 - 8 6 , 2 9 2 , 2 9 8 Turkey, 1 4 - 1 5 , 1 2 1 - 4 0 T u r n e r , H a r o l d , 83

2 1 7 , 223n49, 232, 235, 2 4 2 - 4 3 , 249 Smith, Ram and Dianna, 295—96

U g u r l u , A l i Riza, 1 3 3

sociology, 60

U m b a n d a , 194, 195, 2 0 i n 2 i , 231, 251

Soka Gokkai, 290

umma, 1 1 1 , 1 3 7

S o u t h A m e r i c a , 1 9 1 , 1 9 4 , i g 5 , 2001115.

uncanny, 170

See also specific countries

U n i a o d o V e g e t a l , 8, 188, i g g n 3

Soysal, L e v e n t , I 3 8 n 3

Unification Church, 8 9 - 9 0

Spain, i g 3

U n i t e d States, 7 9 , 8 7 - 8 8 , 1 8 8 , i g 9 n 3

Spirit W o r s h i p e r s ' A n t i - C o m m u n i s t

Universal C h u r c h of the K i n g d o m of G o d ,

Association, 3 1 7

4 1 - 4 2 , 49, 50

spiritual m a r k e t p l a c e , 2 - 3 , 9, 18

universal c u l t u r e . See under

spirituality, 7 - g , 1 8 , 3 7 , 4 2 , 7 3 - 7 4 , 80, 87,

U r a p m i n , 5, 1 2 - 1 3 , 17, 5 5 - 7 0

88, 9 1 , 1 4 7 , 1 9 8 , 2 6 3 , 2 6 5 - 6 8 , 2 7 1 , 2 7 5 - 7 6 , 280, 2 9 6

van d e r V e e r , Peter, 1 7 - 1 8

Steil, C a r l o s , 7 9 , 8 1 - 8 2

van G o g h , T h e o , 1 2 1

Strauss, S a r a h , 2 8 4

Vatican C o u n c i l , S e c o n d , 3 5

culture

INDEX

Vega, Marta Moreno, 231, 254-56 Velho, Otâvio, 12, 13, 14 Verger, Pierre, 206, 215, 218, 219114, 2231154 Virgin Mary, 50, 79, 81-82 Vitoria, Francisco de, 10 Vivekananda, 267-68, 273, 274

World Council of Churches, 36-37 world systems theory, 1, 11, 19, 75, 86, 90 Wuthnow, Robert, 86

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 86 Walraven, Boudewijn, 320m 2 Wasson, Gordon, 187 Weber, Max, I7gn24, 264 White Lotus, 268-69 Wingate, Sir Reginald, 104-5 witch, 86, 244 witness, 51 Wood, Daniel, 216 Woodroffe, Sir John George, 289 Word of God Community, 74, 89

yoga, 4, 6, 17-18, 6 3 - 7 6 , 279-301 Yogananda, Paramhansa, 281-83, 294-95, 298, 3 0 0 - 3 0 i n n 19-20 Yogoda Satsanga Society, 288 Yoruba, 8, 1 6 - 1 7 , 205-23, 2 3 1 - 5 9 Yüksel, Müfit, 135

Yai, Olabiyi Bobalola, 223n52 Yassine, Abdessalam, 158, 164, 170, I 7 7 n i 7 , 1

79 n 2 5

Zaire, 75, 88 Zambia, 75, 88, 89-90 Zernine, Mohammed, i 7 6 m o Zoller, Claus Peter, 300n 1 o

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