week on religion, comments by T

Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels; Pessar, From Fanatics to Folk

T.

In her study of the Pedro Batista-millenarian movement, Patricia Pessar sets her own theoretical approach apart from that of Marxist historians for whom the millenarianists’ religion “was a vehicle for prepolitical mobilization or a mask for authentic class struggle” (6). The case of the Santa Brígida community shows, she argues, that millenarian movements were attempts to adapt folk Catholicism to changing and trying times, and thus to construct alternative modernities.
I have to wonder to what extent Pessar’s study really improves on Marxist analyses of millenarianism. In one of the studies that Pessar criticizes, Eric Hobsbawm argues that millenarianism shared with modern revolutionary movements a “profound and total rejection of the present, evil world, and a passionate longing for another and better one” (57), as well as the actual experience of such a better world in the social relations within the movement itself, which appeared to demonstrate to its adherents the realism of their utopian hopes (61-3). This analysis seems to fit the Pedro Batista movement well enough up to the time of Batista’s death or shortly before, when it was politically compliant while radically rejecting prevalent models of social and economic relations between its members. It is only with the beginning of internal politicking and stratification that the movement ceased to fit into a Marxist mould and seemed to be held together no longer by any lived reality of utopian hope but by religious discourse. Here, Marxist theory, for which “religious discourse serves no other purpose than to mask class struggle” (Pessar, 228), does indeed prove inadequate as an analytical tool. Marxist historians might very well answer, however, that the movement ceases to be a matter for historians precisely at the moment that it no longer masks – ‘expresses’ is a better word – class struggle, broadly understood as the rejection of present productive relations. becoming instead a matter for theologians, cultural theorists, or, indeed, ethnographers.
On a personal note, the book certainly held my interest much better in chapters one to four than through its chronicle of communal decline and folklorization in subsequent chapters, where it concerned itself no longer with Santa Brígida’s position within a broader historical trajectory but mainly with its internal tensions and petty squabbles. Here, Pessar’s discussion should have brought out (continued to bring out) the relation of the community to larger structures of power more explicitly, to have broken out of the insularity of the ethnographic mode. To me, a focus on religious practice is interesting only as long as this practice also expresses or constitutes a political position; the intriguing question about Santa Brígida, which Pessar fails to address, is how and why it ceased doing so and became, instead, one of many purely social and spiritual practices.

week on religion, response paper by K.

This week’s readings on religion raised a number of issues for me, specifically:
(1) what are the effects of “folklorization”?
(2) how is the concept of hegemony manifested through divergent religious practices and their relationship with the state or other power-brokers? (relatedly, why am I obsessed with hegemony?)
(3) how do we appropriately write about religion/spirituality? is it okay to portray it these belief systems as a “stand-in” for other concerns (socio-economic, political, etc.), or do we need to take them on their own terms, however we may construe them?
(4) what is the role of “outside” social actors in the representation of religious movements, such as academics, journalists, politicians, and the state?

I do not pretend to have neat answers to any of the questions outlined above, at least not yet. Regarding the first question about folklorization, I think it’s important to complicate any notion of the “corruption” of a belief system when it is marketed for tourists. While this notion has a certain intuitive appeal, it’s appeal is to an idealized and “pure” concept of culture that could possibly be corrupted by exposure to the outside world. On the other hand, how does it change one’s concept of their own culture when one comes to see it as a marketable commodity? Does the produce a kind of “double” looking whereby one comes to see oneself the way a tourist does? And does that matter? Stephan Palmie takes issue with this “theme-park” approach to cultural origins for two reasons, namely that it diverts attention from the questions of why we need to distinguish “pure” cultures from one another, and because it masks the diversity of cultural practice (160-1). I’m going to jump to the third question, because this is more important for me (and Im running out of time…). I especially appreciated Patricia Pessar’s foregrounding of the religiosity of the Pedro Batista movement, refusing to reduce its appeal to mere structural considerations. This is something I don’t think Reinaldo Roman did particularly well in his “Governing Spirits.” I was mildly frustrated with his account because I wanted to know more about the content of different belief systems, especially of Spiritism. He called this a “science-religion”; and I really wished he’d elaborated more on what he meant by that, particularly in light of Palmie’s argument about the interdependence of the science-magic binary. But the broader\n issue with this question is about representation, and about when and how academics pull epistemological rank on the objects of their study, and relate what a religious movement is really about. I’m not sure how problematic this is, because I tend to view an academic study as an act of translation, of relaying a story from one epistemological tradition to another, with the inevitable distortions a translation always implies. At any rate, I look forward to hearing other people’s take on this problem.
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I’m going to jump to the third question, because this is more important for me (and I’m running out of time…). I especially appreciated Patricia Pessar’s foregrounding of the religiosity of the Pedro Batista movement, refusing to reduce its appeal to mere structural considerations. This is something I don’t think Reinaldo Roman did particularly well in his “Governing Spirits.” I was mildly frustrated with his account because I wanted to know more about the content of different belief systems, especially of Spiritism. He called this a “science-religion”, and I really wished he’d elaborated more on what he meant by that, particularly in light of Palmie’s argument about the interdependence of the science-magic binary. But the broader issue with this question is about representation, and about when and how academics pull epistemological rank on the objects of their study, and relate what a religious movement is really about. I’m not sure how problematic this is, because I tend to view an academic study as an act of translation, of relaying a story from one epistemological tradition to another, with the inevitable distortions a translation always implies. At any rate, I look forward to hearing other people’s take on this problem.

Review of Patricia Pessar’s From Fanatics to Folk – by C.

In her book From Fanatics to Folk, Patricia Pessar explores millenarian movements in Brazil.  Her research focuses on the romeiros of Santa Brigida, a religious community founded in the 1930s by Pedro Batista. Pessar aims to situate Pedro Batista’s movement within a wider historical frame to analyze the social, political and religious components  that link millenarian communities such as the Canudos, Juazeiro and Contestados. For Pessar, Brazilian millenarianism is understood as a form of popular culture. Therefore, issues of power within the community’s elite and the subaltern, and their relationship to the state are central. However, Pessar explains that several authors have chosen to highlight the state and the capitalist economy in their narratives, overlooking or marginalizing elements of religious meaning, ecclesiastical and Folk Catholic institutions in their accounts. She claims that religious believes should be central to the understanding of millenarian movements and in her book she intends to bring these up to front.

As Pessar admits, bringing religion in when studying millenarian movements seems rather obvious. The fact that -according to Pessar – many authors have failed to include a description or analysis of millenarian’s religious believes adequately raises several questions regarding how the subject of religion is approached in the academy. Is there a discomfort in the academy with matters of religious believe? How are we to understand people’s believes? How are scholars (post-)modern ways of thinking, prejudisms or bias regarding faith shaping the narratives they construct? Is believe a discourse different from the one we feel at home? I would have appreciated a fuller discussion on the meaning of faith to the Santa Brigida community, their understanding of their religion, as well as a deeper account on their religious rituals within the community.

I think From Fanatics to Folk greatest strength is Pessar’s analysis of millenarianism as an ongoing social / cultural production. Pessar tracks the historical perceptions of this movement, and romeiros struggles among themselves and with outsiders over matters of representation. She effectively starts her narrative in the first decades of the twentieth century when millenarians were seen by the state and the Church as fanatical and less enlightened. She describes the romeiros’ efforts to resist denigration and maintain their believes, convictions and practices, contesting hegemonic rules and modernity. Just a few decades later, the production a completely new discourse was taking place. There was now a concern for “cultural rescue”, “national patrimony” and “social memory”. Rethinking the value of the folk to cater to the development of the tourist industry was in the agenda. Now the struggle was in the romeiros resistance to turn Santa Brigida’s life and history into a commodity for the tourist market. Pessar’s selection of her ethnographic accounts of the conflicts between the political representatives of the community and the romeiros, such as the debates over the construction of the museum for Pedro Batista’s belongings, or the discussion over the burial procedures of Maria das Dores clearly illustrates the conflicts within the community regarding the coexistence of faith and modernity. There is extreme value in Pessar’s analysis, which can be mobilized to other cases when trying to explain what are the consequences for the community, and how is the practice of faith affected when religious practices become a commodity or a form of economic income.

spirits, religion, modernity and other issues; comments by R.

Ruth Behar Translated Woman. Chapter: “¡Viva el General Pancho Villa!” and Palmié’s Wizards and Scientists.

Esperanza’s story, Ruth Behar’s story, and Mexican-US history in many ways are entangled, connected and complexly overlapped. The anthropologist storytelling of a relationship with a “proud” and “courageous” woman from the other side of the border recreate the journey of Esperanza’s story into the US. And one particular moment of the story is how Esperanza is cured and guided though the help of a spiritist, Chencha, who is a medium of Pancho Villa. Chencha, this “manly woman” or “macha”, run a spiritist center in San Luis de Potosí that attracts people from the rural and urban areas. When Chencha goes into trance first Amalia Diaz de Bonilla, one of Villa’s many women as Esperanza says, comes to let the audience know that Villa is looking forward to celebrate his own birthday party. Then Villa comes and starts talking with the audience asking them to march as his army, what people do within the center. Then Villa asks them how they are, and people begin to tell their problems and testimonies. For each person Villa founds ways to cure and bless her or him, and more importantly to cut the evil produced by the envy or the harm made by the enemies.

Then, Chencha/Villa asks Ruth Behar if she wanted to know how to cure, and if so she/he asked her to bring her/him 3 coins of 1 peso (almost out of circulation at that time). Behar founds herself in the position of asking the rest of the people for 3 coins completely devaluated and wonders how genius Chencha/Villa was to ask the rich Gringa for coins without value. She manages to find them and Chencha/Villa tells they are one for her, one for her family and one for the pueblo, and she must always have them if she wants to learn how to cure.
The spirit of Pancho Villa, of Niño Tomasito, of Amalia Diaz de Bonilla, and other entities of the spirit world are part of our same world but their depictions are a problematic issue for the scientific rationality heir of the enlightened enterprise. Pancho Villa’s images available in the Mexican urban and rural landscape, especially in the markets, showing “the man who dared to invade the US”, with prayers to the man who “triumphered over the powerful” and “made his enemies back down” are part of “popular cults” (for a lack of better worlds) also present in all Latin America in different forms. Religious experience that convey the strength and powers of men and women that defy the powerful and help the poor are often mixed with political experiences such as Pancho Villa’s, and this should not be seen as contradictory or problematic.

In Argentina the Guachito Gil or the Difunta Correa are examples of these types of experiences disengaged from official religious institutions. One problem, though, is how to relate these experiences with the discussion of traditional/modern, hegemonic/subaltern, patriarchal/women-empowering societies such as Mexico, Argentina or Canada? In some aspects curing or doing harm with the help of Pancho Villa could be seen as the weapons of the poor paraphrasing Scott? Behar mentions that Esperanza found her way to curse her violent and evil husband who became blind, the same happened to her mother doing harm to her biological father who died alone “like a dog.” This should also be seen as a gender vengeance? But is it religious experience an antidote to political, economical and symbolical injustice? Is it kinship and the sexual domain the epicenters of spiritual and religious struggles? Or is it more than that? Behar starts her book with the story of a serpent that has not only to be killed by Esperanza but also its tongue has to be cut in order not to let the serpent tells Esperanza killed it. Pancho Villa is more a metaphorical force for the historical imagination relocating and unfixing the fixity of gender while genderizing history and giving strength for the female and class struggles?

These “problematic” issues (spirits, mediums, Villa’s presence in the living, power relations) raised in Behar’s story are at the core of Palmié’s Wizards and Scientists. He asks what makes “certain claims on the past contextually negotiable and dispels other beyond the threshold of credibility” (5)? Things like ghosts or the spirit of a black slave called Tomás behind Palmié’s back are usually not considered as part of the anthropological or historical work. But, Palmié asks, stories of black slaves corpses killed by the slavery/colonial/industrial/modern machinery are not “part of the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West as a whole” (9)? So here “religion” becomes “politics” and vice versa. [Note: I was writing this, reading Palmie’s book with the TV on, when a CBC documentary about the murdered of Alexandra Wiwcharuk in Saskatoon in 1962 was on air (http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/main_beautyqueen.html) and at one point the author Sharon Butala from Saskatchewan narrates how she started hearing the voice of the girl asking for justice and wrote the novel The girl in Saskatoon (2008)].

Palmie needs 77 pages to introduce his research and the types of discussions he is trying to engage with to show the impossibility in many instances of split religion, spirituality, politics, economics and history not only in the Caribbean region but in the Western world too. He made explicit that in many aspects modernity started in the rationalization and industrialization of the sugar plantations in the Caribbe before that in the metropolis. I agree with Palmie, is it possible to separate slavery, sugar plantations, spirits, witchcraft, capital accumulation, industrialization, and modernization of metropolis and colonies? Is it possible to separate the development of western Canada and the construction of the Canada Railway from the dozen of thousands of Chinese workers, the weight of thousands of corpses in the modernization of Canada, and stories of ghosts and spirits1?

What Palmie is trying to do is to think in the dark side of modernity localizing an incomplete form of Afro-Cuban knowledge, morality and social action, he wants to “entertain the possibility that the modernity we struggle to understand, and perhaps might wish to abandon, is not just ours. It also belongs to those whose physical abuse and intellectual denigration was the price paid for its achievement. Before we decide to exit from whatever it is we find ourselves imprisoned in, their voices should be heard” (77). Palmie is also trying to engage in an Afro-Atlantic analysis of the witchcraft of modernity, how can we call the harm (daño) done by the whites in the period of slavery and the dehumanization of human bodies for economic purposes?

I see a huge connection between these two books in that they both are recuperating the spiritual practices of Mexican women and Afro-Cuban people. These practices that were considered as being part of a backward Mexican or Cuban are reevaluated by feminist anthropologist such as Behar or historian-anthropologist such as Palmie or chicano writers such as Cisneros who make altars for the muertitos, or who now like Cisneros say, “‘Nos estamos haciendo muy brujitas’ (We’re becoming very witchy), and laugh” (Behar 1993: 342).

1 In Chinese-Canadian Dreams and Disillusions: ‘Tales from Gold Mountain’ by Irene Tanner-Yuen the author tells the story of “Chu embarks on a two-month long voyage to Canada in search of his father, a poor farmer who left his family months ago to find work. Chu finds work in Canada on a work gang, building the railroad. But there he encounters the bitterness of the Chinese men that were there before him, who experienced mistreatment and prejudice of the white overseers.
Search no more, young man!, one grizzled old worker said. Don’t you know that too many have died here? My own brother was buried alive in a mudslide.
My uncle was killed in a dynamite blast, muttered another, No one warned him about the fuse. The angry memories rose and swirled like smoke among the workers. One day, Chu enters a half-finished tunnel even though the other men warn him of ghosts inside. He meets the ghost of his father inside, who explains to him that an accident killed many Chinese and white men. A ton of rock dropped on us and crushed us flat. They buried the whites in a churchyard, but our bodies were thrown into the river…We have no final resting place. Chu and the other workers gather bundles of chopsticks and straw to perform a symbolic burial on a mountaintop. Afterwards, a rope turns into a snake, to guard the graves of the Chinese who were killed in the accident. (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/childrensliterature/105222).”

Religion and Millenarianism – Comments by O.

I was indeed impressed after reading Patricia Pessar’s (2004) and J. Lorand Matory’s (2005) historical ethnographies for this week. Matory’s study on Candomblé, transnationalism, African diaspora, and global scholarly conversations, in particular, made a long-lasting impression on me. Even though Matory’s work focuses on religion, and not strictly on sexuality, I definitely see how I could benefit from re-reading his work later on as I prepare for my doctoral field research and writing. I became especially interested in (following and) knowing more about a controversy Matory sets in his book over pioneer feminist anthropologist Ruth Landes’s “gender” interpretations on Candomblé in Brazil. However, before I touch on this controversy and on a discussion on what these readings on religion and millenarianism have allowed me to consider in regards to my own research on sex work and labour politics, it may be convenient to briefly summarize some of the key arguments and ethnographic contributions made by Pessar and Matory in their most recent publications.

 

Patricia Pessar’s From Fanatics to Folk:

Having published widely on international migration and transnationalism over the last couple of decades, Patricia Pessar returns to the study of millenarianism and religion—a topic that was the focus of her doctoral dissertation in 1976—with a study of charismatic leaders Pedro Batista and Dona Dodô and their millenarian movement in Santa Brígida, Brazil. Two are the main contributions of this book. First, Pessar considers millenarianism, or the collective movements of people in pursuit of divine intervention and a perfect age, as “a travelling cultural formation in historical motion and ongoing social production” (9). In other words, the author argues that millenarianism “is in historical motion, reflects ongoing social production among a wide range of actors and institutions, involves intertextual comparisons and borrowing among movements, deals with matters and emotions of spirituality and faith, and is subject to political contestation and accommodation” (225). Second, Patricia Pessar makes analytical and methodological use of the tool of “intertextuality” to shed light on the relationships and dialogues among millenarian movements in Brazil, such as those that took place in Juazeiro, Canudos, Contestado, and in her field site Santa Brígida. The study of millenarian movements has tended to be conducted through the analytical lens of the case studies. Yet, for Pessar, these particular “case studies” must be situated within a “long historical sweep”, and within a “genre of related millenarian movements” (8). By combining archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and the reinterpretation of secondary source materials (19), Pessar presents millenarian movements in a deep historical background, and advances the idea that a wide range of social actors have been engaged in their production and continuity since apocalyptic and messianic thoughts were first introduced to legitimize the colonial contest of Brazil.

 

J. Lorand Matory’s Black Atlantic Religion:

Matory’s book is a study of the role of transnationalism, Africa, the African diaspora, and transnational priest-scholar dialogues in the making of Candomblé in Bahia, Brazil. This is a most impressive book that sets out a whole range of new ideas and contributions pertinent to the fields of religion, globalization, and transnationalism. One of the main arguments in this book is that focusing on a narrow use of the concept of “transnationalism” can obscure, and has indeed obscured, the study of the African’s and the African diaspora’s past. Matory argues instead, that “translocal dialogues” are not an exclusive feature of the contemporary world, and that when it comes to understanding the making of Brazilian Candomblé these supraterritorial conversations and exchanges have been in place since the beginning of the 19th century. According to Matory’s well argued and documented study, changes in the ethnic identities, sacred values, and gendered leadership in Candomblé occurring over the past century and a half have to be understood as a result of a series of transnational dialogues—“involving West African, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-Cuban priests alongside European and American slave traders, European imperialists, postcolonial Latin American and African nationalists, black trans-Atlantic merchants, and an international community of ethnographers” (3).

 

The Matory–Landes Polemic:

I found Matory’s allusion to the decisive role of an international community of scholars in the making of contemporary Candomblé the most provocative argument put forward in his book. In particular, Matory’s discussion of Ruth Landes’s (1947) “gender biased” work on Candomblé has, in my opinion, the enormous potential to generate a lot of discussion and debate around issues of ethnographic representation and interpretation among feminist anthropologists in the following years. Echoing Freeman’s accusations against Margaret Mead’s ethnographic observations and interpretations in Samoa, Matory accuses Landes of ethnographic and analytical misinterpretation of Candomblé as a matriarchal practice, where women had a leading and numerically majority role. He also charges Landes with an explicit effort to silence—in conjunction with Brazilian regionalist who had interest in preserving an image of “national respectability”— the presence of adés in the ritual practices of Candomblé. Adés according to Matory are male priests who usually cross-dress and who might be possessed by the orixas during the ritual and healing practices of Candomblé; according to Landes’s 1947 ethnography, adés were “passive homosexuals” or men who are sexually penetrated during intercourse with other men. Matory thinks that the fact that Landes referred to male priests or adés as “passive homosexuals” in Candomblé had the effect of marginalizing male priests who had been otherwise widely present in these ritual practices until Landes officialised the idea that Candomblé was a “city of women”, the best example of “matriarchy” on earth. This polemic is indeed interesting, and it made me want to re-read Landes with Matory’s ideas in mind, to be able to assess critically the relevance and pertinence of his claims. I would also like to look more into Matory’s own intentions and agenda with these claims: by “correcting” an empirical historical error, is Matory committed to the fight against homophobia? Is he interested in re-establishing heterosexism and heteronormativity instead? It seems that this polemic has not received much attention in feminist circles. I was in fact surprised that feminist anthropologists in particular and feminist scholars in general have not picked up on the Landes–Matory debate (or at least not yet). After a search in “Sociological Abstracts” looking for book reviews of Black Atlantic Religion published in the most renowned feminist journals, I found surprisingly none. A careful feminist reading of both Matory’s and Landes’s arguments and evidence is needed much here.

 

Linking Religion, Millenarianism, and Sexuality:

In closing this paper, I would like to move onto a brief discussion of some of the aspects that the readings on religion and millenarianism have allowed me to consider in regards to my own research interest in human sexualities. Both Pessar and Matory emphasize the importance of examining religion and millenarianism as complex processes, this is, they acknowledge and put into practice the study of these themes by looking at the multiplicity of factors and social actors at play. They also challenge, both subtly and more openly, the common place notions of religion, religious practices and beliefs as a massive block, as a repressive force that prevents peoples from “third world” countries from moving or “advancing” into “modernity”, an idea explored in more detail by Pessar. Matory, on the other hand, points to the dilemmas and complexities of interpreting the past with concepts modeled in the present. “Transnationalism”, for instance, has allowed social-science scholars to study impressive social phenomena since the emergence of the nation-states, but has prevented other scholars from acknowledging continuous and enduring translocalism before then. As Matory points out, jurisdictions are not culturally, economically and politically autonomous, and thus what I take from him is the idea that Religion alike—for instance, Catholic Religion in Mexico—cannot be considered as a defining feature or characteristic of a Nation-State. I would argue, in fact, that Religion (with a capital letter to express the idea of Religion as a massive block) is in constant transformation, and that religious ideas are in continuous travel, transformation, and exchange.

 

In the three years I have lived in Canada, I have noticed that many people have the idea of Latin America, and more precisely of Mexico, as a country in which Catholic religion is Everything. Religion in these people’s views seems to be associated with poor, uneducated “third world” Mexicans, and this has pushed me think constantly in the real place religion(s) have in the real lives of citizens of countries/regions usually automatically associated with Religions. (Another example of a country automatically associated with a Religion would be Iran, associated with Islam.) I have yet to explore this issue in detail. In looking at sex work and labour politics in Mexico I would like to critically explore the linkages between these common perceptions about Religions, the lived experiences of religious and non-religious peoples, and the supposedly influential role of religious beliefs on issues of sexuality, sexual education, sexual practices, sexual identities, and so on. Why is it that some regions of the world are more susceptible (and more researched?) through the lens of religion than others? Would someone studying Canada automatically be impelled to look at religion to explain, for instance, the murders and disappearances of sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside? How do we challenge from within the views of insiders and outsiders that link irremediably religious fundamentalism with national identities and characters? How can I distinguish both analytically and methodologically between religion as an oppressive force and religion merely as presence?

 

Works Cited:

Landes, Ruth

1947    The City of Women. New York: Macmillan.

 

Matory, J. Lorand

2005    Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

 

Pessar, Patricia R.

2004    From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press.