Political Anthropology and The Fabrics of Resistance

Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 37.
Copyright 2009 Maria KastrinouTheodoropoulou ISSN 1742-2930
Editorial Note: Political Anthropology and the Fabrics of Resistance

Maria Kastrinou-Theodoropoulou Durham University http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol16/iss2/kastrinou-theodoropoulou.pdf
Intricate social fabrics, processes and results, make the anthropological study of resistance both elusive and intriguing. Intriguing in the challenges it may or may not pose to power and/or domination; further intriguing because it demands close attention to what people do and say and say they do, and the necessary debates of interpretation and ideology it gives rise to. The word resistance and entangled theoretical concepts have been eminent within social sciences at least since the time of Marx. Late Foucault urges us to use resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations (1982: 780). Resistance appears in anthropological literature prominently when scholars begin to become aware of their own historical and political positionality vis--vis the people of their studies (Asad 1973). Theoretically, post-colonialism and the study of agency combined with ethnographies about subaltern cultures make anthropologists aware that people can, and often do, appropriate and reappropriate their domination structures, crystallize and challenge their discourses. James Scott in 1985 published what was to become a breakthrough in studies of resistance: Weapons of the Weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. An ethnographic catalyst in resistance studies, Weapons of the Weak shifts attention to everyday, ordinary, indirect strategies through which peasants play through symbolic sanctions with the limits of power imposed on them. From Marx, Gramsci, Foucault and Scott, the processes and actualities of power/resistance are being debated.1 Nonetheless, the study of resistance continues to constitute a minefield of conceptual problems (Keesing 1992, in Gledhill 2000), for a number of reasons. Some of these include a definitional problem bound up with the history of ideas pertaining to issues and uses of resistance, which makes the term controversial at best if not biased. A second problem is the foundations of such anthropological studies on the bases of thick ethnographic exploration, so we could agree with Ortner on the luring presence of an ethnographic refusal (1995). It was with a certain curiosity for the different paths in which people challenge or accommodate power through, and with an increasing anxiety about the multiple dimensions of resistance (both as praxis and as concept) that I put forward the call for submissions to a resistance issue of Durham Anthropology Journal (DAJ). And with a pervasive sense of urgency and necessity. The responses
In accordance to the tradition in DAJ, I will try to keep this short and I will not go into the details of these debates (but see Comaroff & Comaroff 2002; Foucault 1982; Gledhill 2000; Gramsci 2006; Kurtz 1996; Lukes 2005; Mitchell 1990; Ortner 1995; Sahlins 1999; Scott 1985, 1990; Smith 2004).
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 37. Copyright 2009 Maria KastrinouTheodoropoulou ISSN 1742-2930
received are as varied as the ethnographic instances which they come from. Yet, what the five articles that we present here share the most between them is their defiance of classification. Diverse and intriguing, these articles emphasise different aspects of political anthropology and the history of resistance, while calling for a greater exploration and debate, either by their meticulous scholarship, their ethnographic findings, or through provocation. They deal with aspects of subalternity in a variety of ways and periods, bringing to question overt and covert acts of resistance. The first three articles explore specific ethnographic cases and relate belief and ritual practices to wider historical, socio-economic and political contexts. The fourth article relates to a specific instance in the history of the theory and practice of resistance, while the fifth, an opinionated article, deals provocatively with a resisting subalternity. Peter Collins, in his article On Resistance: The Case of 17th Century Quakers, challenges Scotts reading of both 17th century peasant resistance and his portrayal of everyday forms of resistance as private and hidden. Through a scholarly, careful and well-supported tracing of historical material (including primary resources reproduced in the article), Collins deals with the difficult and challenging questions of what makes real resistance; to what extent political, economic and cultural factors affect resistance movements and strategies; the relationship between resistance and institutional power; and the question of whether resistance needs be revolutionary. The main argument Collins brings against Scott is that Quaker resistance in 17th century England, as a movement and as evolving practices, was not at all hidden: on the contrary, it was provocative and public, and comprised of a complex politico-economic, religious and regional matrix. Its acts of resistance were very public indeed (through the press) and organised (through pubic meetings), highly provocative against the institutional power of state and church, and received an extremely repressive and violent response from secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Yet, the Quaker movement actually thrived under the brutal force of opposition, while, interestingly, it started to shrink after its institutional tolerance, a century later. Emanuel Valentin, in Ritual as Cultural Reserve among Sicilian Migrants in Germany, writes about the rituals of a saint cult, as revitalised by Sicilian immigrants from Mirabella Imbaccari in Sindelfingen, Germany. The article deals with the revitalisation of the Maccarsian saint cult: the festa di San Giuseppe (festival of St. Joseph). Valentin traces the historical changes in social and ritual practices, especially as they appear through the complex processes of migration, modernisation and globalisation. Ethnographically thick, the article accounts for the ritual changes between the socio-historical contexts of Sicily and Germany, underlying the importance of seemingly anachronistic traditional forms as outgrowths of modernity and migration, a hybrid counter-reaction analysed here as cultural reserve: the dialectical processes between resistance and overlay. Far from immigrants playing a passive role in their host countries, Valentin shows how they actively create and re-create time, space and social hierarchies through ritual, whilst also traditional ritual time and space are adapted to changing social hierarchies, like gender roles and conceptions of public-private space. As a complex process, cultural reserve is both an attempt to maintain reciprocal solidarity and resist subordination in shifting social landscapes, as well as a de facto effect of immigration.
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The triangular relationship between belief - politics - economics, in the heart of political anthropology, is put under the ethnographic microscope in Mark Jamiesons article: Contracts with Satan: Relations between spirit owners and apprehensions of the economy among the coastal Miskitu of Nicaragua. Jamieson explores how perceptions of mythical beings (such as spirit owners dawanka) offer a window for exploration of present-day forms of exchange which, like the relationship between the Miskitu and their dawanka, are often mutually exploitative and destructive. Jamieson not only challenges the literature that presents relations with the supernatural as benign, but shows, using both history and ethnography, that such relations and perceptions are interconnected with changing historical and economic realities. The article firstly situates the dawanka within ethnographic, linguistic and cosmological contexts. Secondly, it describes the relations between dawanka, often referred to as satans, and human beings: relations of inequality, amorality and asymmetrical exchange, relations of luring but ultimately dangerous contracts. Then, Jamieson ventures on the troubled history and political economy of the Miskitu, situating the narratives of dawanka within the broader historical contexts of the rise of asymmetrical relations. Jamieson shows that indeed Miskitu relations of production have been asymmetrical and exploitative, and argues that this exploitative interaction between humans and non-humans is a direct commentary/reflection of the historical socio-economic position of the Miskitu population. Since the traditional role of the dawanka in representing socially constitutive cycles of exchange has been rendered redundant, Jamieson argues that these extraordinary beings have come to explain the mysteries of wealth generation within an opaque cash economy. Simone Panter-Bricks article Gandhis Dream of Hindu-Muslim Unity and its two Offshoots in the Middle East, is a historical exploration of some of the most controversial actions undertaken by one of the worlds renowned exemplars of resistance. The article offers a captivating and compact historical analysis of Mahatma Gandhis political experiments with non-violent resistance, providing a contextual historical account of his political campaigns beginning with Africa in 1906 and leading up to WWII. Panter-Brick brings to light new evidence of Gandhis double involvement in the ArabIsraeli conflict, an involvement kept secret for decades; touching upon issues of resistance as perceived and embodied by Gandhi. In this context, Panter-Brick queries about Gandhis dream of Hindu-Muslim unity, as well as who were the beneficiaries of Gandhis political campaigns. Through a well-rounded historical and biographical approach, she provides the contexts of Gandhis actions as they relate to his theory of resistance resistance as non-violence or adherence to the truth satyagraha. Presenting aspects of Mahatmas thought and actions, the article discusses the realities, successes and failures of nonviolence as a means of political resistance, simultaneously revealing the details of his secret and paradoxical involvement in the Middle East. Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos article, Trance Dance: Ritual and Belief, focuses on the emergence of a modern subaltern culture, that of psychedelic trance music and dance. Papadimitropoulos provides a short history of how this subculture came to be and how it is built on the idea of resistance against modernisation by its emphasis on an imagination of a pure past, being in touch with nature. This imagination, we are shown, combines, essentialises and exoticises diverse cultural formations such as perceptions of shamanism. As a reaction to modernisation, in turn, this movement is based on recent historical and politically situated dichotomies between West and rest, nature and culture, as well as an evolutionary essentialisation of Otherness. DAJ 16/2 5 Kastrinou-Theodoropoulou
Papadimitropoulos article presents an interesting array of material, ranging from ethnography, history, ritual studies to biology. His argument captures both the social contexts of the subcultures formation, as well as the possible cognitive reasons for the resilience of a specific music and dance style. This article, audacious in the range of material it presents, acts like a trigger, a direct provocation to the kinds of literature we would usually read in an anthropological publication, and as such we hope will give rise to further debate. Many thanks to all contributors, not only for their submissions but also for their patience. A special thank to Dr. Claudia Merli and Dr. Stephen M. Lyon, present and former general editors of DAJ respectively, for their warm support and invaluable guidance. I am grateful to all the postgraduate peer-reviewers of Durham Anthropology Department for their help. To be the guest editor of an issue dedicated to political anthropology and the ethnographic fabrics of resistance has been both a pleasure and a struggle. The necessity of political analyses emerging from fine-grained ethnographic studies becomes all the more visible as Im writing this from the field. I hope the reader will enjoy this issue and find it inspiring. As a traveller friend wrote to me: now more than ever, to resist is important. Amilla Maria Anthi Kastrinou Theodoropoulou
References Asad, T. (ed.). 1973. Anthropology and the colonial encounter. New York: Ithaca Press. Comaroff, J., and J. Comaroff. 2002. Of revelation and revolution. In J. Vincent (ed.), The anthropology of politics: A reader in ethnography, theory, and critique. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Foucault, M. 1982. The subject and power. Critical Inquiry 8(4): 777795. Gledhill, J. (ed.). 2000. Power and its disguises: Anthropological perspectives on politics. London: Pluto Press. Gramsci, A. 2006. State and civil society. In A. Sharma and A. Gupta (eds), The anthropology of the state. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Kurtz, D.V. 1996. Hegemony and anthropology: Gramsci, exegeses, reinterpretations. Critique of Anthropology 16(2): 103135. Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A radical view. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mitchell, T. 1990. Everyday metaphors of power. Theory and Society 19(5): 545577. Ortner, S.B. 1995. Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173193. Sahlins, M. 1999. What is anthropological enlightenment? Some lessons of the twentieth century. Annual Review of Anthropology 28: ixxiii.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 37. Copyright 2009 Maria KastrinouTheodoropoulou ISSN 1742-2930 Scott, J.C. 1985. Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. London: Yale University Press. Smith, G. 2004. Hegemony. In D. Nugent and J. Vincent (eds), A companion to the anthropology of politics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 822. Copyright 2009 Peter Collins ISSN 1742-2930
On Resistance: The Case of 17th Century Quakers

Peter Collins
Durham University http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol16/iss2/collins.pdf
Abstract Among the most influential theories of political resistance is that of the American political theorist, James C. Scott. Drawing on Scotts influential theoretical paradigm I present an historical anthropology of seventeenth century Quakerism, focusing on this religious movement from its genesis in around 1650, to the Act of Toleration in 1689. My intention is to draw on accounts of early Quaker faith and practice in order to interrogate key components of Scotts thesis. I conclude that despite the undoubted usefulness of Scotts work it is at once both too broad and too narrow and that it should be tested against other, apparently marginal, cases. Keywords: political resistance, religious dissent; Quakerism; seventeenth century; historical anthropology
Introduction My aim in writing this paper is to engage in what should be a profitable dialogue with the American political theorist James C. Scott. I am particularly interested in the arguments that Scott presents in two of his books: Weapons of the Weak (WW, 1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance (DAR, 1990).2
These can in fact can be read as Volumes I and II of the same book, with the second (DAR) being a more thorough theoretical exploration of themes emerging from the earlier ethnography (WW).
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It is here that Scott lays out his theory of political resistance, a theory which has received a great deal of scholarly attention and which remains influential both within the field of political theory and in closely related fields, including sociology and anthropology. I review and interrogate Scotts work on resistance through the lens provided by my own work on seventeenth century (English) Quakers. The Quakers provide a case which is both interesting and challenging with regards Scotts work. On the one hand, Scott himself presents examples from the seventeenth century, on the other hand he draws only on secondary literature (Christopher Hill in particular) and never develops his discussion of such cases. There are, I believe, several reasons for his rather half-hearted consideration of such cases. Firstly, Scott (1985) focuses almost entirely on a single case, the contemporary Malay peasantry. In this largely ethnographic study, Scott presents an often brilliant account of the modes of resistance adopted by the Malay villagers amongst whom he lived (during the 1970s). Secondly, in DAR, it is Scotts intention to present a comparative and generalised theory, drawn both on his Malay material and on dozens of other cases which he argues supports his central thesis. Given his objective to present a general theory of peasant resistancehe quite rightly eschews the temptation to present these exemplars in any detail. I suspect, however, that there are other reasons why Scott merely mentions seventeenth-century cases. Scott is a political theorist and not a historian; seventeenth century texts are available but their study is time-consuming and requires considerable knowledge of the period if they are to be properly understood in their context. Finally, Scott is primarily interested in explaining peasant resistance and it could be argued that by the mid seventeenth century, England was no longer a feudal society and the peasantry had disappeared (Hill 1972, chapter 3). This is largely, though not entirely, true in that seventeenth century England remained overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, and manifested a significant political, economic and cultural residue of feudalism. The Quaker case, then, is both interesting and theoretically significant for a number of reasons. First, the social, political and economic context both is and is not like the other key cases presented by Scott (both in WW and DAR) in that mid seventeenth century England was no longer a simple feudal society: Quakers were never slaves nor peasants in any typically defined sense. Quaker resistance can be understood just as easily in terms of religious as political and economic resistance, against an oppressive, but in the early years, revolutionary opposition: although couched in almost entirely religious terms, Quaker resistance undoubtedly had significant political overtones, recognised by both Quakers and their opponents alike. Finally, Quaker records are unusually rich and provide by far way the most complete picture of the faith and practice of a seventeenth century radical group.3 Scott on resistance Scott develops his thesis over two substantial books together numbering over 500 pages. However, setting out his main argument in brief is not difficult since he does so himself on numerous occasions in both texts. Since the meaning of the term itself is contested, let us begin with Scotts definition of resistance (1985: 290): class resistance includes any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (e.g., rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (e.g., landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (e.g., work, land, charity, respect) vis--vis those superordinate classes.
As is the general custom, in this paper the terms Quaker and Friend are synonymous.
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Scott supports the use of this definition by pointing out that it allows for action undertaken either by individuals or groups, it focuses on the material basis of class struggle and assumes that in describing and explaining resistance, we do better to concentrate on intentions rather than consequences (1985: 290) and this seems reasonable given that many acts of resistance leave the social order intact. On the other hand, as Scott sensibly admits, the determination of intentionality is often far from clear. In the village of Sedaka where he carried out his fieldwork, peasant farmer stole rice from landowners and such an act may be a intended as an act of resistance. But as Scott points out, the peasants motivating intention was just as likely to have the responsibility he felt for providing for his family. This does not seem to me to be a critical point though, in that our motivations for taking action are seldom simple and are, more often that not, multiple, unconscious and even contradictory. Intentions, then, are often difficult to precisely specify even our own. Scott (1985, 291-2) goes on to interrogate the oft-described division of acts of resistance into two types: real resistance and token resistance. Real resistance is organised, systematic, and principled, has revolutionary consequences and embodies ideas or intentions that negate the basis of domination itself. Token resistance, on the other hand, is assumed to be unorganised, unsystematic and individualistic, opportunistic and self-indulgent, has no revolutionary consequences, and implies an accommodation with the dominant regime. At this point, Scott presents, briefly, his central argument, which is that this crude classification of acts of resistance seriously underestimates the importance of a whole range of social action. Resistance, he argues, comprises relatively minor and mostly hidden actions. There may, at some point, perhaps after decades or even centuries of these small, non-public actions, a major uprising after which the social order is overturned but such events are rare and only appear sudden and inexplicable to the elite because resistance has existed as a steady though largely unregarded undercurrent. In Scotts term (developed at length throughout DAR) the many acts of resistance that generally go unnoticed by those in power form a hidden transcript, which exists alongside the dominant and most public culture of the elite which is generally taken as culture per se. As he explains, public acts of resistance are likely to be punished, whereas, disguised or hidden acts of resistance largely go unnoticed, at least by the powerful. Interestingly, Scott refrains from reflecting on his use of the term class which, as I will demonstrate below, is particularly challenging in the Quaker case. I should add that I have merely sketched out in the broadest terms Scotts argument and have omitted entirely his many telling examples taken from various periods of history and from a multitude of different societies. The case of seventeenth-Century Quakerism Scotts working definition of resistance is all well and good, but with the Quaker case in mind, what about that word class? Contemporary commentators, including Quakers and non-Quakers, frequently point out that Friends were a people of the middling sort. Contemporary scholars, with a relatively broad cross-section of records to draw on, agree (Barbour 1964:75-8, 84-93; Davies 2000: ch. 11; Hurwich 1970; Reay 1980, 1975; Vann 1969a: ch. 2, 1969b). Indeed the transition, in England, from a feudal to a capitalist society was slow and painful while debate continues over the kind of evidence that serves to mark this transition. Certainly, the English peasantry had disappeared by the time of the period that concerns us here. There was a burgeoning population of masterless men (Hill 1972, chapter 3), most of whom were drifting from the countryside and into the larger towns, notably Bristol and London. This accelerated process of urbanisation was the outcome of well documented push and pull factors. Agricultural labourers were pushed from their rural homes by the gathering momentum of the enclosure movement, and were pulled towards the towns by the prospect of employment. DAJ 16/2 10 Collins
So, the Quaker movement certainly did not, in itself constitute a class. Indeed, they are most often defined by contemporary sociologists as a sect, though in some senses they might be described as an interest group or voluntary organisation in todays increasingly secular parlance. However, Friends were at first, drawn from a relatively narrow segment of society and certainly saw themselves as opposing the elite, the powerful, the establishment. During the 1650s the group developed mainly in the poorer North and West of England and consisted mainly of yeoman, husbandmen and rural artisans and their wives. By 1660, Quakerism was flourishing in the towns and cities primarily among the poorer sections of urban society. By the 1680s, membership was more varied, with some friends (notably William Penn and Robert Barclay and Anthony Pearson) welcome at Court (Horle 1988: 92). However, for most of the period in question, the Quaker movement can be identified as comprising those who were living rural lives in the north west of England, a region which was considerably poorer than the rest of the country and certainly saw itself in opposition to the wellto-do merchants and aristocracy, characterised as mainly southern. Region would seem to be as important as class, then.4
Quakerism might most easily be understood as a product of the Civil War, which gave birth to dozens (maybe hundreds) of sects and radical groups of one dispensation or another. However, in terms of Scotts argument regarding the slow but steady pressure on the state built up by small acts of resistance over a long period of time it is worth noting that seventeenth-century Quakerism was deeply rooted in the religious and socio-economic and political radicalism of the previous century, and in particular on religious movements which resisted the dominance of Catholicism and Catholic faith and practice both prior to and following the Reformation. There is hardly space here to trace these roots in any detail but mention should be made of the Lollard tradition, which ran a parallel course with Calvinism and the other major threads of religious reform which more obviously brought about and sustained the establishment of the Church of England under the Henry VIII in the 1530s.5 The Lollards were among the first who separated from the newly established Anglican Church in the
4
Hill (1972) argues convincingly that the North and West was the locus of much radical activity. The Particular Baptists were strongest in Wales, and the Grindletonians, another Anabaptist group were based in and around Grindleton in Yorkshire. Leveller and Ranter groups were first of all a northern phenomenon. 5 The Established Church which was by 1600 largely a Presbyterian Puritanism was already far stronger in the South and East of England (Hill 1972: 77pp).
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1540s, finding the new Dispensation still too Catholic for their tastes. The Lollards were more often called Anabaptists or Familist by the seventeenth century, and remained a primarily northern tendency.6 George Fox, the leading Quaker, speaks of meeting groups of Seekers and Shattered Baptists during his first sorties into the North.7 The faith and practice of these groups already contained the seed of what would become known as Quakerism.8 Quakerism provided a final resting place for many of those who were already involved in radicals, including Gerard Winstanley (Digger) and John Lilburne (Leveller).
Charles II (reigned 1660-85)
William Penn (1644-1718) prominent English Quaker
Let us turn, at last, to those actions undertaken by Friends that Scott would recognise as acts of resistance. As I mentioned above, virtually every aspect of Quaker faith and practice constituted a continual string of acts of resistance to the State and the Established Church. Many of these practices might seem, in themselves, trivial, but as Scott maintains, together they formed a serious and growing threat to the status quo. Quaker practice was grounded, in every instance, by their underlying belief in the Second Covenant that is the life of Christ, as presented in the Gospels. However, their position was complicated (and therefore often misunderstood by their enemies) by the prominence they gave to the inward light, the light of Christ that was freely given to every man, woman and child. Most significantly, this gave rise to a loosely knit theology which stood in direct opposition to the predestinarian ideas of the Calvinists who led the attack on Catholicism. From the early 1650s on, Quakers operationalised their beliefs by working out a number of testimonies. The testimonies constituted an increasingly ordered discipline which impacted on every aspect of an individuals life (Collins 2002). By 1660, a Quaker was very easily identified by her or his plain speech and plain dress, for example. Davies (2000: ch. 2) calls them the Quaker tribe, characterised by an extraordinary tightknittedness, strengthened by the discipline of endogamy. Anthony Cohen (1985) would note their energetic commitment to symbolic boundary-making. The typical Quaker, dressed in dark, unpatterned and unembellished clothing, would greet others simply, without the generally expected
A brief though excellent account of English Lollards can be found in Lambert (2002: Ch. 14). George Fox was himself a Leicestershire artisan. He began to preach in the mid 1640s making contact with others who had already adopted a faith and practice similar to what later became know as Quakerism. There is considerable debate on the issue of Quaker leadership, though Fox was, without doubt, the key organiser (Bittle 1986; Moore 2000: Ch. 1; Ingle 1994; Reay 1985). 8 Quakerism, it is worth remarking, was one of a great many radical groups whose roots lay in the Civil War. For the Ranters, see McGregor, Capp, Smith and Gibbons 1993; McGregor and Reay (eds) 1984; McGregor 1976-7; Davis, J.C. 1990; for the Levellers, Aylmer (ed) 1975; for the Muggletonians, Hill, Reay and Lamont (eds.) 1983, Lamont 2006; for the Fifth Monarchy Men, Capp 1972. A good overview is to be found in McGregor and Reay eds) 1984. I cite these texts partly in order that the reader might like to consider the extent to which Quakers differed, with regard to Scotts thesis, to other contemporary dissenting groups.
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bowing and scraping, believing that only God should be so honoured. They would use a particular form of the third person pronoun (thee and thou) to those socially superior to them who would expect to be referred to, more politely, as you.9 Quakers steadfastly refused to doff their hats in the presence of superiors perhaps not so unusual in the North but a distinct breach of etiquette in the Southern counties. To fail to remove ones hat in court meant certain imprisonment. They treated each day of the week as one and so continued to trade on Sundays, even on Christmas Day; indeed, they despised the heathenish names given to the days of the week and months of the year and preferred to call Sunday first-day, January first-month and so on. Citing scripture (Matthew 5.3337 and James 5:12), Quakers refused to swear oaths, a testimony which exacerbated their position vis--vis the legal system, especially when brought to court. Brought to trial for some other misdemeanour was bad enough, but refusing to swear the oath would mean certain imprisonment and possible transportation to the Colonies as well as punishment for the original offence.10 Quakers attacked the Established Church as a powerful institution, mockingly calling churches steeple-houses. They refused to attend divine worship, then a statutory duty and were for this reason continually prosecuted for recusancy.11 Furthermore, they were far from passive in their relationship with the members of the clergy (that is, with Anglican ministers). Davies (2000: 23) notes that Quakers were well-known for pinning scurrilous libels on church doors and heckling clergy in the street.12 They published pamphlets attacking the very grounds of a paid clergy and went as far as interrupting divine services in an attempt to subject ministers to the Truth in a distinctly public manner. As early as 1649 Fox was beaten for daring to interrupt a sermon in MansfieldWoodhouse. His own account (Fox 1952: 44) is typically colourful: Now while I was at Mansfield-Woodhouse, I was moved to go to the steeple-house there on First-day, out of the meeting in Mansfield, and when the priest had done I declared the truth to the priest and people. But the people fell upon me with their fists, books, and without compassion or mercy beat me down in the steeplehouse and almost smothered me in it, being under them. And sorely was I bruised in the steeplehouse, and they threw me against the walls and when that they had thrust and thrown me out of the steeplehouse , when I came into the yard I fell down, being so sorely bruised and beat among them. And I got up again and then they punched and thrust and struck me up and down and they set me in the stocks and brought a whip to whip me, but did not. And as I sat in the stocks they threw stones at me, and my head, arms, breast, shoulders, back, and sides were so bruised that I was mazed and dazzled with the blows.
For a thorough investigation of Quaker speech see Bauman 1983. There were at this time a number of oaths that Quakers chose not to swear. Refusing the Oath of Supremacy, acknowledging the Monarchs supreme over the Anglican Church was punishable by praemuire, which place an individual outside the Kings protection, involved forfeiture of all goods and chattels and loss of income from property, and imprisonment. Refusal to swear the Oath of Allegiance, which judges might require anyone brought before them to swear, resulted in similar severe punishment (Horle 1988: 49-51). 11 Throughout the period Quakers were involved in a vitriolic pamphlet war with those who attacked their stand on the Established Church. Richard Baxter (1657) published a booklet providing 24 reasons why no Christian, or reasonable man, should be a Quaker. His first reason is the fact that while they hurl abuse at the Church and minister of Christ. they are of no church themselves, they are no Christians... 12 Hurling insults such as Serpent, liar, deceiver, children of the Devil, hypocrite, dumb dog, scarlet coloured beast, Babylons merchants, and sodomites almost suggests that the clergy were the resisters and Quakers the oppressors!
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The testimonies were generally defended either in terms of scriptural prescription or proscription. In some instances, the testimony against a professional clergy for instance, Quakers argued that the gospels simply did not mandate such practice.13 Although not a testimony, a common source of public disgust was the Quaker practice of encouraging women to preach, and to become involved in the day-to-day organisation of church activities. And certainly, records of sufferings include many case involving women.14 Although several leading members of the movement had served in some capacity in the Parliamentary army during the Civil Wars, by the mid 1655, Fox and other public Friends had established the Quaker peace testimony as a matter of fact.15 This was a serious form of resistance, not primarily because Quakers would no longer serve in the armed forces, but because they refused to subsidise acts of war in any sense this was a costly action for the government both during the Interregnum.16 Quakers were, on the whole, despised, not only by those in authority (Reay 1985: Ch. 4). They were accused of haughtiness and hypocrisy, they were labelled as Catholics and witches, and thought to be members of other more extreme radical groups (they were often confused with Ranters, for instance).17 Public Friends (and perhaps none more so than Fox) could be abrasive, even aggressive in debate Richard Baxter, a leading Puritan critic of Quakers and Quakerism, wrote, I have had more railing language from them in one letter, than I ever heard from all the scolds in the country to my remembrance this twenty years (Quoted in Moore 2000: 110). Their penchant for enthusiastic displays of metaphorical and embodied critique, especially in the 1650s, must have proved both frightening and extremely provocative to all who witnessed them. To quote from Reay (1985: 36): Several Quakers went naked as a sign ... Such signs were highly symbolic and clearly intended to shock. Sarah Goldsmith walked through Bristol markets in 1655 with her haire about her eares, bare legged, and clad only in a long hairy coat. Richard Sale, a Quaker tailor from Hoole (near Chester), stood clothes in sackcloth with flowers in one hand and weeds in the other, and ashes sprinkled in his hair. Solomon Eccles, a former music teacher from London who had burned his instruments and some books when he turned Quaker, walked through Smithfield naked, with a pan of burning coals upon his head. However, the two acts of resistance which most provoked the State and Established Church was the determination of Quakers to establish and attend their own meetings for worship on the one hand, and their refusal to pay tithes on the other. In both cases the result of their resistance came at a considerable cost. I will dwell at some length on these two modes of Quaker resistance, beginning with an account of tithes, before discussing the issue of Quaker worship. There was, by 1650, a continuing public debate regarding tithes. The Quakers refused payment from the outset. Quakers were not the only one to refuse payment but their consistent and increasingly organised refusal to pay set them apart. By 1655 those who called themselves Quaker would be
There is an extensive secondary literature relating to these testimonies. Broad coverage is provided in Braithwaite 1955, 1961; Barbour 1965. 14 Sufferings were the punishments meted out to Friends and collected and collated ever more systematically by Quaker meetings and eventually recorded in the Great Book of Sufferings maintained by a central committee in London. 15 For more on the Peace Testimony see Barbour 1964 Ch 8. 16 The Interregnum is that period which begins with the regicide of Charles I in 1649 and ends with the Restoration of the monarchy (in the person of Charles II) in 1660. 17 Reading their pamphlets, it would appear that Quakers stood against not only the Church and State, but against everyone.
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disowned by the group should it become known that they had paid tithes. Friends also refused tithe payment on their behalf by non-Quaker supporters. A tithe is a customary payment to the local minister (or a substitute) in kind, amounting to one tenth of ones produce. In rural areas such payment was generally made in wheat or corn, sometimes livestock. In urban areas, it would more often be paid in cash. Tithes had been a contentious issue since the fourteenth century but their position was questioned with greater urgency after Henrys reform of the Church in the 1530s.18 After the Reformation in England the assets of monasteries and priories, along with their tithes, annuities and pensions, became Crown property. These property rights were subsequently sold to lay impropriators who assumed the right to appoint ministers to clerical livings and to collect the tithe. Indeed, as Brace (1998: 16-17) puts it, Refusal to pay tithes became an article of faith for Quakers. Various radical groups, the Quakers chief amongst them, attacked tithe payment on at least three fronts. First, they challenged their scriptural basis and secondly, they argued that whereas tithes were once primarily a source of common good, they had lately become the prize of absentee landlords. Finally, tithes were perceived not only by Quakers but by the majority of dissenting groups as a popish (Catholic) abomination. (Brace 1998: 139-40; Morgan 1993: 171-5). Quakers began suffering for non-payment of tithes in the early 1650s and spokesmen for the moment immediately put pen to paper. According to Horles reckoning (1988: 281) in the country of Cumberland alone during this period, convictions for tithe non-payment numbered 3,652, out of a total number of Quaker conviction of 4,083.19 In most cases, the punishment would have been distraint of goods, that is, the confiscation of the convicted Quakers goods equal to the tithe and a fine; in fact, treble payments were common. In prosecuting Quakers for tithe misdemeanours, local magistrates, clergy and informants, as well as a number of other minor officials such as constables, worked together to maximise the financial (and sometimes physical) damage inflicted on them. Quakers were not the only group to refuse tithe payment. Baptists, for instance, withheld payments in some cases, though their corporate position, at first ambiguous, was by the restoration, entirely law-abiding Quakers, for ever taking the hard line came to see Baptists as feeble backsliders (Brace 1998: 31-4).20
There are many Quaker texts dated from this period which aim to call into question the right of anyone to claim tithes, see for example: Benson 1679; Farnworth 1655b; Fisher 1659; Foster 1688; Fox 1654, 1657; Grayes 1657; Hubberthorne 1658, 1659a, b; Osborne 1659; Pearson 1657. 19 It is worth noting that Cumberland was a rural county even by the standards of the day. Tithes were always notoriously difficult to collect in towns, however, and Horle (1988: 284) indicates that there were just 237 tithe convictions for London and Middlesex during the period amounted to 237 (total Quaker convictions amounted to 4,855). Morgan indicates (1993: 196) that prosecutions for non-payment of tithes, in Lancashire at least) increased during this period. The total number of Quakers in England by 1688 was probably about 55,000. 20 Indeed Friends were as apt to criticise other dissident groups as they were the Church and State. They found certain other radical groups abhorrent, the Ranters in particular. See for example Farnworth 1655a; also discussions in McGregor 1976-7; McGregor, Capp, Smith and Gibbons 1993; Davis 1990; and Cole 1956.
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A page from a record of Quaker sufferings (Marsden Monthly Meeting, (Lancashire) The corporate decision to refuse tithe payment, for whatever reason, was a serious act of resistance. No matter what reasons Friends offered, the elite comprising both secular and ecclesiastical authorities say this action as undermining the very fabric of society. As Laura Brace (1998: 35) notes: Tithes were embedded in the religious, political, social and legal fabric: the Church, the state authorities and the radicals were all able to use the debates around them as a sophisticated tool with which to gauge the attitudes and normative commitments of bother members and their opponents...For the Established Church, refusal to pay implied dangerous sectarianism, while the state regarded tithe opposition as a threat to the principle of taxation, and by extension to private property itself. Along with tithe refusal, the determination of Quakers to meet for worship after their own fashion represented an act of resistance which occasioned brutal retaliation on the part of the authorities. DAJ 16/2 16 Collins
Such conventicles were illegal, under a variety of Acts and older statutes, including the Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, the Quaker Act (1662) and the Five Miles Act. They were also charged with associated offences, including recusancy, vagrancy and, more seriously, outlawry (Horle 1988: 142-46). Charges were also brought by informers, who were encouraged in their activities by the second Conventicle Act. To make matters worse, Quakers were often unaware of these charges and were then subpoenaed for non-appearance in court. During this period there were two forms of Quaker meeting and we can distinguish between the larger and more anarchic threshing meetings which were ad hoc, evangelising meetings held either indoors or out of doors and sometimes drew thousands, to the far more intimate retired or silent meetings attended primarily by those who were already convinced. Quakers also rejected the need for purpose-built premises for their meetings, denying that one place might be more sacred than another, believing that the True Tabernacle was less a building and more a condition of ones faith and practice. The fact that Friends were happy to meet anywhere was a nightmare for the authorities. (Horle 1988: 6-7; Braithwaite 1955: 184, 377; Moore 2000: 146-50). For different reasons, then, both types of meeting posed complex problems for the agencies whose role it was to prevent them. At various times, though particularly between 1660-65, Quaker meetings were perpetually broken up with varying degrees of violence. Quakers never met in secret, but the legalised use of informants meant that some retired (or settled) meetings were prevented by the prior ransacking of premises. On occasion, such meetings would simply adjourn to the street or some other public place at which point those Friends present would come under physical attack and or dragged off to prison to await trial for any one of a number of misdemeanours. Records of Quaker sufferings included hundreds of accounts of disrupted meetings and Quakers were far more likely to be imprisoned for holding a conventicle than for any other reason.21 Space permits the inclusion here of just one example. Certain officials became notorious for their persecution of Friends, men such as Sir William Armourer who harried Friends meeting in Reading soon after the First Conventicle Act. In March 1664 he marched thirty four Friends from meeting to prison (citing the Quaker Act) and then others, mostly women, during the following fortnight. Children continued to meet in their parents absence these were subsequently taken out and beaten. The women were released in June but taken again during the months that followed. The sorry tale continues (I quote from Braithwaite (1961: 227): The men were never brought up on the Quaker Act, but after forty weeks were tried on the oath of Allegiance and acquitted; but many more were soon taken again, and for some years the principal Friends were in prison, and the meeting at Thomas Curtis house was kept by young people and a few stray adults, mostly women. Armourer came one morning in January 1666, and found only four young maids. A servant brought him water, which he threw again and again in their faces, and turned them out. After the Second Conventicle Act, which came into force in May 1670, he illegally padlocked two doors, for it was Curtis private house; but Friends met in another room, which he also nailed up. And so it went on for almost a decade. An important outcome of the continual flouting of the law regarding illegal conventicles was the constant and entirely public testing of the will and rationale of the authorities, particularly of the Cromwell during the Interregnum, of the Monarchy following the Restoration and of Parliament throughout the period. The actions I have described were certainly counter-hegemonic in so far as they formed a co-ordinated attack on the status quo, but they were also, pace Scott, entirely public. Quaker acts of resistance, and virtually their entire faith and practice
21
For instance of the 212 Quakers incarcerated in Lancashire between 1660-64, 196 cases were for attending Quaker meetings just eight for non-payment of tithes.
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during these early years, did not form and were not a part of a hidden transcript, but constituted a continual reminder to the powerful and powerless alike, that here was an alternative to the status quo that could not and would not be dismissed, either by law or by unlawful force of arms. The outcome for Quakers of these acts of resistance were terrible in terms of physical and financial punishment. They faced trial under a wide range of punitive legislation, chief among them the Conventicle Acts (1664 and 1670) and the so-called Quaker Act (1662) of the Restoration Period which led to a wave of anti-Quaker activity. Conclusions The central question posed in this paper is in what ways does the resistance practiced by Quakers in the mid seventeenth century illuminate Scotts thesis? First, although, the Quaker does not comprise a class, it does represent a class and so is a fair test of Scotts argument. However, it is difficult to distinguish between religious and other forms of resistance (political, economic, cultural) in this instance. Whatever the intentions of individual Friends, corporately, the Quaker movement was primarily a radical, religious movement. The stated aims of seventeenth century Friends was to usher in the Second Covenant: they were fighting the Lambs War. Given their belief in the free gift to all men and women of the inward light (of Christ) the social implication of their faith and practice was undoubtedly levelling, calling into question the legitimacy of the hierarchical society which represented the status quo. Their actions whether actually or merely construed as illegal posed a major threat to those in power (whether represented by Cromwell or the King). Their resistance was made all the more public through their use of the printing press. Quaker pamphleteers issued forth a stream of writing both defending their own position and attacking that of their opponents (more or less everyone else), and generally both simultaneously. Their energetic use of the printed word may be said to have reached a peak with Foxs The Mystery of the Great Whore Unfolded...(1659), in which the de facto leader of the movement responded, painstakingly and belligerently, to 100 of the most widely circulated anti-Quaker tracts in a document numbering over 600 pages.22 At the same time, Fox was developing the organisation of the group which involved a series of levels of meeting from local congregations to central (one might say executive) meeting involving representative from all over the country). By 1680 Quaker meetings were receiving a plethora of prescriptions and proscriptions (advices) on right behaviour; meetings, in their turn, were sending accounts of the sufferings of local Friends to a central committee in London (Meeting for Sufferings) in an attempt to provide documentary evidence for presentation to Parliament and/or the King. Alongside to these organisation strategies, Friends also wrote voluminously to each other and collections of epistles were distributed more widely. As Horle (1988: 3) avers, Secular radicalism joined with spiritual Quakerism to produce an explosive reaction against perceived evils in English society. Quaker resistance to what they considered ungodly laws met an extremely repressive and violent response from both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The careful records kept by well-organised Quaker meetings provide a clear unbroken account of their sufferings under the law during the period under review. Distraints and imprisonments number in the thousands; Friends suffered verbal insults and regular beatings both at the hands of the authorities and the public at large. Their places of meetings were regularly ransacked and at least 114 met their death in prison in London and Middlesex alone (Horle 1988:
22
On the question of whether Fox can be said to have been the founder and leader of the Quaker movement see Braithwaite 1955, 1961 and Ingle 1994.
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284). But did their resistance lead to an outcome that might be termed revolutionary? This is undoubtedly a complex question but the simple answer is no. The Act of Toleration, became law in 1689 but tolerance of religious dissent unfolded slowly from the 1670s and by 1700 Quakers (and other less radical dissidents) were allowed to worship, unmolested in a manner of their choosing. They were still penalised for non-payment of tithes, and had in any case and for over a decade engaged less and less in acts of resistance. The expansion of religious toleration was more a matter of evolution than revolution there was no final, cataclysmic act of defiance which led to the world being turned upside down. However, what is most obvious about the Quaker case, most obviously tests Scotts theory. Quaker resistance to a series of murderously repressive regimes was almost entirely public. Their transcript was open for all to witness; their message was free of all disguise (DAR, Ch. 6). Indeed, they virtually celebrated their radical non-conformity in the face of the authorities, by refusing to recognise clergy except to attack them in their own churches, by continuing to hold their (silent) meetings in public, by continuing to refuse tithe payment, by encouraging women to preach and so on.23 At no point in the early period of the movement did Quakers retreat to a place that could conceivably be described as off-stage.24 In fact, leading Friends, including Fox, Naylor, Hubberthorne, Dewsbury, Burrough, Fell, Audland and many others, manoeuvred the authorities into positions where debate was public and centre-stage (Moore 2000).25 George Fox, in particular, attempted to juxtapose the ungodly church and state with the godly faith and practice of Quakerism at every turn. However, a number of commentators suggest that Quaker resistance was less exuberant after the Restoration. Indeed, one leading light, Richard Hubberthorne, wrote in 1660 (quoted in Morgan 1993: 32) would continue to be obedient subjects under every Power ordained by God, and to every ordinance of man (set up by him) for the Lords sake, whether unto King as supreme, or unto Governours or any set up n authority by him, who are for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well, Morgan is right in saying that, from 1660, Quaker texts increasingly emphasise their tendency to passive resistance. It is possible that after a decade of continual oppression Friends had grown weary of the battle. By the turn of the century the movement had already entered what has been called its quietist phase. The point in resisting was reduced during the 1670s and greatly reduced by the Toleration Act of 1689, which granted freedom of worship to nonconformist groups but not to Catholics, whose position vacillated even more wildly than the Quakers during the period. For this reason and others subjecting seventeenth century English Catholicism to this kind of interrogation would prove at least as interesting and as valuable a test of Scotts thesis. But perhaps the main point to be made is that general theories such as Scotts, will contain their scholarly worth just so long as they provide an incentive for such particular studies.
The role of women was crucial to the establishment of Quakerism. Fox and Elisabeth Hooton travelled together in the ministry even before 1650. Margaret Fell facilitated organisation development of the movement by allowing Quakers to use her house (Swarthmore Hall) as a base (Trevett 1991; Mack 2002; Kunze 1993). 24 Indeed, Quakers seemed almost to revel in their suffering. For example, Isaac Penington, a public Friend who, hoping to reassure Friends that he was well, wrote to them from Aylesbury gaol: [The Lord] made my bonds pleasant to me, and my noisome prison (enough to have destroyed my weakly and tenderly educated nature) a place of pleasure and delight, where I was comforted by my God day night and day. (Quoted in Braithwaite 1961: 11) 25 Scotts discussion of charisma is both interesting and certainly apt in relation to Quaker leaders and to Fox in particular (DAR: 121-3). Certainly, Fox was considered a charismatic man, and as Scott argues, this quality was undoubtedly socially constructed. However, once again, this construction was entirely open and can not be seen as rooted in a hidden transcript.
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Setting aside the matter of the hidden transcript for a moment, resistance, for the most part, argues Scott, amounts to the accumulation of many apparently trivial acts. Together they may come to pose a serious threat to those in power. The threat posed by Quakers was apparent to the regimes of Cromwell and the Restoration monarchs from the outset, not entirely because of the evident religious dissent but because of the potential for social disruption (even revolution) that these beliefs and practices suggested. The elite held that Quakers might presently be arguing about thee and thy but would soon open the debate about thine and mine, thus indicating the economic and political consequences of what might appear at first sight to be entirely a matter of conscience. Although it was unlikely that Quakers intended to bring about an earthly revolution, it was this outcome that their opponents most dreaded, and the reason they came to face a degree of repression that was both concerted and often violent. More surprising is the fact that the Quaker movement not only survived but thrived during these years of sustained and brutal oppression but that is another story. References Primary Sources Baxter, Richard. 1657. One sheet against the Quakers. Wing / B1334. Benson, Gervase. 1656. A true tryall of the ministers and ministry of England as also a true discovery of their root and foundation, and on the called English Church ... / Wing / B1904. Crook, John. 1659. Tythes. No property to, not lawful maintenance for a powerful gospel-preaching ministry... / London. Wing / C7225. Farnworth, Richard. 1655a. The Ranters Principles and Deceit. London. Wing / F 501 Farnworth, Richard. 1655b. A Rod to drive out Wild Boars. London. Wing / F 502 Fisher, S. 1659. To the parliament of England, and the several members thereof. Wing / F1059. Foster Thomas. 1688. A Winding-sheet for Englands Ministry. London. Wing / F1637. Fox, George. 1659(1831). The Mystery of the Great Whore Unfolded. With an introductory epistle to the reader written byEdward Burrough. The Works of George Fox, Volume 3. London. Fox, George. 1657. That all might see who they were, that had a command, and did pay tithes. London. Wing / F1931. Grayes, Isaac. 1657. One Outcry More Against Tythes. London. Wing / G1626. Hubberthorne, R. 1658. The Record of Suffering for Tithes in England. London. Wing / H 3230 Hubberthorne, R. 1659a. The Good old cause briefly demonstrated. London. Wing / H 3223A. Hubberthorne, Richard. 1659b. A Word of wisdom and Counsel to Officers. London. Wing / H 3242 Osborne, John. 1659. An indictment against tythes or, tythes no wages for gospel ministers ... / Wing (2nd ed.) / O525. Pearson, Antony. 1657. The Great Case of Tythes truly stated. London. Wing /P989. Secondary Sources Aylmer, G. (ed). 1975. The Levellers and the English Revolution. London: Thames and Hudson. DAJ 16/2 20 Collins
Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 822. Copyright 2009 Peter Collins ISSN 1742-2930 Aylmer, G. 1980. The meaning and definition of property in seventeenth-century England. Past and Present 86. Barbour, H. 1964. The Quakers in Puritan England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bauman, R. 1983. Let thy Words be Few. Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among SeventeenthCentury Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bittle, W.G. 1986. James Naylor, 1618-1660. York: Sessions. Brace, L. 1998. The Idea of Property in Seventeenth Century England. Manchester. Tithes and the Individual. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Braithwaite, W.C. 1955. The Beginnings of Quakerism. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braithwaite, W.C. 1961. The Second Period of Quakerism. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Capp, B.S. 1972. The Fifth Monarchy Men. London: Faber & Faber. Cohen, A.P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge. Cole, A. 1956. The Quakers and the English Revolution. Past & Present 10:3954. Collins, P. 2002. Discipline: the Codification of Quakerism as Orthopraxy, 1650-1738. History and Anthropology 13(2): 1732. Davies, T.A. 2000. The Quakers in English Society 1655-1725. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davis, J.C. 1990. Myth and Furore: Reappraising the Ranters. Past and Present 129: 79103. Fox, G. 1952. Journal. Edited by J.L. Nickalls. London: Friends Home Service. Hill, C. 1972. The World Turned Upside Down. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hill, C., B. Reay, and W. Lamont (eds). 1983. The World of the Muggletonians. London: M.T.Smith. Horle, C.W. 1988. The Quakers and the English Legal System, 1660-1688. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hurwich, J.J. 1970. The social origins of the early Quakers. Past and Present 48: 156162, Ingle, H. L. 1994. First Among Friends. George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism. Oxford: OUP. James. M. 1941. The political importance of the tithes controversy in the English Revolution, 164060. History 26: 118. Kunze, B. 1993. Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism. London: Macmillan. Lambert, M. 2002. Medieval Heresy. Third Edition. Oxford: Blackwell. Lamont, William. 2006. Last Witnesses, the Muggletonian history, 16521979. Ashgate Publishing. Mack, P. 1992. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth Century England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McGregor, J.F. 19761977. Ranterism and the development of early Quakerism. Journal of Religious History 9: 34963. McGregor, J.F., Capp, B., Smith., N. and Gibbons, B.J. 1993 Myth and furore: reappraising the Ranters, Past and Present 140: 155-94. DAJ 16/2 21 Collins
Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 822. Copyright 2009 Peter Collins ISSN 1742-2930 McGregor, J.F., & B. Reay (eds). 1984. Radical Religion in the English Revolution. Oxford: OUP. Moore, R. 2000. The Light of their Consciences: early Quakerism in Britain 16461666. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Morgan, N. 1993. Lancashire Quakers and the Establishment, 16601730. Keele UP. Reay, B. 1980a. Quaker opposition to tithes, 1652-1660. Past & Present 86: 98120. Reay, B. 1980b. The social origins of early Quakerism. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11: 55 72. Reay, B. 1975. The Quakers and the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith. Scott, J.C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Scott, J.C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Trevett, C. 1991. Women and Quakerism in the Seventeenth Century. York: Sessions. Vann, R.T. 1969a. The Social Development of Early Quakerism, 16551755. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Vann, R.T. 1969b. Quakerism and the social structure in the Interregnum. Past and Present 43: 71 91.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 2343. Copyright 2009 Emanuel Valentin ISSN 1742-2930
Ritual as Cultural Reserve among Sicilian Migrants in Germany

Emanuel Valentin European Academy, Bolzano (Italy) http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol16/iss2/valentin.pdf
Abstract Different theories have underlined the importance of the seemingly anachronistic revitalisation of traditional forms of saint cults in front of general processes of overlaying and dispersion. Saint cults didnt disappear through modernisation, but created new potential out of it. The recourse on saint cult and on seemingly anachronistic practices acts in this context and especially in times of crisis as break handle, as counter reaction to globalization, as cultural reserve. The notion of reserve which stands in the vicinity to notions of resistance, archaism, counter culture, fundamentalism and regional/local obstinacy refers to a seemingly authentic behaviour, which is oriented to local forms and which is rooted in a back dated culture, social structure and economy. It isnt simply a survival of the old but has to be seen as a hybrid reaction to actual processes. I follow an approach which understands the saint cult on the local level as result of a dialectical process between resistance and overlay. In this sense I interpret also the recourse on traditional folklore of communitarian and participative character and the reinforced significance of ritual revitalisation in the migration. So as the oscillation between home and host society, the foundation of ethnic associations or traditional food habits, which can work as identity anchor and as strategies of resistance against uniforming processes of adaptation in the migration, the saint cult acts as a reserve, bearing the potential to dampen the cultural effects of the migration crisis and the alienation from the home society. Keywords: migration, ritual change, social change, reserve, Sicilian migrants
Introduction During different periods between July 2003 and March 2006 I conducted non-stationary fieldwork among Sicilian emigrants in and around an industrial city in southwest Germany called Sindelfingen.26 These emigrants originally all came from Mirabella Imbaccari, an agrotown (Schneider & Schneider 1976: 32ff.; Gabaccia 1984: 13f.) located between Caltagirone and Piazza Armerina in the eastern part of Sicily.27 In my research I focussed especially on a Maccarsian saint
The fieldwork was carried out for my M.A. thesis in Eberhard-Karls University, Tuebingen, Germany. They call themselves Maccarsi, a term which stems from the second part of the name of the town, namely Imbaccari, and which I also have adopted when I refer to them in this paper.
27 26
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cult, which was revitalised by Maccarsian migrants in the early 1970s, namely the festa di San Giuseppe (festival of St Joseph), the putative father of Jesus and elected husband of Mary, who is the secondary patron saint28 and protector of Mirabella, next to the Maria SS. delle Grazie (Holy Mary of the Graces). It is our tradition, my informants told me over and over again. With satisfaction they asserted: Like in Sicily. In the many conversations I had with them they reconstructed, with love for detail and an even greater portion of nostalgia, the symbolic space, which they recreate year after year in their houses, and how they remember it from their parental town. For them the tradition was always something ancient, old almost something which is repeated over and over again since time immemorial. But in the course of my investigation this traditionalistic discourse, which regards the ritual in the diaspora as an exact copy of the ritual in Mirabella, showed more and more inconsistencies with the actual ritual praxis. Sometimes my informants themselves deconstructed this aura of traditionalism, emphasising the changes of the ritual in the migration and presenting it as degenerated form against the true festival in the home town. Even that description of the true festival, which my informants associated with their hometown, wasnt consistent anymore with the actual ritual practice in Mirabella. Rather, this ideal type of the true festival appeared to exist only in the memory of the migrants, who seemed to ignore the modernisation process in Sicily and to neglect any possibility of change. On the other side some religious discourses exist in Sindelfingen, which I couldnt find anymore in Mirabella. Ritual and Change Hence the focus of my research was the interplay between ritual, especially ritual change, and social change. With social change I especially mean the change which results from the migration process within a specific migrant group. In addition, I tried to find answers to the following question: Which functional and structural changes undergo a local catholic saint festival through its recontextualization in the migration? Facing different definitions of ritual (Bell 1997; Belliger & Krieger 1998) and their assumption, that stereotypy (Lang 1998b: 448) is one of the principal attributes of rituals, this endeavour seems at first quite paradoxical. Still in the mid-1980s definitions of ritual and anthropological studies of religion dominated, which emphasised the repetitive, the formal and the traditionalism of ritual activity on the one side, but didnt care much about the interplay between rituals or between ritual change and social change. Geertz (1957) and Rudolph & Rudolph (1967) early recognized the importance of ritual and tradition for the satisfaction of human needs in a modernising society. They emphasised the alleviative effect of rituals on social change. But the focus on the problem of ritual change itself is a relatively young phenomenon and centred first on the revitalisation of rituals and the introduction or invention of new ones (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983; Boissevain 1992b; Kreinath, Hartung & Deschner 2004). On one side ritual change can be proved historically and shows that rituals are not static but underlie dynamic processes of transformation. Ritual change comprises such aspects as function, form, meaning and performance, which can change interdependently but also with different velocity (Kreinath 2004: 270f.). Ritual change implies that they arent simply senseless repetitions of some superimposed instructions without transformative effect. Anyway the phenomena of ritual
Every catholic shaped town has one or more so called patron saints, who are believed to be the protectors of the population of that settlement. If there are more than one patron saint we differentiate between main patron saint (in this particular case the Maria SS. delle Grazie) and secondary patron saint (San Giuseppe).
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participants claiming to the fact that their ritual exists since time immemorial in the same unchanged way can often been found (ibid.). On the other side we should not neglect the fact that rituals more than other social customs show a clear tendency to be immune against change (Bell 1997: 211). Already in the 19th century William Robertson Smith faced the question why rituals are more stable than belief systems. He laid the ground for the interest in the social aspects of religious phenomena, in which seemed to lay the explanation for the persistence of rituals (Van Baal 1971: 30-53). The perspective which excluded change is even more the product of the dominant position of the classic Durkheimian definition, for which the ritual as a social fact and collective representation was a mean forming community and reproducing culture (Durkheim 1965). Repetition is an important element of the Durkheimian understanding of ritual. His theory generated essentialising concepts of ritual and led to a synchronic rather than diachronic analysis of the interplay between ritual and society (Tak 2000: 12ff.), which also influenced deeply the functional and structural-functional theories. Even in the 1990s Boissevain (1992b) suggested that the general scientific disinterest in ritual change can be explained by the structural-functional approach, which shaped the ethnological inquiries and especially ritual studies (ibid.: 2). If we look for the theoretical dilemma between structure and process in ethnological theories of the saint cult (Gronover 2005), it becomes clear that representatives of different theoretical strands in the 1950s and 1960s interpreted the catholic saint cult so as religion in general as social institution with stabilizing functions for society. It was seen as an instrument which maintains and reinforces the social balance and structure of a community, which protects and fortifies traditions, values and norms from external influences (Pitt-Rivers 1961; Boissevain 1964; Foster 1961, 1963, 1967, Gronover 2005: 10-34; 39-44). Without integrating a wider historical perspective these approaches were not able to gain insight in the complexities of ritual change. Only the attempt of historical analysis in other works led to an explanation of the interplay between structure and process, between ritual and social change (Wolf 1965; Christian 1972; Gronover 2005: 45-58; 62-74). Durkheims emphasis on a synchronic approach can also be associated with the modernisation theory, which constructed a static polarity between traditional, closed and unchanging societies on the one side, and modern, open and dynamic societies on the other side. Following the modernisation theory rituals should have disappeared at least in modern (post-)industrial societies. Boissevain (1977) predicted in 1977 for Malta: The saints are marching out. Are they leaving for good? Only the future will tell (ibid.: 90). After only seven years he had to admit that he was wrong and testified an impressing revitalisation of saint cults and public ceremonies especially in Southern Europe (Boissevain 1984: 163). Hence Hauschilds (1990) legitimate question: If we take seriously Boissevains observation, that sometimes the saints move out of society, [] but that they come marching into society again on other occasions, then the simple question arises, where they have been in the meantime (ibid.: 18). 29 One possible and oversimplified answer to this question is that the saints migrated with the people from southern European regions to the north and overseas, leading on one hand to ritual change on the local level of the home town and in the migration on the other hand.
My translation. If not written explicitly, the same applies to all translations of citations in the article. DAJ 16/2 25 Valentin
29
The Emigrated Saints: Revitalisation of Local Saint Festivals in Migration Often copies of saints images are produced and their cults revitalised in during migration in order to satisfy the migrants need for their saint. Numerous are the local south Italian patron saint festivals celebrated abroad showing astonishing similarities to the feasts in the home towns. Examples are, among many others, the Good Friday procession of Pretoro, re-enacted by migrants in the Canadian Ottawa (Lanternari 1977: 183); or the feasts of Santa Rosalia, San Faro, San Calogero and many other Sicilian patron saints still celebrated in Elizabeth Street in New York (Gabaccia 1984; 105; 108; Orsi 1985); or San Donato in Altoona (Pennsylvania), Blue Island (Illinois) and Buenos Aires (Hauschild 1990: 547ff.). The revitalisation of local saint cults in the process of migration is often linked to the foundation of brotherhoods, party committees and other corporative associations in honour of the saint. In the migration these corporations can reach a bigger vitality than in the society of origin itself (Hauschild 1990: 561; 2003: 617ff.), encouraging the cohesion between the Italian migrants and influencing also the religious life in the home town (for example through collections of donations for the festival in the home town; Hauschild 1990: 549; 556). Against processes of isolation these corporations enable the establishment of social networks beyond the own family (Gabaccia 1984: 105), although it hasnt always to be like this: Gabaccia writes about Sicilian party societies in New York, whose existence was linked fundamentally to their economic profit. Similar to the Sicilian home towns the foundation of a party society in one neighbourhood led to a rapid formation of a rivalling one in another (ibid.). Behind the revitalisation of saint cults in the migration stands mostly the aim to reproduce in exact manner and with a true-to-detail devotion the feast of the home town. But different factors coming along with the migration process represent striking breaches influencing deeply the continuity of the festival and causing changes of the ritual forms and of the religious discourse. Such factors are among others the socio-economic development of the migrants, the span of time between departure of the migrants and the revitalisation of the festival in the migration, the embedding of the festival in a new socio-cultural environment implicating new conflicts between different interest groups (both among Italian migrants themselves and between Italian migrants and other ethnic groups or even the church), which can lead to an adaptation and reformulation of the ritual form. Despite evident processes of change, the believers, organisers and participants celebrate in these ritual performances an authentic (religious) culture and an apparent persistence of old world traits (Bianco 1974). Although these rituals in the migration are lived as continuous traditions they have to be understood as results of the processing and re-processing of original cultural forms, and hence as their modifications. Ritual revitalisation in the course of migration draws lines of continuity between elements of the past and elements of the present, creating the frame for a cultural and social identity within a foreign society and showing differences to the host society (Bianco 1974: 87; 105; 120; Fortier 2000: 144). Hence, this revitalisation is closely related to the (re-)production of ethnicity (Fortier 2000: 144). Theoretical Premises Different theories have underlined the importance of the seemingly anachronistic revitalisation of traditional forms of saint cults in front of general processes of overlaying (Giordano 1992). Schenda & Schenda (1965) saw the reason of the adherence to traditions in the general loss of security coming along with processes of overlapping. The conservation of the old and known is in this sense a search for that lost security (ibid.). Lanternari (1977) explains the ritual revitalisation in DAJ 16/2 26 Valentin
Italy as nativistic reaction to super-imposed cultural models (also an overlay) and processes of centrifugal, dispersive and individualistic tendency (ibid.: 181). 30 Ritual revitalisation acts also against the psychological malaise and the identity crises (ibid.: 180ff.) coming along with it. Especially because of the participation of migrants Lanternari (1977) saw in the saint cult an instrument of social and communitarian reunion (ibid.: 180). He understood the phenomenon of the returning migrants to the feasts as indication of the resocializing function of popular feasts (ibid.: 181). Di Nola (1976) applied a Marxist perspective and explained the recourse to saint festivals with the degradation of human beings through capitalism (security vulnerability, forced migration, low salaries), that means the contradictions of the industrial society (ibid.: 24). Risso, Rossi & Lombardi-Satriani (1978) see the cultural resistance of traditional forms in Southern Italy against the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and against the insights of modern medicine as grounded in a culture of misery, which seems not to be an automatic consequence of, but a system of cultural responses to the economic situation (ibid.). South Italian peasants seem to have twofold resentments: on the one hand they want to participate to the new, dominant culture and have ambivalent sentiments to their own traditions, which they have already partly rejected. On the other hand they face a dominant culture, which degrades them to an inferior status, and flee into the saint cult in order to maintain traditional practices within a changing social environment (Appel 1977: 78). Boissevain (1984) interprets the increase of Good Friday processions and of the patron saints festivals on Malta as search for security and identity in the face of rapid social change. The recourse to collective festivals and rituals is a temporary alleviation from processes of isolation and alienation, from the sentiment of anonymity (Boissevain 1988: 75; 1992a: 174ff.; 1992b: 8f.) resulting from the ecclesiastic loss of power, the better living conditions and the intensive intervention of the welfare state into the private life of individuals (ibid.). An explanation based on the notion of search for identity like Lanternaris use of the notion identity crises is hard to grasp. Giordano (1984) recognized this, when he writes that such an ethnocentric argumentation gives the phenomenon an irrational colour (ibid.: 450). But indeed it is sure that a saint festival can temporarily restore the social unity of a town. The yearly feast is a moment of religious and ethnic cohesion (Hauschild 1990: 556), a moment, which unites the emigrants of the second and third generation with those staying at home in a new, nostalgically coloured feeling of home (ibid.: 39; also see Greverus 1964; 1965). Hence, feasts stitch together the cloth of a disrupted society and local culture in a symbolic and emotional manner. Comparing the above mentioned theories (Lanternari, Di Nola, Risso, Rossi & Lombardi-Satriani, Appel), the reinforced revitalisation of saint cults seems to result from general processes of overlaying and dispersion. Saint cults didnt disappear through modernisation, but created new potential out of it. The recourse on saint cult and on seemingly anachronistic practices acts in this context and especially in times of crises as break handle, as counter reaction to globalization, as reserve against the accelerated world of the present (Hauschild 2003: 11). The notion of reserve which stands in the vicinity to notions of resistance, archaism, counter culture, fundamentalism and regional/local obstinacy refers to seemingly authentic behaviour, which is oriented to local forms and which is rooted in a back dated culture, social structure and economy. It isnt simply a survival of the old but has to be seen as hybrid reaction to actual processes (Hauschild 2008).
Meant is here the weakening of kinship ties, migration of workers, urbanization and socioeconomic subalternity. DAJ 16/2 27 Valentin
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I follow an approach which understands the saint cult on the local level as result of a dialectical process between resistance and overlay. In this sense I interpret also the recourse on traditional folklore of communitarian and participative character and the reinforced significance of ritual revitalisation in the migration. The process of migration, especially the forced migration because of economic misery and unemployment, represents a big crisis stemming from disgregative processes of isolation, cultural alienation, environmental change, socio-economic insecurity, loss of familiar bonds and weakening of the cohesion of kin groups (Lanternari 1977: 180ff.). The revitalisation of a saint cult in the migration bears the potential to act exactly against these processes, which come along with the migration. So as the oscillation between home and host society, the foundation of ethnic associations or traditional food habits, which can work as identity anchor and as strategies of resistance against uniforming processes of adaptation in the migration (Giordano 1984), the saint cult acts as a reserve (Hauschild 2003: 11; 2008) and as retarding element (Hauschild 1990: 563f.), bearing the potential to dampen the cultural effects of the migration crisis and the alienation from the home society. It connects the old with the new and fits into the stress ratio between adaptation to the new conditions in the host society and the resistance of anachronistic practices against these processes of adaptation. The matter at stake here is a relation which Giordano (1984) referred to as interweavement of processes of uniformisation and differentiation. This stress ratio between appropriation and defence is the focus of my analysis of the Maccarsian St Joseph festival in Sindelfingen. Mirabella, Sindelfingen: A History of Emigration Amu ristatu sulu limpiegati, studenti, buttiari e pensiunati! Un sinnacu assai givani vantamu, ma sempri nn Germania chianamu! Si u Statu nan nni porta i Marocchini, i Curdi, lAlbanesi e i Filippini, ristamu sulu quattru pi semenza e naffidamu a bedda Pruvidenza!31 (Di Seri 1999: 147) In Mirabella the neo-colonial period (Schneider & Schneider 1976: 115), in which the export of manpower was the primary energy loss, set in relatively early. The first migration wave began around 1850 and was directed to Latin America, i.e. to Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela. The size of this migration becomes clear, when we look at the fact that in 1983 90 percent of the people older than 80 years has remigrated from Argentina (Horn 1986: 137). The second big migration took place in the early 20th century and was directed to the USA (Giordano 1984: 448f.).32 The Italian South didnt have any profits of the Italian period of economic development after the Second World War and didnt participate in the ongoing process of industrialization. This situation led to the third big migration wave in Mirabella. Due to the bilateral agreement of 1955 between Germany and Italy,
Only the employed, students, shopkeepers and retirees remained! A very young mayor we have, but always we are calling to Germany! If the state wouldnt bring us anymore the Moroccans, the Curds, the Albanians and the Philippins, then we would just be four for the sowing and would trust in the beautiful providence! 32 Neef (1986: 407) writes on the contrary, that the first migration wave was directed to North America, while the first one was directed to South America.
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which regulated the German recruitment of Italian workers (Rieker 2003), there was a growing flood of Maccarsi, who migrated as Gastarbeiter (guest workers) to Germany. These emigrants concentrated especially in two neighbouring towns in the surroundings of Stuttgart, namely Sindelfingen and Calw and other smaller settlements around these centres (Giordano 1984: 448f.; Horn 1986: 139ff.; Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986: 164; Di Seri 2001: 128). Due to this initial labour migration in the mid-1950s and the rapidly increasing chain migration in the following decades, almost one third of Mirabellas population (approximately 3,000 persons out of 9,000 inhabitants) was living in Sindelfingen and its near surroundings in the mid-1980s. To these, around 1,000 people have to be added those who emigrated to north-Italian industrial centres (Giordano 1984: 449; Horn 1986: 139). Today the phenomena of migration concerns approximately 60 percent of Mirabellas population (Di Seri 2001: 10). Because of the geographical proximity which is not comparable with the distance between Sicily and the Americas the migration between Mirabella and Sindelfingen shows a clear pendular character (Giordano 1984), i.e. the emigrants move periodically between hometown and host society. As logical consequence tight transnational contacts still exist between Mirabella and Sindelfingen. Three bus companies offer direct connections between the two towns three times a week, several import-export companies offer food transports or move services, there is even an international funeral parlour for the many migrants who often possess expensive mortuary chapels for their entire families at the outskirts of Mirabella. The strong orientation to the home town and the explicit wish of returning to Sicily, which was the point of departure of almost any Maccarsian emigrant, resulted from the insecurity of their status as Gastarbeiter (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986: 173). But many didnt return before reaching their personal economic goals, which often needed many years, sometimes provoking nostalgic reactions in form of home sickness and illnesses (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986: 172; Busch 1983; Frigessi Castelnuovo & Risso 1986). Like overseas migration (Bianco 1974: xiif.), the migration to Germany was characterised by a rapidly starting disillusion which replaced the original wish of return. Many migrants didnt return to Mirabella anymore, even after the realisation of their economic goals. This was due to the fact that meanwhile their children were grown up, rarely showing any interest in returning to the home town of their parents (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986: 174ff.). Especially the ones who still didnt get any pension payment had to recognise that the working situation in Mirabella was still as disastrous as in the time of their migration. Even for those who returned the experience of their home town was often a disappointment, because the reality didnt coincide anymore with their superelevated home ideal, which served as psychological halt for personal hopes and expectations during the migration (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986: 186). Socio-Cultural Changes among Maccarsian Emigrants in Sindelfingen Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come , bisogna che tutto cambi. Mi sono spiegato? 33 (Lampedusa 1974: 33) The Maccarsi in Sindelfingen arent peasants, land workers or artisans anymore, so as most of them had been in Mirabella. Their everyday life is definitely not bound to agriculture anymore, even if
If we want that everything remains as it is, then its necessary that everything changes. Did I make it clear? (my translation).
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some of them still have parcels of land in Mirabella, which mostly lie fallow. Mirabella, a place in which two cultures pounce on each other and mingle. Here live Mirabellesi and Germans, a place, whose inhabitants alienated from each other (Horn 1986: 132). Maccarsian migrants havent directly lived the changes which occurred in Sicily during their absence or watched them only from the distance, although their migration was an important factor leading to them. Hence the process of alienation of the migrants occurred not in relation to a fixed point (change of the migrants vs. unchanging home town), but has to be understood as a meshwork of exponential relations (change of the migrants and change of the home town) and relational links (change of the home town through the influence of the migrants). Withdrawal from the Public Space The solidarity and contact within the group of migrants, which at first consisted only from men, seem to have been strongest at the beginning of the migration to Germany, i.e. at the time of total social and psychological disintegration (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986: 177). Because Italians have a strong binding to the primary group, as Lauer & Wilhelmi write (ibid.), a withdrawal from the public space into the security of the private realm took place when women and children joined their husbands and fathers in Germany. The family-house became the primary space of socio-cultural activities, which was simultaneously an adaptation to the German way of living (ibid.). The piazza (town square) and the passeggiata (promenade) with their manifold functions as platforms for communication, employment exchange and negotiation of social status (Reinhold 1986) ceased to exist in Sindelfingen. Rather extra-familial contacts with paesani (fellow countrymen) were now mostly possible through organised associations or activities of the church. Gender Roles In Sindelfingen Sicilian patterns of gender behaviour and of the division of labour along the lines of male and female changed fundamentally (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986: 186). In order to realise the financial goals of the migration as soon as possible many women took up jobs in factories or as charladies, a behaviour which was mostly unaccepted in Sicily. On the other side men began to take over certain household activities, which in Sicily would have been regarded as untypical behaviour of the Germans, a term which also applied to the emigrated Maccarsi (ibid.). The new work situation (mostly shift work) made it very difficult to conserve the traditional gender roles, i.e. the outwards working man and the child rearing woman. Many parents were obliged to send their children back to Sicily, where they went to school under the charge of grandparents, relatives or often catholic schools. Behind this stands not only the explicit wish that children should learn the Italian language well, but it reflects also the German working situation standing in conflict with traditional gender roles. Through this the phenomena of the separated core family was perpetuated, although the migrants had tried to act against this through the unification of their families in the migration. Sicily was a society dominated through segregation of sexes and familism (Schneider & Schneider 1976: 93). But the male dominance of the public and political arena didnt imply that women lived isolated inside the houses (Gabaccia 1984: 43f.; Busch 1983: 218ff.). While there was lively contact to neighbours and relatives during work on the streets in front of the house, during the evening passeggiata or during the regular visits to church, in Germany dependence and fixation on the spouse grew. This applied especially to women, who didnt have time for extra-familial contacts anymore because of their role as housewife, mother and money earner (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986: DAJ 16/2 30 Valentin
176). Parental networks, which were existent only partially in Sindelfingen, couldnt give a possible protection in front of the isolation as before (ibid.; see also Busch 1983: 192ff.). Social Control An important element of the Sicilian home (Heimat) is the public space, i.e. places like the piazza, the many bars or the streets. Through manifold possibilities of occupation, appropriation and control, public space satisfies socio-cultural and symbolic needs of the inhabitants (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986: 162f.). With the mostly open doors even the private room of the household is separated from the public space only through the threshold. Insofar the South Italian neighbourhood represents a strong instance of control determining prestige, honour and status of a family according to its grade of maintenance or rupture with the code of behaviour (Davis 1969; Gabaccia 1984: 45). Lauer & Wilhelmi (1986: 182) didnt find any fundamental transformation of the values of Sicilian migrants, but noticed an adaptation to German cultural patterns. In a test consisting of images representing houses Lauer & Wilhelmi (ibid.) came to the conclusion that migrants preferred the alone standing family house because of its privacy, not giving any value to neighbourhood contacts. This fact leads the two authors to suppose that the house-constructions in Sicily which copy German housing patterns have to be more than pure money investments or material enrichment. The migrants preference for privacy is indicative for their refuse of social control, which besides the longing for prestige and social ascension was a possible motive for migration (ibid.: 165; 168): Social mechanisms of control, which through positive or negative sanctioning of social behaviour stabilise the value system in a familiar environment, are lost with the familiar frame of reference in the foreign space, or the instance of control is now a neighbourhood, are now colleagues, with whom the emigrants are not linked anymore through a common value system. (ibid.: 170) Senseless rules of behaviour intensify the feeling of estrangement in the migration, which any migrant tries to escape. In reaction to this an over-adaptation (ibid.: 170f.) or at least a partial adaptation to the host society occurs, for example in relation to child rearing practices and marriage (ibid.: 178f.). This adaptation manifests itself not only in the withdrawal into the family, but also in the permanent wish of return (ibid.: 171). The authors close with the assumption that because of the decay of public life through an increased privatisation and a stronger focus on the familiar sphere, the realisation of the mentioned dwelling ideal will be followed by a impoverishment of interaction (ibid.: 187). Maccarsian Migrants in Sindelfingen: Persistence in Change? Lauer and Wilhelmi (1986) sketch a situation of Maccarsian migrants in Sindelfingen that is too one-sided and ignores any relations between the processes of uniformity and differentiation which Giordano (1984) has written about. They draw an image of the migrant, who imprisoned by his wish for return seems to live in a condition of total passivity, putting any social bounds and relations of reciprocity outside of his family on ice. If Banfields amoral familism (1965) as ethical basis of political action was not tenable in southern Italy and especially not in Sicily (Silverman 1968; Miller 1974; Muraskin 1974; Moss 1981; Gabaccia 1984: 10), then Lauer and Wilhelmi (1986) seem to have found it again in Germany. Because of the disinterest of the Sicilian in the political area (ibid.: 159) Lauer and Wilhelmi came to the conclusion, that for Sicilians the informal control of space stands in the foreground. More important is the appropriation of free DAJ 16/2 31 Valentin
spaces like the piazza, which at the end has to be seen as place of political action, or the celebration of traditional festivals (ibid.). I disagree with the assumption of Lauer and Wilhelmi (1986). In the year of their publication the two authors couldnt know that only one year later, in 1987, an Italian association would be founded in Sindelfingen. However, even in the early 1970s there were clear processes of ethnic revitalisation (Lanternari 1977; Giordano 1984), testifying against the supposed passivity or lack of appropriation of foreign space, and standing for the active occupation of it through reactivation of social norms and institutions stemming from the society of origin. I refer to the religious festivals of Mirabella, which have been revitalised by Maccarisian migrants in the early 1970s in Sindelfingen, Calw and surroundings in chronological sequence of their appearance: the festa di San Giuseppe, the festa della Maria SS. delle Grazie and the procession of Good Friday. Through these festivals the migrants reproduce symbolic-religious spaces of their homeland also in the foreign country and so create their own familiar spaces (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986) of transnational34 character, in which they periodically reactivate a feeling of home. Hence, the return to the home town must not to be linked anymore to the participation in these festivals (Giordano 1984: 450f.; Puosi 1986). The revitalisation of rituals in the migration undermines the idea of the home town as constant object of longing or permanent place of return. The place of the return nostalgia must not be a physical place. Fortier (2000) grasped this in the notion of homing desire, which is satisfied through religious festivals far from the home country: [T]hat is the desire to feel at home, by physically or symbolically re-membering places as habitual spaces which provide some kind of ontological security for Italians living in a non-Italian, non-Catholic world (ibid.: 163). I understand the reactivation of these festivals in the migration like the periodical return to the home town (Giordano 1984) as cultural pendular. Perpetuated through the interweavement of acculturation and re-acculturation tendencies (ibid: 455) it represents a balance act between two cultures (ibid.: 453) and bears potential resistance against uniforming processes of adaptation: Through the oscillation the migrant is not at the mercy of the host societys alien culture, but deals periodically with the specific collective cognition and with patterns of behaviour of the own community of origin. In intervals the oscillating migrant immerges into his culture of origin and is remembered of its fundamental traits, which probably dont represent any constituent element of the host culture. (ibid.: 453) If we look onto the fact, that in part these religious practices have been adopted by the children of the migrants, and following the argumentation of Giordano a little bit further, then the cultural oscillation acts as identity anchor also for the following generations: the periodical symbolic return of/to the parental festivals, the oscillation between two cultures represents on one hand marking points for future orientation but confirms also the actual loss of tradition on the other. Hence, it serves in discovering (inventing) again the cultural traits of the society of origin (Giordano 1984: 454).
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Transnationalism refers to a process, through which emigrants create social fields, which link their country of origin to the host country (Glick Schiller, Basch & Blanc-Szanton 1992: 1). [Immigrants] develop and maintain multiple relations familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders (ebd.:1) [and] develop identities within social networks that connect them to two or more societies simultaneously (ebd.:2). I am speaking here about the transnational character of the festival of St Joseph, which I will describe as follows, because it still shows a high degree of information and resources exchange between home town and place of migration. Following Vertovec (2000: 12) this is besides the transfer of money, travels and communication necessary in order to differentiate migration from diaspora.
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Maccarsian St Joseph Altars and Their Changes in the Migration The main periods in which Maccarsian emigrants returned to Mirabella were those in which the religious festivals took place, i.e. the festival of San Giuseppe (Giordano 1984: 450f.) and the festival of Maria SS. Delle Grazie (Horn 1986: 136). Their significance as cultural magnets (Turner & Turner 1978: 27), which they certainly still have, decreased gradually, especially when the process of families joining their emigrated kin came to an end in the early 1970s. At this time the first emigrants began to celebrate the St Josephs festival also in Sindelfingen and surroundings. Since then the festival was also established in Germany. Probably because of its private character, the festival of St Joseph was the first festival introduced in the migration. St Joseph, the putative father of Jesus and elected husband of the Virgin Mary, is celebrated on 19th of March within the intimate space of single family households. Preparations In the week before the 19th of March Maccarsian women start with the preparations for the St Joseph altars. These altars, which are erected in different households, are large banquets: big tables are covered with a huge amount of comestible goods like fresh and dried fruits; raw, cooked and partly wild vegetables; fish, flour, pasta, and so forth. The most important elements of the altars are three devotional breads positioned on the highest point of the altar, ephemeral statues which represent the persons of the Holy Family. Besides these many other devotional breads cover the altar representing different symbols associated with St Joseph, some of them of phyto- or theriomorphe shape. Among the cooked foods are many typical local dishes of Maccarsian or Sicilian origin, like sfingi, cassateddi, pesche, impanati, and many others. Because St Joseph was poor the food and dishes on these tables are regarded as poor peoples food. But next to these traditional, poor foods today we can also find a lot of modern consumer and luxury goods like chocolate, coffee, fruits out of season or exotic fruits like mangos or avocados, representing emblems of globalisation on the banquets. Additionally, amounts of money can be found, which may reach up to several hundreds of Euros. The most of these goods are ordered by a transport company, which brings them directly from Sicily. This is necessary because some goods like the wild vegetables or the big laurel branches for decoration cant easily be found in Germany or just taste better. The Vow Altars in honour of the saint are erected as ex voto, that means that they are preceded by a prummisioni, a vow. The aim of such a vow, which an individual person takes in front of the saint mainly because of diseases, misfortunes or processes of house building, is to achieve a grazia (grace) from the saint. As part of a wider Sicilian system of grace (Di Bella 1992) the St Joseph altars hence bear a reserve which uses a transcendent instance (the saint) in order to achieve a psychological stabilisation of the individual and a certain security facing especially difficult life crisis. Because St Joseph is regarded as patron saint of the family this reserve shows an explicit familiar focus: the vows always address the own core family in a narrower or the own kin in a wider sense. According to the requested grace the vows can be differentiated by the addressee (for oneself or a third person of the own family), their frequency (the altar can be built once or every year for the entire life) and their effort (mostly measured on the costs of the altar). Nevertheless the vow is no longer the sole reason for the erection of an altar. Especially emigrants of the first generation, who are confronted with their childrens disinterest in the parental traditions, DAJ 16/2 33 Valentin
build the altar in order just to keep the tradition alive, bearing the wish to teach the own children something about their original culture. Collective visits of the St Joseph altars Starting on noonday of 18th of March the altars are visited by numerous friends, relatives and curious people, to whom the members of the host family serve sweets and other typical dishes. Every altar builder knows about the gossip of the people, who visit the altar, and is hence very conscious about the social control which comes along with these visits. Insofar it is very important that the altar and everything surrounding it makes a beautiful figure (fare bella figura). During the ritual the private room of the household goes through a process of opening and publication. On the 19th of March your house has to become a church! With this metaphor a woman brought perfectly to the point that during the ritual the private, intimate and closed space of the family is transformed into a public, outward oriented, open realm of the community. The banquet becomes an altar forming the centre of the church. Its sacrality is underlined through a touching taboo, which begins at a fixed point in time, at noon of the 18th of March. Through this sacralisation an exceptional frame of time and space is drawn and a stage for the performance of the ritual is created. Like a church the private home becomes a public space and as such it implicates a certain degree of social pressure, too. This is shown in the moral obligation felt by relatives and friends to visit an altar. With these visits an appreciation of the ritual action comes along. Di Bella (1992) emphasised the symmetry between the concept of honour and the concept of grace in Mediterranean societies, especially in the society of Sicily. Both of them base on the oral pact. If we reduce the system of grace on its fundamental institutions, namely the vow and the miracle, then the equilibrium between the two guarantees a regulated function of this system (ibid.): the believer must be worth of the saints grace; the saint in turn must assist the humans. If grace has been obtained the privileged relation between believer and the saint and its publication through collectively recognised practices serves for the enhancement of the public image both of the believer and the saint (ibid.: 162): Thus, communicating to the audience the circumstances in which a person obtained grace is a way of making himself known as worthy of a miracle, worthy of receiving the saints grace, and therefore worthy of renown (ibid.: 158). Di Bella (ibid.: 164) interprets the system of grace as strategy of the social inferior classes, which cannot compete for honour with the upper classes because of their subaltern position. The recourse on saints makes it possible for powerless individuals and groups to build up celestial relations with humanised saints, which are copies of those terrestrial relations denied to them. The competition for honour finds its alternative in the system of grace: Terrestrial relations and their celestial counterparts are therefore to be viewed as complementary in maintaining a stable society (ibid.: 164). Hence the system of the grace serves as reserve leading to collective appreciation of the person who was bestowed with a grace both in the religious and in the social sphere. The St Joseph festival as ritual of the family fits perfectly into the process of withdrawal from the public space into the security of the domus35 (Orsi 1985) which comes along with the migration (see paragraph Withdrawal from the Public Space above). The familiar home, which increasingly became the primary space of socio-cultural activities, is sacralised during the festival. It becomes a social stage; the private space becomes public. Thereby the traditional relation between social control and prestige is re-established, which has lost its integrative function in Sindelfingen because
The home and the family, grasped by Orsi (1985: 75) with the term domus, form the ritual core of the St Josephs festival. Orsi (ibid.) saw the domus as centre of the Italo-American culture (ibid.: XX; 75ff.), on which loyalty, solidarity and respect of an individual are concentrated.
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of the dispersion of the collective with its common values and norms. Because of the absence of traditional social stages (like the piazza) the publication of the private household during the festival gains a new functional meaning in the migration. Rather than just increasing the social control private space becomes sacralised public space, in which Maccarsian migrants appear temporarily as collective community. Due to the spatial dispersion and fragmentation of the community this is an important moment in the re-staging and strengthening of a common identity in the migration. Lamenti du Vnniri Santu, Lamentations of Good Friday Starting in the afternoon and till late at night, a group of 5-10 men goes from one altar to the next. There they sing in Sicilian dialect the lamentations of Good Friday (Lamenti du Vnniri Santu). These chants are a fundamental part of the procession of Good Friday in Mirabella and are also recited there for San Giuseppe. Indeed lamentations like these can be found all over Sicily (Giallombardo 1990; 2005). The words of the lamentations recount the pain of Jesus from the perspective of his mourning mother. A very striking difference between Mirabella and Sindelfingen is the fact that in Mirabella the lamentaturi recite outside of the houses, in which the altars have been erected, on the open street. For this service the host family offers them food and drinks in front of its house. The like can be found in many parts of Sicily during the Eastern festivities. It is a ceremonial exchange with food and singing constituting the two poles of it (Giallombardo 2005: 27). The fact that in Sicily it is mostly the man of the house, who brings this gifts outside to the street, while the women take over the role as donator only inside of the houses, leads Giallombardo (ibid.: 27) to interpret this as implying an affinity between women and the closed space of the household. This staging of feminine and masculine spaces in the context of nutrition (ibid.) constructs following Giallombardo such binary oppositions like man/woman, outside/inside, public/private. In Sindelfingen the lamentations are not recited on the street but inside of the houses. The same applies to the consumption of food and drinks offered to the lamentaturi. These points exemplify how the incorporation of the St Joseph festival into the German society goes along with a process of withdrawal into the private space. Hence, in the migration the ritual oppositions between genders, which seem still existent in Sicily, become less and less clear due to the total withdrawal of this exchange into the private space of the family. The change of traditional gender roles in the migration (see the paragraph Gender Roles above) is paralleled by a change of the ritual division of labour: the ritual realm of the men cant be clearly identified anymore with the public space; women on the contrary cant be associated anymore with the private space alone. The ritual withdrawal into the private space is certainly also due to the opinions regarding the reception of the festival through the German society. The emigrants dont want to attract attention through noise on the street. Through the privatisation of the festival it becomes invisible. On the other side it happened that the festival experienced a folklorisation (Boissevain 1992a: 11) serving as an instrument for the formation of a particular Italian image. In 2002 more than 1,000 visitors were welcomed to a Josephs altar erected inside the rooms of an Italian Association in Sindelfingen: Because this long Italian tradition, which is celebrated mostly in Southern Italy, is forgotten more and more here in Germany, we want to practice this festival here too now, one member of the association is cited in an article published in a local newspaper.36 And further: We celebrate this
Sindelfingen: Erstes St.-Josephs-Fest des italienischen Vereins: Kstliches aus Nchstenliebe (Sindelfinger Zeitung, 21.03.2002).
36
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festival not only in order to bring it closer to our children again, but also in order to show the Germans something of our culture. Hence, the revitalisation of the festival in the migration bears a twofold reserve against the forgetting: the matter at stake is not only to bring the tradition closer to the younger generation again, but also to remind the host society about the presence of Maccarsian emigrants, to show the Germans an aspect of Italian tradition. Hence through the festival, difference is emphasised. Besides this image building there is further a more political aspect of the St Josephs altar in the Italian Association. We have just to look at the fact that it was used for the improvement of the contacts between the Italian Association and representatives of local politics when both the mayor and the spokesperson for foreigners affairs of Sindelfingen were invited to the altar. The Night: Time of Miracles Most of my informants both in Sindelfingen and Mirabella told me that the altar has to be left alone during the night, because this is the time during which the saint goes to action. He visits the altars making noise and leaving traces behind, such as finger prints in the salt which has been appositely flattened in its cup before the night comes. I collected many wonder-stories about these nightly visits, both outside and inside the mission. These kinds of visits are interpreted as special signs of the saints benevolence and blessing, testifying the saints acceptance of the offered banquet. But his intervention happens also when the altar wasnt constructed in the right manner, for example if too many glasses on the altar are removed by the saint by throwing them on the floor. Hence the saint acts as preserver of the tradition, sanctioning those who didnt respect the original form. The change of the tradition and its modernisation has to be legitimised through the saint. The Meal of the Poor According to the tradition on the 19th of March three poor people have to be invited for a meal on the altar. These are a man, a little boy and a little girl representing the Holy Family Joseph, Jesus and Mary and therefore called santi, saints. In order to purify themselves from every sin, both in Mirabella and Sindelfingen they have to confess and to assist a mass before coming to the banquet. The women of the household start with serving all the dishes on the altar to the saints, who are supposed to symbolically taste all of them. From the representatives of San Giuseppe a careful behaviour towards the other saints is expected, as if it would be his own family. Afterwards all the goods on the altar are offered as gifts to the saints, which they take with them to their homes and share with their families, friends and neighbours. Sometimes the gifts sustain such a family for more than one month. During the distribution of the gifts to the saints, friends and relatives are also integrated into this ritual of commensality. Several dishes are served to every single visitor, among them countless sweets, bread and a plate of noodles with broad beans prepared according to a special recipe for that ritual occasion. Not only Maccarsian people come for this meal, but also people from other Sicilian towns and other Italian regions. Even curious German neighbours happen to come. The ritual bears a strong function in forming identity. During the festival the Maccarsian community goes through a metamorphosis, which on one side fits into Turners notion of anti-structure (Turner 1969), while on the other representing a reproduction of the social life during festive moments in Mirabella. The society, which is fragmented in everyday life of the migration, is again united in one corporation, like in Mirabella before. Through the presence of not only Sicilians, but also migrants from other Italian regions and even Germans, the belonging which is traditionally DAJ 16/2 36 Valentin
bound to the distribution of food becomes enlarged. The distribution acts no more as identity creating moment for the family or the Maccarsian community alone, but includes also migrants from all over Italy. Hence the Maccarsian St Josephs festival seems to have lost its former reference to locality. It is no more a symbol of intra-Italian diversity but becomes an interregional symbol for multilayered significances, which are associated by different groups in different situations with Maccarsian, Sicilian or Italian identity (Orsi 1999: 265). On the altars in private households in Sindelfingen I noticed a general loss of the charitable character of the St Joseph altars. Although many altar builders told me about the meal of the poor as being a fundamental element of this ritual, asking the same people about whom effectively was invited to their altar, I was often told that they were chosen amongst their own relatives. My informants justified this often with the difficulty of finding real poor today. In this discourse the decay of the charitable aspect reflects a general improvement of the economic situation of the emigrants community. Hence traditional reciprocal practices towards the poor, embedded in particular forms of ritualised gift exchange, lost their significance. Rather the meal of the poor as reserve against material poverty has been substituted both in the society of origin and in the migration by the custom of making own family members the primary addressees of the ritual reciprocity. On the other hand the fact of own family members becoming the primary addressees of the gifts on the St Joseph altar represents an adaptation of the ritual to a discourse, which doesnt associate the poor with a nutrition deficiency or hunger, but with a minor degree of participation in certain aspects of the modern consumer society. This is reflected in one of my informants statement when asked why she invited family members to her altar and not poor people. She gave me the short answer: We are all poor! In this context the banquet as practice of reciprocal solidarity and the stronger involvement of family members as addressees of the gifts can be understood as reserve against processes of dominance and subordination. In the retreat into the family, the basic element of human society, lie strategies and reactions to an environment marked by calamities and economic inferiority (Hauschild 2003: 234ff.): It is the society of the constant shipwreck, the culture of the broken, about which we are talking, self-help, mutual help is here the matter and naturally also the healthy egoism of familism (ibid.: 234). In this light the offering of the gifts to own family members seems to be a quite rational reaction to historical, topographic and economic determinants and not a manifestation of a peculiar form of Sicilian amoral familism (Banfield 1965). Summary This paper is a short resume of my research about the interweavement of ritual and social change, exemplified on a local popular-catholic saint cult revitalised in the migration process. Revitalised rituals through migration dont have the same original meanings anymore which they had in the society of origin. Nonetheless, they represent lived religious practices with important factors in forming identity and integration. As such they are fundamental elements of a cultural reconstruction (Baumann, Luchesi & Wilke 2003: 31). Through the sacral status ascribed to religion and rituals they offer secure and familiar spaces within an environment which is perceived as fundamentally changed (Baumann 2003: 171; Baumann 2004). Religion becomes a reserve which stabilises an individual psychologically, not only in order to handle the fundamental dangers of human life, but also the social change and its cultural effects coming along with the migration process. Hence, it is especially important for migrants to conserve practices, symbols, images and contents as much authentic as possible (Baumann 2003: 171). This rhetoric of continuity (Skefeld 2004: 151) hides the many processes of change, reshape and invention lying behind the assumed continuity of revitalised traditions. Due to the interweavement of continuity and DAJ 16/2 37 Valentin
transformation, the relation between social change and the content of rituals has to be looked on in a much differentiated way. The dumb rule, that ritual forms generally change slower than their functions (Tak 2000: 15), and the premise, that there are no direct links between social change within a society and the contents of rituals (ibid.), must not be valid for the situation in the migration. Summarising, the most fundamental changes of the ritual praxis fit perfectly into the social change coming along with the migration process and the settlement in the host society. On more levels (decrease of the charitable character of the ritual, shift of the ceremonial exchange of chant and food from the street into the houses) I recognised a strengthened withdrawal into the private room of the family. This process fits into the social withdrawal from the public space into the security of the domus (Orsi 1985) coming along with the family unification, which was the necessary condition for the revitalisation of the festival in the migration. This emphasises very clearly the strengthened importance of the family as reserve in the migration. The St Joseph festival re-institutionalises and perpetuates periodically the values of an ideal type model of core family (the Holy Family), putting on it a Sicilian model of gender relations which slowly seems to disappear in the migration. While originally the saints, who the family incorporates temporarily during the ritual, originated from the lines of breakage of the Sicilian society, i.e. the poor and orphans, today most of the families use these resources for themselves. St. Josephs banquet as praxis of reciprocal solidarity and especially the strengthened familism can be understood in this context as reserve against processes of dominance and subordination. The withdrawal into the family, the elementary component of human society, is a strategy and a reaction to a catastrophic environment and experienced economic inferiority (Hauschild 2003: 234ff.), which culminated directly in the migration crisis. In this light the recourse on the family appears as rational reaction to historical, topographical and economic determinants, and follows rather a mentality of superimposition (Giordano 1992) and a rationality of superimposition (ibid.) than the logic of a Sicilian form of amoral familism (Banfield 1965). Interestingly enough, during the ritual this process of withdrawal into the family is paralleled by a process of opening and publication: the private room and the family become public, outward oriented, open realms of the community. This process implicates two interwoven aspects. On one hand, the opening of the private household acts against the lack of social stages and offers a space in which Maccarsian migrants can appear as collective community, re-enacting and strengthening a common identity. On the other side, the ritual re-establishes the traditional link between social control and prestige, which lost its integrative function in the migration because of the absence of a collective group. It is the involvement of the collective and the publication of the privileged relation between individual (and the family respectively) and saint which bears a prestigious reserve for the family in order to increase its reputation in the religious and hence in the social realm. Of course, the withdrawal into the private space is due also to a certain opinion regarding the German societys reception of the festival, making it invisible to the outside world. In opposition to this, through its folklorisation (Boissevain 1992a:11) the ritual becomes a politicised instrument for shaping a particular Italian image. The revitalisation of the ritual bears a twofold reserve against the forgetting: it is not only a matter of bringing the children again closer to the parental traditions, but also of emphasising the presence of Maccarsian migrants through their cultural difference from the host society and other migrant groups. Clear relations between processes of de- and relocation can be recognised. The saint, which was honoured before as deus loci, becomes released from its local town context. His home and sphere of action shift with those of the migrants. Hence locality, i.e. the home town, seems to lose its meaning; the saint and its cult become delocated. But it is a relative delocation, i.e. the ritual isnt totally released from the home town Mirabella, but rather becomes translocative (Tweed 1997: DAJ 16/2 38 Valentin
Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 2343. Copyright 2009 Emanuel Valentin ISSN 1742-2930 94).37 As such it offers surfaces of overlapping linking the old home with the new. Paradoxically, it is precisely this relative delocation of the festival which allows a relocation of the Maccarsian migrants identity: because of its originally strong relation to the locality (Mirabella) it represents especially in the migration a meaningful factor as identity anchor, point of reference and orientation. The delocation of the saint facilitates also the expansion of the social unity emerging around his cult, from Maccarsian migrants alone to the whole community of Italian migrants. The saint isnt a symbol of intra-Italian diversity anymore, but becomes an inter-regional symbol with manifold meanings which is associated according to the situation with Maccarsian, Sicilian or Italian identity. In this articles discussion I couldnt go into details regarding the ecclesiastical invention of new ritual elements, showing how new reserves can be introduced and mobilised from outside. Reformulating pagan elements of this popular-catholic ritual in a theologically more appropriate terminology they strengthen the role of the church and the priestly functions in this otherwise domuscentred religious praxis in which the familiar home becomes a church, the banquet becomes an altar, the women of the house become ritual specialists, image breads become statues and lamentations in Sicilian dialect replace the clerical blessing. Here in turn, the church uses the traditional discourse about the ritual as banquet of the poor as reserve, in order to disconnect the ritual reciprocity from the family and to reformulate it more generally in the Christian terminology of charity. With this the St Josephs festival regains again its original meaning as reserve against material affliction (for a detailed discussion of this point see Valentin 2007).
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 4453. Copyright 2009 Mark Jamieson ISSN 1742-2930
Contracts with Satan: Relations with Spirit Owners and Apprehensions of the Economy among the Coastal Miskitu of Nicaragua
Mark Jamieson Durham University and University of Sussex http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol16/iss2/jamieson.pdf
Abstract This article examines the role of the spirit owners or dawanka who among the Miskitu control supplies of fish and game, as well as access to other goods. Whereas the existing literature on relations between similar beings and other Amerindian peoples tends to demonstrate a balanced or generalised reciprocity emphasising social reproduction, those between dawanka and the Miskitu of Kakabila are often mutually exploitative and destructive. The article considers the regions socioeconomic history, changing conceptions of personhood, and materials gleaned from fieldwork, concluding that present-day perceptions of dawanka and other mythical beings frequently represent a fear of the individualistic and selfishly motivated forms of exchange which many see as having come to replace those that are socially reproductive. Keywords: Miskitu, Nicaragua, anthropology, economy, belief Introduction Most anthropologists working among the Miskitu-speaking peoples, indigenous hunterhorticulturalists and fishermen of eastern Central America, have at one time or another encountered the term dawanka, used variably to mean in different contexts owner or master.38 Dawanka is a bi-morphemic word, composed of two constituents dawan and -ka. The first morpheme, dawan, bears the semantic load, capturing the meaning of master or owner, while the suffix -ka modifies the noun, in this case dawan, to show, in simple terms, that its semantic scope is limited, either by discursive context or another associative or possessive noun. A dawanka is thus the owner or master of something. Without the limiting suffix -ka, Miskitu nouns tend to acquire an absolute semantic scope, in that their meanings are potentially linguistically and philosophically unrestricted in an almost Platonic sense. Dawan is an excellent example, since this term, without the limiting ka, is only ever used to mean God, the absolute master or owner of everything, whereas dawanka necessarily means owner or master of something specific.
See Conzemius (1932: 126-132), Helms (1971: 187-188), Barrett (1992: 219-220), and Dennis (2004: 211-216). DAJ 16/2 44 Jamieson
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Dawan or God, in this conception, is the absolute master or the absolute owner, while human beings, as dawanka, are masters and owners of the particular (objects, houses, property and so on). Somewhere between ordinary human dawanka and the Dawan God of Miskitu Christian belief, there exist extraordinary non-human dawanka who control or influence aspects of the world over which humans (other than shamans - sukia, prapit or spirit uplika) have little influence. It is these nonhuman dawanka with whom I am concerned. The Miskitu of Kakabila, a small village in the Pearl Lagoon basin of eastern Nicaragua where I have been conducting fieldwork over several years, recognise the existence of a number of these spirit owners, the mostly widely talked about being Duwindu, the dawanka of all the animals (especially the game animals) in the bush (known in some Miskitu communities as Swinta), and Merry Maid (known elsewhere as Liwa Mairin), the dawanka of the fish and animals in the lagoon, the rivers and the sea. Both control the movements of the fauna in their respective domains and allocate the numbers which hunters and fishers may catch. Duwindu wears a big-brimmed pointy hat and may be recognised by his lack of thumbs. If one shakes hands with him, one should only offer him four fingers in case he steals the thumb. In some accounts, he also has feet turned backwards, producing footprints which cause hunters following him to lose themselves in the deep and trackless Nari Forest west of the village.39 Merry Maid has a voracious sexual appetite and will entrap unwary fishermen, drawing them into her underwater domain where they become ensnared. Some say that she has a golden hairbrush and mirror, which if successfully stolen from her, will enrich the thief.40 Besides these figures, there are other dawanka, the most notable of which are Sisin Dawanka (cotton-tree owner) and Kwah Dawanka (fig-tree owner). As with Duwindu and Merry Maid, both of whom are described as science uplika (persons with magic), in other words, humans or of human type rather than spirits strictly speaking. Sisin Dawanka, according to some, snares its victims by offering them secret knowledge located in its roomy boughs. Kwah Dawanka, employs the pungent scent of its tree, the fig, to ensorcell his hapless victims. Hills too are often said to contain dawanka, and these too are often said to be dangerous. Finally, plants and animals deemed to have special properties are said to have dawanka of their own. In Kakabila the manatee (palpa) is said to be one such animal, Palpa Dawanka regulating the success of the hunters who seek it at the mouths of the lagoon creeks in the June night (see also Jamieson 2001: 261). Relations between dawanka and human beings Among many Amerindian peoples, relations between owners of the flora and fauna of the wild are represented in terms of a necessary reciprocity. Shamans mediate between these owners and human beings and ensure, as far as possible, that human beings are supplied with adequate supplies of meat and so forth. Hunters are urged to treat the spirits of the animals they kill with respect, while the shamans themselves ensure, in some cases, a reciprocal flow of human souls. In return the owners of these animals release enough animals to ensure that the needs of humans beings are fulfilled. Relations between humans and the spirit owners are thus organised around a symmetrical reciprocity which is socially reproductive and ultimately benign.41 Inspired by Kindblads (2001) use Some villagers claim that the individual with these backwards feet is Aubiya, another 'mythical' figure. 40 According to a few Kakabila people Merry Maid is male. 41 Hallowell 1976 and Brightman (1993) are particularly good ethnographic accounts which emphasise this aspect of human-animals relations. DAJ 16/2 45 Jamieson
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of Parry and Blochs (1989) conceptual apparatus, one might say that human relations with the owners of these animals and other resources constitute cycles of exchange within the long term transactional order, meaning that they effectively reproduce social and cosmic order. As such they are worthy of human respect.42 Among the Miskitu of Kakabila, apparently similar beliefs are widely held. Duwindu determines the available supply of games animals, Merry Maid the supply of fish, Palpa Dawanka the appearance of manatee, and so forth. However, in spite of the fact that villagers have elaborate discourses about the importance and significance of respect (rispik) between humans and between humans and Dawan (God), they in no way express the need to respect Duwindu and the other dawanka who control access to resources. Indeed I have never seen killed animals treated with the respect reportedly accorded animals by hunters in other Amerindian cultures. Only cooked food, which as villagers say Dawan supplies, receives respect.43 Gratitude is thus reserved for the absolute, morally impeachable master or owner, Dawan, rather than for the dawanka, the masters or owners who control the particular domains from which foodstuffs come.44 In other words, the supply of raw upan (meat and fish), made possible by the dawanka, is nothing to be particularly thankful for.45 By their own accounts, the Kakabila hunters and fisherman have few dealings with the owners who manipulate the supply of meat and fish, who, they deem, are unpredictable beyond their understanding, and they feel, therefore, that they have little reason to be grateful if they are fortunate enough to be successful. Rather it is specifically the gift of cooked food (plun or pata), made possible by God, which demands respect; specifically, it is the set of circumstances which produce the cooked meal - notably the existence of people in particular relationships to oneself - that excites thankfulness before Dawan.46 While relations with Dawan are represented in terms of unconditional gratitude, those with the dawanka - Duwindu, Merry Maid, and so on - are understood in terms of amorality, for while Dawans bounty is invariably given to the good, scarcity and misfortune often being rationalised in terms of sin and the worthless behaviour of the bad. The favours of the dawanka on the other hand seem to be given out almost at random with little regard to the goodness of the beneficiaries. Dawanka are thus seen to be almost capricious in their relations with humans, and most certainly amoral insofar as it is they who are responsible for the good fortune enjoyed by the bad. Not only do dawanka frequently privilege the undeserving; often, villagers intimate, the undeserving approach dawanka seeking advantage in a variety of ways. Particularly powerful dawanka such as Duwindu and Sisin Dawanka can offer individuals wealth, fortune with members of the opposite sex, misfortune to enemies and so on. In the case of Sisin Dawanka, I was told, the supplicant only has to approach a cotton-tree in which he is supposed to reside and a door in the tree will open to admit him or her, at which point negotiations (deal takaia) begin. The dawanka may grant the supplicant a major request but usually demands a price. For example, he may grant the supplicant his or her wish For example, Brightman (1993: 103-135). Children who play around inappropriately with their plates are sternly told:'Respect your food!', while villagers finishing their meal invariably say out loud: 'Tingki, Dawan!' ('Thank you, God!') 44 Dawan, equated with the Christian God, is male. 45 Upan is a category encompassing meat and fish. Breadkind or tama includes root crops, breadfruit, bananas and plantains. Kakabila people sometimes say, 'Upan apu, plun apu' ('No upan is no food'), meaning that a meal without meat or fish is no real meal. 46 The gift of cooked food implies a closer relationship (usually one of consanguineal kinship, close affinity, or compadrazgo) than a gift of raw foodstuffs.
43 42
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on the understanding that he will later claim his or her first or next child, an aspect of the contract which the human party may, in his or her greed, disregard. Later, the dawanka may return for what he claims is his by right of contract, sometimes if he feels the supplicant has tried to cheat him, as it supposedly usually the case, killing or harming him or her in some way. Fulfillment of the dawankas promise inevitably entails an eventual counter-claim, as the dawanka eventually presents the beneficiary of his previous work with the deals small print. The hapless victim now finds himself or herself unable or unwilling to fulfill the dawankas side of the bargain and pays the price. Dawanka in this aspect thus represent to Kakabila people the dangers of engaging in selfish, individualistic and anti-social forms of exchange; those characterised by Kindblad (2001), following Parry and Bloch (1989) as cycles of exchange which benefit only the short term transactional order (Jamieson 2003, 2007, 2008). Dawanka thus have two sides to their nature. On the one hand they are responsible for the supply of whatever goods they control (animals in the bush, fish, knowledge and so on) and are therefore necessary for the reproduction of social life; while on the other they offer opportunities to the unwary, greedy and unwise for fulfillment of individualistic and antisocial desires. It is this second aspect which makes dawanka so dangerous; so dangerous in fact that only shamans (sukias and prapit) have techniques for dealing with them without becoming ensnared themselves.47 It is this danger and immorality that Kakabila Miskitu say makes them satans (setan nani). And it is not only dawanka who provide individuals with opportunities to advance their interests. Dar, a vine or (in some accounts) a small bird, can make one invisible if it is caught and held.48 The interesting point about Dar is that people who mention it, almost all of whom say that they would love to catch it, usually talk at length about the ability it confers on its captor to steal from others and rob banks. It is, in other words, a hard-to-find good which all too easily corrupts the weak of will. The so-called Black Heart Book provides other means of obtaining goods by illicit means. This volume, well known to my informants but only through secondhand accounts, is said to contain a multitude of spells, all of which promise to benefit the reader in the short term. These, however, are ultimately evil and inevitably lead to Dawans wrath and the readers comeuppance.49 Dawanka and the historical emergence of asymmetric relations As I noted above, in many traditional Amerindian cultures relations between humans and spirit owners are by and large represented by anthropologists as socially constitutive and benign, exchanges between the two domains being organised around reciprocal flows of energy; for example, meat and other goods for either human souls or respect. As I have also indicated, relations between the Kakabila Miskitu and dawanka are by and large anything but benign, exchanges between the two benefiting only individuals, often at the expense of others. I now turn to the question of why this might be so. Often, when wealthy and well-known personages in Bluefields, Pearl Lagoon and elsewhere meet an unexpected death, it is rumoured that they were dealing with a dawanka, the assumption being that extraordinary wealth is readily obtained illicitly through Faustian contracts with such figures. 48 It was described to me in one account as a bird who cries 'Dar! Dar!'. The man who told me this said that his wife nearly caught one on one occasion. 49 Mention should also be made of Bloodman, said by Kakabila people to be a white man wearing large white boots, a long white coat and a beard, who comes to steal the blood of children (Jamieson, in press). Nietschmann (1979: 110), in his book Caribbean Edge, characterises Bloodman as 'a symbol of the Miskito's past experiences with outsiders'. DAJ 16/2 47 Jamieson
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In many traditional Amerindian hunting and hunter-gatherer cultures relations between individuals, or at least adult males, are egalitarian, and relations between such individuals are imagined in terms of reciprocity, whether balanced or generalised. The idea is that the successful hunter gives to the less successful hunter who in his turn will give meat when he is more fortunate. While in fact many hunters are perpetually unsuccessful and others regularly successful, due to differentials in skill and application, it is nevertheless true that notions of this kind are widely held. Similarly relations with others more distant are frequently imagined in terms of a generalised or balanced reciprocity, groups living some distance away being imagined as partners with whom one exchanges wives (or husbands) and other goods. In these contexts relations of this kind are often indexed through classificatory cross-cousin marriage and Dravidian-type kinship terminologies in which brothers-inlaw and male cross-cousins are exchange partners, and vice versa. Relations of production and reproduction with other human beings are thus thought of as being symmetrical, a notion which finds expression in understandings of the relations of production and reproduction with those non-human beings who control supplies of game, fish and other goods.50 Amongst the Miskitu, however, relations of production and reproduction are imagined in very different terms. These, I have argued elsewhere (Jamieson 1998, 2000), are best understood, at least in the domain of kinship, in terms of the notion of capture in which mothers-in-law ensnare sonsin-law, wives brothers sisters husbands, mothers brothers sisters sons, and so forth. Relations between individuals are thus predicated on the understanding that they are intrinsically asymmetrical. Furthermore, relations of production in the broader regional economy are also evidently asymmetrical and have been for much of the Miskitu peoples history. These asymmetries, I argue later, colour much of what the Miskitu have to say about their relations with dawanka and similar figures. We already know that Miskitu engagement with merchant capitalism was already well advanced by the end of the seventeenth century. English traders had, as early as the 1630s, begun to bring goods to exchange with the Miskitu, and by the end of the century, this trade had become indispensable to the Miskitu. The English traders, most working out of Jamaica, wanted slaves, mules, sarsaparilla, turtle shell, and the services of Miskitu guides, mercenaries and provisioners. The Miskitu for their part wanted guns, iron tools, cloth and other manufactured goods. The Miskitu, whose relations with their Indian neighbours had been mainly organised around symmetrical trade and raiding, now took on an asymmetrical cast, as they forced the latter into tributary relationships, frequently enslaving them. Meanwhile, relations with the new trading partners, the English, were also asymmetrical, in terms of both the content of the trade and relations between the two groups. The English, at least in regional terms, considered themselves the superior partners insofar as they validated the aspirations of Miskitu leaders by taking them to Jamaica and Belize, and by giving them titles and ceremonial regalia. The Miskitu leaders, for their part, seem to have regarded the English as sponsor brothersin-law (waika) to be (at the local level) cultivated and captured, often through marriage.51 By the 1850s companies, principally North American, were coming to the Mosquito Coast in search of natural resources. A rubber boom was quickly followed by the arrival of logging and banana companies, while in a few districts mining companies began the exploitation of gold and silver. In this regard Brightman (1993: 163-169) has an interesting discussion of human-animal affinal relations among the Rock Cree. 51 See Helms (1971: 14-25, 1983) for accounts of this history, and Dennis and Olien (1984) and Helms (1986) for accounts of Miskitu titles. Jamieson (1998) contains discussion of the perceived brother-in-law relation between the Miskitu and the English. DAJ 16/2 48 Jamieson
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Miskitu men became workers in these enterprises, selling their labour to the companies for contracts typically lasting several months at a time, sometimes moving to find work elsewhere when the company moved on, sometimes returning with a little money or goods bought at company stores to their home villages.52 These men, who learned to be mobile, came to be known as mani uplika (one year people) or sulyar (employees - from soldier). These relations with the companies, however, were very different to those previously enjoyed with the traders. With the traders the Miskitu had controlled the terms of their own labour, specifically their time, place of work and output, and they were also able, presumably, to negotiate in terms of price. Now, however, they were proletarians, selling their labour to companies who controlled their place of work, the time they worked, output and wages (Noveck 1988). The English-speaking brother-in-law (waik or waika) had turned into the boss (bas), and relations of production and reproduction, as experienced by the Miskitu, became markedly more asymmetrical, as they came to depend on cash and company stores. Economic relations now became markedly more exploitative, as the cash economy and its digital logic, in which all values became reducible to the cash price, began to displace the analogic nature of transactions, whereby goods were valued in terms of social and use values, which had constituted the focus of social relations beforehand (Kindblad 2001).53 Later, particularly after the decline of company activity in the region after the Second World War, the Miskitu began to project a much reported perception of their own poverty in relation to others (e.g. Helms 1971: 156), one which informs, I believe, their ideas about the illegitimate generation of wealth. In many Miskitu-speaking communities, the withdrawal of the companies from the region since the 1950s has meant a prolonged recession. Many Miskitu are now too young to remember the wealth that the presence of the companies supposedly brought to their villages, but all have heard that the early and middle years of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua (somoza taim - Somoza time) were prosperous and work was readily available. Only in some coastal communities since then, has the extraction of marine resources - turtle, fish, shrimp and lobster - generated significant income, but even in these the ethos of post-somoza taim poverty is wide-spread. Interestingly, in these latter coastal communities, of which Kakabila is one, this new market demands not the alienation of ones labour (as the companies did) but the (over-)exploitation of resources taken from the commons, which are then taken out of intra-village networks of reciprocal exchange and sold instead for cash to commercial buyers. In the meantime the diversion of labour away from agriculture has occasioned the emergence of a market (among specialising fishermen) for breadkind (horticultural foodstuffs) and game meat where once there was none. This has brought about a further digitalisation of the moral and cash economies of the Miskitu, exacerbated by perceptions that the over-exploitation of the commons for the market place, and of fish in particular, is generating shortages (see Nietschmann 1973 and Kindblad 2001).
52 53
See Helms 1971: 25-33. Kindblad's (2001) imaginative and entirely convincing analysis of the displacement of 'analogic' encodings of exchange by 'digital' one, following Wilden's (1973) establishment of these terms in social science analysis, is focused on the coastal Miskitu of the period after 1960. I hope that he would agree with me that the process of 'digitalization' of exchange relations in the region predates this period, albeit with respect to phenomena other than those (marine resources) which he examines. DAJ 16/2 49 Jamieson
Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 4453. Copyright 2009 Mark Jamieson ISSN 1742-2930 Discussion The accelerating rate of changes to the fragile environment and, more importantly, an (apparently) capricious economy are, I suggest, responsible for the particular nature of Miskitu perceptions of their relation to the individuals who supposedly monitor these domains. The dawanka, responsible for regulating the supply of meat, fish, plants and so on, are, it seems, losing control of their domains, as market-oriented practices and shortages render redundant their performance of traditional roles, the allocation of game and fish to hunters and fishers. They have, however, found another niche; one in which they are called upon not to account for relations between human and human, and human and non-human in terms of socially constitutive cycles of exchange, but rather to explain the mysteries of wealth generation within an opaque cash economy that favours amoral individualism, accumulation and secrecy over the morality of socially constitutive exchange relationships (Jamieson 2008). The Miskitu of Kakabila thus present us with a context in which the scenario described by Parry and Bloch (1989) - that individualist short term cycles of exchange are imagined to have displaced socially reproductive long term cycles of exchange - has materialised. This is exactly the kind of context in which discourses lamenting the evils of money are likely to be found, according to these authors. What we find in Kakabila, however, are not accounts of the evils of money; only, rather, complaints by individuals that they have too little of it. Rather it is the little-understood processes which put money into the hands of the few, regardless of their social worthiness, and not into the hands of the more deserving, which are demonised; presented as contracts with satans, among which dawanka like Duwindu are prominent. My reading of this material suggests that we Americanists may have something to learn from Africanists, especially those focused on witchcraft beliefs as these come to be reconstituted in terms of modern political economies. These Africanists have embraced the idea that relations with the supernatural are usefully understood in terms of present-day economic realities, and they have produced an important body of work to demonstrate this (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993, Moore and Sanders 2001).54 Miskitu notions of relations with dawanka can usefully be understood in the same terms. Although very different in so far as they tend to be either non-human or semi-human figures, the Miskitu dawanka, like their African witch and sorcerer counterparts, have moved with the times, rationalising their businesses to accommodate new forms of what Marx famously calls the relations of production. This new way of understanding the business of dawanka, in terms of a model that is readily comprehensible and widely shared, makes sense of the generation of disparities in wealth produced by an increasingly complex regional economy which, as far as ordinary people can see, favours accumulation and hoarding over traditional forms of gift-giving. Coastal Miskitu experience relations of reproduction nowadays in terms of their positioning as petty commodity producers and occasional proletarians, subject to exploitation and incomprehensibly volatile and apparently capricious market prices, and many consequently have come to see their relations with the dawanka who supply natural resources and other goods as being founded on similar principles. Furthermore, relations with dawanka, like relations between humans, are imagined in terms of a zero-sum logic, in which supplicant and dawanka are positioned as unequally situated adversaries, each trying to outwit the other, the former seeking to get away with the wealth or whatever else is offered by the dawanka, the dawanka trying to enforce his or her claim to the The similar ideas of Nash (1979) and Taussig (1980) for the Bolivian tin miners have yet, it seems, to be embraced in Lowland American contexts. DAJ 16/2 50 Jamieson
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supplicants soul, first child, or whatever. Goods are not therefore reciprocally exchanged in a great, mutually beneficial cosmic loop, as for example among the Tukano described by Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971) but are, instead, obtained through thoroughly asymmetrical antagonistic encounters with dangerous and unpredictable others, often referred to as satans (setan nani). With the generation of wealth nowadays so obviously framed by encounters between antagonistic others (commodity producer versus buyer, capitalist versus proletarian, worker versus fellow worker) in an increasingly competitive market place, Miskitu have come to imagine the generation of wealth as a limited good (Foster 1965), goods bound for others inevitably entailing the impoverishment of others (see Jamieson 2002a, 2002b). Conclusion I have tried to show in this article that analyses of beliefs centred on spirit owners are usefully served by historically sensitive models. Spirit owners in many Lowland Amerindian societies are frequently described as gatekeepers to resources, and ethnographic accounts frequently emphasise their custodial, benign nature, often rendering them static and ahistorical. The materials presented above, however, suggest that the social lives of these beings, at least those known to the Miskitu, are in fact complex and responsive to changing economic circumstances.
Acknowledgements This article is based upon ethnography collected during eighteen months residence in Nicaragua in 1992 and 1993, almost all of which was spent in the village of Kakabila in the Pearl Lagoon basin. This work has been supplemented by six shorter periods of further fieldwork, again mostly spent in Kakabila, in 1997, 1998, 1999-2000, twice in 2002 and 2004, and by another longer period of research in 2005-2006 during which time I worked in Kakabila and in the Ulwa (Southern Sumu) community of Karawala. This work has been also made possible by fieldwork grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Emslie Horniman Trust, the University of Manchester, and a Royal Anthropological Institute Fellowship in Urgent Anthropology, I am sincerely grateful to those bodies for funding this work. Most of all I wish to thank the people of Kakabila and other communities in which I have worked for their help and interest in my work.
References Barrett, Bruce. 1992. The syringe and the rooster: medical anthropology on Nicaraguas Atlantic Coast. Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Brightman, Robert A. 1993. Grateful prey: Rock Cree human-animal relationships. Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1993. Introduction. In Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its malcontents: ritual and power in postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 4453. Copyright 2009 Mark Jamieson ISSN 1742-2930 Conzemius, Eduard. 1932. Ethnographic Survey of the Miskito and Sumu Indians of Honduras and Nicaragua. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin N. 106. Washington. D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Dennis, Philip. 2004. The Miskitu people of Awastara. Austin: University of Texas Press. Dennis, Philip, and Michael Olien. 1984. Kingship among the Miskito. American Ethnologist 11: 718737. Foster, George. 1965. Peasant society and the image of the limited good. American Anthropologist 67: 293315. Hallowell, A. Irving. 1976. Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view. In A.I. Hallowell (ed.), Contributions to anthropology: Selected papers of A. Irving Hallowell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Helms, Mary W. 1971. Asang: Adaptations to culture contact in a Miskito community. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. ______. 1983. Miskito slaving and culture contact: ethnicity and opportunity in an expanding population. Journal of Anthropological Research 39 (2): 179197. ______. 1986. Of kings and contexts: ethnohistorical interpretations of Miskito political structure and function. American Ethnologist 13: 506523. Jamieson, Mark. 1998. Linguistic innovation and relationship terminology in the Pearl Lagoon basin of Nicaragua. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4: 713730. ______. 2000. Its shame that makes men and women enemies: the politics of intimacy among the Miskitu of Kakabila. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6: 311324. ______. 2001. Masks and madness: ritual expressions of the transition to adulthood among Miskitu adolescents. Social Anthropology 9: 257272 ______. 2002a. Ownership of sea shrimp production and perceptions of economic opportunity in a Nicaraguan Miskitu village. Ethnology 41: 281298. ______. 2002b. La reproduccin de desigualdades internas y la economa del camarn en una comunidad miskita. Wani 31: 30-37. ______. 2003. Miskitu or Creole? Ethnic identity and the moral economy in a Nicaraguan Miskitu village. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9: 201-222. ______. 2007. Miskito o criollo? Identidad tnica y economa moral en una comunidad miskita en Nicaragua. Wani 48: 6-24. ______. 2008. Sorcery, ghostly attack and the presence and absence of shamans among the Ulwa and Miskitu of eastern Nicaragua. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: 554-571. ______. In press. Bloodman, Manatee Owner and the Turtle Book: Ulwa and Miskitu representations of knowledge and economic power. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Kindblad, Christopher. 2001. Gift and exchange in the reciprocal regime of the Miskito on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, 20th century. Doctoral dissertation, Lund University. Moore, Henrietta L., and Todd Sanders. 2001. Magical interpretations and material realities: an introduction. In Moore, Henrietta L., and Todd Sanders (eds), Magical interpretations, DAJ 16/2 52 Jamieson
Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 4453. Copyright 2009 Mark Jamieson ISSN 1742-2930 material realities: modernity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa, pp. 127. London: Routledge. Nash, June. 1979. We eat the mines and the mines eat us: dependency and exploitation in Bolivian tin mines. New York: Columbia University Press. Nietschmann, Bernard. 1973. Between land and water: the subsistence ecology of the Miskito Indians, Eastern Nicaragua. New York: Academic Press. ______. 1979. Caribbean edge: the coming of modern times to isolated people and wildlife. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company. Noveck, Daniel. 1988. Class, culture, and the Miskito Indians: a historical perspective. Dialectical Anthropology 13: 1729. Parry, Jonathan and Maurice Bloch. 1989. Introduction: Money and the morality of exchange. In J. Parry and M. Bloch (eds), Money and the morality of exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo. 1971. Amazonian cosmos: The sexual and religious symbolism of the Tukano Indians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taussig, Michael. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wilden, Anthony. 1980. System and structure: essays in communication and exchange. New York: Tavistock Publications.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930
Gandhis Dream of Hindu-Muslim Unity and its two Offshoots in the Middle East
Simone Panter-Brick Independent scholar http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol16/iss2/panter-brick.pdf
Abstract This article is a historical exploration of some of Gandhis attempts to unite the Hindu and Muslim populations of India, as well as his political experiments with non-violent resistance. It provides an outline of the period beginning from his first campaign in South Africa to the eve of the Second World War. In light of Gandhis dream to unite Muslims and Hindus, his defiance to British imperialism, and the results of his political struggles, it presents aspects of the Mahatmas political maneuvering that remain largely unknown until this day a secret episode still shrouded in mystery. His intervention in the Arab-Israeli conflict in Palestine has been kept a carefully guarded secret, decades after Gandhis assassination. Within the historical and political timeline of Gandhis political actions, within and outside India, this article analyses the conditions that led him to intervene in Palestinian affairs, his expectations thereof, and the outcomes of his endeavours. Keywords: Satytagraha, India, Palestine, Hindu-Muslim unity, Arab-Israeli conflict
Introduction Mahatma Gandhi aspired to represent all his fellow-countrymen, Muslims no less than Hindus. This he had achieved in South Africa. It was also in South Africa that he firstly experimented with nonviolent resistance, to which he gave the name of satyagraha. On his return to India (1915), he sought Hindu-Muslim unity on an all-India scale. He was initially successful in winning Muslim support by backing and leading the movement for the maintenance of the Ottoman Caliphate (Panter-Brick 2008a). This interference in the affairs of the Middle East was the first incidental offshoot of Gandhis dream. He became involved in the Palestinian conflict in 1937, when approached by the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem for his support. His involvement was kept secret and did not bear fruit: success could not be achieved without the Muslims of India, who so heavily outnumbered their Muslim brothers in Palestine. Moreover, the political environment in India and Palestine was not conducive to the realization of his dream. This article reviews the nature and scope of the Mahatmas original vision, which aimed to achieve a common Hindu-Muslim cause by means of political resistance against British imperialism. This vision was a dream that turned into a nightmare in March 1940, when the Muslim League adopted the so-called Pakistan resolution. Hindu-Muslim unity remained elusive and Gandhi had to renounce his ambition to represent Muslim India. Non-violence, however, became under his DAJ 16/2 54 Panter-Brick
Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 leadership a formidable political weapon, well-rooted in a series of prolonged experiments in South Africa and in India. He never visited the Middle East, but was nevertheless drawn into Palestinian politics, on one occasion to help the Muslim cause, on another to respond positively to an approach from the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. South Africa, India, and Palestine - each of these countries in turn - saw the development of his experiments in Hindu-Muslim unity. Four distinctive phases mark the unfolding of the dream. Firstly, Gandhi led a campaign in South Africa on the behalf of the Indian community, Hindus and Muslims alike (1906-1914). Secondly, the campaign organized by Gandhi for the sake of the Caliphs jurisdiction over Jerusalem grew into a joint Hindu-Muslim campaign on an all-India scale (1919-1922) thereby catapulting the Mahatma to the head of the main political party, the Indian National Congress. Thirdly, the nightmare of the Hindu-Muslim tensions grew unremittingly over the years, with the expansion of the Muslim League and Jinnahs meteoric ascendancy as its president (emulating that of Gandhi twenty years previously). Finally, Gandhis quest for HinduMuslim unity underlay his discreet involvement in Palestinian politics in 1937. Scope and nature of Gandhian resistance Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) forged his new weapon of political resistance in a century of unstoppable arms race and extensive killing fields. He offered this mode of action, not simply as an alternative to violence, but as an efficient method of resistance. From the age of 37 to the end of his life, Gandhi was actively engaged in political campaigns, either against repressive legislation or against British dominance over India. Except for intervals as short as four to six years between four campaigns of non-violence, he was devotedly preparing or leading non-violent resistance, or being jailed as a result. He achieved some of his ambitions, notably in South Africa, with the repeal of the Asiatic Registration Act of 1906 and of the Immigration Act of 1907, and also in India, with the emancipation from British rule. However, he made no impact in Palestine. Non-violent resistance as an experiment in politics Gandhi was not a political theorist. He was a man of action, not of words (although the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi fill one hundred heavy volumes). In so far as there is a theory of nonviolence, it is an ex post facto formulation, a reflection on practice. It was in South Africa that Gandhis first foray into a political campaign of resistance took place, with little inkling of the future scope of that experiment. He ploughed his own way with the help of his inner voice, in a way that had to adhere to truth and non-violence, since God is Love and Truth (Gandhis well-known definition: see Panter-Brick 1963, chapter 1). He was led by intuition, by courage and determination, and by political astuteness. However, he soon realized the originality of his method of resistance. When people referred to it as passive resistance, this struck him as a misnomer. Passivity, he rejected. His was not the weapon of the weak, but that of the strong, not of the coward, but of the brave, not of hatred, but of respect for the adversary, not of harmful design, but of love. He coined the word satyagraha, meaning adherence to truth. It is generally translated as non-violence. Satyagraha as a sequence of experiments Upon his return to India, Gandhi continued to experiment. He made one experiment after another, applying the lessons of the preceding experience to the next. Indeed this was the way he looked at DAJ 16/2 55 Panter-Brick
Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 the work of his life and why he chose to entitle his autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. His satyagraha involved a variety of methods, such as deputations, lobbying, strikes, demonstrations, picketing, bonfires of documents or clothing, public speeches, marches, boycotts, illegal crossing of borders. It also included, more threateningly, infringement of certain laws, noncooperation with the government, civil disobedience on carefully selected items, open rebellion, to be used as a last resort, when mediation and diplomacy had failed. Gandhi organized four satyagraha campaigns, sustained with the help of the Indian National Congress: the South African campaign (1906-1914); the Non-cooperation campaign (1920-1922) preceded by two years of political agitation and followed by two years of Gandhis imprisonment; the Civil Disobedience campaign with the famous Salt March (1930-1934); and the campaign of Individual Civil Disobedience followed by the Quit India Rebellion (1940-1942). The beneficiaries of the experiments Who were the beneficiaries of Gandhis political campaigns? The answer is short and clear: Indians only, in South Africa, where Gandhi was living for two decades, and in India, when he returned home to the mother country. For charity begins at home. From what did they have to be saved? The answer is even shorter: British hegemony. Like the rules of grammar, this principle suffered exceptions. On two occasions, Gandhis solicitude concerned the inhabitants of Palestine. The same British adversary was being tackled there, but the beneficiary, or rather, the beneficiaries were not Indians, but were to be Arabs and Jews. His two interventions in the affairs of the Middle-East are woven on the warp of the dream of Hindu-Muslim unity. First phase: the South African experience The Indians of South Africa were the first recipients of satyagraha. Gandhi, himself a resident of Natal and Transvaal, was practicing as a barrister on behalf of Muslim merchants, but was as yet a stranger to politics. Because of his profession, he soon became involved in upholding the interests of local Indians. The lesson of unity At the end of the nineteenth century Indians in Natal were deprived of political rights, except for some wealthy, mainly apolitical Muslims. Gandhi stepped into politics, when they were removed from the electoral roll. This was his first, lawful but unsuccessful exercise to resist anti-Indian legislation. Indians in South Africa were divided traditionally by cultural background in a mosaic of religions, castes, languages, regional origins, social classes and type of employment. But the Europeans had no time for these niceties, and despised Indians globally for what seemed like unhygienic living conditions and their illiteracy, binding them all in the same basket.55 To them, this group of people was known as coolies. Even Gandhi, the educated gentleman, fresh from the London Inns of
Gandhi was very keen on cleanliness and hygiene. He performed the cleaning of latrines, a job incumbent on the untouchables his lack of sense of smell was the butt of a joke by Kallenbach, in one in his letters to the Mahatma.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 Courts, was referred to as a coolie-barrister. Moreover, prejudices against the coolies were growing for economic reasons and their continued influx from India was resented. The problem, from the Government point of view, was not the immigration of Indians on a three-year hard-labour contract of indenture; the problem was how to send them back to India at the end of their contract.56 To escape the prejudices, the affluent Indian communities liked to set themselves apart from Indians in general, by calling themselves Arabs, because they were Muslims. Others wanted to be known as Parsis,57 so as not to be confused with the working population of poor Indians, mainly hawkers, with the indentured Indians labouring in temporary serfdom on the sugar estates and coalmines, and those freed to fend for themselves after their three-year contract expired. Gandhis first bold defiance of the Government was sparked by legislation designed to give greater control over Asiatic: the Transvaal Asiatic Registration Act of 1906 which introduced their compulsory registration. Particularly objectionable to Gandhi, was the finger printing of all Asiatics, as if they were potential criminals. At once, he organized resistance to the so-called Black Act, including disobedience to what he considered an abuse of power. Astutely, Gandhi gradually overrode the heterogeneity of the Indian community. In this, he was helped by the example of Europeans who wanted to treat all Indians in the same manner. Gandhis unique professional status promoted him as the only acceptable leader to his community. He was well-introduced in business circles and influential in the Muslim community. He had no serious competitor for leadership. His cleverness in bonding together the interests and allegiance of all Indians is one of the main reasons for the success of his first fight. Unity was the lesson he took back to India with him. His faith in Hindu-Muslim brotherhood deepened and became the dream and ambition of his life. The lesson of non-violence, a means to the end Another important reason for his South African success was that he chose, out of belief and out of tactics, not to use violent resistance, neither in word nor in deed, and in his case not even in thought. Had he not done so, the Indians would have been wiped out from Transvaal and from Natal, as they had already been cleared from the Orange Free State. Gandhi managed to keep his flock entirely non-violent, right through eight years of resistance; this was an extraordinary feat indeed. This achievement had an impact on his future expectations. When the second satyagraha campaign was launched in the larger context of India, he demanded from his people the same non-violent commitment than in Africa, and, confronted with violence in his ranks, he did not hesitate to suspend the campaign at a crucial stage. Later, he realized that, in India, he was demanding the impossible. Therefore, before starting the third campaign in 1930, he warned, loud and clear, that this time he would not suspend the movement, if outbreaks of violence occurred. In the fourth campaign, he went to even further lengths in risking anarchy and casualties, in a do or die call to his followers in the Quit India campaign (1942). This short analysis leads to another observation. The success of the South African campaign in difficult circumstances was proof enough for Gandhi that the new weapon he had forged through eight years of resistance was, not only a potent way to resist in the political field, but also worth of
A three-pound poll-tax on these Indians and their families was imposed to dissuade them from settling in South Africa. Gandhi took the lead of the resistance against the tax and demanded its repeal as part of his campaign. It was rescinded in his final deal with General Smuts, who was his main adversary. 57 The Parsis are an affluent Indian community with their own religion.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 universal application. He would be proud, if not anxious, to ascertain this potency in the future, when the occasion arose. When he sailed back to India just before World War I broke out, was he not spoiling for another fight? Exclusion of the black population from the South African campaign Universal application did not mean that people, other than Indians, did benefit from Gandhis South African campaign. Although Gandhi believed in the applicability of non-violent resistance in the political field at this stage, he had no intention to use it for anybody except for Indians. He cared exclusively about his own community, studiously looking after the Indians interests only. In South Africa, Gandhi deliberately avoided contact with the indigenous black population and its political plight. He knew how to limit his demands. He believed that when launching resistance in support of some specific reform, he should be satisfied if and when his original claims were granted. Thus the black population stayed apart from the Indians. Gandhi also congratulated himself on keeping his distance with the Chinese community, affected by the Asiatic legislation; their resistance collapsed, leaving the Indian resistance unaffected. Second phase: Hindu-Muslim unity sealed (1920) The dream came true in the form of a non-violent movement, led by Gandhi in1919 after his return to India, for the sake of Muslim Jerusalem, and in the name of Indian Muslims. Gandhi was espousing the defense of the Sultan and Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, defeated in the First World War. Dismemberment of the autocratic state was to be the penalty for having chosen the wrong side in the war. Gandhis interest lay in the part of the Empire called the jazirat-ul Arab, the island of Arabia, so called because of the seas and great rivers on its borders. On these lands, the Sultan as Caliph exercised temporal as well as spiritual power as a Quranic injunction.58 Deprivation of temporal power on these lands raised, in the hearts of the Indian Muslims, the cry of Islam in danger. Gandhis involvement in the Caliphate struggle The threat concerned mainly the lands stretching from Syria to Egypt. Only the small administrative unit around Jerusalem bore the name Palestine. The Mandate of Palestine would give the new country a name. From 1917, when British troops entered the holy city, the Sykes-Picot agreement with the French, promised the two Christian countries a share in the Middle-East: Syria and Lebanon to the French, Palestine and Mesopotamia to the British.59 Jerusalem was of crucial importance to Muslims, because, next to Mecca and Medina already in the hands of Arab Muslims fighting the Ottomans - it was Islams most sacred place of pilgrimage. Rushing to the help of his Muslims brethren, Gandhi suggested to them to use his weapon of civil resistance for the maintenance of the status quo ante bellum in the holy shrines and for saving the Caliphs temporal power on these - so far neglected - backwaters of the Ottoman Empire.
The Muslims claim Palestine as an integral part of Jazirat-ul-Arab. They are bound to retain its custody, as an injunction of the Prophet (Gandhi, cited in CWMG, vol.19, p.530). 59 The existence of Islam demands the total abrogation of mandates taken by Britain and France (Gandhi, cited in CWMG, vol.19, p.444).
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 Why and how did he intervene? He did it for the sake of Indian Muslims only: If I were not interested in the Indian Mohammedans, I would not interest myself in the welfare of the Turks any more than I am in that of the Austrians or the Poles. (Shimoni 1977, p.25) Muslims from other countries were far less vocal and concerned by the fate of the Caliph. Many Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East were either in a state of revolt, or in a state of relief for escaping the draft into the Ottoman army. Indian Muslims did not see it that way. The brothers Mohammed and Shaukat Ali, took the lead of a powerful agitation, whipped up by ulemas and maulanas in villages and towns, organizing khilafatist committees and conferences. One Indian deputation went to the Viceroy, one to the British Prime Minister, to no avail. Muslims then turned to Gandhis weapon of resistance. They knew about his success in South Africa. When he offered to lead them into non-violent resistance in exchange for their non-violence, they agreed to promote his strategy and follow his instructions. It was thus that Gandhi launched a non-violent movement, a new experiment of satyagraha on an all-Indian scale, for the sake of Hindu-Muslim unity in 1920. Unity sealed at Nagpur (December 1920) The non-violent campaign entailed a policy of non-cooperation with the British Raj (rule), over a wide range of activities boycotting, to start with, elections, courts and schools. Without waiting for Hindus to join, Gandhi launched the Non-cooperation movement in August 1920, before asking for the still questionable endorsement by the Indian National Congress. The largest and predominantly Hindu party had to be persuaded to fight for the sake of the Caliphate. Two sessions of the Congress, in Calcutta (September 1920) and Nagpur (December 1920), were necessary to adopt non-violent resistance and the leadership of the Mahatma. Martial law in the Punjab and the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre helped the Congress to make up his mind to join the Muslim fight. Moreover, Gandhi warned that another opportunity, for Hindus and Muslims to join hands, would not reoccur before one hundred years (Choudhury 1985, p.25) and promised swaraj (independence) in one year, an irresistible bait. Hindus having joined the movement with Gandhi at its head, the British Government was faced with the biggest threat to its rule since the Indian Mutiny in 1857. As argued in Gandhi and the Middle East: Palestine proved to be the unlikely platform on which Mahatma Gandhi was to build his political power in India itself (Panter-Brick 2008b). Indian unity defeated by the Turks (March 1924) Gandhis imprisonment in 1922 put an end to his concern for the holy places. He was arrested after he unexpectedly suspended the Non-cooperation campaign, as it was about to enter active resistance, following the murder of policemen in the village of Chauri-Chaura. The movement was never resumed. The movement was deflated. The Turks buried the Caliphate issue shortly after Gandhi was released from prison in 1924. They established a secular state, ending the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate an abolition the Indian khilafatists refused to endorse. Hindu-Muslim unity never recovered its strength and became elusive in spite of Gandhis continued efforts. Communal riots increased. However, from this experiment, Gandhi and Congress gained a strong arabophile profile. Jawaharlal Nehru, in charge of the partys foreign policy, stood out as a convinced partisan of Arab nationalism in Palestine. The Arab struggle against British Imperialism is as much part of this great world conflict as Indias struggle for freedom.60 As for Gandhi, after
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Quoted from Nehrus presidential address at Faizpur in December 1936, cited in Zaidi (1987), vol.3 (period 1928-38).
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 the abolition of the Caliphate by the Turks, he shrunk from any more inroads into foreign affairs, leaving them for Nehru to handle. Third phase: Hindu-Muslim contention (1924-1939) The days of pleading for clients had gone forever, but Gandhi behaved in politics the way he had behaved in courts. As in law, he was dealing with cases, from which jurisprudence would emerge, giving rules and conclusions. He would always try conciliation and compromise to save time and money, rather than engage in confrontation. More or less blindly, he was feeling his way in politics, reacting to challenging circumstances. He made mistakes, but also learned from them. He often changed his mind, seemingly inconsistent in his consistency, which was to believe in the universality and perennial efficiency of his South African discovery, ever stretching it to new limits. As stated in his own words: At the time of writing, I never think of what I have said before. My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth, as it may present itself to me at a given moment.61 However, he would not abandon Hindu-Muslim unity, and, therefore, would not renounce his pretension to represent Muslims. The claim of representation Gandhi saw himself as the mandatory of the people he was defending. The claim to be the spokesman of his fellow-countrymen came to him as a natural aftermath of his South African experience and extended to all Muslims. But the consequences of this stand were to be tremendous, since it led to the partitioning of India. Who were the Indians Gandhi claimed to represent? India, to Gandhi, was mother India, the mother of all the inhabitants of that continent. His India stretched geographically to the external borders of the Indian Empire, no more, but no less. Her children aspired to independence from British rule for all the lands bequeathed to them by recent history. In Gandhis mind, India was one and indivisible, in spite of there being two political Indias: British India under the direct British rule and Princely India under autocratic rulers in their sovereign states, linked to Westminster by treaty. Gandhi looked forward to a single democratic state, not only for the people of British India, but also of the princely states, including his own, Rajkot, where his father had been Prime Minister.62 The desire to care for all Indians was expressed strongly in 1931 in London, after the Gandhi-Irwin Pact in the middle of the Civil Disobedience campaign (the third satyagraha campaign). At the Viceroys request, Gandhi participated in the Round Table Conference, hoping for a general consensus among representatives of different communities and principalities to settle divisive issues. But the claim to truly represent Hindus and Muslims made agreement elusive. It provoked disclaim from all the other delegates. Gandhis political isolation at the meetings, his simple attire even his portable spinning wheel- among the distinguished gathering, failed to convey the strength of the absent Congress. Confronted by an array of unconvinced compatriots, sounded by the new Labour Prime Minister, questioned by the media, Gandhi gave his dream of Hindu-Muslim unity an undesired publicity, since it caused the failure of the Round Table Conference. Representation of Muslims, as understood by Gandhi, became a sore issue.
See full quotation in Harijan, 30 September 1939, CWMG, vol. 70, p.203. In 1939, Gandhi intervened in that state to increase the influence of his party, the Indian National Congress, and failed in his attempt. The princely states were extremely reluctant to relax their autocratic rule.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 The consequences of the claim The issue became vital eight years later, when Jinnah opposed Gandhi with a credible counter claim a claim to represent all Muslims, whether members of his party, the Muslim League, or not. Jinnah justified his own claim by the two nations theory, which effectively took the wind out of Gandhis sails. He denied the Hindu Congress the right to speak for any Muslim (see Jinnahs story, narrated in full by Wolpert 1984). The two men had known each other since 1915, when Jinnah had welcomed Gandhi back from South Africa on behalf of a Bombay reception committee. Gandhi commented that Jinnah should not have expressed himself in English. Jinnah was then an Indian first and a Muslim next, a nationalist and ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity to quote the poetess Sarojini Naidu, a Congressman as well as a Muslim League man not a man to be given lessons. At the Nagpur Congress, he opposed Gandhi and his unconstitutional methods of resistance, but was howled down as a result, a very unpleasant experience witnessed by his young and beautiful wife. Eight years later, Congress rejected him again at Calcutta, when his constitutional amendments to the Nehru Report were not accepted. He could not repress some tears, when Gandhi and the Congress for the sake of Hindu cohesion refused to agree with his proposals to act in unison on the eve of the 1930 campaign for purna swaraj (full independence). Not easily discouraged, Jinnah made a last attempt to cooperate with Gandhi and the Congress in 1937. The elections in the wake of the Government Act of 1935 had offered political power at the provincial level for the first time. In exchange for the cooperation of the Muslim League he presided, Jinnah had asked for a share of power in the newly formed provincial ministries. He was rebuffed by Nehru, and Gandhi refused to intervene in spite of Jinnahs personal appeal to him. Although they met again in seemingly sweeter but inconclusive discussions, the rift worsened at an alarming rate63 with the spectacular growth of the Muslim League under Jinnahs presidency. Thereafter, the two leaders competed for the recognition of Indian Muslims. The Indian National Congress pushed to the forefront some of its renowned members, so as to stress the importance of the Muslim connection. Jinnah substantiated his own claim by making the Muslim League vote for Pakistan (March 1940). Whether Jinnah meant a real Pakistan or whether he used the vote as a threat, is still strongly debated. But whatever the game that Jinnah was playing on the political chessboard, it ended with the creation of Pakistan. Gandhi was outplayed. Was Jinnah also outplayed? For he seemed reluctant to accept the moth-eaten Pakistan that the Viceroy finally offered him, so much so that, rather than say yes, when asked by His Excellency, he replied with a sullen nod of the head. Lord Mountbatten told the story himself and adds: Isnt it fascinating that the whole thing should have depended on which way he (Jinnah) was going to shake his head (Collins and Lapierre 1982, p.46). Fourth episode: an offer of mediate in Palestine (1937) Gandhi intervened for a second time in the affairs of Palestine in July 1937. Having been approached by an emissary of the Jewish Agency from Jerusalem, he responded with an offer to mediate in the
Gandhi to Jinnah, 3 February 1938: everybody spoke of you as one of the staunchest of nationalists and the hope of both Hindus and Mussalmans. Are you the same Mr. Jinnah? What proposal can I make except to ask you on bended knees to be what I thought you were. Jinnahs answer, 15 February 1938: I think you might have spared your appeal and need not have preached to me on bended knees to be what you had thought I was (see Panter-Brick 2008, pp.103104).
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 Jewish-Arab conflict (Panter-Brick 2008b, pp.53-65). The Offer was buried for half a century in the archives of the Central Zionist Agency and in the graves of the team of would-be mediators, who kept the secret to their last breath. The political context of the Offer In the khilafat episode, described earlier, no weight was given to the Jewish question, because, in 1919, the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was still in limbo. Frictions occurred between Muslims and Jews - two riots actually in 1920 and 1921 just skirmishes, judging by Indian standards, unnoticed by Indians at the time of the khilafat campaign. Ottoman rule over the small Jewish community had mainly been tolerant and benevolent. Theodor Herzel, at the end of the 19th century, foretold the creation of a Jewish state, but he kept the prediction to himself, because it would have met with unbelief and scorn. If I were to sum up the Congress in a word which I shall take care not to publish it would be this: at Basle I founded a Jewish state. If I said this loudly to-day I would be greeted with universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.64 He consequently discussed hopefully, if not successfully - with Ottoman authorities about Jewish immigration in the Holy Land. Some years later, in wartime, the main problem for the Jews, who had kept their Eastern European nationalities, was either to renounce their passports, which denounced them as enemies of the Ottoman state since so many of them were of Russian origin or to take the risk of being drafted to the war against Russia. At the end of the war, Gandhi seemed unconcerned by the Balfour Declaration (dated 2 November 1917), which welcomed in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people (Panter-Brick 2008b, pp.39-40). Likewise, Indian khilafatists, under the spell of the Caliph, were unconscious of the threat of mass Jewish immigration to their shrines. However, by 1937, the Balfour Declaration was at the centre of the Arab-Jewish conflict, with a strong, if divided, nationalist Arab movement opposing the Jewish community, the yishuv, with growing animosity and violence (Panter-Brick 2008b, chapter 5).65 The Mandatory Power tried to deal with the contestants, White Paper after White Paper, but did not escape their wrath. The Palestinian Arabs were adamant that the Jews had no right to enter Palestine, no right to buy land, no right to settle in this context, the terminology Arab and Jew refers to opposite power-politics in the Arab-Jewish conflict at the time of the Mandate. Violence was resorted to, and in 1937, Palestine suffered from terrorist activities in the Great Strike of April to October 1936 (Panter-Brick 2008b, pp.46-47). Gandhis proposal of mediation to the Jewish Agency happened in the lull between the Great Strike and the armed rebellion that was to devastate Palestine from the autumn of 1937 to 1939. The lull and respite from violence from October 1936 to September 1937 was obtained by other Arab states from reluctant Palestinian nationalists so as to give the Peel Commission (19361937) a chance to search for a peaceful solution.
See Walter Laqueur (1972), A History of Zionism, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, on the first World Zionist Congress at Basle in August 1897, p.108. Theodor Herzel was the founder of the Zionist movement. 65 During the period under consideration, namely the period of the Mandate preceding the start of the civil war, land was bought for cash from the State, from private owners, and even from the feudal Arab families owing large estates. The Arab tenants of these estates were evicted because Jewish emigrants (both Zionists and anti-Zionists) followed the policy of employing Jews only (a policy which served them well in the six months strike of 1936). If force was used, it was the force of the law. This was an increasing cause of mounting tensions, disruption, resentment and hatred, as a growing number of tenants had to leave the land they farmed for centuries.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 Gandhis secret Offer of July 1937 coincided with the publication of the recommendations of the Peel Commission, that Palestine should be divided.66 In the Arab armed resistance to partition, Gandhis Offer of 1937 was doomed from the start. The emissary How is Gandhis initiative to be explained? The reason why Gandhi tried his hand at solving the Arab-Jewish conflict is to be found in the identity of the emissary, sent by the Jewish Agency in May 1937. This emissary had been selected with care, vetted in London and instructed about his mission by the Zionist leadership. He was not the first to contact Gandhi on behalf of the Agency. Olsvanger, also a South African Jew, well-learned in Sanskrit, had contacted Gandhi in October 1936. He reported having spent twenty minutes with ein Laemmel (a simpleton; Panter-Brick 2008b, p.31). This time, the emissary was Gandhis dearest friend and his right hand in the first non-violent resistance. They had not seen each other since their common fight, but the friendship was still alive and strong. The twenty-two years of absence only made their loving hearts fonder and the joy of the reunion sweeter. They had been separated by the war, as they were sailing for a new life together in India. The friend, Hermann Kallenbach, was travelling on a German passport. He was sent to a detention camp in the Isle of Man and later, to Germany in an exchange of civilians. When the two friends contacted each other again after the war, Gandhi was canvassing support for the Caliphate. Kallenbach, understandably, did not join the Khilafatist fight and went back to South Africa, to his job as an architect. In May 1937 Kallenbach arrived in India, stayed six weeks with Gandhi, explaining Zionism. Did Gandhi change his mind as a result? How far he did so, is debatable. Whatever it be, on the day of his friends departure, the Mahatma had found three personalities willing to negotiate a settlement between Jews and Arabs, one Hindu: Nehru, his political heir; one Muslim: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, president of the Indian National Congress; one Christian: C.F. Andrews, a well-connected and trusted friend, versed in diplomacy. Gandhi owed Kallenbach a debt of gratitude from the South African days. Were the recipients of Gandhis solicitude not so much the Jews in Palestine than Kallenbach, a Jew who helped him so effectively in his South African struggle? The conditional Offer of 1937 The offer of help was unavoidably conditional. The Jewish Agency had to declare the end of its dependence on the Mandatory Power, before negotiations could start. A settlement with Arab Nationalists should involve only two parties, Arabs and Jews, with no interference from Britain. Gandhi, Nehru and the Indian National Congress had no love for Mandates, considered as a sanitized version of colonial rule. The Jewish Agency made no such declaration. Nothing came out of the Offer. Kallenbach did not come back in time for the follow-up, as he was supposed to have done. And the Offer, which could very well have been the last chance for dialogue before the end of the Mandate and the Arab-Israeli wars, was soon irrelevant, as dependency on British protection became a life-line for the Palestinian Jews - Zionists and anti-Zionists alike (Panter-Brick 2008b, p.49).
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 Goodwill, Hindu-Muslim unity and the Offer Before making the offer of mediation, Gandhi had taken care to include in his team of negotiators prominent political figures with untarnished pro-Arab record, who might exercise influence with Arab statesmen in the Middle-East and be amenable to Gandhis promptings. As for Gandhi himself, he had the credentials of the Caliphate fight and, in July 1937, he was the most powerful politician in India. Having now, through Kallenbach, the ear of Jewish personalities such as Moshe Shertok, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency (who was to become Israel Foreign Affairs Minister) and Chaim Weizmann, the leader in London (and future President of Israel), Gandhi thought he might have a chance to settle the Arab-Jewish issue on the basis of Muslim goodwill. At this stage, goodwill could not be guaranteed, and results even less, as Gandhi let Shertok know on the fourth of July 1937. In the form of a written statement that was to accompany the verbal offer, Gandhi wrote: I have little doubt that immediately the support of physical force is disclaimed, and the Jewish colony begins to depend upon the goodwill of the Arab population, their position would be safe. But this, at best, is a surmise. My opinion is based purely on ethical considerations, and is independent of results. (Central Zionist Archives, S.25.3587; see Shimoni 1977). Nonetheless, Gandhis reliance upon goodwill rested on more than ethical considerations. The offer was to be pressed upon the Arabs by means of the political weight of the Muslims of India. That weight was considerable, as Kallenbach explained in a letter to Weizmann on 4 July 1937, his day of departure: Both (Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad) think that by direct conversation between Arabs and Jews only, will it be possible to reach an understanding and they believe the time is ripe for such conversations. They are willing to assist to bring about these conversations, when called upon to do so, so is Mahatma Gandhi. The Mohammedan population of India, being 70,000,000, is by far the most important in the world. The intervention of some of their leaders with a view to reach conciliation, may have far reaching results. What do you think about it? (Central Zionist Archives, S.25.3587; see Shimoni 1977 and Sarid 1997). It is noteworthy that the figure stated by Kallenbach in his letter to Weizmann covers the Mohammedan population - not the Muslim membership of the Indian National Congress. And is it not worth stressing that the whole idea of mediation took shape before the rift with Jinnah, just before the Muslim League was refused a share in the formation of the Provincial ministries, and at the very time its president was offering to implement Gandhis constructive program spinning included? As Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach in August 1937: much of the work lies in India as I visualize the development of the settlement talks. (CWMG, vol. 96, p.290) He also informed his friend of a long discussion with Andrews on that vision, who then reported to Kallenbach: Here (in India) in an extraordinary way is the key to the whole question (ibid.). History tends to repeat itself. Gandhi had sought yet another re-enactment of his dream of Hindu-Muslim unity, through yet another elusive dream, peace in the Middle-East. Conclusion Eventually, Gandhi drew his own negative conclusions regarding his intervention in Palestine and his hopes to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity at home. On 22 March 1939, he convened a secret meeting to signal to the Jewish Agency that he was abandoning any prospect of DAJ 16/2 64 Panter-Brick
Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 mediation in Palestinian affairs. He required the presence of six people, not only that of his friends Kallenbach67 and Andrews and the assistance of his two secretaries Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal, but also invited two Jewish personalities to attend. One was the editor of the official organ of the Bombay Zionist Association and the other, from Tel-Aviv, was collecting funds in India on behalf of the Jewish Agency. Nothing transpired of the secret meeting, except that this was the end of the Palestinian road for Gandhi. Shohet, the Indian Zionist attending the meeting, wrote accordingly to Epstein, his contact in the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem on 24 March 1939: He (Gandhi) has been frank about the part the Muslims play in the question, though it is evident he will not say anything about it even in the minutes of a private interview (Shimoni 1977, p.51). Without the weight of the seventy million Indian Muslims, Gandhi could not achieve his ambitions in the Middle East. The Mahatmas dream of Hindu-Muslim unity faded away with the creation of Pakistan and the civil wars in Palestine.
References Choudhury, V. 1985. Indian Nationalism and External Forces, 19201947. Delhi: Capital Publishing House. Gandhi, M. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) (100 volumes). The Publication Division, Government of India: Navajivan Trust. Collins, L., and D. Lapierre. 1982. Mountbatten and the Partition of India, March 22-August 15, 1947. Singapore: Trans-East Distributing Company. Gandhi, M.K. 1927. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. Gandhi, M.K. 1954. Satyagraha in South Africa. Stanford: Academics Reprints. Gandhi, M.K. 1939. Harijan, 30 September. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The Publication Division, Government of India: Navajivan Trust. Laqueur, W. 1972. A History of Zionism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Panter-Brick, S. 1963. Gandhi contre Machiavel. Paris: Denoel. Panter-Brick, S. 2008a. Palestine, the Caliph and Gandhi: A Non-violent Jihad. Asian Social Science 4 (7): 147153. Panter-Brick, S. 2008b. Gandhi and the Middle East. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Sarid, I., and C. Bartolf. 1997. Hermann Kallenbach, Mahatma Gandhis Friend in South Africa: A Concise Biography. Berlin Verlag: Gandhi-Informations-Zentrum. Shimoni, G. 1977. Gandhi, Satyagraha and the Jews: A Formative Factor in Indias Policy towards Israel. Jerusalem Papers on Peace Problems: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations.
Kallenbach paid a second and ill fated visit in 1939 to India, when he nearly died of malaria. He recovered sufficiently to attend the March meeting and left for South Africa, never to return. He died in 1945.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 5466. Copyright 2009 Simone Panter-Brick ISSN 1742-2930 Wolpert, S. 1984. Jinnah and Pakistan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaidi, A.M. 1987. Indian National Congress: The Glorious Tradition. New Dehli: Indian Institute of Applied Political Research.
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Psychedelic Trance: ritual, belief and transcendental experience in modern raves

Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos Aegean University in Mytilini http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol16/iss2/papadimitropoulos.pdf
Abstract Ethnographic fieldwork in various non-industrialised societies around the globe has demonstrated that dance is often related to trance: states of mind in which ordinary conscious awareness is usually partly and temporarily suspended. In these ethnographic instances, trance states are institutionalised and form a part of the religious norm. There, it appears that trance- induced naturally or chemically with certain drugs- is related to possession by spirits and deities and thus is an instrument of ritualistic and religious importance because it provides the basis for experiencing the sacred or the supernatural. But what happens in a western cultural context when, usually, young people gather in so-called raves and dance non-stopped within a large crowd, often under the influence of psychedelic drugs? This introductory paper focuses on the description of the psychedelic trance subculture, in relation to the contexts of its historical socio-cultural emergence, past and present perceptions of shamanistic cultures, and to brain cognition. Keywords: trance, raves, ritual, music, transcendental experience, dancing.
Introduction Theoretical research and fieldwork in various traditional societies around the globe indicates that dance, defined as a purposeful and intentionally rhythmical patterned activity that derives from music68, is often related to trance: states of mind in which ordinary conscious awareness is usually partly and temporarily suspended. More important is the fact that in some societies, such as those of Western Africa, trance states are institutionalized and form a part of the religious life of the people so concerned. There, it appears that trance induced naturally or chemically with certain drugs is related to possession by spirits and deities, and thus is an instrument of ritualistic and religious importance because it provides the basis of experiencing the sacred or the supernatural. In other words, through listening to music and dancing a qualitative change occurs in the minds of individuals that facilitates what they perceive as a religious or transcendental experience69.
We can define music as humanly organised sound (Blacking, 1976: 1). One definition of religion regards it as that which is concerned with, or related to the sacred. Since some, but not all, transcendental experiences are experiences of the sacred, and since some, but not all, religious experiences are
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 6774. Copyright 2009 Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos ISSN 1742-2930 In a different cultural context, that is in the industrialised West70, usually (but not always) young people, members of what sociologists label countercultural groups, have for the last fifteen years used to gather in large numbers ideally outdoors and dance passionately for many hours under the sounds of extremely loud repetitive electronic music, often under the influence of drugs. Such musical activities are known as raves. At first glance, what people do in raves seems to be quite unrelated to what people do during trance states in non-industrialised societies mainly because the formers goal is entertainment whereas the latters aim is religious in character, and is guided by a structure of custom. On a closer look, however, evidence suggests that certain special qualities of both the sound and the drugs can produce perceptual changes, and thus may facilitate an encounter with the transcendental. Interestingly, it is precisely these two factors music and drugs which are seen by members of such countercultural groups as crucial in altering their normal state of being and creating a feeling of ecstasy that is a mystical experience which by some may be interpreted as a religious one. Hence, my interest in this essay is to explore whether modern day raves have a mystical aspect from the viewpoint of the participant, or if they are just a cynical attempt to trap young people into drug dependency. Therefore, the focus of this paper is on perceptions and practices concerning altered states of consciousness. Much of the work conducted on altered states of consciousness has been disturbing to social anthropologists because it has emphasised psychological processes over social function and structure and, as Atkinson observes, in some cases implied a reduction of symbolism and ritual to psychobiological functions (Atkinson, 1992: 311). On the other hand, religious behaviour, as any kind of human behaviour, is a product of the interaction of sociocultural and personality influences. For this reason then we should not try to explain social psychological facts by relying only on sociological theories. Thereby, my attempt to understand the neurophysiology of trance does not imply an explanation of the associated structures of ritual, knowledge, and society. Historical Background Firstly, it is useful to account for such parties as the raves, and throw some light on the motives of the organisers and the participants. The material that follows was gathered through participant observation in both indoor and outdoor raves in the United Kingdom, Italy and Greece as well as by literature review. It must also be emphasised that I will refer to only one branch of the so-called rave culture which is erroneously perceived as homogenous and therefore even the aforementioned term rave culture is a mere generalisation71 namely the psychedelic trance dance movement.72 As the adjective psychedelic suggests there is a kind of music called trance
transcendental we may agree with Walsh and Vaugham that there is clearly some overlap between transcendental experiences and religious experience (Walsh and Vaugham, 1993:6). 70 Of course, I do not in any way consider the west to form a closed or homogenous cultural system since such a thing does not exist. But I do hold that there are particular philosophical and theological ideas and assumptions, as well as value orientations that developed historically which are shared among the different peoples of so-called west. These structure our conception of the cosmos and define man's position in it. 71 It is a mistake to ascribe a single life-style or ideological orientation to that stage in the life cycle that we call youth. As sociologists demonstrate there is extremely wide range of alternative values and lifestyles held by youth whose apparent homogeneity is largely a journalistic myth (Zablocki and Kanter, 1976: 281). Additionally, as Davis and Munoz have indicated for hippies, there may be a value tension even within subcultures. In the case of hippies such a value tension was observed between contemplative, inwardly- directed forms of mind expansion and more hedonistically oriented forms of sensual excess; this distinction between individuals was designated by the terms heads and freaks respectively (Davis and Munoz, 1968: 156). 72 The psychedelic trance music as an underground type of electronic music can be contrasted to more mainstream and popular electronic music like house, progressive house, garage and trance music. Through personal observation and contact with peer groups I believe it is correct to relate the latter with club culture which then should be
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 6774. Copyright 2009 Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos ISSN 1742-2930 that is different than psychedelic trance. Indeed, trance is a more general category and refers to a kind of fast dance electronic music. Why it came to be named as such is doubtful, but the fact that it can actually induce trance states- at least in the eyes of its creators and dancers should be considered a serious possibility. Unfortunately, I cannot prove this claim but I can only pin-point at the fact that people can dance intensively even for more than ten hours! The psychedelic trance movement was imported in the early 1990s from the shores of Goa in India where many hippies had settled after the decline of the hippie movement in the early 1970s. It sampled fragments of the views of people like Timothy Leary and tried to create a new ground for the psychedelic tradition, confirming that the hippy ethic was in renaissance, and that it was not simply a barren imitation of the sixties but something entirely new (Colin, 1997). Thus, psychedelic and hippy ideals merged with electronic dance music resulting in an aggressive and fast, but at the same time rhythmical, electronic music whose melody indeed difficult to be perceived by nonreceptive ears is created by the combination of a basic repetitive fast beat73, that resembles the sound of African drums, with other peculiar electronically produced sounds often inspired by natural sounds such as those of thunders, water drops or bird singing. These sounds produced by disc jockeys (DJs), the accompanying non-stop dance, and feelings of euphoria and ecstasy, which are facilitated and more quickly reached but not entirely created by the use hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and psychedelic mushrooms, bring about an atmosphere that is perceived as mystical and is thus imagined as similar to shamanic tribal drumming. For the music to take proper physical and psychological effect it has to be played as loud and for as long as possible. But it is very important to note that the psychedelic trance dance scene is often seen by participants as a contemporary version of the ancient dance drug rituals of tribal shamans an idea that resembles that of hippies who fancied themselves as white Indians74. Thereby, in various internet sites75, designed by the organisers of such raves, one sees explicit the belief that they are in some way connected to prehistoric tribes who had celebrated in music and dance thousands of years earlier in the same surroundings, and some still do in other places of the world; that free parties are shamanic rites, which using the new musical technologies in combination with certain drugs and long periods of dancing- preferably in settings of spiritual significance- can bring urban youth closer to the earth with which they have lost contact, hence focusing on the consequences of the contemporary ecological crisis. Discussion From this description of the psychedelic trance dance movement it is evident that members of such countercultural groups have very little understanding of the function of trance and dance, and the relation between the two in other traditional societies, or of the cultural imperatives that urge the individual towards employing such tactics. It seems rather that they have naively idealised and exoticised a primitive culture a common lay strategy which usually manifests no real interest in such cultures or in how tribal peoples see the world that surrounds us.
contrasted to the so-called rave culture. The basic difference between the two lies in that there is no specific lifestyle or ideology deriving out of the club culture which is mainly hedonistic in character whereas a more egalitarian and spiritual way of life seems to be suggested by the rave culture. This is manifested in that free parties are seen as ideal, while clubs can be described as selling you a good night. In addition, clubbers are often described as fashion victims, even in the use of drugs, that is in that they use the hedonistic drug known as ecstasy (MDMA), instead of hallucinogenic drugs (LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, mescaline, etc.) which are seen as spiritual drugs. 73 The usual sequence of the beat is between 138 and 152 bpm (beats per minute). 74 The Psychedelic Library Homepage. 1979. http://www.psychedelic-library.org/grinspoo.htm. 75 The Gaian Mind Psychedelic Community. 2001. The Gaian Mind. Available at: http://gaian-mind.com/about.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 6774. Copyright 2009 Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos ISSN 1742-2930 In Western African communities such as those of the Fon in Niger, the Dogon in Mali, and the Shilak in Nigeria, people go into trance by dancing to worship their gods, control the dangerous forces of nature and call down divine power into themselves. On occasion such a dance in West Africa may even have a clearly social function, like when crime is controlled by the witch-finding trance dance which discovers criminals (Gorer, 1944: 39). But in general, as Gorer points out, it appears that for West Africans76 trance dance is a very important mechanism which gives meaning to their lives and unites them with the forces which control their universe (Ibid). The same function of trance has been observed in various traditional societies like in the Lapps shamanistic rites where magic drums are again important for inducing trance states (Hultkrantz, 1955) or for trance in Bali (Holt and Bateson, 1944). To believe that non-Western dance represents earlier stages of Western dance is like falling into the trap to think that modern non-Western peoples represent earlier stages of Western cultural evolution. Nevertheless, it appears that youngsters in psychedelic trance parties do actually experience what we call altered states of consciousness, that is experiences that seem to transcend our usual conception of ourselves77, and can therefore be interpreted as mystical. This is suggested by participants who often experience hallucinations or synesthesia,78 which is the capacity to experience sensations of several kinds as a result of stimulation of one sense only (Neher 1980:9). For example, ones auditory apparatus is stimulated by the music but at the same time the person can see the music, that is feel that the music is blue or that the sound is a spinning-top. One could easily claim that such experiences are the effects of the drugs young people use and thus reduce such parties to an epiphenomenon of drug use. But consciousness alteration is found in over 90% of the societies represented in the Human Relation Area Files and, as De Rios observes, it is accomplished by a wide array of sensory deprivation and sensory overload techniques (De Rios, 1974:161)79. What we see here is that the use of psychotropic drugs, that is drugs which cause psychological change or modification of mental activity, is a widespread phenomenon in non-industrialised societies where, as we already said, the use of drums and violent motion can produce trance states. In the contexts of modern psychedelic trance subcultures, the use of drugs like cannabis, LSD, magic mushrooms and mescaline80 and the aggressive dance is studied by sociologists and regarded as a problem, whereas in a traditional sociocultural context similar activities and altered states of consciousness are observed by anthropologists, and considered to form a part of the natives consistent metaphysical system and world view.81
For an ethnographic account of these groups see Mercel Griaule (1965) for the Dogon; Gilbert Rouget (1985) for the Fon and the Shilak; and Jean Rouch's ethnographic film Les maitres fous (1955) on the Fon. Lewis, I. in Ecstatic Religion (1989) refers to the Yoruba of Nigeria for similar functions of trance states. 77 For a more detailed description of transcendental states see Neher, 1980. 78 In regard to synaesthesia, Neher suggests that hereditary mechanisms may be important factors in creating it (Neher, 1980:9). 79 Interestingly, De Rios sites Wasson and Wasson (1957) who have argued that hallucinogenic use is a major factor in explaining the world of demons and gods which have entered into mans beliefs throughout the world (De Rios, 1974: 152). She also refers to Levi-Strauss (1970) who has shown the distribution of American Indian use of psychotropic mushrooms outside of Mexico to include California Indians, Salish, Kwakiutl, Menomini, Blackfoot, Omaha, Iroquois, G, Munduruc, Yurimagua, Tukuna, Jicarill Apache, and the Argentine Toba (De Rios, 1974: 151). De Rios herself, in her article writing about the religion of the Mayas suggests that the particular substances of psychotropic Flora and Fauna may have influenced their world view (Ibid.:148). 80 Mescaline is the synthetic of the peyote cactus which is used among North and South American Indians as a means to make contact with the spirit world. In Mesoamerica it has been used for more than two thousand years (Barfield, 1997: 132). 81 I am not trying to equate the use of psychotropic substances in different historical, social and cultural situations; rather I am implying that whereas the activity is to a certain extent the same it is invested by different meanings, and has
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 6774. Copyright 2009 Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos ISSN 1742-2930 But since altered states of consciousness, like trance, exist in such diverse cultural settings, it follows that there must be a common denominator to all mankind. This common denominator is the human brain, and for our purposes we should agree with Jackson that what is true at the neurophysiological level must be universally true, irrespective of society or the individual (Jackson, 1968: 297).82 It has been suggested that certain unnoticed links exist between the auditory apparatus and the peculiar sensation we interpret as mystical or religious experience, that may involve a feeling of a supernatural presence. Such an approach focuses on psychophysiological processes which are considered as partly responsible for arousing religious feelings (Tuzin, 1984). More specifically, under certain conditions and in certain forms, aural stimuli may become instrumental in creating transcendental experiences. Naturally occurring sounds like the thunder or other similar ones may arouse a strange sense of anxiety which is perceived as intrinsically mysterious (Tuzin, 1984: 579), and is thus unconsciously interpreted as being of supernatural nature since the supernatural has always been mysterious. Interestingly, however, the sounds that can create this anxiety, disrupt sensorimotor function, and trigger such an association are not the ones we can hear but those we cannot. These are infrasonic sound waves whose frequencies are below conscious human perception83; it is infrasonic sound waves which the thunder produces.84 In addition, certain evocative ritual sounds, such as those produced by large drums, bear a resemblance to or are in fact imitative of these naturally occurring sounds. Their effect may thus be to produce religious sentiment, but not in a direct way as, for instance, when someone feels relaxed under the sound of classical music. It rather seems that the association between the ritual sound and the accompanying feeling of religiosity is unintentional and occurs again unconsciously. We should also take under serious consideration that the cross-cultural popularity of drumbeats (Tuzin, 1984: 581) which can be even electronically produced may have to do with their ability to help to induce mind-altered states that may be interpreted as ecstatic, mystical or religious. Interestingly, it has been argued that the rhythm, the drumbeats have can affect the central nervous system which modifies brain activity in a way that produces abnormal states such as trance. Neher (1962, cited in Tuzin, 1984)85, by discovering a correlation between drum rhythms of an effective frequency for causing abnormal states (7-9 cycles per second) and the normal range of brain wave frequency (8-13 cycles per second), suggested that the tuning of outer and inner rhythms is probably sufficient for inducing trance (Tuzin, 1984: 581). If there is any validity in the aforementioned theories then perhaps we can hypothesize that young people dancing under the sounds of a repetitive electronic drumbeat, whose rhythm, has neither a beginning nor an end, can actually fall into trance. However, this is not to underestimate the effects of powerful psychoactive drugs, like L.S.D, which
different function and structure. We should also stress that native cultures are acutely aware that over indulgence in drug use can undermine social order, and therefore there are rules to regulate access to the drugs (Lebot et al., 1992, cited in Barfield, 1997: 132). 82 It is generally agreed that the chimpanzee is the closest primate to man in regard to behaviour and genetic make-up. Jackson notices this, and remarks that the astonishing thing is that chimpanzees living freely and undisturbed in the forest like to drum and dance! (Jackson, 1968: 297). Jackson cites Reynolds, V. (I965) Budongo: A Forest and its Chimpanzees as source for details of a chimpanzee festival of dancing and drumming. 83 Approximately below 20 hertz. 84 On this basis we can perhaps trace a link between thunder and religiosity and explain the widespread personification of thunder as the voice of God (Tuzin, 1984: 585-87). It is also interesting to note that a deaf ritual specialist is an anomaly, whereas a blind one is common enough. (Jackson, 1968) and (Tuzin, 1984). 85 Nehers views have been challenged on the basis that the alignment of inner and outer rhythms in the way he suggested is unlikely to occur. See Rouget, 1977, Music and Possession Trance in Blacking J. (ed.) The Anthropology of the Body, pp. 233-39.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 6774. Copyright 2009 Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos ISSN 1742-2930 drastically alter human consciousness and can create experiences that are interpreted as transcendental or religious. In our daily lives we separate between subject (ourselves) and object (the material world out there). This separateness is of survival value for us because it enables the subject (us) to make decisions and manipulate the object through voluntary activity. What we call conscious, the I state of daily life, our perception and thinking, is a result of cortical interpretation, that is of the activity of the outer layers of our brains. By contrast, subcortical activity is responsible for our subconscious. The fact that we are able to separate between subject and object is a reflection of the relative independence of cortical interpretation from subcortical activity (Fischer, 1971: 902). Under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs the ability to perceive the environment in the usual way and the constancy of the visual world diminish, and the subject turns inward; space and time are also distorted, while inner sensations dominate. Characteristically, the capacity to verify these changes through voluntary motor activity disappears (Ibid.), and it is common in sites of psychedelic trance parties for people to state that they were overpowered and not free, or, quite the opposite, that they did not experience the subject-object dichotomy of everyday life. These changes in perception indicate that the individual has a restricted interpretative ability of his or her experience which can thus be perceived (at the moment he is living it) either as creative (artistic, religious) or psychotic experience. In the case of an ecstatic experience, the person will structure it according to his belief system. Hence, a man can feel one with the divinity, whereas another one can feel the oneness of everything or of the universe. Thereby, the aforementioned separateness between subject and object ceases to exist, and this may be the result of the drugs affecting the cortical and subcortical activity to the extent that the two become indistinguishably integrated (Fischer, 1971: 901). In other words, the experience of the oneness with the universe that we interpret as a religious one may in fact be the result of our conscious and subconscious becoming one; or, to put it otherwise, that for a while we are, in a sense, aware of our subconscious. We saw how certain properties of sound can create altered states of consciousness, bring people into trance and facilitate mystical experience. We also focused on similar conditions that can be brought about by the use of hallucinogenic drugs. However, this does not mean that all drug experiences are mystical, but, obviously, we cannot prove that no drug experiences are mystical. To ask ourselves whether the experiences hallucinogenic drugs induce differ from religious experiences reached naturally is asking the wrong question. The reason is that in this phenomenological level, that is in the descriptive one, drug experiences cannot be distinguished from their natural religious counterpart (Smith, 1993: 93). Music, drugs and continuing dance can induce trance regardless of whether we talk about the shamanic dance of the Lapps or the psychedelic trance parties of countercultural groups. We should add another factor which can also produce heights of ecstasy: the emotional contagion of groups (Neher, 1980: 69). Parties, parades and religious ceremonies are all examples of events where a specific feeling of joy or sorrow, precisely because is felt by many people at the same time, is magnified and can thus become very intense as to make a whole crowd to dance, cheer, or cry. These considerations may lead us to conclude that in a psychedelic trance party the potentials for the participants to fall into a trance state are actually there. It is doubtful, however, if the participants have any understanding of what their activities actually involve. Whether or not these were the intentions of the people who introduced these parties in the first place is not certain; the same can be said for the creators of this type of electronic music.
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 6774. Copyright 2009 Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos ISSN 1742-2930 Conclusion In conclusion, from the preceding discussion it is apparent that, in the so-called West, an altered state of consciousness can often be portrayed as an anti-social mode of being and it is thus not highly valued. This is indicated by the fact that we classify movements like the one that was presented here as marginal and countercultural. As anthropologists, we know that each culture categorizes experience differently. Goleman correctly observes that the study of a code different from our own can lead us to concepts and aspects of reality from which our own way of looking at the world excludes us (Goleman, 1993: 18). There are cultures, such as shamanic, which value altered states of consciousness, and therefore construct their image of the world from multiple states. By contrast, Western culture focuses largely on the usual I state of being, or the usual waking state. This focus appears to have created in Western culture a deep rooted fear of altered states of consciousness, a fear which can perhaps be traced to a Christianity ethic imposed over Western people. This fear can probably explain the general suspicion of techniques such as meditation, but most importantly, it reveals the complexity of the religious experience and the multiplicity of ways for reaching the sacred.
References Atkinson, M.J. 1992. Shamanisms Today. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 307330. Barfield, (ed.). 1997. The Dictionary of Anthropology. Blackwell Publishers. Blacking, J. (ed.). 1977. The Anthropology of the Body. London: Academic Press. Blacking, J. 1976. How Musical is Man? London: Faber and Faber. Boas, Franziska. 1944. The Function of Dance in Human Society. New York: Dance Horizons. Colin, M. 1997. Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. New York: Serpents Tail. Davis, F., and L. Munoz. 1968. Heads and Freaks: Patterns of Drug Use Among Hippies. Journal of Health and Social Behaviour Special Issue on Recreational Drug Use 9(2): 156164. De Rios, D.M. 1974. The Influence of Psychotropic Flora and Fauna on Maya Religion. Current Anthropology 15(2): 147164. Fischer, R. 1971. A Cartography of the Ecstatic and Meditative States. Science 174: 897904. Goleman, D. 1993. Psychology, Reality and Consciousness. In R. Walsh and F. Vaugham (eds), Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision. New York: Putnam. Gorier, G. 1944. The Function of Different Dance Forms in Primitive African Communities. In F. Boas (ed.), The Function of Dance in Human Society. New York: Dance Horizons. Griaule, M. 1965. Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. London : Oxford University Press for. Hanna, L.J. 1979. Movements Toward Understanding Humans Through the Anthropological Study of Dance. Current Anthropology 20: 313339. Holt, C., and G. Bateson. 1944. Form and Function of the Dance in Bali. In F. Boas (ed.), function of Dance in Human Society. New York: Dance Horizons. DAJ 16/2 73 The
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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 6774. Copyright 2009 Panagiotis Papadimitropoulos ISSN 1742-2930 Hultkrantz, A. 1955. Swedish Research on the Religion and Folklore of the Lapps. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 85(1-2): 8199. Jackson, A. 1968. Sound and Ritual. Man 3(2): 293299. Kaeppler, L.A. 1978. Dance in Anthropological Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 31 49. Lewis, I. M. 1989. Ecstatic Religion : A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. London: Routledge. Neher, A. 1980. The Psychology of Transcendence. New York: Dover Publications. Rouch, J. 1955. Les maitres fous. [Film] Les Films de la Pliade. Rouget, G. 1977. Music and Possession Trance. In J. Blacking (ed.), The Anthropology of the Body. London: Academic Press. Rouget, G. 1985. Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Possession . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, H. 1993. Do Drugs Have a Religious Import? In R. Walsh and F. Vaugham (eds), Paths Beyond Ego. New York: Tarcher/Putnam. Storr, A. 1992. Music & The Mind. London: Harper Collins. Tuzin, D. 1984. Miraculous Voices: The Auditory Experience of Numinous Objects. Current Anthropology 25(5): 579596. Walsh, R., and F. Vaugham (eds). 1993. Paths Beyond Ego. New York: Tarcher/Putnam. Yinger, M.J. 1960. Counterculture and Subculture. American Sociological Review 25(5): 625635. Yinger, M.J. 1977. Presidential Address: Countercultures and Social Change. American Sociological Review 42(6): 833853. Zablocki, D.B., and M.R. Kanter. 1976. The Differentiation of Life-Styles. Annual Review of Sociology 2: 269298. Internet Resources: The Psychedelic Library. 1979. Psychedelic Drugs in the Twentieth http://www.psychedelic-library.org/grinspoo.htm (Accessed 20 March 2003). Century.
The Gaian Mind Psychedelic Community. 2001. The Gaian Mind. http://gaian-mind.com/about (Accessed 16 March 2003).
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Kapferer, Bruce, and Bjrn Enge Bertelsen (eds). 2009. Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Reviewed by Julian Kotze Durham University http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol16/iss2/kotze.pdf
Edited by two social anthropologists of wide international experience, this book explores the realities of state power as expressed in war and war zones. The authors selected by the editors are clearly experts in their specific fields, and, taken collectively, their works present a disturbing overview of the social impact of war on combatants and noncombatants alike: they present the reader with depths of analysis which not only impress, but also assist in unraveling the very complex social conundrum of the relationship between war and sovereign power. The three sections that this collection encompasses thus offer the reader wellbalanced and comprehensive insights into the topic of conflict; and of the social implications that ensue during events of crisis and confrontation. The interaction, relationships and cultural rationale of agents and players, behavior patterns in the field of conflict, is the theme that runs though the journal articles in this edited book. Using a diversity of examples, the first section, Transformations of Sovereignty, Empire, State, covers three issues that can be seen as global manifestations of the phenomenon: the military, state and market forces that inform and maintain conflict, and which in turn shape the distributions of political power. The second section, War Zone, describes destabilization in the war zone itself, as a reality that is experienced by citizens, and as a manifestation of political thinking within a specific country, Uganda. Detailed analyses of social behavior by the three contributors, gives this section an additional value for country specialists as well as war researchers. In the third and last section, Sovereign Logics, political contexts, and interpretations of military action in a number of countries, are used to explore the dynamics of conflict and violence, and the effect this has on collective attitudes within the countries affected. Kapferer and Bertelsens introduction states that the purpose of the essays is to explore the situations of civil strife, violent resistance and war in the circumstances of shifts in the organisation of state power and the emerging of new forms of sovereignty. They locate this focus on specific states and their powers within the larger arena of the political and economic actions of whole spectra of social actors. And argue that: In our usage, the state is a political order or politics machine that is distinguished by a totalizing dynamic whereby it (its agents, agencies and instructions) creates or
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shapes relations and processes to the terms of its dynamic in the socio-cultural fields into which state orders intrude and/or from which they emerge. Applying theoretical perspectives from Deleuze and Guattari, they suggest that these dynamics are actually intrinsic in structuring all social and political formations. This claim is contextualized in the case studies of the direct dimensional links between the state and the formation of war in section one, and is further illustrated in the later contributions of Alnaes, Finnstrm and Storaas on war zone social dynamics. In anthropological terms, the third and last section is theoretically the most interesting, as it examines examples of unfolding changes in state sovereignty, and how these shifts take place. The data used here were collected from guerrilla movements, paramilitary actions and death squads. Though the research methods used for gathering the data are not explicitly outlined in these essays, it can nevertheless be understood as ethnographic participant-observation, as there are conversations reported with informants and assistants. These are mentioned in some of the essays, albeit fleetingly. Throughout, there perhaps could have been more specific accounts of methodology, as understanding the research tools would have given students and other readers a clearer understanding of the difficulty and complexity of gathering data and information in this topic area. However, there is a strong emphasis on the use of historical informed analysis on the formation of political states: archival data and documents including news papers were extensively used for this purpose. This takes the essays beyond mere reportage and potentially gives them lasting value, as it clearly enhances the analytical discourse on contemporary events and strengthens the conclusion that the authors come to. The well described historical background also fleshes out the trajectories for other research, for example investigations of the experience of refugees in Europe who are from the aforementioned countries. This collection of essays does give the balanced interpretation of the socio-cultural journey that is taken by the nations, the states, the leaders running the states and nations, the civilians, media and others involved in the crisis and conflicts using a range of methods to make that shift into the next level where the society can functions as a whole, or not. I would recommend this to any student and or individual who would like to get more detailed data and understanding on the topic of conflict, crisis, war and the impact it has on the society from a cultural perspective.
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Political Anthropology and The Fabrics of Resistance

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Durham Anthropology Journal Volume 16(2) 2009: 37.

Copyright 2009 Maria KastrinouTheodoropoulou ISSN 1742-2930

Editorial Note: Political Anthropology and the Fabrics of Resistance

On Resistance: The Case of 17th Century Quakers

Charles II (reigned 1660-85)

William Penn (1644-1718) prominent English Quaker

Ritual as Cultural Reserve among Sicilian Migrants in Germany

Psychedelic Trance: ritual, belief and transcendental experience in modern raves

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