Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity Edited by Peter Van Der Veer

Introduction, Peter Van der Veer

Van der Veer begins with a discussion of the interplay between the gestures of description/testimony and confession/conversion. The confession of truth that comes with conversion is “a very modern truth since it is a personal, autobiographical account of a ‘private’ experience that is not authorized by a social institution such as the Church” (2). In the context of colonialism and conversion, description of the other acts as a foil for thinking about the self and also for experimenting in areas such as secular education (3). Through this discussion, Van der Veer turns to a description of the work’s purpose: examining “conversion to modernity in the interplay between Europe and the colonized world” (4). The authors in the work attempt to “develop an understanding of the interaction between the developments in the colonizing and the colonized worlds [which] should lead us away from the commonsensical simplicities of theories of modernization and secularization in which modern Europe unilaterally modernizes its Others, whose role is limited to reaction” (7). For example, missionary projects led to modern European conceptions of personhood (9). Van der Veer highlights three key themes that run throughout the collection: identity politics, translation, and transformation. Under the heading of identity politics, Van der Veer states that an important accomplishment of this volume is its incorporation of the state into its analysis of conversion (10). Under translation, Van der Veer introduces the relationship between belief, language and experience (15). Lastly, Van Der Veer talks about transformation and how modernity and conversion value change despite tension with religious truth’s claimed stability (18-19).

The Politics of Protestant Conversion To Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century France, Keith P. Luria

Luria opens with the obvious point that the meaning of conversion is relative to context (24). The context that Luria studies in the essay is 17^th century France. In the Protestant-Catholic struggles to win converts, the stakes were not just a turn to God but also a submission to a political institution “that represented, indeed that defined, truth” (25). Clergy of both faiths stressed the sincerity of conversion and looked down upon those who deserted their faith for having worldly motives (though the latter were often quite compelling due to family, kinship, commercial, or class pressures) (25). Clergy of each faith presented “a model of conversion that stressed the importance of conscience and deep interior motivation, as well as true doctrine and the role of intellect and emotion in adhering to it” (28). Luria focuses his essay on such a model presented by the Catholics, which he chose in part because of the added political motives for conversion to Catholicism, namely obedience to the king (28). Luria points out, however, that political motives were not the same as “worldly motives”: “Catholic converts and polemicists described the return to political loyalty as prompted by the sincere recognition of a religious as well as a political error. Loyalty to a monarch was not, therefore, another worldly concern or obligation imposed by custom, law, or social interest. Just as true religious feelings of the conscience were to be above such matters, so too was political fidelity. It came from the heart” (29). Thus, Catholics perceived Protestants as politically disloyal (29). Luria describes the example of the Capuchin mission starting in 1617. The Capuchins emphasized the theological without acknowledging the “worldly” (especially financial) reasons for conversion to Catholicism, for acknowledging these non-pious reasons would suggest insincerity, though they did use worldly incentives for conversion (a practice that left them vulnerable to Protestant criticism) (31-3). That the Capuchins denied the validity worldly reasons for conversion but did acknowledge obedience to the king is highly ironic, Luria argues (33). In conversions, a political statement was also made that accepted the convert back as a loyal French subject (34). The association between politics and Catholicism remained intact over the century (37). Luria concludes that the case study of conversion in 17^th century France shows that conversion can be a norm not an exception and that interior conversion (in line with Augustine and William James) is only part of the 17^th century conversion experience (38-9). Further, Luria suggests that in arguments over forced conversion there is evidence of an understanding that true conversion is the work only of God (40).

A Different Road to God: The Protestant Experience of Conversion in the Sixteenth Century, Judith Pollmann

Conversion narratives are a popular genre in Western culture from the time of Augustine, but they are conspicuously absent in the 16^th century conversions to Protestantism. This essay asks what we should make of the lack of conversion accounts from 16^th century Protestants in a culture with available literary models and a lot of discussion of conversion by Reformation thinkers (48). After reinforcing why a lack of conversion narratives is surprising; reviewing the literature that has focused on existing conversion narratives that seem to fit the traditional model; arguing that the few accounts of conversion that Reformers left was not to testify but to prove their motives to people who doubted them; and suggesting that conversion narratives that are written are not historical accounts of experiences but are retrospective accounts of what a convert wants people to think he’s experienced (to justify his change) (48-52); Pollmann turns to an explanation of why 16^th century converts did not write conversion narratives. Unlike Paul and Augustine, 16^th century converts to Protestantism wanted to downplay the revolutionary nature of the change. Change was not positive for 16^th century people: “In both the political and the religious discourse of the sixteenth century, the juxtaposition of new (and therefore evil) developments with old (and therefore good) traditions is overwhelmingly present. It is one of the peculiar paradoxes of sixteenth-century culture that despite the enormous changes it wrought, it was simultaneously characterized by a universal dislike for innovation” (52). There were different Reformer and popular strategies for dealing with the new. Reformers denied that their interpretations were new—they were just a return to an uncorrupted version of the Church. Faced with the paradox of needing to emphasize how different their way was without wanting to admit innovation, Reformers would speak in terms of return to and learning of old truths (53-5). Emphasizing learning, new Protestants could feel they were becoming better without suggesting they had been sinning before. This was particularly important to minimize rifts with family members who did not convert and to maintain belief that their ancestor’s were in heaven (56-7). These are the reasons Pollmann suggests that conversion narratives were not popular; however, they became popular in later generations, though many of those narratives were conversion to being a true Christian for people already born within Protestantism (58).

Nineteenth-Century Representations of Missionary Conversion and the Transformation of Western Christianity, Peter van Rooden

This essay focuses on the emergence of Protestant missions at the end of the 18^th century (65). Van Rooden states his argument at the beginning: “The mobilization for missions at the end of the eighteenth century was part of a profound shift in the social and discursive place of religion in European and North-American societies. Missionary endeavors are a modern phenomenon, not only in the sense that they presupposed and propagated the modern distinction between a public and a private sphere, but also because they acted to transform Western Christianity itself” (66). To begin his analysis, van Rooden analyzes Dutch missionary society in the early 19^th century, which he shows understood its activity as moral work in the private sphere which indirectly transforms the public sphere (66-73). The mission journal examined locates Christianity in the individual conscience, so sincere conversion requires a separation between public and private (70). Beyond the missionary journal, van Rooden also looks at missionary societies and argues that they confirm what the journal shows, namely that Christianity should be voluntary and individual (72). Van Rooden then goes back to early modern religious establishments to show the contrast between them and the missionary ideology of the 19^th century: whereas missionaries conceived of the expansion of Christianity as separate from political expansion, early modern thought did not (nor did they have the resources for such expansion) (73-7). By examining English and American missionary work in the 19^th century, van Rooden reinforces the same point since these missionaries were taking place in contexts where religion was detached from ecclesiastical and political bodies—religion becomes solidly grounded in a newly developed private sphere in ways it had not been earlier in the European context (78-81). Van Rooden ends by returning to Dutch society and discusses new separation of church and state, which reshaped Dutch society to include new freedoms for religious minorities. Mission societies helped Dutch society cope with this shift, giving people a site to be involved in public religion (81-3). By the late 19^th century, missionary societies were well accepted throughout Europe. Missionary societies helped Europeans to understand the new position of Christianity in society (83-4). Van Rooden ends by arguing, “Locating Christianity within a private sphere, expecting it to effect societal change indirectly, the missionary effort was both indication and cause of a fundamental discursive shift in the relation between religion and politics in the West” (84).

Religious Conversion and the Politics of Dissent, Gaura Viswanathan

During the secularization movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, there are at least elements if not origins of modern citizenship, enabled by legislation that allowed for dual allegiance to religion and nation (89). Viswanathan uses two narratives from the time period to investigate “the strains and stresses in community self-identification, especially when community or individual self-perceptions conflict with the definitions accorded them by the nation-state” (90). He uses one example from the metropole (England) and one from the colony (India). In the period under investigation, between 1790 and 1850, the English educational program sought to deracinate Indians so that they were replicas of Englishmen, though still denying them political rights; it was also the same period when non-Anglicans were politically enfranchised in England (90). Viswanathan argues that these two developments, though at first site almost opposite, he argues that there are strong parallels between the two: there was the desire to make colonial subjects (even though non-Christian) and non-Anglicans in England into “good Englishmen” (91). Yet, the situation with respect to religion is not the same for the colony and metropole because of differences in civil enfranchisement (92). The flawed nature of British attempts at secularization in India rests on the fact that despite lack of Christian proselytization, Englishness becomes a replacement for Christianity (92). Furthermore, in struggling for independence, Indians turned religious difference into a political matter (93). Viswanathan turns to the narratives to demonstrate these points. He begins by explaining the comparison: “The point of comparison lies in the fact that both Newman’s conversion to Catholicism and Ambedkar’s to Buddhism sought to reclaim cultural identities located at an originary point (pre-Reformation Catholicism for Newman, the triumph over caste-ridden Brahmanism by Buddhism for Ambedkar), defined as the historical model for enlightened nationhood” (95). He starts with John Henry Newman, who converted to Catholicism in England under the public eye in 1845; this conversion was “less a private event of sudden spiritual illumination than an interpretive index to the main currents of contemporary social legislation and the direction of national consolidation upon which he imagined it to be premised” (96). Newman turned to Roman Catholicism as a way to return to the religious culture of the early Church—a return to national and religious roots—and his vision for a Catholic England was as a world imperial center (97). Viswanathan’s critique of Newman is as follows: “His univeralism seeks to go beyond the nation, but it ends up working regressively, not only by reintroducing religious identity as both contained in and transcending national identity, but also by locating in the authority of Catholicism the foundational structure of true Englishness. Newman’s transnational solution cannot effectively disentangle belief from structures of authority, despite the privileging of popular imagination and intuition over rationality and elite modes of intellectual apprehension. Caught between the demands of secular national identity and local religious differences, Newman turns his back on conversion as a dynamic principle of change to embrace one of self-confirmation and discovery of what is already latently present as religious teleology. The radical revisionist possibility of conversion is reversed, as achieving a point of compatibility between Catholicism and Englishness replaces the earlier challenge to the desirability of nationhood posed by his conversion. The sustained tension between Catholicism and Englishness inevitably diluted the efficacy of Newman’s dissent from Anglicanism and rendered it homogeneous with assent to prevailing secular norms—in short, to the construction of English nationhood, in the service of which his own conversion is then sacrificed” (98). Ambedkar’s politically-motivated religious conversion (he led a mass conversion of other “untouchables” along with him) took place in the 20^th century, in an effort to show that the enemy of untouchables, dalit, was Hinduism not the British (99). Following Christopher Queen’s analysis, Viswanathan explains why Ambedkar turned to religious conversion to fight political battles as follows. The act of choosing Buddhism was a move from premodernity to modernity, since religious choice is a hallmark of modernity; yet, he also acted as a postmodern man by crafting his version of Buddhism to fit his needs. For example, he eliminated the Four Truths from his version of Buddhism because he felt they made Buddhism more difficult to accept for non-Brahmins (100-103). Another important aspect of Ambedkar’s postmodern deconstruction and reconstruction of Buddhism was his historical explanation of the rise of the untouchables, which he explains as ostracization arising from a conversion to Buddhism in 400AD (105). This narrative challenged the Indian National Congress’s depiction of dalit demands as antinational while depicting Buddhism as compatible with nationhood before the derailing effects of Hinduism (106). Furthermore, the choice of Buddhism instead of Christianity or Islam suggested that he sought national Indian, not transnational solutions for the dalits (106-7). Despite distrust of the state, which denied the rights of the dalit people, Ambedkar believed the state was a necessary framework for maintaining universal religious freedom (108-9). In the end, Viswanathan describes Ambedkar’s conversion as an act to form a moral community, embedded in the modern, Indian-ruled state purged of the castes (110-111).

The Conversion of Caste: Location, Translation, and Appropriaton, Nicholas B. Dirks

This essay focuses on the view of one colonial observer, a nineteenth century missionary to Southern India, Robert Caldwell, on caste. Caste was invariably portrayed by observers as an essential, transhistorical part of Indian culture that was both religious and political in nature—knowing caste meant being able to know and rule India, as well as to be able to convert its people. The legacy of Caldwell’s work as well as the discourse of other missionaries have had a tremendous impact on social reform movements in the colonial and postcolonial contexts in complex and contradictory ways, which is explored in this paper (115-117). In particular Dirks points to Caldwell’s legacy as a ethnographer, philologist, (speculative) historian of race in reform movements, Tamil politics, Dravidian radicalism and nationalism (118-120). In essence, the paper asks, how did this 19^th century British missionary provide “the terms of a colonized discourse and associated politics that has laid claim to both some of the most progressive politics in India in the twentieth century and some of the most provincial and reactionary” (120)? Dirks also points to ways in which Caldwell’s thought has been transformed or ignored for contemporary political purposes (the reason that Caldwell disliked Brahmins, namely their influence on lower castes and resistance to Christianity; the larger context of critique of caste altogether not just critique of Brahmins) (120). Dirks also attempts to present a theoretical argument about conversion as translation:

[T]he politics of location are inseparable from the politics of translation, thus invoking the questions brought to the study of language and history by nineteenth-century British missionaries, and those that frame the evaluation of the appropriations as well as transformations of this knowledge in the work of later political and cultural figures. Conversion, in other words, is not just a social process engaged in by groups such as the missionaries who sought to recruit followers into their own forms of religious practice and belief. Conversion in this paper becomes rather a more general trope for both translation and appropriation, a sign of the epistemological violence implied by myriad efforts to know, domesticate, name, claim, and ultimately inhabit “the other.” Conversion is emphatically intransitive, a one-way street. As such, it is always a relationship of domination, even when the means of domination are much more subtle and even voluntary than in the more general colonial situation. We might recognize the dialectical logic conceived by Hegel in his characterization of the relationship between master and slave (121).

After this lengthy introduction, Dirks relatively briefly sets out to prove his point. Caldwell came to India in 1838. His experience was that relatively few people were converting and that those who converted to Christianity were disdained as a “new low-caste” (122). It was mainly lower caste people who converted, and they did so for material help, though they were often discriminated against. Caldwell wished to have higher classes convert which would change the attitude to Christian conversion, he believed (123). In his time in India, Caldwell wrote extensive ethnographic work on Shanars, who he claimed were racially distinct from Hindus, in which he discussed that the lack of influence from “Brahmanical religion” made it easier for Christian conversion to be effective (later Dirks describes how Shanars vehemently rejected Caldwell’s assertions about them [128]). He included a scathing critique of Brahman treatment of lower classes within a sociological treatment of caste. He found a correlation between insincerity of conversion and higher caste rank (124-5). In his philological work, Caldwell attempted to create a theory of Tamil origins, which he paired with a conjecture about the history of Aryan migration. In this work, anti-Brahmin sentiment was loud and clear, as was an anti-caste sentiment (though Dravidianist ideologies forget this latter part, thinking he was only anti-Brahman) (128-30). In the Dravidian Renaissance from the end of the 19^th century, the Dravidianists drew on Caldwell’s work with language and his anti-Brahmin sentiments (131-2).

In the final section, Dirks examines appropriations of Caldwell: “If it seems peculiar that Caldwell’s Christian understanding of southern Indian society should be adapted to the purposes of an extreme form of secular ideology, it is even stranger that Caldwell’s colonial view of Aryan cultural hegemony should have been so easily converted for the uses of a xenophobic nationalism that substituted Brahmanism for British, Aryanism for modernity, Sanskrit for Hindi or English, and northern India for Europe. Thus, too, the conversion of meanings of caste from precolonial to colonial grammars participated in extraordinary processes of translation and appropriation” (133). Dirks ends with a discussion of translation: conversion is translation, and it comes with the difficulties, violence, transitivity of translation. In Caldwell’s case, the grammar (“a kind of metatranslation”) that he created of Tamil was used for possessing a people, to repossess their souls and their language at once by detatching them from the Tamil context and universalizing them (134). Now, the secular anti-Brahmans participate in another form of translation and repossession (135).

Materialism, Missionaries, and Modern Subjects in Colonial Indonesia, Webb Keane

This article is about Calvinist Christian encounter in twentieth century Sumba (a Pacific Island). He states, “In this paper, I will look at some of the difficulties they face as providing evidence of aporia that arises when a Protestant subject seeks to define itself by delimiting the functions and meanings of material objects. Two sets of practices in particular serve in Sumba as potent synecdoches for the transformations of value and the subject, and occasion a high degree of controversy. Calvinists challenge marapu ritual (as well as Catholicism and Islam), both for what they take to be inauthentic language (formulaic prayer spoken ‘with open eyes’ by priests) and for its apparent materialism (the ritual use of inalienable values, or sacralia, and sacrifical meat). […] I wish to show [through ethnographic work in the late 1990s and early 1990s and examination of Dutch missionary accounts] how the conjunction of pagan practices and Christian evangelism reveals and historicizes some common difficulties in distinguishing signs, objects, and subjects, and how these are to be assigned their proper values” (138). The concept of fetish is used to explain how Christians attribute false value to the objects used by the other, for material things are understood to have objective value which the other misevaluates (139).

Keane’s report of marapu accounts of Christianity highlight how marapu people challenge Christianity on issues of mediation, language, and money. They view Christians as arrogant for addressing God without deferential mediation, i.e. offerings (143). For the marapu, material signs are needed to connect with the immaterial; they think Christians have no proof of their beliefs; and they find it odd that Churches are constantly collecting for money (141-4).

Mission deputies evoke the scientific spirit to show that when marapu convert, nothing negative happens to them, thus indicating there is no truth to their beliefs; scorn the “animistic dependence” of the natives; and find the sacrifices to be a material waste that serves a symbolic and social function (146-7). Keane then turns to the subject of meat and offerings of, which is both a social and religious centerpiece of the society. There is a long, dynamic debate by missionaries about the extent to which converts to Christianity can and should participate in the sharing and offering of meat—is it idolatrous or a necessary part of living in the society (149-153)? With regard to meat, Keane explores three points: “the difficulty Christians encounter in clarifying the distinction between performative language and material object, the problem of social functionalism, and the ambivalently ‘modern’ models of economic matter that result” (153). The Christians viewed marapu life as a political economy of excess or misplaced value, unaware of what things really were worth; they did not recognize the value of performativity in ritual exchange (154-5). Missionaries often developed functionalist reinterpretations of marapu life. The prime example presented is the missionary Louis Onvlee, who broke down aspects of marapu ritual in his ethnographic work into different social functions; his picture of marapu life turns their ritual life into a sort of “commodity fetishism supplanting social relations” (159).

In his conclusion Keane highlights the problems faced by Christians—how to win over converts and how those converts should act—and by natives—how to justify themselves in a changing context. Marapu tend to begin to view themselves in functionalist terms and to constantly reference aspects of their world to the functional equivalents in Christianity (159-60).

Serial Conversion/Conversion to Seriality: Religion, State, and Number in Aru, Eastern Indonesia, Patricia Spyer

In Indonesia in 1977, there were mass conversions leading up to the national election, in which voting required citizenship which required choosing between 5 recognized agama [religions] (Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Biddhism). Spyer explains, “This essay takes off from the mutual implication of religion and state in Indonesia to explore how, in Aru, an insistence on a rhetoric of number and accounting in diverse narratives and storytelling moves, traces the contours of a discursive space in which intperpretation of conversion and the elections that compelled them collude in the making of persons and their proper places within Suharto’s New Order regime. My aim will be to investigate one dimension of the complex and ongoing process of Aruese conversion: the significance of ‘the avalanche of numbers’ (Hacking 1990)—and the practices in relation to which they have to be reckoned—that confronted me on a recent visit to these islands. Through selected examples I hope to convey a sense of the immense wave of numbers currently inundating this sprinkling of islands in the easternmost reaches of the Indonesian archipelago” (171-2). She reports on the “serialization of social life,” by which she means the “process by which homogeneously defined and bounded units are created, units such as ‘religion,’ ‘citizen,’ or even adat [traditional] dance…which at least for the practical purposes of rule are regarded as alike, interchangeable, and enumerable; in short, as belonging to a series of like sorts” (172). Under the heading of serialization, Spyer considers “the constitution of citizens defined on the basis of their affiliation to one of the five recognized agamas [religious traditions], the accounting of converts by the Catholic mission, the national program of development, and a phenomenon that I have termed serial conversion” (172-3). The seriality attests to conversion to modernity, or rather, multiple modernities (172).

Conversion in Aru was characterized by competition for souls, influence and incentives from officials, rapid successions of conversion from one faith to another, limits to which of the five accepted religions were options in particular localities, and enumeration of converts and their demographic details (174-7). Modernity must be multiply configured, Spyer argues, and conversion cannot be modeled as a monolithic, teleological “missionary-in-a-rowboat” (177-8). She explores the Catholic mission in Aru in the 1970s, characterized by high rates of attendance to reap the benefits of charitable work but low church attendance, to show the complexity of what religion meant in Aru (180-181). She further explores agama as “a requisite of good citizenship,” as part of religious nationalism (181-3). To explore the meaning of this further, she turns to the Backshore community who converted to Catholicism in three waves in 1976.

She recounts her meeting with an adat [traditional] specialist, a “Stern,” in 1994 (183-9). They talk about an annual ritual centered around the Cassowary bird, which was thought to have special powers. The discussion shows the ways in which the Cassowary tradition and the new Catholic agama were integrated. There was some level of avoidance of any mixing of adat and agama, but there were also complex ways in which the two mutually supported each other: “In Bermun the relations between adat and agama, Cassowary and Catholicism, are very much in flux and subject to intense negotiation. Within this flux, however, what seems most salient at the present time is less the substitutions by which agama comes to replace adat, or, more commonly, something construed as the ‘old’ religion, although the demarcation of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ is certainly effective in some rhetorical context, than the construction of a copresence—sometimes amiable, other times uneasy—of agama and adat” (186). The “conversion to seriality” portrayed in the example of the cassowary is an example of the “larger conversion to modernity” (186). In addition to the Cassowary example, Spyer recounts other aspects of her interview with the Stern, including the prominence of numbers and his comparison of his role to that of a Catholic priest (186-9). Spyer ends her essay with a further discussion of numbers: the use of numbers by the Catholic missionaries to evaluate success and the creation of categories through numbers (as Asad points out) (191-2). Together with religion, instrumental for citizenship, numbers and statistics are key to the modern Indonesian state (192-3).

Modernity and Enchantment: The Image of the Devil in Popular African Christianity, Birgit Meyer

The ideal set out by Weber of increasing rationalization and disenchantment is in tension with the reality on the ground for the Ewe people in West Africa who encountered Dutch Pietist missionaries. In fact, part of Weber that is often forgotten is his acknowledgement that the “official god-concept” exists at the same time as belief in lower spirits and demons in many places (200). Meyer states, “It is the aim of this essay to throw light on the conversions occurring in the course of the mission’s activates among the Ewe between 1847 and 1916. I will try to provide insight into the political, socioeconomic, and religious implications of conversion by way of studying believers’—both missionaries and Ewe Christians—ideas regarding the turn to Christianity. My main concern in this essay, then, is the relationship among conversion, modernity, (dis)enchangment, and the image of the Devil. I will argue that Pietist missionaries’ and Ewe converts’ image of the Devil lay at the base of a popular form of African Christianity that entailed both the modernization and the enchantment of the converts’ world” (201).

Meyer first outlines the Pietist movement including its anti-modernity stance and stronghold amongst those wishing to live rural life styles (though obviously these people are thoroughly modern while they resist modernity and rationality) as well as its belief in the Devil operating in the world (this opens the door for popular religion to be incorporated into Protestantism) (201-203). When the Pietist missionaries arrived, they were modernizers in the eyes of the Ewe; the changes they incited were mostly changes in outward way of life, and ironic twist considering the Pietist missionaries despised outward oriented religion at home (204-8). Conversion brought economic opportunity, mostly for Ewe men who converted, though it also upset the traditional order of society such that the rich no longer felt obligated to care for their poorer extended family members; conversion had mixed results for women, who benefited by some Christian doctrines, like outlawing polygamy, but were disenfranchised from being priestesses and did not gain economic opportunity (208-210).

The final section of the essay deals with the figure of the Devil. The Pietists thought of the Ewe as heathens, decedents of Ham, who were in opposition to the Christians in a long list of ways. The Pietist missionaries believed in the Devil, which they associated with the Ewe religion, and thus lived in an enchanted world themselves. Meyer shows how “[b]y laying emphasis on the Devil, not only popular religion at home but also traditional Ewe religion were declared real rather than superstitious, and became part of the Christian discourse in a transformed way” (211). While many converts abandoned old beliefs, and in fact missionaries considered such a turn away to be a mark of true conversion, the missionaries’ encouragement of such a turn away by showing the diabolical nature of the old spirits ironically led to the preservation of belief in the spirits. The missionaries essentially confirmed the existence of the Ewe spirits by portraying them to be Devil’s spirits (214-5). This was enhanced by translation, since the way sin was translated into the Ewe language was by using a term meaning evil things (215). The continued belief in the spirits led to “backsliding” to traditional practices, especially in cases where spirits were believed to cause sickness and the Christian way of life did not offer any practical solutions to the threat of illness (217). Meyer summarizes this fascinating paradox as follows: “On one hand, the mission intended to abolish the old religion; on the other hand, it was indispensable in order to demonstrate the meaning of Christianity. In this context the Devil was a key figure, because through him the gods and other spiritual beings remained real powers. Hence, the old religion was never abolished but only looked upon from a distance and through a particular filter. Since it remained part of Ewe Christians’ discourse, its power was acknowledged. This implied that the non-Christian religion, though considered Satanic, remained an alternative to Christianity. When spatial, social, economic, and symbolic separation from the ‘heathens’ and mere belief in the Christian God did not prove to be protective enough to prevent serious mishap, and when prayers did not provide satisfying remedies, Ewe Christians abandoned the mission’s dictum that the traditional religion was ‘evil,’ and returned to the traditional priests to counter the evil that had befallen them with sacrifices to the angry tro or by dzo” (218-219).

Meyer concludes by largely agreeing with Horton’s theory of conversion, but critiquing his emphasis on the High God, since for the Ewe, the Christian God came with the Devil and thus the old spirits (220). Thus conversion does not always lead to rationalization and disenchantment (221). The Ewe were ambivalent about modernity, which is reflected in their mixed religious practice and belief (222).

Devils, Holy Spirits, and the Swollen God: Translation, Conversion and Colonial Power in the Marist Mission, Vanuatu, 1887-1943, Margaret Jolly

Jolly begins by drawing on Vincente Rafael to introduce her perspective on Christian conversion: there is overlap between conquest, conversion, and translation, but one must recognize that conquest can mean winning over hearts not just domination by force and conversion can include altering desires not just abandoning what one wants; and conversion can been synonymous with translation, expressing meanings in different contexts and forms (231). In her essay about Marist mission in the Pacific islands of Vanuatu, Jolly “emphasize[s] the centrality not only of the translation of words or of cosmological concepts but of practices embodying contesting ideas of sacred potency, most poignantly in the process of dying and death” (232). Jolly begins with a discussion of scholarship that has posited conversion as dialogue, suggesting that such an approach can be misleading if it does not adequately address hierarchy and hegemony (234-6). Yet, in Vanuatu, missionaries should not be viewed as completely hegemonic because Christian beliefs adopted by converts were essential for gaining political independence in the late 20^th century (236).

Jolly then turns to silence, telling of the experience of missionaries with closed mouthed people in Vanuatu: they would refuse to teach the vernacular to missionaries and sometimes refuse to speak (236-7). Yet, there were also many missionaries who did develop close relationships with local people. Jolly tells the story of Father Elie Tattevin, a priest she learned of from her fieldwork in the 1970s. Tattevin is interesting for his work translating words for God, spirit, sanctity, and sacred power. Jolly reports how finding equivalents for words like God in the native language was problematic, and the equivalent he came up with brought a lot of unintended cultural baggage (the name for God he chose was that of a creator being who was one among many, for example) (238-44). After a relatively lengthy discussion of different translations of terms, Jolly concludes, “By using indigenous terms to demarcate the new sacred spaces and objects of Christianity, Marist priests like Tattevin did more than extend Catholic notions of the sacred to island churches. By appropriating an indigenous word, kon [for sacred], and insisting that its true meaning lay beyond ancestral spaces, a struggle was declared. Similar processes of partial translation and appropriation occurred throughout the archipelago. Such acts of translation simultaneously endow the holy with local value and threaten to eclipse that local value in the name of a holier holy” (244).

Jolly then moves beyond translation of words and concepts to embodied practices. She focuses on death, a prominent theme for missionaries and ni-Vanuatu (people of Vanuatu) who were suffering from various epidemics that were threatening to wipe them out: “Given both the sheer amount of dying and its shared religious salience, it is hardly surprising that death was the prime occasion on which the contest and negotiation between missionary and indigenous understandings of sacred power was most fiercely enacted” (246). Jolly recounts deathbed baptisms and fear of holy water as bringing death and competitions between Catholicism and native religion played out in the context of death (247-52). Jolly concludes: “This brief exploration of the Marist project of conversion in Vanuatu suggests the importance not just of translating words and concepts but of translating rival aetiologies of life and death. The epidemiological conditions were clearly conducive to such a contest—the proliferation of mysterious deaths in a succession of several introduced epidemics. The outcome of the combat between the powers of the ancestors and of God was evident in the differential survival of the ‘heathen’ and the ‘mission’ party. Even if missionaries tried to disclaim responsibility for either killing or curing, this contradicted local views that all death was motivated (by living sorcerers/priests or ancestral spirits) as well as their own beliefs in extrahuman agency in the world…The Marists strongly believed in God’s will; they also sometimes believed that they were vulnerable to sorcery attack, refusing gifts of food because they suspected they were ‘poisoned.’ In understanding the centrality of death in the process of conversion, we need also to ponder the new meaning that conversion gave to Christian life. It required generations of ni-Vanuatu, like islanders elsewhere in the Pacific, to detach themselves from their past, to resignify ancestral powers and sites as diabolic and destructive, and to embrace the new powers of the church not just as more efficacious but as bringing light and life in lieu of darkness and death” (252). Jolly highlights, as Meyer did, the continued life of ancestral spirits for the Christian converts (252-3). Jolly ends by adding the complexity that Christian conversion did not just challenge the ancestral past but also challenged colonial domination (253-4).

Comments on Conversion, Talal Asad

As far as I can tell, this essay is a loosely assembled collection of comments on conversion. Asad begins by discussing why religious conversion begs for explanation while secular conversion to modernity does not. Today, conversion to modernity seems to justify itself the way that religious conversion used to, namely that there is no need to justify it, because there is truth in it. Conversion to modernity is a lot like conversion to a religion despite the fact that secular people don’t necessarily recognize it as such since many feel religious conversion is irrational; Asad states that the two are actually a lot alike because both happen based on larger forces that are out of the convert’s control, which change the range of choices available to the convert (263).

Asad next discusses the epistemic changes that result from the encounter with missionaries. Is the syncretism arising from conversion related in the same way to each of its original parts? Asad discusses the concept of consciousness, which appears in a discussion (by the Comaroffs) of Tswana rainmaking and missionary encounter. The concept of conscience is a Christian one, Asad explains. Upon conversion, the subjects had new possibilities for thinking of themselves as subjects. Beyond questions of resistance, one must think of epistemic shifts that occur: “The changed epistemic structure brought about by the conversion to modernity articulates a range of new possibilities not adequately captured by the simple alternatives of passive reception by subjects or active resistance by agents of unoriginal reproduction or synthetic originality. The politics of consciousness, like the politics of personal identity of which it is part, is an entirely modern Western possibility. The self-conscious selection and integration of new elements into that identity (which many anthropologists refer to as syncretism or hybridity) is central to that possibility. That is to say, the centrality of self-constructive action is due to a specific epistemic structure” (265).

Asad then turns to the concept of conversion as a Christian concept which has had variable meanings throughout time. In general, conversion is transitive (divine enablement) and intransitive (self work) aspects, which are intertwined. Since Augustine, there has been a sense which conversion is closely bound to power. In the modern era, there has been some level of embarrassment about the link between Christian conversion and secular colonial endeavors, though some theologians like Max Warren have argued that colonial has been positive because it has prepared the world for the Christian truth. This means that secular conversion to modernity a part of the world willed by God; thus the secular and religious histories of the world are intertwined (265-7).

Asad then turns to “the doctrine of religious toleration in the early modern state in order to think about the connection between external (‘secular’) force and internal (‘religious’) belief” (267). Two key epistemological changes must be stated here: Truth acquires a private status and propositions gain some prominence relative to practice (267). Asad discusses Kirstie McClure’s work on early Locke, especially his understanding of conscience as relativistic understanding of truth, which still must serve as the basis for civil jurisdiction; in later work, Locke deals with religious conflict, which leads him to decide it is necessary to find a non-religious absolute/objective for the purpose of civil jurisdiction. McClure shows how Locke “renders (religious) difference into (cultural) diversity, and prohibits private and public agents from attempting to coerce others into or out of existing religions” (268). McClure argues that difference should be brought back to the political domain, and that compulsion according to principles should be allowed. Asad rejects McClure’s argument for several reasons. He also rejects Susan Mendus’ argument that Locke believed belief could not be willed (269). He concludes, “The general point I am making here is that arguments like those of McClure and Mendus on Locke’s theory of toleration articulate some of the assumptions about the practical and moral limits of forcible conversion. But they do not pay adequate attention to the historical conditions—including changing psychological discourses—that construct those limits” (270-1).

Asad ends with a discussion on agency, especially the common insistence that converts are agents. Again Asad insists on keeping context in mind: “The point is that agency is not a universal property, nor is it a transcendental quality. ‘Agency’ operates through a particular network of concepts within which the historical possibilities and limits of responsibility are defined” (271). He urges us to think, in discussing conversion, about the specifics of the cultural and time of the people being discussed (272).

Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth

Introduction

This book is about comparative mythology, specifically in the field of the history of religions: what it is, what it isn't, and why it can and should be done. Myth is: "a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it...believed to have been composed in the past about an event in the past...an event that continues to have meaning in the present because it is remembered" (2). Even Plato was ambiguous about myth: the ones he didn't like were lies, the ones he did were truths. Myth is not a single story but a narrative. It is at once a) telescopic and microscopic, b) greater than the sum of its parts, c) cross-cultural, and d) expresses an idea and its opposite (3). Chapter 1 assumes that myths can be compared, and compared cross-culturally; it asserts that such work is “pragmatically possible, intellectually plausible, and politically productive” (3-4). Chapters 2-6 will engage with various arguments against those assumptions, and conclude with a paean to Levi-Strauss and a call for academic eclecticism/intellectual pluralism, which Doniger believes to be at the heart of comparative mythology.

Chapter One: Microscopes and Telescopes

We can use the metaphors of the microscope and the telescope to describe the mythic lens; in fact, they are combined within a myth itself. The microscopic level is epitomized by the novel: a personal, solipsistic, highly detailed narrative, inapplicable to anyone but the author—although, of course, many novels “assume that the drama of a few representative men and women speaks to our condition” (8). The telescopic is entirely general, abstract, almost a theoretical or mathematical formula, which deals with unfathomably great experiences: a level at which “we might imagine an ideal experience devoid of any human telling” (9). Myth vibrates in the middle of this continuum; it spans “the widest range of human concerns , human paradoxes” (9). The scholar of myth must maintain this double-vision, both ends of the continuum; his or her analysis comes down to where the “f-stop” of the lens is set: an arbitrary, heuristic choice. Through the microscope, one can see every contextual detail of the cultural in question; through the telescope, one sees the unifying themes (10). Another way to distinguish these levels of analysis: the telescopic view is psychoanalytic: Freud, Jung, Eliade. The microscopic is psychological: a focus on individual insight. The middle is the contextual detail of cultural studies (10).

In myth, an example of the telescopic extreme is the story of Job in the Hebrew Bible. Job, at the end of his horrific ordeal, and his ultimately overriden denunciation of God's infinite justice, is invited “to see through the divine telescope, to see the god's-eye view of his own sufferings, to torment himself for his own sport” (14). The dynamics of Job can also be illuminated by Krishna's epiphanic unfurling of his true identity and cosmic form to Arjuna in the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. No longer is Krishna the smiling friend, the charioteer, Arjuna's pal, but “Time, destroyer of all” (as Oppenheimer famously quoted), who has already forewarned victory for the Pandavas over the Kauravas. Arjuna has to plead Krishna to return to his friendly guise, and he does, but the message is clear: the war, like the necessary evil employed to win it, is unreal, an illusion (15). The grandiosity of both theological visions does not demand that the actors accept it—after all, they continue to act in the world. However, neither does it suggest that this activity is ultimately real, purposeful. “To the question, 'Which is the reality?' the myth replies, 'Yes.'” (18).

Myths form "a bridge between the terrifying abyss of cosmological ignorance and our comfortable familiarity with our recurrent, if tormenting, human problems" (22). To the level of the microscopic, and an example from real life rather than a text: in Anne Frank's room in Amsterdam, there were two charts; one was a record of Otto Frank's children's height, measured by notches in the wall, and the other a map of Europe with pins marking the Allied forces' advance (24). The most banal, ordinary personal detail of life, placed right next to the documentation of a cataclysmic event. Like the alternating views of the Holocaust in that house in Amsterdam, listening to a story with mythic dimensions juxtaposes the "human microscope and the cosmic telescope" (25). To preface a later argument: this metaphor is not simply about myth, but comparative mythology; the individual text is “the microscope that lets us see the trees; the comparison is the telescope that lets us see the forest” (25).

Chapter Two: Dark Cats, Barking Dogs, Chariots, and Knives

Myth is inherently comparative. We compare things all the time. The problem of sameness and difference, or the simultaneous engagement of the two (David Tracy calls this “similarity-in-difference”) is central to comparative mythology and postmodernism in general (28). Obviously, difference is important; the old proverb “In the dark, all cats are gray” illustrates the kind of essentialism that has often been used to demean the sexual or racial Other (31). The problem, more often than not, is not racial/sexual discrimination but indiscrimination (32). Thus comparatists [the term Doniger herself uses] must reject the doctrine of sameness, not allow similarity to be normative, but must also attempt to argue for “very different humanistic uses of the same doctrine” (33). The comparative method “forces us to come to terms with the Other, the one both different from and the same as us” (34). Perhaps we can “replace polarized grids with infinitely fluid continuums,” but in the end any assumption of likeness must also take into account the pole of difference (35). It is in the motion from initial, implicit comparative assumptions to the acknowledgment of and actual practice of comparison, and the recognition that own understanding forms the third term [recall Chidester, Savage Systems, p. 265] in the triangle of comparison, that the comparative method is explicitly developed (35-6).

Here is an example: Compare the stories of Tamar and Judah from the Hebrew Bible with that of Helena and Bertram from All's Well That Ends Well. In both stories, “a woman whose husband refuses to sleep with her disguises herself as someone else and tricks him into bed” (36). Wendy Doniger, concurrently writing a book on sexual masquerade, represents the third term in the series: Hebrew Bible/Shakespeare/Gender Issues in 1997. To fill in the gaps of the story of Tamar, we can (and should) take into account the Jewish commentaries, but also take heed of Mircea Eliade's claim that “outside a culture, the best gloss on a myth is a myth from another culture” (39). This brings the conversation about meaning out from merely the historical context of ancient Judaism into “the broader context of the human religious imagination and even beyond, in the context of human experience” (40). We cannot know that the same ideas about sexual rejection were in the minds of the authors of the Hebrew Bible and Shakespeare; but the questions are not simply our projections. The comparative method instead places the two texts themselves in conversation, “Sometimes even in the intimate pillow talk of textual intercourse” (40).

In sum, comparatists should not let difference discourse (i.e. contextualization, historicist explanations) override cross-cultural comparison. Cultural specificity is, no doubt, essential—in fact, comparing texts-in-contexts allows the advance of the comparative enterprise without lapsing into universalism. But comparative work “need not be contextualized to be rigorous […] it is not essential for this thick cultural description to be a part of the interpretation ultimately presented to the reader as a basis of comparison” (45). Comparison must justify the extraction of myths from their historical context, and the provision of different mythic contexts—as stated earlier, the best way to understand a myth can be through a myth from a another culture (45). Thus the focus of the comparatist should be on "cultural morphology": to look for parallels between the same sorts of people in different cultures (46). The cross-cultural view “is not an overview that subsumes the contextualized view, but an alternative view that slices the problem in a different way, that sees sideways, horizontally, instead of vertically” (47). One parable of similarity-in-difference across cultural tales is A.K. Ramanujan's story about the knife: it may have changed handles and blades a few times, but it is the same knife (50). A cross-culturalist would at once argue that the whole (of a myth) can survive even when the parts change, and would also take interest in those moments of change, of cross-cultural translation (51). To insist exclusively on historical context (eg. J.Z. Smith's critique of Eliade's lack of historicism) is “to deny the power of the myth or imaginal consciousness,” which is basically another way of denying difference (52).

Chapter Three: Implied Spiders and the Politics of Individualism

To talk about the sameness of myth and the difference of context is to assume that they derive from certain shared human experiences across different cultures (54): life and death, the body, parenting, sex (especially sex). Narrative does not transform raw experience; human experience is inherently narrative. But we can never give a perfect account of experience; all we have to go on is are the multiple tellings, the “refractions” (to borrow from Plato in another context—cf. The Statesman 269b), which are culturally specific and even specific to each individual (56). We can only approximate the Platonic experience behind the myth (as comparative linguists do in the case of Proto-Indo-European), “by extrapolating from what all the myths have in common, modified in the light of what we can simply observe about the human situation in different cultures” (56).

Universalism is only bad when it is constructed top-down; narrative details such as those above—the body, sexual desire, procreation, pain—are much less culturally mediated than, say, Oedipus or God (59). These shared life experiences comprise the material from which, like the spider emitting its silk to weave its web, human storytellers weave their own cultural artifacts, "their own Venn-diagram webs of shared themes all newly and differently interconnected" (61). The concept of the implied spider draws on Wayne Booth's concept of the "implied author"; we must believe that the spider, the experience behind the myth, exists, though we can only discern its existence through its creations: the webs, the myths that humans weave (61). (Theologians use this argument to prove the existence of God). The metaphor of the spider can be used in many ways: the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad (1.1.7) uses the spider's emission and retraction of its thread to explain the unity of the creator and creation; Kierkegaard (Either/Or, I:19) uses the spider's courageous leap into the unknown to describe blind faith in the future; Joan Aitchison (The Language Web) uses the interconnectedness and complexity of webs to describe the universality of human language (62-3). According to Doniger, “the mind itself, the basis of language and myth, is part of what could truly be called a World Wide Web” (64).

This section of the chapter answers the question not of whether comparative myth can be done, but whether it should be done. In response to the postcolonial and postmodern critique of comparison: don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is plenty of bullshit out there, but comparatism can be: a) rigorous, b) self-conscious about universalist hypotheses, and c) politically emancipatory (or at least humanistic).

• Rigor: The comparatist must know the language of (at least one of) the primary texts in comparison, and must really know the context. This is a comparison “that relates, that frames, that clarifies” (65). Doniger claims that she knows (lack of) rigor when she sees it; this book itself is a corrective.
• Unfalsifiable Theories: Grand hypotheses are seldom avoidable in “conceptually bold studies,” but they can be approached with caution, and above all made explicit. At the very least, a comparative work should provide many, many, many examples and many, many, many details.
• Politics: The radical particularizing of recent theory seems to deny a shared basis for anything: cultures, people within a culture, humanity period (67). “Either similiarity or difference may lead to a form of paralyzing reductionism and demeaning essentialism” (68); after all, European colonialism was supported at once by a doctrine of essentializing sameness and of essentialized difference. There is, obviously, a salutary postcolonial critique of comparison and its complicity with evolutionist, providential theses of history (viz. Olender). But this consciousness should be used “not to exclude Western scholars from the study of non-Western myths...but to show how myths (and the comparative study of myths) can be used...to blast apart the ghettoes of ideology” (71).

How do we navigate between “the Scylla of universalism and the Charybdis of cultural essentialism [i.e. the problem of the individual]” (72)? Through a particular form of cross-cultural individualism: the many particular retellings of themes shared across cultures emphasizes at once the individual contribution of each text's author, as well as the universality of that insight. We need not posit a “transcendental agent” as the source of cross-cultural similarity (the problem with top-down theories of universalism); instead, we build from a focus on real people: authors of texts with many different agendas (73). This emphasis on the individual “at all levels of society, from high culture to popular culture,” addresses the objection that “humanism falsely universalizes an ideological fiction based on the interests of the privileged” (75). What Doniger advocates is a search for the individual spark of originality in other cultures as well as one's own (76)—“paying homage to the Tolstois among the Zulus, Prousts of the Papuans” (74).

A final note: Comparatists working from the bottom-up should view the discipline of mythology as an artistic rather than a scientific enterprise. “Art brings us together as a family because it is an individual expression of a universal sentiment” (77). There is a continuum here, too: art is not just art, nor is science just science. So the comparatist is truly, like mythmakers themselves, a—here's the rub—bricoleur (77).

Chapter Four: Micromyths, Macromyths, and Multivocality

Myth holds paradoxical meanings in charged tension. This transparency allows for: a) multivocality in a single telling, b) retellings, variations on a single theme, and c) reinterpretations from within and without tradition (80). Myth is not an idea, or a dogma; it is a narrative which contains many of these ideas and dogmas, but does not commit itself to a single one (81). It is not entirely possible to have a myth without any point of view, but we could hypothesize, for example, “an unmarked, neutral experience involving a woman, a man, a garden, a tree, a fruit, a serpent, and knowledge” which brings us to understand “how the dominant reading of the Hebrew Bible could tell that story as it does...while other tellings of that myth cast it differently” (82). To be more specific: the dominant reading of Genesis is that of the Fall (subtle serpent, forbidden fruit, evil woman, bad knowledge), while the alternative reading is of progression from the stagnant Garden of Eden to a place of possibility and creativity (and, of course, sexual pleasure). This positive reading may have existed alongside the biblical one, and was developed by the Romantics; Shelley saw Prometheus' gift in Satan's fruit. Mark Twain also said something funny: The problem wasn't the serpent, but the fact that the apple was forbidden; if the snake were forbidden, Adam would have eaten the snake. (82).

Myths speak in many voices; one of the ways they do so is, as in the case of the Mahabharata, to employ “the literary convention of nested tellings of stories within stories, which collapses all the tellers from the outermost layer to the central...so that often we do not know which voice is speaking” (86). Multivocality allows us to line up several different meanings in a myth: we could focus on each voice, “asking whether they are male or female, traditional or subversive; or on different agendas, asking whether the text seems to care more about sex, religion, or politics” (87). But the story “is not infinitely pliable; it always clusters around a given set of meanings, which it can invert” (87). Even if a single telling can have so many points of view that it cancels itself out, each telling does favor one over another, putting a different spin on it (87-8).

Another way to think about the operation of myth—in the sense of a story embodied in a group of texts—is the micromyth and the macromyth. The micromyth is not so much a skeleton or a scaffolding (i.e. archetype) as a trampoline: stories leap away to form their own specific cultural meanings (88). To return to the example of Genesis: the story of Adam and Eve as micromyth is "A woman and a serpent in a tree gave a man a fruit." Amid all the individual cultural inflections of this myth, constituting the core, determining the latent meaning, which manifests differently in different tellings, becomes entirely subjective (91). To avoid the common denominator fallacy (ahem, Joseph Campbell), we must construct the macromyth, "a composite of the details of many variants and insights; it arranges texts, and micromyths, in their possible systematic relationships [..] The macromyth makes possible the cross-cultural rather than the universalist enterprise" (93). To follow-up the example: the Genesis macromyth would not only include Adam and Eve, but what Shelley and Mark Twain and modern feminist scholars had to say about it.

Myths generate variants, often because “they wrestle with insoluble paradoxes” (95). But sometimes a new telling emerges to paper over the holes caused by these tensions; for example, the early parts of the Ramayana say that Ravana never forced Sita to his bed, although he kidnapped her out of his infatuation. To explain this puzzle, later parts of the Ramayana add the backstory of a curse which prevented him from consummating his lust (97). Another way to generate variants is through 180-degree parodies; for example, Little Red Riding Hood, in some older European tellings, eats her grandmother and climbs into bed with the wolf (98).

Myths have always been used for different political ends, and “different tellings of the same myth may make explicit different political agendas embedded in it” (101). For example: one political myth inverted in separate tellings is the American myth of cowboys and Indians-- “How the West was Won” vs. “How the West was Lost” (103). Another example of a myth with different political meanings grafted onto a basic narrative: the old Norse myth of the Valkyries, through the medieval German Nibelungenlied, into Wagner's Aryan triumphalism in the The Ring of the Nibelung, the music from which was adapted by Coppola in the film Apocalypse Now to refer to the American forces in Vietnam (103-4). Myths are not inevitably reactionary (à la Barthes), nor are they always about the past (à la Eliade); rather, they can look to the future, to subvert the dominant paradigm (106-7). “Revolutionary myths express...the fluxus quo […] Storytellers may, like judo wrestlers, use the very weight of archetypes to throw them, and with them to throw the prejudices that have colored them for centuries” (107).

Chapter Five: Mother Goose and the Voices of Women

Women. Their voices exist. Deal with it. It doesn't matter whether texts were written by men; we can retrieve these voices from existing patriarchal texts, by arguing less about the author of a text than about the points of view expressed within the text (110). We usually don't know the gender of the authors of ancient tales, but perhaps we can identify “women's stories” by subject matter: say, the pain of childbirth. Even male-authored texts which deal with the topic (Genesis 3.16, Metamorphoses 9.265-301), though it may have meant different things to the author, relied on women's experience (114-5). This method is not infallible, nor is the attempt to identity “women's interests” in standpoint (115); powerful women in a story do not equal feminism (the moral is often to destroy them: viz. Clytemnestra), nor do women's stories always express a woman's point of view (116-7). Some scholars think that women's stories can be those told for or to rather than by women; however, they may not always advance the listener's or reader's interest; women often end up the enemy in both men's and women's stories (118-9). In other words, this is the false consciousness argument that since women “share the dominant mythology of their culture...and assimilate the images that men have of them,” women's tellings often do not subvert the patriarchal viewpoint, “but merely offer ways either to satisfy or evade it (119-20).

However, "[t]exts controlled by men do not necessarily represent a man's point of view. Men cannot always erase entirely the female voices that they appropriate or imitate" (122). Doniger argues that myth often employs “androgynous” language: there is certainly a history of separating men and women through language (women speak Sanskrit in early texts, such as the Rg Veda, but are relegated to Prakrit in classical dramas of the commen era), but language is also something they share, through conversation; the folklorist and scholar A.K. Ramanujan famously said, in the vein of linguistic androgyny, that Hindu men speak a mother tongue (usually vernacular) at home and a father tongue (Sanskrit, English) in company (126-7). We can find women's voices in men's texts by reading them carefully, by noting the “artificially separate levels of two genders within a single language” (127).

For example, take the Kama Sutra's discussion of adultery. Unlike the patriarchal line represented by, say, the Laws of Manu (cf. 9.15: “Good looks do not matter to [women], nor do they care about youth; 'A man!' they say, and enjoy sex with him, whether he is ugly or good looking”), the Kama Sutra reproduces women's voices more sympathetically, listing some possible reasons for committing the act: “He is propositioning me in an insulting way” or “He has no tie to me; he is attached to someone else”...or “He has always just treated me as a friend [...]” (129). It may well be that one and the same author could have composed both texts, “who in his moments of piety excoriated women...and in his moments of relaxation sought them out,” putting on his legal hat when dealing with a husband's complaints and his lover's pants after talking to his wife or mistress (131).

Another great example of "androgynous" texts which confuse the male and female voices: Catullus' reworking of Sappho's poem about a man looking at a woman whom she also desired. After Catullus changes the genders, we now have a man (Catullus) looking at a woman (Lesbia--inspired by Sappho?) looking at a man looking at a woman (133-4). Even when the gender of the author can be determined, the ideas of that text (such as, say, the Mahabharata) were dispersed widely and received by people of different genders. It is more appropriate to say that "[t]he author of a myth is a tradition, not just one human male; and traditions have women in them too" (135).

Chapter Six: Textual Pluralism and Academic Pluralism

How do we explain cross-cultural parallels? One account is historical diffusion: the “same” myth appearing in two different cultures signals a process of borrowing (139). However, this obsession with “tale-tracking” can have political implications; British Orientalists traced everything to India, froze its glory in the classical past, and said “they used to tell great stories, but they need us now to run their country” (141). Historical diffusion also does not explain “why, when one culture borrows from another, certain elements are kept and others are not” (143). Levi-Strauss proffered the hypothesis of independent origination: that “borrowing takes place because of the similarity in structure between myths” in both lending and borrowing cultures (143). Doniger, as usual, wants a both/and: “a comparatist needs both an analogical [independent-originative] and a homological [diffusive] imagination” (144).

Structuralism still matters. It gives us a good account of how myths are made; the structuralist isolates “mythemes” (Levi-Strauss), atomic units of a myth (Doniger's “micromyth”), which constitute the core of any corpus of myths (145). We need a post-post-structuralism to rescue Levi-Strauss. Sure, there are problems: he asserted the all mythology was dialectical, while Doniger posits a continuum (148). However, Levi-Strauss did not merely reduce myth to a set of logical symbols, as the structuralist caricature would suggest, but “reveals to us more complex levels of meaning...and suggests many rich patterns of interpretation” (149). We should stay a while on the structuralist bus, although the structural mythemes “must be formulated in such a way that they can be plotted, not graphed […] For inversion is an intrinsic quality of myth” (150). In fact, why not take structuralism to its logical extreme, and suggest that domination and subversion, or good and evil (or God) are mythemes in themselves? (151)

Levi-Strauss saw beyond the polarity of history (contextualized, diachronic) and structure, or myth (decontextualized, synchronic). In the same way, we should see beyond the methodological polarities of the academy, in favor of eclecticism, which is “essential to the comparatist's methodology” (153). The scholar/bricoleur should be able to treat methodologies like a toolbox; although there are limits to the pluralism of interpretation (you can't say that Caesar killed Brutus), there should always be room for more than one (153-4). Comparison is central to the idea of a university, or better, a multiversity: “a community in which a number of scholars work together on different projects in different ways” (154). The collective enterprise implies that the academic world should be a place where we can always call for a second opinion (158).

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism--Gershom Scholem

Forward by Robert Alter

Scholem’s work includes philological analysis as well as “large imaginative interpretations of the texts” (xv). This book accords a new place to Jewish mysticism in the Jewish tradition for the first time: the revisionist project shifts mysticism from the margins to a central place (xviii). Alter argues there are ideological reasons for Scholem’s treatment of mysticism, especially of Sabbatianism, which Alter claims Scholem viewed as “a kind of abortive and misdirected trial run for the impulse of national self-redemption that would find a more viable channel over two centuries later in the political movement of Zionism” (xx). Alter also emphasizes the theme of continuity and change that runs throughout Scholem’s work (xxi).

First Lecture: General Characteristics of Jewish Mysticism

Scholem’s project is to reclaim Jewish mysticism as a historical project: “[W]hat I am going to present is a critical appreciation involving a certain philosophical outlook, as applied to the life texture of Jewish history, which in its fundamentals I believe to be active and alive to this day” (3). Scholem begins with the problem of defining Jewish mysticism: there is a range of definitions including “immediate awareness of relation with God” to “knowledge of God through experience,” but also including historical phenomena that are inextricable from the tradition, and the only way that mysticism can be understood through rational knowledge is through paradox (4-6). Scholem speaks of mysticism in evolutionary terms, as a stage in religious development which pushes the limits of the traditional (7-9). Scholem undertakes a comparison between philosophical and mystical Judaism on the known and the unknown: whereas the mystics focus on the distinction between the known and the unknown God, the philosophers push this distinction to the side (11-12). For mystics, there are spheres of God (including a sphere of evil) revealed in stages and described by mystics through metaphors: this topography does not imply dualism as Gnostics did, but aspects of one God (13). Mystics struggle with language to describe the paradoxical nature of their subject, but also with the will to express their subject—there was a degree of voluntary censorship of mystical ideas, which leaves limited written accounts of Kabbalism (15-17). The attitude toward language, however, is not negative; in fact, the Hebrew language is key to the spiritual nature of the world for Kabbalists (a movement that developed and changed over thousands of years) (17-19). Scholem then discusses the role of history and tradition to Kabbalism: Kabbalah literally means “tradition,” which Scholem points out is paradoxical because knowledge built on personal religious experience is understood as “traditional wisdom” (20); yet it is also thought of as secret knowledge but deeply connected to the Jewish tradition and texts (21). How does Kabbalism relate to Rabbinic Judaism? Kabbalah did not arise in reaction to philosophical enlightenment but certainly was in opposition to it (24). The philosophical tradition relied on allegory to express ideas in a different way, the Kabbalistic tradition used allegory and symbol to express the unexpressable (26-7); the Halacha, Aggadah, and prayers were also regarded different for the two groups (25-34); the existence of evil is a major difference, which for the philosophers is meaningless and for the Kabbalists is all too real (35-6). Scholem also points out that in distinction to other forms of non-Jewish mysticism, Kabbalism was exclusively a male doctrine (37), though Kabbalism did understand God as having a female element (38).

Second Lecture: Merkabah Mysticism and Jewish Gnosticism

Before Medieval Kabbalah there was Merkabah mysticism from the 1^st century BC to the 10^th century AD (40), particularly in Palestine (41). Merkabah mysticism was exclusive to an elect few, and often focused on Creation and Chapter 1 of Ezekiel, where an image of God’s throne-chariot is portrayed (42). Scholem describes this mystical tradition as “throne-mysticism”: “Its essence is not absorbed contemplation of God’s true nature, but perception of His appearance on the throne, as described by Ezekiel, and cognition of the mysteries of the celestial throne-world” (44). The best examples of texts come from the 5^th and 6^th centuries and are “Hekhaloth Books,” or “descriptions of the hekhaloth, the heavenly halls or palaces through which the visionary passes and in the seventh and last of which there rises the throne of divine glory” (45). These writings are sui generis descriptions of experiences that do not rely on Biblical sanction, leading Scholem to classify them with the apogrypha as opposed to traditional Midrash (46). Scholem emphasizes that the Merkabah mystics are organized groups which produced textual lineages (47), and to get into the groups there were conditions for admission (48). Once in groups, mystics prepared for the mystical journey through ascetic practices (49). In the journey, there are magical elements to protect against dangers on the journey (50-54). Scholem points out that the ideas of the journey through seven heavens is an adaptation of an old Greek cosmological idea (54); he also emphasizes that Hekhaloth differs from Gnosticism at the same time because God is pictured as a divine King but here is an absense of God’s immanence or love for God (55) and what a mystics gains by reaching the throne is an experience but not love (56). Scholem provides examples of hymns that are examples of this type of mystical literature, which are part of the technique for reaching ecstasy (example is kedushah, “holiness”, which made it into mainstream liturgy). (57-60). Scholem examines the Shiur Komach tract, which discusses God in anthropomorphic terms, which was repulsive to the mainstream tradition for its descriptions of God’s body and its dimensions (63-7). Scholem explains the focus on cosmology and eschatology in contrast to later Kabbalah, which is less focused on description, though describes Hekhaloth literature as an important influence on later Kabbalah, which was focused on man as well as the divine, while Merkabah texts were focused solely on the divine (75-9).

Third Lecture: Hasidism in Medieval Germany

German Jewry did not make significant strides in developing Jewish metaphysics but they were key to developing mystical thought through Hasidism, a movement which developed a large following (80-81). The key figures come from the Kalonymides family who came from Italy to the Rhineland: Samuel the Hasid (12^th cent), his son Jehudah the Hasid of Worms (died 1217), and his disciple and relative Eleazer ben Jehudah of Worms (died between 1223 and 1232) (82). The key work is Sefer Hasidim, “Book of the Devout,” which has works from these threw founders; it paints life in medieval Germany with realism (83). German Hasidism was influenced by early Merkabah mysticism (84). The messy whole (not an organized system) of German mysticism formed under the influence of the older mystical system as well as novel circumstances— in the wake of the crusades and persecution, Hasidic writings were focused on eschatology, though not apocalypse but Redemption (87-8). Mystical thought spread to new subjects formerly untouched by Merkabah mysticism, including God’s unity, mystical psychology, reasons for commandments in the Torah, theology of history, and most importantly, a new focus on how to live, which made the doctrine appeal to everyday people instead of an elect few (90-1). Hasidism was a non-intellectual tradition which emphasized asceticism and bearing shame, altruism, following the law, and true love for and fear of God (87-95). The ideal Hasid was one whom had humility and restraint (there is a focus on man, not just describing God as Merkabah mysticism had) (97-8). Scholem also discusses the more magical elements of German Hasidism, including Gematria, Notarikon, and Temurah, prayer instead of approach to God’s throne, direct contact with the psychic world (100-3). There is evidence of Christian influence with a new system of penitence that develops (104-105). Scholem describes the theosophical elements of German Hasidism, including its pantheistic elements. God came to be pictured as pure spirituality, immeasurable infiniteness, omnipresence, and prime mover of the universe; God becomes close to man, closer than the soul to the body, and even is pictured as part of the soul (107-10). The main components of Theosophy in German Hasidism are divine glory (kavod), a cherub on a throne, and God’s holiness and greatness (110-6). This old Hasidism described here has little in common with the later Hasidism of the 19^th century (discussed below).

Fourth Lecture: Abraham Abulafia and the Doctrine of Prophetic Kabbalism

Starting in around 1200 in Spain through the early 14^th century, new doctrines of Kabbalah were taught by word of mouth, leading. Scholem argues that this mode of transmission leads to innovations; furthermore, the acceptance of new revelation through media like dreams too led to innovation. There was also a conservative impulse, however, since Kabbalists wanted to keep their doctrines bound to the tradition (119-121). Scholem argues that in later forms of Kabbalah (like the Zohar), in contrast with what has been described thus far, ecstatic experience is less prominent, and occurrences like union with God take on spiritualized instead of ecstatic forms (122). Scholem introduces the term devekuth, which refers to being joined with God: this term can refer to ecstatic experience but he suggests its meaning is more about “a perpetual being-with-God, an intimate union and conformity of the human and the divine will” that involves a level of restraint and “incommensurateness” (123). All of this is by way of introduction to what he discusses in this lecture: Abraham Abulafia’s ecstatic literature, produced at the same time as the Zohar but much less popular (124).

Abulafia’s work included manuals that made Kabbalah accessible to almost anyone who wanted it, even those without education in the tradition; in fact, Abulafia himself had almost no training in the tradition (125). Abulafia admired Maimonides and tried to connect his ideas to the latter’s. Abulafia was inspired by prophesy (127) and tried to present himself as a Jewish and Christian prohet (128-9). Abulafia’s ideas centered around a sealed soul, which one needed to unseal to gain access to the “stream of cosmic life” (131). Abulafia focused his contemplation of the Hebrew alphabet, which supposedly held hidden meaning in combinations (133-4); contemplation was to bring ecstasy (138-9). The resulting ecstatic experience involved a form of self-recognition and confrontation (142). Scholem explains that Abulafia was influenced by German Hasidism and Yoga (he traveled to “the Orient”) and suggests that Abulafia’s practices were on the threshold between mysticism and magic (144). Scholem ends the chapter with an example of the style of Abulafia’s writings.

Fifth Lecture: The Zohar: I: The Book and Its Author

The Zohar was written in Castile in the late 13^th century. The style is pseudepigraphic form, like a mystical novel, which also includes Mishna-like sayings (156-7). It is written in Aramaic, homiletic, and unsystematic (158). Scholem argues emphatically that the author is Moses de Leon, who wrote the group of writings that make up the Zohar himself (contra theories that contend the sections are from different authors) (159). The Zohar is written in Aramaic, a language the author knew from studying texts such as the Babylonian Tamud and the Targum Onkelos, the Aramaic translation of the Torah (164). Scholem suggests there are real parts of the Zohar and imitated parts, namely the sections Raya Mehemna and Tikkunim (168-170). Scholem outlines the sources the de Leon used: Babylonian Talmud, Midrash Rabba, Midrash to the Psalms, Pesikototh, Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, Targumim, and Rashi’s commentary to the Bible and Talmud (173). He also used other 13^th century Hasidic and Kabbalistic literature (173). The Zohar is written in two registers: primitive modes of thought and feeling and profound contemplative mystical thought (175). There is a lot of conformity in his ideas with contemporary Jewish and Christian ideas, including the Gnostic idea of “left emanation,” organized spheres of Satan’s realm (177). On the other hand, he completely leaves out popular Kabbalistic ideas like the successive periods of cosmic development (178). Scholem also tries to date the Zohar, and concludes that it was written mainly between 1280 and 1286 (188). He also revisits authorship in more detail to conclude that it was Moses de Leon, but that there are still some unanswered questions (193-201).

Sixth Lecture: II. The Theosophic Doctrine of the Zohar

Scholem characterizes the Zohar as “a Jewish form of theosophy” (205). He defines theosophy not in the modern way but as “a mystical doctrine, or school of thought, which purports to perceive and to describe the mysterious workings of the Divinity, perhaps also believing it possible to become absorbed in its contemplation. Theosophy postulates a kind of divine emanation whereby God, abandoning his self-contained repose, awakens to mysterious life; further, it maintains that the mysteries of creation reflect the pulsation of this divine life” (206). Unlike the old Merkabah mysticsism, this Kabbalistic thought was about God’s inside glory not his appearance (207). The innermost being is called the En-Sof (“the Infinite”), and this is supposed to describe God’s hidden life, not any metaphorical representation of it. God is pictured to have two worlds, the En-Sof and his attributes (of which there are 10), and the dual worlds form one whole (208). The Zohar adopts a Christian exegetic strategy but focuses on one aspect of this strategy, the mystical, and in particular, on mystical symbolism (210-17). A lot of attention is given to creation symbolism, which happens within God (217-21). There is a tension in the Zohar between theism and pantheism: the language implies theism but there are obvious pantheistic tendencies (222). A tension also exists in the maintenance of monotheism in the book because of the theosophistic depiction of various manifestations of God (224-5). A mix also exists in the book between the primitive and the Jewish, especially in the realm of sexual symbolism, the erotic, reproductive imagery (225-9). A key innovation in Kabbalism includes introducing a feminine element of God (229). The Zohar also deals with the problem of sin and the fall, which disturbed God’s unity; the religious acts of Israel are the way to some healing of this brokenness (231-3). The highest values become unity with God, the devekuth, as well as a life of poverty (233-5). The Zohar also writes on interpreting evil, which is connected to a manifestation of God (235-9). The soul is also a prominent topic in the Zohar, including the doctrine of preexistance of all souls since the beginning of creation (240-2).

Seventh Lecture: Isaac Luria and His School

The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 had a transformative effect on Kabbalism, changing it from an elite to a popular doctrine which came to include Messianic impulses (244-7). Apocalyptic meanings were read into the Psalms and Kabbalistic doctrines were reinterpreted in light of the suffering of expulsion (249). Safed in Upper Galilee became the new center of Kabbalism about 40 years after the Spanish expulsion (251). The two most famous Safed Kabbalists were Moses ben Jacob Cordovero and Isaac Luria. The former was a systematic thinker who reinterpreted the Zohar and other texts (252-3). Luria did write some but what we know of him is mostly from his disciples, especially Israel Sarug. Luria was a visionary but was invested in keeping his ideas in sync with the textual tradition (254- 8). Luria developed the Kabbalistic tradition, strongly basing his ideas on older Kabbalists (258-9). Luria developed a dramatic cosmogony that was strictly theistic: Tsimtsum entails that the universe exists by God’s shrinking, which is a solution to the problem of God creating the world out of nothing. This also explains the root of evil (260-4). Two other major doctrines of Luria’s were Shevirath Ha-Kelim (“Breaking of the Vessels”) and Tikkun (mending a defect) (265). Luria interpreted man as a micro-cosmos of God, symbolic of God’s deeper life, and understood God as changing and developing as man does through stages of conception, pregnancy, birth, etc (269-71). Part of the restoration, Tikkun, of the world is the coming of the Messiah, which is a focus for Luria; one way to bring this about is through prayer (274-7). Luria’s doctrine is a populist one, one that relies on the action of all Jews to fulfill the commandments (278-9). Another aspect of Tikkun is transmigration of souls to rejoin Adam’s (280-4). The necessity of every Jew’s participation in restoration of the world explains Luria’s version of Kabbalism’s popularity (284-5). “To sum up, the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria may be described as a mystical interpretation of Exile and Redemption, or een as a great myth of Exile. Its substance reflects the deepest religious feelings of the Jews of that age. For them, Exile and Redemption were in the strictest sense great mystical symbols which point to something in the Divine Being. This new doctrine of God and the universe corresponds to the new moral idea of humanity which it propagates: the ideal of the ascetic whose aim is the Messianic reformation, the extinction of the world’s blemish, the restitution of all things in God—the man of spiritual action who through Tikkun breaks the exile, the historical exile of the Community of Israel and that inner exile in which all creation groans” (286).

Eighth Lecture: Sabbatianism and Mystical Heresy

In the context of exile and Kabbalistic theories of redemption, it was only a short step to the popularity of Sabbatai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza (287-8). The story of Sabbatai Zevi as Messiah really relies on Nathan of Gaza. Before 1665 when the crucial events in the story took place, Sabbatai Zevi already sometimes made messianic claims, though no one took this seriously. He was a manic-depressive man, though his followers came up with theological interpretations of his illness (289-91). Sabbatai Zevi was known for committing anti-Halachic acts and took on the persona of holy-sinner (292-3). Nathan of Gaza, who had a vision of Zevi as Messiah, convinced Sabbatai Zevi that he was the Messiah (295). The movement that developed after Zevi’s apostasy was paradoxical with respect to its relationship to Orthodoxy—moderate forms existed side-by-side with orthodoxy easily yet to be called Sabbatian was highly pejorative (299-300). Post-Zevi, the popular movement turned into a secret movement that spread in Europe (302-4). Scholem hypothesizes that Sabbatianism was so threatening to rabbinic Judaism and suggests that its emphasis on new freedom that threatened orthodox doctrines of creation (305). Freedom of the soul despite political situation was appealing to the masses, though posed problems for rationalizing the disconnect between inner and outer life (306-7). The relationship with orthodoxy is further strained after Zevi; for example, Abraham Perez, one of Nathan of Galilee’s students, created an antinomian theory which regarded followers of rabbinical Judaism as sinners (312-314). Another problematic doctrine was that of the holiness of sin (315-20). The other paradoxical doctrines include that the apostasy of Zevi was a sacred mystery and that the Sabbatians had received the mystery of the Godhead by someone other than Zevi (321-2). Scholem ends, “To the Sabbatians all reality became dialectically unreal and contradictory. Their own experience led them to the idea of an existence in permanent contradiction with itself, and it is not surprising that their God no less than their Messiah bears the mark of such self-contradiction and disintegration” (324).

Ninth Lecture: Hasidism: The Latest Phase

A new form of Hasidism was founded by Israel Baal Shem in the mid-18^th century. The movement became particularly popular in Eastern Europe through the 19^th century (325). Its texts were more accessible which made it popular (326). Lurianic Kabbalism, Sabbatianism, and Hasidism all were part of a move to make Kabbalah accessible to the populous (237). Unlike its predecessors, however, Hasidism tried to get rid of Messianism (329). Hasidism, like Sabbatianism, conceived of an ideal type of man for community leadership, one touched by God (330-4). In describing Hasidism, Scholem says it is hard to pin it down, to say what it’s all about, to say what is new and what is conservative (338). Hasidism drew on Musar books (moralizing tracts) that were written in the previous century (340). A distinctive feature is the mystical psychology, the idea that one should enter his own self to seek transcendence (341). The leader, or Zaddick, was the man who attained the spiritual ability to be with God (343); thus, a cult of personalities instead of doctrines develops (344).