Finding Culture in History, Western Style:
Why Jews, Indians, Catholics, and Mormons are Still Good to Think.
Religion and the American West Seminar, AAR meeting, 2011
Response to Dennison, Moran, Smith, and Imhoff
Greg Johnson, University of Colorado at Boulder
*** Note: These comments were not written for publication, though I am happy to have them posted on the Religion in the American West blog. The musings that follow are not supported with notes, though I am now motivated to pursue some of the following ideas in a more sustained and detailed manner in the future. For the time being, I am happy to engage questions and comments by email: greg.johnson@colorado.edu.
I’m bit out of place here, or I should say, out of methodological space, and time, for that matter, insofar as my own work is radically presentist and ethnographic, whereas these papers are all historical. So I find myself playing an anthropological role, seeking “culture” in their history. I fear that my chosen point of intersection with these papers will seem idiosyncratic, and will certainly leave many stones unturned. Moreover, my angle of vision on these papers has, for the purposes of this response, caused me to position myself in caricature form—as a champion of category long feared dead. Suffice it to say, this is not my usual way of framing issues. But, sometimes, old fashion issues are best addressed by old fashioned means. So what you get here is an old school culture in conversation with some very savvy historians and their histories. In the end, I hope this incongruity of approach and period will yield theoretical gain.
First, I’d like to express my gratitude to the organizers of this session for inviting me to give the response. Second, I thank the authors for their fine papers—I learned a great deal about the place I call “home.” Third, I’d like to thank Jim Bennett for circulating a helpful set of questions to us beforehand. He asked:
How does each article help us understand religion in the West?
What, beyond mere geography, makes these topics distinctively Western?
How does attention to religion help us understand the West?
How do these Western dimensions enhance our understanding of American Religious History, or religion in general?
Our ability to grapple productively with these questions is crucial for the continued vitality of this seminar. Indeed, our task is one of articulating a disciplinary space writ small. Happenstance in place won’t do. Excellent individual papers—and we have those today—are necessary but not sufficient. Establishing second-order horizons through shared conceptual languages and attendant analytical schemata is what we need.
I’m increasingly attentive to the importance of developing shared comparative vocabularies, and am alarmed by calls from the cutting edge to curtail or abandon this very conversation. My comments, then, are addressed to this tension. I will seek to render explicit some ways our authors have contributed to theorizing religion in the American West, and I will add my own footnote to this effort. Then I will turn to some brief comments about each paper.
(1) Nation formation, religions and “religion.”
In their various ways, each of these papers makes a compelling case that particular religions and the concept of religion take shape in the West at the same time and in conjunction with the shape-taking of the nation and state, as well as of particular states. Pointing to this process of co-formation and its many variations is the signal contribution of these papers and one that establishes a bedrock conceptual framework for sustaining this seminar well into the future. Rather than repeat the details of each paper—and the details are delightful and delightfully examined—I’ll assume that the audience is familiar with the cases and will devote my energies to add to the cumulative insight of the papers by developing the following point: if religion, then culture.
(2) The culture concept, again.
The American West was the crucible in which the culture concept was formed. My point is hyperbolic, but only metonymically so. One major strand of cultural theory received its articulation here—and this strand has had a profound impact on a range of theorists, from Levi-Strauss, to Geertz, to Marshall Sahlins, and, by many avenues, to the study of religion. I’m referring to the Boasian school of anthropology and its robust concept of culture. Franz Boas, an urban Jew, we should note, worked primarily on the Northwest Coast. West, to be sure, but too damp and green for any real Westerner. A generation of his students and colleagues, however, worked out “culture” in the heart of the West, principally in American Indian contexts, but not without reference to unfolding historical flows and networks. Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Alfred Kroeber, among many others, built upon and nuanced Boas’s “culture”: more or less bounded, largely relativistic (in the sense of internally coherent and locally framed), meaningmaking, and structure giving. This sense of culture was advanced vis-à-vis the prevailing social evolutionary and racializing currents of the day.
That this notion of culture is often dismissed as an imperial apparatus is shockingly misguided. It can and has been put to that purpose, but focusing only on this trajectory is to see neither its origin nor its principal applications and potential yield. Conceived generously, “culture” enables a double movement that is the condition of possibility for thick description and thick comparison. It does so because it relentlessly directs our attention to the local context—wakan is not mana—but, simultaneously, “culture” affirms the notion that, if carefully studied, humans are finally, if only approximately, intelligible to one another. Thus, while wakan and mana are not the same, just as Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith are not the same, culture is one register in which we can theorize similarity and difference, fit and not-fit, and which enables, on occasion, the obdurately other to be re-described as having an uncanny family resemblance, and vice versa.
Of course the concept of culture has been challenged, often in corrective and productive ways. We are careful now to acknowledge that cultures are historically fluid, constantly negotiated, asymmetrically constituted, entail exceptions as often as they do regularities, and so forth. And the transnational character of the modern period certainly disrupts cultures in numerous ways, not the least of which is subordinating them to states and institutions not of their own making. The plain fact, however, is that Utes haven’t stopped being Utes. Each cultural day for Utes is
awfully complicated, to be sure, and much of the stuff therein could be described as not-Ute, or post-real-Ute. I am persuaded, however, that Utes are still meaningfully Utes, and so I feel a theoretical obligation to ponder how this is so. For this task, I go back to the radical insight of Boas—which first emerged in his early studies on the color of seawater: cultural worlds are symbolically ordered and ordering. Culture renders percepts into concepts, which is to say it makes possible such things as communication and abstractions that rely upon shared conceptual terms. This theory of culture is also a theory of cultural change. Each new percept is fit into the conceptual apparatus of the culturally-known, but in this fitting process, new hinges and linkages are formed within the systematicity of the known so as to articulate new sets of relationships between the constituent elements. To my mind, this remains a powerful account of culture, despite its admittedly reified and reifying tendencies.
Why dwell on “culture”? Because its fate and our own “religion” share a common lot. Or, more precisely, the practitioners of the second-order discourses about these concepts—anthropologists and scholars of religion—are in the same boat, cast off by Talal Asad and his would be epigones. Culture and religion, they would have it, are not symbol systems, are not readable, are not translatable and thus are not comparable. Any attempt to compare—to construe second-order languages across traditions is, in this view, a form of violence. My point is not to belittle Asad’s corrective contributions to our field, and to anthropology, for that matter. But he and his followers go too far, leaving us nowhere to go at all. By their lights, “religion” and “culture” are done for. Recall Asad’s Genealogies. We know that Geertz and his definition of religion get worked over—again, in some usefully corrective ways. It is worth remembering that the assault began not with religion but with culture. Asad’s initial complaint against culture is that anthropologists have a habit of over-reading agency in its interpretation. Asad opened Genealogies with a critique of Marshall Sahlins and his Boasian concept of culture. The argument unfolds so as to enfold religion and its interpreters in a wholesale dismantling of comparative analysis.
This should matter to us because of late Asad has become more influential within religious studies than he has ever been within anthropology. Various iterations of the Asadian line—whether by Saba Mahmood, Arvind Mandair, or Ananda Abeyesekere, for example—come awfully close to dismissing the concept of religion and the practice of religious studies. Many of the proximate results are healthy for our field. We now see more clearly that secular democracy is neither. We have been shown that our concepts of religion tend towards the parochial, and we feel more palpably the colonial ghosts that haunt us.
But are we prepared to go the distance down the Asadian path? If so, get ready to divide the colonial loot, because we will be no more than atomized area studies bereft of any enabling crosstalk. Before we go this way, let’s review the inventory of things that keep us in business: revelation, prophecy, divination, sacred texts, sacred places, genealogies leading back to the other than human, imagined futures that are other than worldly, forms of bodily comportment disciplined by the authority of tradition, sumptuary practices modeled on sacred instructions or
prohibitions, magical healing, sorcery, and witchcraft, for example, mark the start of a list. We might want to preserve a language for talking about these things. Might we do better than “religion”? Perhaps, but I side with those who say we should continue to get our work done rather than pin eschatological hopes to the not-now-not-yet school of “theory for theory sake.”
So what are scholars of the American West in particular to do about this predicament? My suggestion is simply that we not abandon our key categories. Let’s restore culture, in particular, to its homeland. Let’s pay modest homage to the pioneers through brazen talk about symbols and meanings. To be sure that my point is not mistaken, let me emphasize that I am not arguing for a return to essentialism. My core commitments are social constructivist in orientation, and I regard symbols and meanings as frequently being harnessed to ideological projects that are asymmetrical in the benefits they confer, the statuses they secure, and so forth. But to do my work—even of this staunchly constructivist variety—I engage religious formations as symbolically ordered, meaning–structuring systems. My assumptions, biases, and conclusions, then, may be very different from those of scholars starting from theological or essentialistic premises, but our attachments to hermeneutic imperatives are roughly similar. When we go to work we interpret meanings.
What I am arguing for at a second order level, then, is parallel to what our authors have described as taking place on the ground at a primary level in the West in terms of fluid social boundary dynamics catalyzed by moments of tension or opportunity (about which I will say more shortly). We have an opportunity now, it seems to me, to step away from our micro-identities as being affiliated with this or that theoretical camp, and, instead, to assert our broadly shared if differently imagined larger-order identity as scholars of religion. And, regionally speaking, this recentering of our constitutive term should be accompanied by embracing our common birthright: the concept of culture. Our shared failure would be in walking away from it. Translation, comparison, and crosstalk—however crosswise and occasionally bullying—have long animated the West. Are we too sophisticated to own up to that in our study of it?
(3) Segmentary affiliation.
One dynamic at play in all four examples is what anthropologists call segmentary lineages or affiliation: that the scope of actual or perceived relatedness expands and constricts according to proximate needs, threats, and opportunities. For my purposes, I’m imagining this anthropological construct in largely metaphorical terms. In this capacity, it points us to the telescoping and microscoping dynamics of social formations. Analyzing borders and boundaries is central in all four papers, but so too is the recognition that these are constantly being refigured, ruptured and retrenched at a dizzying pace in the roughly modern, roughly Western American context. All of the authors bring precious details to show the various formation and deformations attendant to border patrolling through religious cum political discourse.
Their analyses help us appreciate afresh Evans-Pritchard’s riddle of the Nuer—namely that the Nuer could be either Nuer or Dinka, two tribal designations, depending on the time of year, the fecundity of the land, proximity of British colonial rule, and other social facts of life. The answer to the riddle was that “Nuer” was the macro-ethnonym pertaining to the whole—that is, it is the name used when the Nuer felt holistic and expansive. When they felt divisive, some fraction thereof privileged another genealogical line and its name, Dinka. Evans-Pritchard focused on the proximity of the tribes and their partially shared blood and affinal lines as the source of tension—and desire for differentiation between them. Thus, relatedness bred both incorporation and differentiation.
“Christianity” is the Nuer of the West, of course, and the normative regional Christianity is Protestant. Catholics and Mormons are Dinka, at least some of the time. Under what conditions does the normative sense of Christianity expand, such that Catholics and Mormons are resituated as Nuer? Will the Nuer elect a Dinka president? They have before. Add to Evans-Pritchard’ s insights those of Mary Douglas on the purity and danger of social bodies, JZ Smith’s attention to proximate others, Lincoln’s attention to sentiment and sociality, and Tweed’s foci of crossing and dwelling, and we have a pretty serviceable repertoire of conceptual tools for making sense of shifting religious identities in the West, which range from the indigenous to the imperial, and all the crosscutting and telescoping possibilities in between.
I applaud the authors for having ferreted out details of various instances of this dynamic, now I would push them to articulate more strongly its theoretical relevance in a second order register.
(4) Observations and questions.
Brandi Dennison: I love the attention to Utes, whose religious lives have not been studied adequately since the time of Jorgensen’s classic The Sun Dance Religion. Bear Dance anecdote.
Dennison’s paper provides a fascinating account of an opera and its short but telling life. Who knew? I very much appreciate Brandi’s effort to link her analysis of the opera and Ute religious changes. I am wholly persuaded that discourses about Utes such as the opera were taking shape and being shaped by increasingly secularist discourses about religion. But I am less persuaded by Brandi’s argument that the Bear Dance fell out of discursive favor for this reason and that in its place the Sun Dance became the ritual of secularist favoring for its individualistic emphasis. The dance was and is “other” in the American imagination. Blood sacrifice and thirst sacrificing are both beyond what culturally dominant Americans, then and now, have entertained as “truly religious.” Here we might explore repression, as the pierced, thirsty dancer resembles rather closely certain Christological mainstays.
Question: Was the Sun Dance as depicted in the opera a piercing dance? The death of one of the dancers makes it sounds that way.
Note on Ute metaphysics: a system organized around attracting health, repelling danger and contagion. Much of Ute life is organized around this basic divide. One might say this metaphysical regard for health and the ritual management of it is the cornerstone of Ute culture; and one may add that it is a principal mechanism of Ute cultural change insofar as the new—the plains Sun Dance, for example—is indigenized according to Ute conceptions of things. In this instance, the piercing and blood letting of the plains danced is dropped in favor of a different sacrificial negation, abstaining from water. To the Ute, the Sun Dance is the thirst dance. A similar story can be told about Ute inflections of peyote practice.
Question: I would like to hear Brandi say a little about how she thinks about authenticity. Is it a native category? A category of analysis? Or is it both?
Ute myths as quintessentially non-liberal, same with mortuary practices. Worth exploring how non-Ute audiences have engaged these.
On Ute Sun Dance and “assimilation,” see the work of Marvin Kauffman Opler, who stands in the Boasian tradition. Incidentally, he is also famous for a pioneering study of the psycho-social ills of urban life.
Konden Smith: Mormonism is God’s gift horse to the study of religion. Some look it in the mouth and turn away. It is not a beast they want in their corral. But I think any comparativist worth his or her salt should find a place of importance for the Latter-day Saints. If we can’t study the made-ness of Mormonism with a straight face, then something is awry in our method or theory, and probably in both. Mormonism and reactions to it constitute some of our best data—well chronicled, suitably rich in ideas and images, and hotly contested. The simple fact of Mormonism should settle the question of whether or not the rubric of Religion in the American West is intellectually warranted. It seems that everyone in the West has something to say to Mormons and Mormons to them. Take Hopi prophecy for example, in which the White Brother took on a Mormon hue for some members of the tribe. Or Hawaiians who moved to Salt Lake to be near to the Temple and then were relocated to Skull Valley at Iosepa, the only trace of which one can find today is a distinctly Polynesian cemetery.
As to Smith’s paper, I appreciated learning more about the history of reactions to Mormons in Utah, and I very much like the idea of putting the Utah episode in the context of other conflicts of the day, such as those in Kansas and Nicaragua. The execution of this move, however, could be stronger, and I urge Smith articulate more clearly his reasons for setting up his argument this way. I am intrigued by Smith’s framing of his analysis in terms of millennial discourses and expectations. But this too needs to be fleshed out. I’d like to hear a bit more as to why he finds this the most significant frame for exploring anti-Mormon rhetoric and movements. A piece of this discussion might include giving a more developed account of the range of millenarianisms at play at this time.
Sarah Imhoff: Thoughts on the romanticization of Indians. I’ve already mentioned that Franz Boas was city Jew—a Berliner—whose admiration for and study of American Indians gave us “culture.” A few other city Jews who have found Indians good to think are Marx, Durkheim, and Sahlins. In any event, Jewish identifications with American Indians is not a new trope, but one of the various articulations of noble savagism. This makes good structural sense: From a Jewish perspective, American Indians share a similar social position. They are tribal peoples who must make their way through the cracks, fissures, and margins of the imperial state and its preferred religious traditions. Furthermore, they appear to put considerable stock in their religious visionaries, have richly developed theologies of suffering, and don’t by and large eat pigs, large because they don’t have any. In the Mormon imagination, incidentally, Hawaiians played a similar role—of lost tribes rediscovered. But there the pig problem took on outsized proportions, as Captain Cook found out when he asked for too many of them.
In any event, it is worth noting that the dominant fraction of society deployed the trope in reverse, with occasionally strident forms of anti-semitic anti-Indianism, though the particular Semites focused upon in these cases were Muslims. It would be interesting to know if Sarah has come across anti-Indian, anti-Jewish rhetoric. One line in Brandi’s paper that hints in this direction.
I’d be curious to know something about what happened when the Galveston Jews “discovered” actual American Indians.
Finally, Sarah’s basic question is a classic: Who valorizes the rural and for what purposes? I’m drawn again to Raymond Williams’s classic The Country and the City, and it seems that Sarah is well on her way of supplementing it in telling ways.
Kate Moran: This is a very persuasive paper. I absolutely love the double movement of the argument, which provides an excellent example of a careful historian at work.
My question for Kate is two-fold: (1) If the Philippines, then what about Guam? (See, e.g., Vincente Diaz’s recent book, Repositioning the Missionary: Rewriting the Histories of Colonialism, Native Catholicism, and Indigeneity in Guam); (2) If California missions, then what about New Mexican pueblos? Story of visit to pueblo churches.
Finally, I offer apologies to Kate—she must think that my thinking about culture hasn’t changed one iota since she took a course on culture contact with me nearly fifteen years ago. Believe it or not, Kate, Boas hasn’t been part of my staple lot over recent years. But in this time of heightened genealogical sensibilities, I’ve begun to appreciate my roots anew. And those roots, as I’ve tried to show, are ones we all share in some measure by way the intersection of geography and intellectual history.
