RELIGION AND DEVELOPMENT:
Reflexions on the work of Philip Quarles
van Ufford and Matthew Schoffeleers
By Wim van Binsbergen
a substantially shortened version of
which was published in: Antropologische Verkenningen (Utrecht),
1991
click here for the fully formatted version
ABSTRACT
Wim van Binsbergen investigates the claim made by Quarles van Ufford and Schoffeleers (1988) that there is a close parallel between the social scientific study of religion and that of development. These authors argue that it was essentially religious motivations that triggered the emergence, after World War II, of development thinking as a major framework for North-South encounters in the contemporary world. Hence they seek to study development as a form of religious discourse. After situating this intention in the context of university research in the Netherlands at the time, Wim van Binsbergen questions the epistemological basis for subsuming the study of development under that of religion, as if the latter would present a superior, privileged viewpoint. He stresses the extent to which development is a powerful hegemonic devise on the part of the North Atlantic for continuing to conquer the world albeit now with largely non-violent means. In an attempt to apply the ‘development as religion’ thesis to the capricious development trajectory of the Nkoya people of western Zambia throughout the twentieth century, he calls attention to local ideals of well-being and achievement, which may be totally divergent from those defined by North Atlantic development thinking, and which therefore amount to an endogenous development model. This case study also highlights the role of the state: as long as local and regional historic identity claims in western Zambia were rejected by the state, the population was dismissive of the same kinds of development efforts which at other times, when such claims were honoured, were locally welcomed and allowed to take effect. Wim van Binsbergen admits that a perspective from religious anthropology is eminently suitable to bring out endogenous models of development. Such a perspective is also argued to illuminate what Wim van Binsbergen claims to be a crucial development nexus of African religious: the highly constructive environmental conservationalist implications of African cults of the land. The article ends with a brief assessment of a number of studies seeking to apply the ‘development as religion’ thesis in a number of ethnographic settings in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
A review article of:
Quarles van Ufford, P., & M. Schoffeleers (eds), Religion and
development: towards an integrated approach, Amsterdam: Free
University Press, 1988, ISBN 90.6256.673.1, 293 pp., octavo,
preface, introductory chapter by the editors, 2 illustrations,
bibliographies, Dfl. 52.- (£ 24.50).
INTRODUCTION1
On the occasion of the retirement of
Professor J.W. Schoorl as professor of the sociology of
development at the Free University, Amsterdam, the members of the
department of cultural anthropology and sociology of development
produced a Festschrift, entitled Religion and development:
towards an integrated approach; the editors are Philip Quarles
van Ufford, a development sociologist, and Matthew Schoffeleers,
an anthropologist of religion (Quarles van Ufford &
Schoffeleers 1988).
The book
is excellently produced, carefully copy-edited, and is reasonably
free of the homespun Anglo-Dutch which is the hallmark of
academic publications in the Netherlands. As far as form is
concerned, the reader can only complain about the absence of
indexes of subjects and authors, and about the fact that the few
pages specifically dedicated to Schoorl's own, impressive
contribution to the establishment and growth of Third World
studies in the Netherlands2 are the only parts of the book to
appear in Dutch and therefore largely inaccessible to an
anglophone readership.
But then,
the book as a whole is not about Schoorl's work and its impact.
Most of the fourteen contributions, including the editors'
ambitious introduction, make hardly any reference to Schoorl's
publications.3 His impact has been as much in the field of
academic leadership and administration - creating and maintaining
the conditions under which his department has formed a productive
and congenial productive base for scores of Dutch scholars - as
it has been in the field of scholarly production. Acknowledging
this fact, the editors decided to present primarily that
organizational inheritance to the wider world: a broad panorama
of the department's research in progress, organized around the
theme of 'religion, power and development' that has formed its
major focus throughout the 1980s, in a way that particularly
reflects Schoorl's inspiration. Around this focus, the book's aim
is to bring together, for cross-pollination and even
amalgamation, the two main descriptive, analytical and
theoretical orientations available in the department: cultural
anthropology and the sociology of modernization.
In the
editors' words:
'Exchange of insights and the growing
willingness to communicate led the staff [of the department] to
move towards a theoretical perspective able to accommodate the
various disciplinary interests in ways beneficial to each. Some
of our work is presented in this book. We hope that it will
interest kindred minds uncomfortable with the rift between
anthropology and development sociology and willing to work
towards their reintegration.' (p. vii)
One is
reminded of classic anthropological analyses of funerary
ceremonies: although the group has suffered a loss by the
departure of one of its members, much emphasis is laid on the
continued viability of the remaining group, and its identity is
brought out both by the evocation of central symbols that bind
them together and by the specific articulation of the group's
ties with the outside world, with other groups and individuals -
such as the illustrious international colleagues whose names are
cited in the preface, and who played a major role in the
conferences and workshops which, ever since 1979, helped to shape
the outlines of the department's research programme and to
generate internal and external debate. What could be a better
tribute to the departing scholar than a book demonstrating that
he leaves behind an active, creative department, with an
integrated research programme geared to both development issues
(the contemporary intellectual's touchstone of societal and moral
relevance), and religion (on which the identity of the Free
University as a denominational - Protestant - institution
revolves)?
Meanwhile
the book's topic, focusing on religion, suggests that it
commemorates not only Schoorl's contribution but also Matthew
Schoffeleers', who as programme coordinator has been a major
driving force behind the department's successful research
programme, and who as reader (1975-1979), subsequently professor
of the anthropology of religion has done a great deal to raise
the department's religious studies to international standards.
Among other things, this edited collection is one stanza in
Schoffeleers' own's swan's song: he took an early retirement from
the department in 1988, but has since taken up a part-time chair
in Utrecht. Meanwhile André Droogers succeeded him in the Free
University chair of religious anthropology.
In
stature, scope and physical perfection the book does justice to
these two fine scholars, and to the research efforts they have
shared with their colleagues in the department. The twelve
regionally-based case studies cover four continents (North
America and Australia being the only exceptions), with a
concluding thirteenth contribution on the succession of dominant
idioms in the study of women and development. The introduction
seeks to cover the entire history of the anthropology of religion
and of the sociology of development, as a mere steppingstone
towards the integrative perspective on religion and development
on which the collection revolves. All this makes the collection
more than just a book: it is a proud summing-up of an aggregate
hundred years of research, and a programme for presumably a
similar volume of research efforts in years to come.
Repeated
reference is made to the difficulties that beset current academic
work in the Netherlands: problems of funding, and personal
agendas overburdened with teaching and administrative commitments
(e.g. p. vii, p. 51 n. 1). If this collection is more than just a
book, it is particularly a meta-scholarly political statement,
meant to publicize and justify the department's research during
the 1980s, and thus to secure continuing staff establishment and
research funding for the imminent future.
This puts
the reviewer in a painful dilemma. The social sciences have
evolved procedures to review 'just a book', and, in this
connexion, for the sake of the testing and accumulation of
scholarly insights, incisive criticism is expected, within the
limits of codes of honour and graciousness. However, no accepted
scholarly procedures have been agreed upon (nor does this seem to
be possible) for the dispassionate, public, published critique of
such essentially political statements as research programmes
involving a score of researchers, millions of guilders, a time
span of almost a decade, individual timetables making extensive
research activities problematic, job insecurity, the struggle for
survival of university departments etc.
But then,
the decision to disguise meta-academic statements as
contributions to academic debate has, in the present case, not
been made by the reviewer, but by the editors themselves.
Introduced onto the plane of scholarship, the claims advanced in
Religion and development deserve to be assessed as contributions
to scholarship, for the latter's sake but also in order to
improve them and make them less vulnerable when they will
eventually be voiced in the political arenas of national
university policy and research funding - where, as all of us have
painfully experienced in recent years, utterly non-academic and
often inconsistent standards may be applied.
A UNIFYING THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE?
The book's preface, introduction, and
blurb are so insistent that a reviewer simply cannot refrain from
assessing the extent to which the book lives up to the
expectations kindled there:
'Religion is a crucial factor wherever
people define, initiate, adopt, oppose or circumvent development
processes. In virtue of this, development activities and the
responses to them are like a dialogue carried on in code. To
learn how and why religion plays its varied roles, to understand
the discourse, to become sensitive to the human dimension in
social transformation, cultural anthropology and the sociology of
development should join forces.
Moreover,
an integrated approach in terms of religion will correct [sic]
the self-awareness of the two disciplines, and put them on the
way towards fruitful rapprochement.
This, at
any rate, is the thought that inspired a five-year research
programme at the Free University, Amsterdam. It is the contention
also of the editors of the present volume. The collection of
essays offered here is meant to demonstrate its truth.' (blurb
text on back cover)
The
central focus of the book, therefore, in the editors' perception,
is on religion: religion as a touchstone, to measure and
understand hitherto underplayed cultural and symbolic aspects of
development or of the resistance to development - and religion as
an all-encompassing category under which even the idea of
development, the organizational efforts clustering upon this idea
and the specific activities undertaken in the name of
development, can be subsumed:
'to get at the religious depth-dimension
of development studies and people's reactions to development
activities' (p. 1)
and
'treating development studies and
activities as a quasi-religious phenomenon' (ibid.).
In both
perspectives it is religion which, as a supposedly more profound
and primary concept, is alleged to help us understand development
- and scarcely the other way round. In their desire to integrate
anthropology and the sociology of development, both editors, each
with his feet firmly in either discipline, yet seem to agree that
fundamentally the interdisciplinary relation should be one not of
coordination but of subordination. The anthropology of religion
is presented as being eminently equipped to understand the
rhetorics, power games and legitimating tendencies of the
development idiom in its impact on North Atlantic and
particularly on Third World societies; and this should be so, in
this editors' opinion, because development is said to have in
common with the more obviously religious phenomena that it
upholds (and this allegedly suffices to define these phenomena as
instances of religion in the first place) two images of the
world: one this-worldly, immanent, the tearful valley of everyday
misery, - and one other-worldly, transcendent, ideal, after which
the former should be modelled.
'By means of acquainting themselves with
the experiences and analyses of the developed world - as
enshrined in the latter's development models - the inhabitants of
developing countries are supposed to obtain a clearer idea of the
problems facing them and the possibilities of overcoming these
problems. These models are salvific in that they contain not only
a promise but also a prescription to make that promise come true.
The development experts are the 'priests' (Berger 1974), who
mediate between the two worlds'... (p. 19)
The
editors' argument on this central point, based on a 1982 essay by
Mary Douglas where she makes a point about religion as involving
transcendence, and about bureaucracy as a form of transcendence
(Douglas 1982), is far from elaborate - after just over a page it
rushes on to discuss the present collection's various
contributions in terms of this and related perspectives.4
Although this review article examines the editors' overall
perspective rather than the individual chapters, below I shall
briefly return to these and examine the extent to which they
converge with this view. But let us first have a closer look at
the editors' judgement of Paris, which makes them attribute such
great relevance to religious anthropology for the sociology of
development, without attempting to make this relationship
balanced and symmetrical.
My doubts
on this point are twofold: first on grounds referring to the
organization, politics and economics of the social sciences; and
secondly on epistemological grounds.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF DEPARTMENTAL
RESEARCH
Some major underlying incentives for the
attempt to integrate anthropology and the sociology of
development remain outside the scope of the editors' explicit
argument. They derive largely from the meta-academic political
realm of recent Dutch academic policy at the national level. From
the late 1970s onwards, Dutch researchers in the social sciences
and the humanities have been told to give up their fragmented
individual research, to bundle their efforts, establish linkages
within their departments as well as at the inter-departmental and
inter-university level, work towards integrated research
programmes with a common theme if not with a shared theoretical
and methodological perspective. Units of assessment and funding
in academic research shifted from the individual level to that of
the integrated research programme, such as the one that led to
the present volume. Within the framework of the Voorwaardelijk
Financiering - Conditional Funding - system as imposed by the
Dutch government, the persuasive phrasing of such an overall
programme, its claims to academic and societal relevance, the
neatness with which the interrelatedness between its various
sub-programmes and between the participating individual
researchers is argued on paper, have come to influence, directly
and dramatically, success in funding, and even in survival of a
staff establishment. And finally, with the development idiom
pervading the political scene and public opinion in the
Netherlands from the 1970s onwards, funding success in the social
sciences and humanities became more and more related to the
extent to which a project or a programme manage to assert an
explicit development component.
This is
one reason why the editors should go to such pains to argue that,
in their book and in the research programme that volume reflects,
the relationship between anthropology and the sociology of
development should be so harmonious and integrative. Thus, the
'alarming' disciplinary heterogeneity of the programme could be
transformed into a very strategic division of labour. The
sociology of development would be capable of providing,
automatically, the development component to whatever research
undertaken within the programme; while the anthropology of
religion would live up to the expectations of theoretical and
existential profundity, conjuring up the 'founding fathers' of
the discipline if not of the social sciences in general,
meanwhile offering us, in the perspective of 'development as
religious discourse', such relativist distance and ideological
critique of development as might satisfy even the most entrenched
anti-development purist of academic production.
Yet, in an
ideal world of relatively plentiful research funding and of a
national government that takes pride in the academic work being
conducted at its universities, one should be able to admit that
the growing-apart of sub-disciplines and, subsequently,
disciplines is only the most predictable of results of an
increase of scale, intensifying rates of production, increasing
bureaucratization and professionalization, in academic life over
the past fifty years. The editors tend to hold a idealist view of
the various disciplines as revolving on a set of leading ideas
and founding fathers - although they do seem to realize, at other
points in their argument, that these leading ideas are subject to
fashionable paradigmatic changes (e.g. p. 12), and although their
own eclectic and cursory treatment of such founding fathers as
Marx, Weber, and Durkheim suggests that these names, far from
defining an unequivocal body of ideas and paradigms, may be
invoked to back up a great many essentially different social
science approaches (cf. note 4). It is in association with formal
positions in a state-supported bureaucratic organizational space
that academic disciplines emerge, wax and wane, engage in
competition or drift apart, persist, change, or disappear: around
the condensation cores of professorial chairs, departments,
institutes, national and international professional
organizations, journals, and the scope for competition, expansion
and innovation these positions offer. It is part of the
meta-academic idiom to dissimulate these material facts of
academic life and pretend that what we are basically engaging in
as academicians is the pursuit of immaterial ideas and ideals.
Elsewhere however, applying Mart Bax seminal paradigm of the
religious regime,5 the editors do admit that the two disciplines
might rather be seen as 'interrelated regimes' (p. 18), as both
ideological and organizational conglomerations involved in an
internal and external power struggle. This aspect might have been
developed further to render the treatment of the relation between
the two disciplines less static and idealistic. More in general,
closer assessment of the economics, the organizational sociology,
and the internal politics, of academic production - against
more of an awareness of the relation between academic production
and wider political and ideological structures in modern society
- is missed in this argument that seeks to define and to alter
the relationship between religious anthropology and the sociology
of development. They are simply two disciplines which, on the
contemporary academic scene, have carved out substantially
different 'ecological' niches, with substantially different
relationships to meta-academic idioms of legitimation and
political support in the wider society. The obvious alternative
solution, of divorcing the two disciplines and breaking up the
Procustean bed of the joint research programme, is not even
explicitly contemplated. The specific set-up and political
situation of the department which produced this volume appears to
have persuaded the editors not to problematize their desire to
integrate and amalgamate the two disciplines involved.6
A NOTE OF CAUTION
The epistemological argument is simple.
The subordinative relationship between the sociology of
development and religious anthropology as advocated by the
editors reminds one in a very disconcerting way of a similar
subordination which has too long haunted the social sciences: the
pretension that our conceptual and methodological apparatus as
social researchers is not some relatively ephemeral social
product wrought with myriad limitations springing from the
make-up of our society, its history of global expansion, and from
our specific academic relations of production, - and as such
essentially comparable with the social phenomena we seek study
with that apparatus7 - but instead constitutes an absolute
(transcendent?) touchstone for these other social phenomena, and
existing at a different, typically higher, plane of existence (of
objectivity, of illumination) from the latter. In the form of an
equation:
religious anthropology : sociology of
development = social science apparatus: society under study
Perhaps
the hope of having access, as a privileged, intellectually
better-equipped minority, to such a higher plane of reality,
constitutes an essential element in all specialized intellectual
production. But surely, from here it is only one step to calling
also the social sciences, and a fortiori the anthropology of
religion, a form of religion tout court. Here again the
officiants (the scientists), the generation and manipulation of
symbols, the production of value and patterns of evaluation on
that basis, and the organizational projection through which the
value thus produced can be turned into societal and political
power. If religious anthropology is to teach us how to understand
the more profound aspects of development and counter-development,
where is the ulterior analytical framework that helps us to
understand what, after all, is religious anthropology? Can the
subordination be reversed?
It is
significant that the editors do not explicitly invite us to
explore, symmetrically, the extent to which a sociology of
development perspective might illuminate our religious
anthropology. Yet this is precisely what many of the
contributions they brought together, succeed in doing; here I
think particularly of contributions like Hans Tennekes on
modernization processes in contemporary Dutch Protestantism
(chapter 2), Joop van Kessel & André Droogers' contribution
on the sociology of development and the significance of religion
in Latin America (chapter 3), and Philip Quarles van Ufford's
piece on the Dutch Reformed Church mission in Central Java,
1896-1970 (chapter 4). Is, after all, the relationship
coordinative rather than subordinative, and are we not in fact
looking for a meta-science that can cast light on both?
Philosophy? Sociology of knowledge? Societal praxis? Development?
Considering
what a modern, soul-searching anthropology has painfully learned
about the nature of the anthropological enquiry in field-work,
about the transcultural encounter which defeats and renders
ridiculous all attempts at social scientific imposition in terms
of the subordinative model (cf. van Binsbergen & Doornbos
1987), - considering the growing awareness that, in general, the
production of scholarly knowledge on the Third World should take
the form of a dialogue rather than a North Atlantic monologue
(van Binsbergen 1988a), I am tempted to suggest that a real
touchstone of either discipline does not lie in any of the
entrenched academic disciplines within our intellectual horizon.
It lies in the eminently practical attempt to break through that
horizon and to allow ourselves to be guided by the pre-scientific
transactions, expectations and evaluations as will be engendered
between ourselves and that mystical category of 'the people' - be
they the members of our research population in some Third World
setting, or the development experts with whom we associate
ourselves (without necessarily sharing their idiom of redemption,
but neither explaining away that idiom as merely instrumental for
power aspirations) or even the fellow-members of our department
in their day-to-day attempts at academic production and survival.
This
concern is in fact central to many of the contributions in this
book (it is most articulate in van Kessel & Droogers' paper),
and turns out to have inspired the editors in a more courageous
way than their own pronouncements in the introduction would
suggest. It is here particularly that Religion and development
opens up a new discourse.
DEVELOPMENT AND RELIGION: BEYOND
INTELLECTUAL IRRELEVANCE AND ALIENATION
For strangely enough, when we subtract
the meta-academic implications from the editors' argument, the
concept of 'development as religious discourse' does ring true to
a considerable extent, casting light on the moral fervour, the
normative aspirations (sometimes bordering on moral blackmail
vis-à-vis the sceptics - not to believe in development is the
modern heresy par excellence) and the redemptive claims that many
of us are familiar with in the context of a development idiom, as
used by either North Atlantic experts, Third-World recipients, or
the Third World elites who mediate between the two. This 'new
piety', with all its Eurocentric and neo-imperialist overtones,
has managed to captivate a considerable portion of current
political, ideological, religious and academic discourse in
contemporary society.
Here it
becomes clear that it was not just for opportunist,
university-political reasons that the editors sought to integrate
a theoretically-inspired religious anthropology and a sociology
of development which, critically or naively, starts out from the
popular common-sense concept of development. When they speak of
'development as religious discourse', it is not only other
people's religious discourse (which could then be intellectually
appropriated and taken to pieces by religious anthropology), but
also their very own: as Christians no doubt, but also - and this
is more relevant in an academic context - as conscious
participants in a global society, seeking to lend meaning to
their intellectual production, and to discharge their
intellectual responsibility by applying themselves to the
conditions of the poor, the oppressed and the suffering.
The
development perspective is analysed as religious discourse, not
primarily in order to debunk and expose it in its
intercontinental economic and political ramifications: where it
does generate power for North Atlantic interests, their salaried
expert personnel and for associated elites in the Third World.
There is in fact, as I shall point out below, too little
attention to these aspects of development in the present book.
But what does come out in a stimulating manner is the attempt to
explore the extent to which we as researchers can share in the
development discourse, deepen it without destroying it, trying to
make it more effective and more attentive to the voice of the
ordinary Third World people we, as anthropologists (including
religious anthropologists) have such direct, intimate access to.
This aspect of the book amounts to an exhortation to use our
scholarly insights in order to better understand the development
idiom, as well as the complex, too often ignored responses of the
people at the grass-roots level, whose symbolically-coded
expressions tell us, more than questionnaire surveys can do,
about how they experience their present conditions and the
planned change they are subjected to, and what sort of betterment
they envisage themselves.
Here the
book begins to suggest attractive, sophisticated alternatives to
the current type of development-orientated research. The latter,
especially in the context of consultancies, too often takes the
interests and preoccupations of the commissioning agencies for
granted, and shuns fundamental theoretical and politically
sensitive questions. It is particularly important that such
alternatives as suggested in Religion and development could be
pursued in research at Third World universities, where because of
the paucity of academic research funds and pressure of routine
work, consultancy research is increasingly the only,
intellectually barren, option available to local scholars.
Despite
the shortcomings of their introductory tour de force, the editors
therefore merit praise for exhorting us to explore the ultimate
ideological consequences of this aspect of current North-South
relations.
Yet one
wonders if here, again, an idealistic strand can be detected in
their reasoning. A number of awkward questions come to mind.
AWKWARD QUESTIONS
Where does the concept of development
come from in the first place, and what explains its gaining such
tremendous global appeal and power precisely as from the 1960s?
To what
extent is the contemporary development idiom merely a secularized
version of a religious, missionary idiom of an earlier epoch,
rather than a new religion in its own right? (Cf. the chapter by
Quarles van Ufford, and that by Dick Kooiman on multiple
religious affliation in nineteenth-century Tracancore, India.)
The
editors make the obvious link with decolonization of the Third
World; but what remains of the idea of 'development as religious
discourse', once we are prepared to expose much development
effort as an attempt to expand the capitalist mode of production
beyond its Third World periphery, or - if cultural rather than
material imperialism fits the bill - to facilitate the cultural
hegemony of the North Atlantic region?
Religious
anthropology may be well-equipped to gauge the depth of the
development idiom as semi-religious, to explore its symbolism and
the organizations and transactions into which it ramifies, but
one seriously doubts if the works of such prominent religious
anthropologists as Turner, Fernandez and Douglas do really offer
us a sufficient, or even a necessary, basis for the ideological
analysis of the development idiom as yet another idiom of
subordination, manipulation and legitimation.
In this
connexion we need a number of concepts which the editors failed
to include in their summary of the anthropology of religion since
1960: the state, class formation, accumulation, modes of
production, ideology, hegemony, ethnicity, regionalism,
patronage. With these concepts, among others, and with the
sophisticated use we have learned to make of them when applying
them to national and intercontinental power relations, we might
be able to understand the generation and maintaining of such
social and political power as springs from and settles around the
development idiom. At the back of all this is current world
politics and the super-institutions, like the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which dominate the development
scene at the material and political level. One cannot analyse the
idiom without coming to terms with the material realities, where
power and privilege are created and redistributed, and countries
are beaten into regional (i.e. sub-continental) and
intercontinental submission, and made to sink into debt ever
deeper. These international connections are far too much ignored
in the present book.
While we
need to pay the keenest attention to the state in this context,8
much more is involved than an a priori, 'classic' (p. 20)
opposition between church and state over development activities
and institutions (p. 19) - nearly the only form in which the
state enters into the editors' introductory argument.9 On the one
hand, the contemporary development industry is largely a matter
of interstate interaction - to such an extent that even the
private organizations involved define themselves by reference to
the state - as NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Hence
development activities are intrinsically, and often in a rather
sinister way, tied up with the ruling, exploiting elites that
have appropriated state power in large parts of the world.
Alternatively, an examination of the role of organized religion
in African countries would show that the contribution of religion
to state formation is far more complex, and often far less
conflictive, than the mechanical assumption of church/state
opposition would suggest. The world religions have greatly
contributed to the formation of attitudes, values, images, skills
and organizational forms on which the colonial and post-colonial
state could rely in its penetration into rural and urban
peripheries, and as such they could be said - on one level of
abstraction - to belong to the state rather than, or even while,
being opposed to it. For instance, the contribution of organized
Christian religion to African political independence movements
was typically slow to gain momentum, and often tinged with
opportunism. And whereas all over Latin America, and in the
Republic of South Africa, mainstream Christian churches have now
become very vocal in their confrontation of state policies, in
other parts of the Third World acquiescence and accommodation
more readily characterize the relations between world religions
and the state. Islamic fundamentalism since the 1970s of course
shows the lasting prophetic potential of world religions
challenging the secularizing state, but on the other hand its
theocratic tendencies make it eminently amenable to the state
once it has managed to appropriate its central institutions - as
not only the Iranian case demonstrates.
POPULAR CULTURE AND ENDOGENOUS MODELS OF
DEVELOPMENT
To look at development as religious
discourse ties in with a rapidly expanding movement calling
attention to the cultural dimension in development (cf. Geldhof
et al. 1987). Many Third World states now go through a phase
where the more or less deliberate, state-facilitated construction
of a national popular culture, with its constructed images and
expressions mediated through consumer electronics, becomes a
major legitimating and stabilizing force for the ruling elite.
The concept of development - worn to a cliché - has rapidly
invaded local discourses all over the world, dragging North
Atlantic images of achievement, gratification and prestige in its
trail.10 It features prominently in the transformed images as
upheld by modern popular culture - but so do selected elements of
neo-traditional local culture, and of the world religions.
In such a
context it becomes interesting to assess to what extent people's
expectations and preferences reflect models of a better life as
ingrained by exposure to world religions, or alternatively
reflect endogenous concepts and models of desired 'development'
springing more directly from a neo-traditional socio-cultural
heritage. It is on this point that the contribution from
religious anthropologists would be particularly valuable for the
study and the practice of development; for they are trained in
reading between the lines of formalized normative statements,
probing for experience, for often non-verbal symbolism to convey
meanings and contents that are too subtle, if not too politically
sensitive and dangerous, for words. The identification of
obliquely phrased local agendas for desired change is
time-consuming and difficult - partly because their overt
expressions tend to be phrased in terms which seem to ignore or
oppose modern state penetration and participation in capitalism,
and instead may rely on values and institutions which at
superficial analysis may only appear to the researcher and the
development agent as a irrational desire to return to an
isolated, unadulterated past existence.
AN ENDOGENOUS DEVELOPMENT AGENDA AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES: THE CASE OF THE ZAMBIAN NKOYA
My research among the Nkoya (an ethnic
minority from Zambia's Western Province) as from 1972 has only
very gradually made me aware of their possessing just such an
agenda, - in the disguise of neo-traditional attitudes and
structures superficially to be interpreted as signs of
'uncapturedness' (Hyden 1980), 'peripherality', 'backwardness',
'a virgin condition with regard to the state and capitalism'. The
extent to which the conjuncture of external conditions prevented
or furthered the (partial) execution of this agenda, more than
anything else determined the Nkoya's specific, and changing,
responses to the development efforts directed at them by the
Zambian state and agricultural, medical and political agencies
associated with that state.
Their
clinging, in the 1960s and early 1970s, to medico-religious
representations and practices which were largely kinship-based
and (in terms of possession and sorcery) expounded a transformed
local cosmology rather than cosmopolitan medicine; their reliance
on village and neighbourhood courts of law and moots rather than
on the state-created Local Court; their passionate identification
with neo-traditional chieftainship even if deprived of its
executive power and its precolonial and colonial role in the
adjudication of local conflicts; their rejection, alternatively,
of national-level party politics hinging on the ballot box and
democratic representation; their persistence in unsophisticated
kinship-organized subsistence agriculture and hunting (redefined
by the modern state as poaching), and their rejecting of
cash-crop production; their lagging behind in a pattern of
urban-rural family separation at a time when urbanization, to the
tune of increasing autonomy of nuclear families, had been general
Zambian practice for decades - all these aspects of Nkoya
'intransigence' were not static datums of Nkoya culture based on
ignorance or rejection of the wider society beyond the narrow
confines of the village, but rather deliberate retreatist
strategies in the face of a world that denied and suppressed the
Nkoya ethnic and political identity as forged in the course of a
hundred years of a collective experience of repression and
humiliation - largely at the hands of the precolonial Lozi state
and its colonial successor, the Barotseland indigenous
administration.
This
strategy (from which only a small minority opted out - by
personal social and spatial mobility, often involving a temporary
change of public ethnic identity and language use) was informed,
but certainly not dictated, by a cultural orientation which could
be considered to belong to the realm of the longue durée: in all
probability having an existence of several centuries at least.
The specifically Nkoya form of retreat was in line with such key
values in their culture as : wumi - the good, healthy life of the
human individual, only possible in harmony with nature and the
supernatural, i.e. ancestral, world; kukala shiwahe, a similar
concept but with emphasis on human relations, between the members
of a village; shishemi, (self-) respect for the ordained order of
nature and society but also, given this framework, the
unwillingness or even inability to negotiate or to compromise;
lizina: the name, which is a group's most cherished possession,
and of which any individual is only a temporary repository;
wulozi: sorcery, the disruption of the cosmological order by
evil, especially bent on killing the lizina; and more important
than any of these concepts: wene, kingship, the incarnation of
the most exalted lizina, epitomizing the political, social and
natural order, impossible to alter except at the death of the
current incumbent (the mwene or king), and with the royal
orchestra, particularly the named and venerated royal drums
(mawoma and zingoma), as its most powerful epiphany - drums which
were traumatically taken to Loziland in the nineteenth century,
never to be returned.
In the
first half of the present century, being Nkoya had come to mean:
retreating from wider involvement, and, in the face of Lozi
political encroachment and arrogance, doggedly hanging on to the
mere skeleton of what wene had been in the nineteenth century.
This cycle
was broken as from the late 1970s, when Lozi domination at the
national and regional level suffered dramatic setbacks and when a
trickle of middle-class and even some upper-class Nkoya 'elites'
began to effectively mediate, as politicians and agricultural
entrepreneurs, between the state centre and the village,
restoring and expanding the influence of Nkoya chiefs (the
state-encapsulated heirs to wene) at the local and regional
level, furthering recognition of the Nkoya ethnic identity at the
regional level, and thus rendering the party, the state and its
development initiatives acceptable. Profoundly aware of their
glorious past with powerful and splendid states in the centuries
preceding Lozi domination and colonial rule, and viewing
traditional kingship as the cornerstone of a meaningful
life-world whose other components are the cult of the land,
cosmology, medico-religious life, kinship, and the rural economy,
this was the agenda for whose implementation the Nkoya has been
impatiently waiting throughout the colonial period and the first
ten years of independence.
From the
urban centres and the district capital, political and cultural
'brokers' who had one foot in the world of Nkoya-ness and one in
the wider Zambian society and polity, have stimulated
agricultural and educational development and political
participation in their home area, where they increasingly take an
early retirement on newly established farms: land secured through
a combination of modern and neo-traditional claims, and worked by
farmhands recruited on a mystifying combination of kinship and
wage labour. So here we see the transformation from urban social
climbers to rural kulaks, with which we have become familiar
elsewhere in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. For nearly all of
these elites, the principal venue of their access to the economic
and political centre was the education they received at mission
schools operated by the South African General Mission in the
area. Still their interactions are cast in an idiom in which
evangelical, neo-traditional and ethnic references merge and in
which the collective, brilliantly improvised prayer is a
principal rhetoric form. The Nkoya history produced and published
as part of this process had to emulate, typographically and
stylistically, the Bible...
From 1982
onwards the Nkoya elites' efforts were specifically bundled in
the Kazanga Cultural Society - a newly formed, urban-based ethnic
association effectively linking urban and rural cells, serving as
a channel for information and financial support to migrants and
rural destitutes, propagating Nkoya language and culture, and now
focusing its attention on the organization of a newly concocted
annual Nkoya cultural festival which, as an expression of ethnic
identity and as a tourist attraction, is to rival the famous
Kuomboka ceremony of the Lozi, which celebrates the
neo-traditional royal institutions of the latter ethnic group as
incapsulated in the colonial and post-colonial state.
Meanwhile,
the appeal to and partial implementation of the Nkoya's own,
historically-informed agenda of desired change may have opened up
their society for recognizable forms of 'development' in the more
usual sense, but it increasingly becomes clear that its emphasis
on ethnic recognition and chieftainship, rather than on class
analysis of their position as peasants and marginalized,
temporary urban migrants, has made it the wrong agenda: one much
too vulnerable to well-intentioned but essentially exploitative
interests - on the part of the very brokers who brought
development and ethnic rehabilitation, and on other members of
their class but hailing from other ethnic groups than the Nkoya.
From the tar road linking the district capital to the national
capital of Lusaka, the latter's new market-orientated and
partially wage-labour based agricultural enterprises expand ever
further into the outlying villages, for the first time in history
create a significant pressure also on other land than riverside
gardens, and threaten to eclipse the village communities and
their historic modes of production, whose very persistence was
the ultimate aim of the local agenda in the first place. The
villagers' very hesitant small-scale attempts to engage in
cash-cropping and to organize themselves for medical improvement,
are overshadowed, if not crushed, by the elites' expansion. The
remoter villages have now become places of out-migration, not so
much to the towns any more, but to areas like Namwala and Mumbwa
district which offer better opportunities to peasant farmers.
The
brokers' skillful manipulation of the Nkoya cultural idiom,
through their explicit association with the kingship (they
invariable stress their close kinship ties with its contemporary
incumbents) remove these exploitative aspects from overt dialogue
if not from consciousness. And most ironically, one mwene now
trades rights in local land to the new farmers who are ethnic
strangers - for symbolic submission and recognition on their
part; thus estranging himself from his local people and their
needs and aspirations.11
This
complex and contradictory pattern of 'development' cannot be
understood without access to the Nkoya's own endogenous notions
of a desirable future, - notions which at first made them
withstand explicit development efforts from the outside, and
which recently allowed them to be manipulated into forms of
'development' which underneath their pleasant ethnic formulae are
turning out to be exploitative and disruptive.
LAND, CULTS, PROTEST AND DEVELOPMENT
Speaking of endogenous models of
development, from a book co-edited by Matthew Schoffeleers one
would have expected more of an explicit treatment of the central
contribution religious systems have often made to the upkeep of
ecosystems in a precolonial, pre-capitalist setting. The
development idiom is increasingly becoming an environmentalist
idiom. Well, concern for the land, for nature, is one of the few
constants of African religion over most of the continent.
Schoffeleers' edited collection Guardians of the Land duly
explored this dimension of regional cults and pilgrimage systems
in South Central Africa (Schoffeleers 1979), in line with
convergent work by e.g. Ranger (1985) for Zimbabwe and van
Binsbergen (1981) for Zambia. The patterning of essential
agricultural tasks, such as the onset of firing the bush and the
beginning of the planting season, has combined with perhaps more
symbolic agricultural activities such as rain-calling and crop
and harvest ritual in order to underpin, if not to create in the
first place, a mode of agricultural production where man's
reticent, respectful use of natural resources guaranteed the
relatively stable persistence of the ecosystem. Much of what is
called rural development has amounted to either
(a) the disruption of
time-honoured ecosystems under the impact of cash crop
production, enlargement of scale and so-called rationalization of
agricultural production, changing gender relations in production,
labour migration etc. - in short the impact of the capitalist
mode of production, or
(b) the subsequent attempt to
partially redress such ecological disruption.
It remains
to be seen if such redress can still make effective use of the
regulative potential offered by territorial cults. Their hold on
rural society has usually diminished because of: the introduction
of new foci of power; new systems of circulation, movement of
people, and distribution; and new forms of organization including
Christian churches. When the latter then adopt (in response to
local expectations as much as in reminiscence of the rural
European agrarian world many expatriate missionaries would hail
from) an ecological, territorial dimension (harvest ritual,
prayers for rain) in their own ritual, this could be seen as an
attempt to reconstitute some of the lost potential of the old
cults. The concerns of religion and development would then merge
to a very illuminating extent. Religion in this context is not a
way of upholding a transcendent, and alien, ideal for the
transformation of the world, in order to make it resemble that
model more closely: the 'developed', i.e. industrialized, urban,
capitalist North Atlantic world, etc. Religion is here primarily
an immanent, this-worldly and local model for the production and
reproduction ('conservation'!) of human society in an immediate
natural environment whose essence is that it is only partially
transformed by human hands - the typical village setting in much
of the Third World up to the 1950s.
In the
South Central African case the specific, cosmologically anchored
views of social, economic and political well-being as found in
territorial cults tend to be at variance with the changes which,
often under the aegis of 'development', occur when the
communities involved are opened up to capitalism and the modern
state. In Zambia, the cultic response was largely accommodating
to these changes in this respect that older symbolic and
organizational material was redefined into new, healing cults
which were eminently compatible with the new status quo; however,
the massive Lumpa cult as founded by Alice Lenshina in 1953,
while representing another installment in this ongoing
redefinition process, did challenge the colonial state,
capitalism and Christian missions in a very articulate way,
leading on to the violent 1964 uprising which meant the end of
Lumpa (van Binsbergen 1981). A similar redefinition process, not
so much of the ancient cult of the land but of notions of
causation, sorcery and evil which appear to have formed its
complement for centuries, was channeled into an even more
widespread cultic response in South Central Africa: the
Watchtower movement, which constituted the main anti-colonial and
anti-traditional expression in the 1920s-1940s, and which has
since settled down to a theoretically theocratic movement of
economically active citizens who reject but do no longer combat
the secular state (cf. Long 1968; Cross 1973; Fields 1985). The
continued presence of the routinized Watchtower response among
the Nkoya since the 1940s accommodated (and enabled me to
pinpoint) much of the retreatist response described above, even
though the theocratic and symbolically purist Watchtower
perspective implied a particular selection and partial
transformation of the underlying general cultural orientation of
the Nkoya adherents. In Zimbabwe, alternatively, phases of
acquiescence alternated with the territorial cults' essential
support for protest and violent struggle marking both the
beginning and the end of the colonial period (Ranger 1967, 1985;
Lan 1985).
With
regard to the cult of the land, a similar case is explored in the
present book by Peter Geschiere and Jos van der Klei in their
analysis of the Diola uprisings in Southern Senegal, 1982 and
1983.12 It is somewhat regrettable that a similar line of
reasoning failed to inform Venema's otherwise interesting
analysis (chapter 7) of Islamic revival in Tunisia in general and
in the northwestern highlands of Khumiriya in particular. Here,
where the Berber-derived cult of the land has taken the form of
the veneration of saints and shrines in an idiom of popular Islam
(van Binsbergen 1980, 1985a, 1985b), the thwarted development of
the 1950s and 1960s did lead to a far greater entrenchment in
local, popular religious expressions (very partially controlled
by the Islamic brotherhoods)13 than is suggested by Venema's
discussion - only to give way to a greater emphasis on formal14
Islam, and even to a limited fundamentalist presence, in the
1970s and 1980s.
These
examples in themselves contradict the editors' view (p. 4 and
passim) of religious anthropology in the post-colonial era as
entirely concentrating on the a-political analysis of symbolism.
It is not the only place in the introduction where they fall
victim to sweeping generalizations and over-elegant distinctions.
Meanwhile the actual insights gathered in this field do converge
with the fundamental thrust of their argument, corroborating the
significance of the study of even traditional and neo-traditional
religion for an understanding of development processes.
FURTHER PERMUTATIONS OF THE RELATION
BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT AND RELIGION
With all their emphasis on the
subordinative relationship between religious anthropology and the
sociology of development, in actual fact the relationship between
religion and development in this book shows several other
significant permutations. An examination of the chapters makes
this clear.
In a very
loose sense the first seven contributions do deal with
'development as religion', but they do so in rather a predictable
if fascinating way: mainly by looking at obviously religious
institutions such as Christian churches, mission bodies, and
varieties of Islam in East Asia and North Africa, and assessing
the extent to which an implicit or explicit development idiom,
cast in religious or in more secular terms, enters into the
religious discourse and religious action of the participants
involved. A borderline case is Selier & van der Linden's
piece, discussing the half-hearted development efforts of the
Pakistan government with regard to housing, agricultural
production and migration, which leads them to the conclusion that
such a policy apparently seeks to gain popular legitimacy not so
much by its deeds but by its words. Hardly a word on religion or
religious anthropology here; in a skillful way, the chapter deals
with (thwarted) development only.
What one
misses in this part of the book, having read the introduction, is
an empirical study of 'development as religious discourse' in a
context that is not already obviously religious, in the more
established sense, in the first place. The study by Selier and
van der Linden, or the discussion of changing paradigms in the
study of women and development by Lilian van Wesemael-Smit, could
have done just that, but they fail to make even the remotest
application of the editors' ambitious theoretical schemes. One
would have expected that the editors had commissioned one or two
chapters specifically devoted to the careful, empirical in vivo
study of the development industry, to development debates at
international and intercontinental meetings, or to the precise
mapping-out of the micro-history of specific projects, with real
actors, their organizational apparatus, their ideologies, the
transactions they engage in among themselves as dispensers,
brokers or beneficiaries of development, the perceptions and
power relations that are created and transformed, and the moral
fervour and missionary zeal generated in that process.
Ironically, all this happens to sum up the speciality of one of
the editors, Quarles of Ufford (cf. Quarles van Ufford 1980,
1986; Quarles van Ufford et al. 1988), who could have matched his
historical overview of the Dutch Reformed Mission in Central Java
with an excellent chapter on the development industry along the
lines suggested here. With regard to a somewhat narrower subset
of such research (notably into 'the difference between what is so
loftily intended and what comes out of it in the field') the
editors realize that
'Development organizations are often less
than enthusiastic about this type of research.' (p. 16)
But that in itself is a very good reason
to undertake it, especially when the central claims of the book
could be very much more substantiated by the results of such
prospective research! The claim so proudly stated in the book's
blurb is as yet rather unfounded as far as its own contents are
concern. For however interesting the discussions of world
religions and development are - they are about 'religion as
development' much more than about the illumination that a
religious-anthropology perspective might bring about when applied
to a secular development setting that is not already dominated by
world religions from the outset.
The second
part of the book, covered by the chapters 9 through 13, shows
examples of an even more familiar permutation of the relation
between religion and development. Here the book's emphasis shifts
from 'religion as development' to 'development or religion'. The
editors identify 'the religious dimension of survival
strategies', in societies experiencing the inroads of such forces
as commonly associated with development: the modern colonial and
post-colonial state, and the capitalist mode of production.
Surprisingly, the editors treat this part of the book as a large
residual category, which they barely manage to integrate in their
general theoretical perspective, and for which they even have to
resort to a superficial common-sense categorization in terms of
physical, political, cultural and psychological survival, without
any systematic foundation in social theory. In fact, what we have
here is various endogenous notions of desired change or
development as conceived in (more or less transformed)
neo-traditional terms. The contributors in this section15 are
eminently capable of subjecting their data to adequate analysis,
but apparently the time or the editorial power was lacking to
persuade them to present their material more fully in terms of
the overall thesis of the book. In particular, this section
hardly addresses the inspiring theme of development as a possible
solution to scholarly irrelevance and alienation - perhaps with
the exception of Schoffeleers' sociological contextualizing of
the controversy between Black theology and African theology in
the Republic of South Africa (chapter 10).
All this
makes for considerable heterogeneity in the book. Rather than
attempting to conceal this under the cloak of their introductory
claims, the editors should have felt sufficiently confident of
the quality and the novelty of the collection as a whole, and set
out to explore the systematic advantages of such a variety of
perspectives. Now the claim of unity, so obviously unwarranted,
can only do undeserved damage to the book and presumably to the
research programme on which it is based.
CONCLUSION
That Philip Quarles van Ufford and
Matthew Schoffeleers marked, with this book, the beginning of a
new discourse on development is obvious. My critical remarks
mainly anticipate on the range on new questions that are now
opening up for further enquiry and debate: both on the level of
theoretical reflection, and in the way of specific research
tasks, whose outcomes could demonstrate the potential of the
approach advocated.
Here
empirical operationalization towards anthropological methods in
the narrower sense appears to be a necessary step. It is
remarkable that some of the contributions which treat the central
inspiration of this book most fully (I am thinking here of the
chapters by Tennekes, van Kessel & Droogers, and
Schoffeleers) are discussions of existing publications and the
deductive construction of a possible interpretational framework,
rather than reports of empirical anthropological field research.
The more empirical pieces on religion as development are largely
based on historical documents, whereas the field-work pieces
largely deal with the 'religion or development' theme which in
the editors' treatment is somewhat peripheral to the book. The
application of the methods of participant observation to
development in action, in a secular contemporary setting, as
suggested above, appears an obvious next step.
In
conclusion I should remark that for the further elaboration of
these themes, particularly in view of the blind spots identified
in my review (epistemological implications, the state, the
international framework of political economy, endogenous agendas
of development, etc.) fruitful cooperation might be sought, not
only with those scholars abroad whose names rightly feature in
the preface, but also with colleagues in the Netherlands, with
whom the Free University research group not only shares a number
of research interests and specific activities, but also the same
meta-academic political space.
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Notes
1 A draft version
of this review article was discussed at the workshop on Religion
and Development, Institute of Cultural Anthropology/Sociology of
Development, Free University, Amsterdam, June 15, 1988. I am
grateful to the participants, including the editors of the book
under review, for constructive and clarifying remarks made on
that occasion.
2 'Woord vooraf'
(Preface), pp. ix-xiii; and Schoorl's list of publications, p.
xiv-xvi.
3 In the various
lists of references as attached to the individual contributions:
p. 30, 70, 165, 229, 264; in fact, only Geschiere & van der
Klei, in a footnote on p. 225, and Sutherland, pp. 158, 162-163,
engage in a slightly more than perfunctory discussion of
Schoorl's work.
4 In passing I
note that the major omission in this part of the argument is Max
Weber, whose study on Protestantism and the rise of capitalism
offered the classic paradigm of 'religion and development' (Weber
1976; ironically, cf. Schoffeleers & Meijers 1978). Mary
Douglas' assertions in her 1982 paper are simply not enough to
consider bureaucracy - the dominant form under which the state
and development present themselves in the modern world - a form
of transcendence and therefore of religion (introduction, p. 18).
Reference to Weber's distinction between charismatic, traditional
and legal authority (Weber 1969), his discussion of bureaucracy
(Gerth & Mills 1974: 196-244) and in general the massive
Weber-inspired literature on bureaucracy, would have enabled the
editors to avoid this far too facile short-cut from development
to religion. Instead, they do quote Weber, out of context, as an
exponent of the type of Eurocentrism and progressism that was to
become part and parcel of an uncritical variant of the sociology
of development (p. 11-12). This must be, in Weber's otherwise
enlightened work, an echo of his times and intellectual climate
in general: his own extensive studies on Oriental societies and
their religions (in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and in Gesammelte
Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie) can still be fruitfully
consulted by readers seeking for a comparative, profound and
non-Eurocentric perspective!
In the same vein the editors credit Durkheim (along with Mauss)
for the belief in the complete otherness of alien cultures -
'an idea that was to become characteristic of French anthropology
as a whole (Fabian 1983).'
Is this
the same Durkheim who, in what the editors rightly identify as
his quest for the moral reconstruction of North Atlantic society
at the fin de siècle, turned to Australian aboriginal religion
in order to identify and explain 'the elementary forms of the
religious life' - implying, in his assumption of universal human
comparability, not the fundamental otherness but on the contrary
the fundamental sameness between 'their' society and ours
(Durkheim 1912)?
5 Unfortunately,
a contribution from this distinguished member of the department
could not be included in the present collection, which the
editors compensated by specific discussion of his work on pp.
8-9; cf. Bax 1987.
6 That the
editors are prepared to go to extremes to bring the two
disciplines together is clear from the fact that a considerable
part of their introduction is taken up with the discussion of
superficial parallels in their history. In passing, a third
sub-discipline, women's studies, is included in the argument,
probably because this is the only way to accommodate a chapter
that is not in the least interpretable in terms of 'development
as religion'. The main parallels between the three
(sub~)disciplines appear to consist in
(a) the fact that their
history as summarized by the editors can be divided into three
phases, and
(b) in an overall sort of
tendency which could perhaps be called 'routinization of
charisma'
(Weber 1969).
However,
the characterization of the religious anthropology since 1958 as
oblivious from political issues, and entirely concentrating on
symbolic structures, is contentious; cf. Fernandez 1978;
Fasholé-Luke et al. 1978; van Binsbergen 1981; van Binsbergen
& Schoffeleers 1985; Ranger 1986; and references cited there.
Schoffeleers himself has never been contented to study symbolism
as divorced from political and economic context, as is clear from
his contribution to the present book (on the controversy between
Black theology and African theology in the Republic of South
Africa), as well as from his many articles on the Mbona cult and
other aspects of Mang'anja religion in Southern Malawi (to be
reworked in Schoffeleers, in press).
This is perhaps the sort of distortion one can expect from
authors who (claiming support from a passing reference to van
Binsbergen & Schoffeleers 1985) are keen to avoid 'the cruder
versions of Marxism' (p. 8); who reduce the enormous potential of
modes of production analysis (cf. van Binsbergen & Geschiere
1985; Raatgever 1988; with regard to religious studies: van
Binsbergen 1981, 1984a, in 1988b) to
'a
particular assessment of western culture as the standard by which
other cultures are measured' (p. 12),
whereas
the concept of modes of production, on the contrary, allows us to
pinpoint the specific, irreducible logic of non-western economic
and ideological systems; and who sneer at
'those
expecting panacea from modes of production [drawing] their
material from sub-Saharan Africa' (p. 15).
7 Cf. Asad 1973;
Copans 1974, 1975; Leclerc 1972; Fabian 1983; van Binsbergen
1984b; and in general the growing body of literature on
'reflexive' anthropology.
8 As is actually
done, in the present book (but regrettably with exclusive
reference to the internal operation of states within their
national territories), in the chapters by van Kessel &
Droogers already referred to above; by Selier and van der Linden
on mobility, housing and policy in Pakistan; by Koster on
religion, education and development in Malta; by Venema on
contemporary Islamic revival in Tunisia; and by Geschiere and van
der Klei on the Diola uprisings in 1982 and 1983 in Southern
Senegal.
9 This has to do
with the editors' reliance on Victor Turner's (1969) argument
concerning communitas and anti-structure, which would make
religion appear as an eminently critical, prophetic force,
challenging the status quo and the state which could be
considered the latter's expression. Although some of the
contributions in the present book (the excellent chapters by
Tennekes, van Kessel & Droogers, and Schoffeleers) clearly
demonstrate that this prophetic challenging of the state is part
of Christianity in both the First and the Third World today, this
is by no means a universal constant. The forms and effects which
Turner attributes to communitas may also be observed in political
discourse and collective action in the context of 'secular'
politics in contemporary Third World states: mass rallies; public
humiliations, amputations and executions; etc. - the state itself
makes use, and partly reconstitutes itself, by virtue of the very
mechanisms by which it is said to be threatened.
10 Meanwhile
we should not forget that it has only done so in recent decades.
In this respect one is puzzled by the extent to which the editors
manage to discuss the precise and imaginative historical
contributions by Sutherland on power, trade and Islam in the
eastern archipelagos, 1700-1850, as dealing with a development
discourse (p. 22-23).
11 Van Binsbergen
1985c, 1986, 1991 and references cited there.
12 That a cult of the
land very similar to that of the neighbouring Diola may also form
the main element for a particularly well-balanced symbiosis
between a viable neo-traditional socio-ritual order at home and
massive outside participation in the capitalist mode of
production through labour migration, is brought out by my study
of the Manjaks of Northwestern Guinea-Bissau (van Binsbergen
1984a and 1988b); a similar point in van der Klei 1989.
13 And not
fraternities, p. 22.
14 And not orthodox, p.
130.
15 Including
Kooiman's; Schefold on ethnicity as expressed through housing
among the Sa'dan Toraja and Tabo Batak of Indonesia; and van
Wetering on the ritual laundering of black money among Surinam
Creoles in urban Holland.