Because of this particular history, in which European modernizing power met non-European societies, the subject of conversion has to be regarded as one of the most important in the anthropology of religion. †Rodney Needham (1972) has drawn attention to the great conceptual difficulties involved in dealing with conversion. He begins his discussion with †Evans-Pritchard’s statement that the Nuer language does not have a word which could stand for ‘I believe’. This leads him to an argument about the particular intellectual baggage of the term ‘belief in English, which tends to refer to an ‘inner experience’. Missionaries soon discovered how misleading it can be to translate ideas and practices in terms of ‘belief, and of William James’s individualized, inner experience. It is not surprising that missionaries were so strongly involved in philology and linguistics, since the practice of conversion is very much a matter of translation. One of the early activities of missionaries in a new target area was to make dictionaries and grammars of the language in order to produce translations of the Bible. The particular understandings and misunderstandings in this area were themselves productive in transforming colonized cultures, but not always in the ways intended by colonizers and missionaries.
The project of translation in the colonial encounter also involves the description of the ‘heathen’ practices of the people who had to be converted. Some of the terms used to describe these practices found their way into the scholarly discourse of the nineteenth century. An example is the term †‘fetishism’ which derives from the pidgin fetisso, a term used by Portuguese and Dutch slave traders on the Gold Coast of Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The fetish was a hybrid object pieced together from bits of bone, beads, feathers. It came to stand for the irrational religion of the enslaved African peoples, but, interestingly, it was taken up by †Marx to point out the irrationality of Western modernity. Marx developed a theory of †‘commodity fetishism’ as the heart of *capitalism’s mystification.
While this example shows the extent to which, to use *Lévi-Strauss’s expression, the non-religions of others are ‘good to think with’ in the critique of Western practices, it also allows us to compare precapitalist economic formations with capitalist ones. In a study of belief in the devil in Colombia and Bolivia, Michael Taussig argues that:
The fetishism that is found in the economics of precapitalist societies arises from the sense of organic unity between persons and their products, and this stands in stark contrast to the fetishism of commodities in capitalist societies, which results from the split between persons and the things that they produce and exchange. The result of this split is the subordination of men to the things they produce, which appear to be independent and self-empowered.
(Taussig 1980:37)
In Taussig’s analysis of the beliefs of *Latin American plantation workers and tin miners who are half peasants, half proletarians, the devil is the hybrid object that bridges precapitalist and capitalist *cosmologies. This transformation was not only examined by Marx, but also by †Marcel Mauss (1990 [1925]), who compared gift *exchange in a large number of societies. In Mauss’s most famous example, from the Maori, it is the life-force, or hau, of the thing given which forces the recipient to make a return. Mauss’s investigations have spawned a large amount of anthropological research on gifts and *sacrifice. Mauss’s student †Louis Dumont (1980), for instance, makes the argument that the precapitalist economy of India’s *caste system is based on fundamentally religious conceptions of hierarchy and interdependence and is modelled on the Vedic sacrifice.
One term which received a new lease of life in the colonial encounter is †‘syncretism’. While Erasmus of Rotterdam used the term in 1519 in the sense of reconciliation and tolerance among Christians, it acquired a negative meaning in Protestant theological disputes where it came to stand for the betrayal of principles at the expense of truth. This negative sense continues to adhere to the term when, like fetishism, it is used to point to the hybridity inherent in the Christianization of the world. Sincerity and insincerity of conversion are therefore perennial themes of missionary discourse. While missionaries are aware of the fact that Christianization entails the articulation of the local and the global, syncretism as an illicit contamination of the Eternal Truth is the enemy to be fought tooth and nail. This view is not only found among Christians, but also among, for instance, Muslim theologians who condemn any form of syncretism as ‘innovation’. On the other hand, the Erasmian positive sense of tolerance also continues to adhere to the term, as in attempts to resolve often antagonistic relations between religious communities in multicultural societies. This is especially true in the †postcolonial world in which the civilizing mission of the West seems to have been replaced by a celebration of hybridity, †creolization and syncretism.
Conversion to a world religion is not conversion to transcendent religious essences, but to new self-understandings which only become possible as part of particular historical formations. It is therefore interesting to note that Christian missionary activities have been conspicuous in their lack of success in areas which were already Islamicized, such as the *Middle East, or Hinduized such as South Asia, or resisted colonization, such as *East Asia and *Japan. African, Latin American and Pacific religions seem to have been much more amenable to syncretic combinations with Christianity. In an influential contribution, Robin Horton (1971) argued that the religions of sub-Saharan Africa often had two tiers, a lower level of local spirits and a higher one of a (largely inactive) supreme god. The local spirits were concerned with the daily affairs of the local community, the microcosm, while the supreme god was concerned with the macrocosm. Similar arguments have been made for other religious systems, such as Theravada Buddhism where anthropologists make a distinction between spirit cults which deal with daily concerns and Buddhism as a salvational religion. However, when sub-Saharan Africa was drawn into the *world system, Christianity, with its elaborate macrocosmic cult, replaced the African supreme god.
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