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Abstract
What are the routes by which African diaspora religious groups gain legal legitimacy in modern nation-states of the Americas? African diaspora religions, once prohibited under slave laws, remain predisposed to conflict with the ‘culture of legality’ that is constitutive of the contemporary modern world-system. In negotiating this conflict, different legitimating tactics are called upon in different nation-states, depending on the type of national mythology and level of legal-rational development present. Two legitimating tactics exercised by African diaspora religions are described here: ‘simulation’ in the United States, and ‘sedition’ in Honduras. A third path toward legitimacy, which I call the strategy of ‘seduction’, occurs when states appropriate African diaspora religions as a form of symbolic capital communicating depth and authenticity. Examples of this path are drawn from Brazil and Haiti.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to express gratitude to Geneviève Zubrzycki, Winnifred Sullivan and Rosalind Hackett for comments on earlier drafts of this essay. The writing of this essay was supported by a fellowship from the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.
Notes
1. The Afro-Brazilian religion carried by slaves from West Africa, from roughly the same region Rosenthal describes. Candomblé devotees revere deities or ‘saints’ called orixá, from the Yoruba tradition, which perform the same role as the vodun in Benin and Togo. Indeed some of the vodun bear the same names and characteristics as the orisha, revealing the religious transculturation that preceded European penetration.
2. Indigenous law can be viewed as a subset of customary law, referring to a social practice and space that predates the settler state (Povinelli Citation2002, 48). This is more complex for African diaspora religions, which predate the rise of modern settler states and refer to social practices and spaces that predate the colonial process, and from which they were forcibly separated (unsettled) as part and parcel of ‘settling’, but which do not signify the autochthonous and authentic organic roots of the settler state for obvious reasons of their deracination. I have tried to deal with this issue elsewhere (Johnson Citation2002b).
3. I have addressed the question of why, or in what respects, African diaspora religions can be considered ‘indigenous’ at length in earlier work (Johnson Citation2002b). The short version is that African diaspora religions are indigenous in the sense that they are performed in the terms of territoriality—terms that privilege particular locales as sources of knowledge and power—however reconstructed and imagined such territoriality may be. I therefore use the category of ‘indigenous’ advisedly in this essay to refer to religions primarily oriented to territory in their own identifying practices, even if that territory is, in part, imagined through diasporic consciousness. Analytically speaking, such religions' organic relationships to land sites in the Americas are reconstructions involving ‘imagined communities’ and therefore a territorial double consciousness (Anderson Citation1991; DuBois Citation2003 [1903]; Johnson Citation2002b): they are emplaced both in specific sites in the Americas and in relation to a memory of ‘Africa’, an ‘Africa’ that, however, can only be imagined through the prism of the socio-political context of the Americas. Edward Casey refers to this distinction as that between ‘poetical space’ (that of memorable place, drawing on allusions) versus the physical or sited space known through bodily occupation (Casey Citation1987, 208).
4. In both cases, moveover—that of the Garífuna and that of Brazilian quilombos—Africans and Amerindians intermarried, further blurring the lines of primordialist categories.
5. Although this may be changing, in part as a consequence of the transnational Garífuna networks that make the Garífuna simultaneously harbingers of New York-style modernity and the African diaspora's ‘deep tradition’. The nationalisation of the traditional dance style punta, as punta-rock, is the most striking example to date. Honduras is taking cognisance of that fact that the Garífuna may be, along with Mayan ruins, their best tourist attraction.
6. On this matter, Raymond Williams (Citation1976, 298) traces the uses of ‘standard’ and ‘standardisation’, ‘standard of living’, and so on, to the mid-nineteenth century, precisely the period of the solidification of the modern nation-state system. Similarly, Arendt comments that the objective of positive law is to stabilise human change and allow for the maintenance of boundaries by limiting excessive or disruptive variation (1966, 463, 467).
7. To group an immense variety of distinct religions into a single category like African diaspora religious culture is an analytical move taken at some risk. It is in some ways an artificial class, in so far as there is no clear empirical mark of belonging other than groups' self-identifying practices that mark them as ‘African’. Moreover, as I have described elsewhere (Johnson Citation2002b), the Garífuna case suggests that a religious group is not simply of the African diaspora or not, but rather becomes so through a process of adopting new identifying practices. The benefit of the classifying move, however, is that it allows us to consider legal issues in broader terms than the challenge faced by a single religious group. Moreover, despite the great variety among African diaspora religions, Garífuna living in New York consult Santeria leaders and understand their religious grammar if not perfectly, well enough, and vice versa. It is fair to say there exists a shared religious sensibility manifested in the central role of drums, dance, spirit possession and sacrifice in Santeria, Candomblé of Brazil, Haitian Vodou, the Garífuna gubida religion of Honduras, Belize and Guatemala, and so on. Most important for the present is to say that African diaspora religious culture in the Americas is united by sharing the legacy of displacement and enslavement, whether actual or (as in the case of the Garífuna) threatened, the subjection to racialised structures of power (Gilroy Citation1993; Gordon and Anderson Citation1999), and the quality of being placial (the neologism is borrowed from Edward S. Casey; for example, Casey Citation1997, 288), territorially rooted in or related to ‘Africa’, even if that territory is imaginatively remade. Religious power only exists to the degree that it is manifested in specific performances and specific locales.
8. I use ‘tactic’ and ‘strategy’ in the sense articulated by Michel de Certeau (Citation1984): strategic power is thoroughly instituted, spatially bounded and implies far-reaching effects, both temporally and geographically; tactical power is local and interstitial, working ‘between the lines’ of strategic institutions.
9. The second highest rank of initiation in Santeria, the italero performs the divination on the occasion of a new initiate's (iyawo) consecration, revealing her/his future trajectory with the orishas. As to the church's name, ‘Lukumi’ is derived from the Yoruba oluko mi (‘my friend’), and became the common term for those practicing Yoruba-derived religions in Cuba. Babalu Ayé is a key orisha of the Santeria pantheon, the doctor and afflicter who wields the force of smallpox and other diseases, as well as the force to heal.
10. Palmié argues, convincingly, that the initial legal conflict was not between Anglo and Hispanic sectors, but between rival factions within the Cuban and Cuban-American population. Race and the management of the image of immigrants were of central concern. With the Mariel boatlift of 1980, the profile of arriving Cubans was considerably ‘darkened’, raising concerns among already-established, and ‘whiter’ Cuban-Americans from (or descended from) the post-1959 exodus. In an eerie reprisal of turn-of-the-century Cuban social dynamics, Santería was viewed as a signifier of African-ness, blackness, and backwardness, and hence feared (Palmié Citation1996, 189–191 ).
11. ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.’
12. It is worth noting parenthetically that ‘real religion’ is determined by similarity to Islam, Judaism and Christianity. It is also worth noting the frequent reliance of the Court on the Encyclopedia of Religion for its understanding of everything from ‘sacrifice’ to ‘Santería’ itself. At least before the Supreme Court, these essays do matter in ways exceeding the scholarly objectives of academe.
13. Articulo 77: Se garantiza el libre ejercício de todas las religiones y cultos sin preeminéncia alguna, siempre que no contravengan las leyes y el orden publico. Los ministros de las diversas religiones, no podran ejercer cargos públicos ni hacer en ninguna forma propaganda política, invocando motivos de religion o valiendose, como medio para tal fin, de las creéncias religiosas del pueblo.
14. The hurricane left in its wake an estimated 5,000 dead, 1.5 million homeless, and $3 billion in damage.
15. More notoriously, at least in Garífuna narratives of the series of events, is Miguel Facusse, president of the Cressida corporation.
16. Similar articles had protected the Honduran coast in earlier constitutions as well: in the 1956 Constitution's Article 159, and in the 1965 Constitution's Article 102. The motive for the articles derives from Honduras' longstanding border wars with its neighbours, most recently the ‘Soccer War’ with El Salvador in 1969. Articulo 107: Los terrenos del Estado, ejidales comunales o de propiedad privada situados en la zona limítrofe a los estados vecinos, o en el litoral de ambos mares, en una extensión de cuarenta kilómetros hacia el interior del país, y los de las islas, cayos, arrecifes, escolladeros, peñones, sirtes y bancos de arena, sólo podrán ser adquiridos o poseídos o tenidos a cualquier título por hondureños de nacimiento, por sociedades integradas en su totalidad por socios hondureños y por las instituciones del Estado bajo pena de nulidad del respectivo acto o contrato.
17. Miguel Facusse, one of the main protagonists, led the Project of National Transformation, for which he received, in 1997, $55 million from the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group. Facusse is regarded as a key enemy by the Garífuna for his aggressive land-purchases of traditional Garífuna territory in Limon, Honduras.
18. Prior to 1992, the Garífuna held ‘titles of occupation’, granting the right to use, but to not to own the territory.
19. Domínio pleno has been contested not only by mestizo neighbours and developers, but by some Garífuna themselves, who have learned the market value of individual beachfront plots and wish to maintain the private of sale to the highest bidder, Garífuna or not.
20. Despite a presidential promise to Garífuna leaders from 22 July 1998 not to pursue the reform for the immediate future.
21. Especially Articles 13–19, protecting the unique rights of indigenous peoples to guarantees of respect for the spiritual value of land (Article 13), the recognition of ownership (Article 14), the rights to natural resources on such lands (Article 15), the protection against forced removal (Article 16), to the right of return if already relocated (Article 17), the legal protection of the transmission of land rights among members (Article 17), to the implementation of sanctions against encroachers (Article 18), and to provisions for expansion equal to that provided other groups (Article 19).
22. For example, Honduras This Week, 30 August 1999.
23. This has become an annual march, begun in 1992 as a protest on the occasion of the Quincentenary of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas (England Citation1999, 18).
24. Personal communication, Bartolome Guerreiro, World Garífuna Organization, Triunfo de la Cruz, July 2002.
25. Among them Bartolome Guerreiro, co-leader of the World Garífuna Organization, and Celeo Alvarez Casildo, leader of the Organización de Desarrollo Étnico Comunitário. About one-third of Garífuna reside in the United States, above all in New York City. The transnational quality of Garífuna activism was crucial in this and other engagements.
26. To wit, Garífuna shamans (buyei) in New York City often complain of the weakening of their abilities across such a distance, and the need to periodically return home to replenish the force of their tutelary spirits.
27. Honduras is considered as the third most corrupt state by the organisation Claritas, has had nominal civilian rule only since 1981, and is popularly considered rife with bribery, such that it is popularly repeated that ‘bribes are law’.
28. The spelling of ‘Vodou’ differs here from the ‘Vodu’ used earlier in the essay, following the conventions of reference to Haiti in the former case, and to West African Ewe religion in the latter.
29. Haitiweb.com Magazine, 17 June 2003 (accessed 10 July 2003). ‘Black Spartacus’ gestures (whether or not consciously is impossible to tell) to Wordsworth's poem, To Toussaint L'Ouverture (1802–1803).
30. Genesis amnesia is not unique to law but is rather common to all instituted cultures. Foundational schemas gain emotional force precisely by being viewed as uniquely real and uniquely revelatory of otherwise invisible correspondences. Practitioners of Brazilian Candomblé do not attend to the ways the religion has become attenuated according to the national political context, and how Candomblé is as Brazilian as it is African; or the dates and places when new spiritual entities were added to the pantheon. Rather, the religion is regarded as ‘African’ and perennial. Human creativity is concealed. It is important, nevertheless, not to equate the concealments of legal culture and African diaspora religious culture. Genesis amnesia works toward a different objective in each. In legal culture, concealment serves the purpose of suggesting universality, objectivity, and a utopic displacement. In African diaspora religious culture, the concealment serves the opposite purpose: the location and acculturation of every innovation in the West African past. In legal culture, the locations of law are concealed to appear global; in African diaspora religious culture, the globality of the religions is concealed to appear located.
31. In placial religions, actors think and act not only in a given place, but through place, the sites of specific memory and value, the house of one's rearing (Bachelard Citation1994 [1964]), or the landscape that sprouts dreams (Casey Citation1987). Places are once-arbitrary spaces now filled with value, intimacy, memory and meaning (Tuan Citation1977). Places are inhabited and known through the senses.