Introduction: Ethno‐Graphing “Divine Intervention”

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Acknowledgements

For the completion of this Introduction, I benefited from a guest scholarship at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale (Germany) in 2006; it helped me accessing the theoretical horizons that are present in this introduction. I am indebted to my exchanges with Chris Hann, Deema Kaneff, and Frances Pine. The paper has also benefited from the comments and suggestions of Elisabeth Claverie, Anne‐Marie Losonczy, and Bernard Lory. I am grateful to William A. Christian, Jr., for the careful reading and English language editing of the final draft.

Notes

[1] Quoting Cannell (2006: 3). See Stewart (2001: 326–327, and the whole issue dedicated to secularism in Social Anthropology vol. 9 no. 3) for a critical view of the implicit assumption of the “secularism”, broadly understood, as a sine qua non condition of contemporary social scholarship on “religion”; see the elaboration of Cannell 2006: 3. For a critique of “rationalism” as posture in the study of religious phenomena, see also Claverie (1991), Luhrmann (1989:12–13) and passim.

[2] An approach that is exemplified by Christian (1996) and Claverie (2003: 51–105).

[3] Here, “Europe” denotes both the area of cultural and political geography and its association with Christianity. Even if Europe (especially medieval) and Christianity are made relevant to anthropological reflections on religion (Asad 1993), “Europe” as a field site still remains on the periphery of anthropological debates on religion, even for Christianity; see Hann 2007.

[4] In using the term of “supernatural” in a broad sense, encompassing the divine realm as it is understood in Christianity, I follow the cultural and social‐constructivist direction in the study of sanctity opened by Peter Brown (1981, 1982); see Caciola (1996: 301–302). The analytical and practical difficulties of separating the divine realm from other ‘experiences of the supernatural’ are discussed in a recent elaboration on ‘the supernatural’ as a category: Albert 2009, Albert & Rozenberg 2009.

[5] If modernity is the conceptual site from which anthropology operates (Asad 1993: 19), anthropologists are sensitive to the fact that there is no contradiction between rationalism and thinking with categories of the supernatural, or adopting “magic” as a perspective on modern way of life; see Luhrmann (1989: 7–18).

[6] See Christian (1989: especially 212–215) for a longue durée perspective.

[7] Apolito (1998, 2003), Bax (1995), Blackbourn (1995), Christian (1981, 1984, 1989, 1996), Claverie (1991, 2003) and Zimdars‐Swartz (1991) are among its milestones.

[8] See, for instance, Voile (2004), Mayeur‐Jaouen (2005: especially 107–110) and Aubin‐Boltanski (2007, 2008).

[9] Anthropological work on post‐colonial (mostly African) societies, in which the effects of political modernity are described in terms of “witchcraft” (Geschiere 1997, Moore and Sanders 2001) or “sorcery” (Kapferer 1997), is particularly relevant to our concern with supernatural intervention: see infra. For a relevant work of ‘matching’ the supernatural to anthropology of religion, see Albert 2009:148–155.

[10] This definition subsumes a class‐sensitive (with attention to resistance) and a gender‐sensitive approach of agency (Comaroff 1985: 252–254, Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, Doumato 2000, Goddard 2000).

[11] The important analytical tools are associated with Marshall Sahlins: defining event through the “structure of conjuncture” (Sahlins 1985: 136–156), helps reducing this dichotomy. See also Comaroff (1985), Comaroff and Comaroff (1992), Bensa and Fassin (2002), Hirsch and Stewart (2005), Sewell (1995) and Stewart (2003).

[12] For discernment as a basic category in medieval doctrinal politics and its disciplining, see Caciola (2003).

[13] A reference to the title of Christian 1987; the whole book on Ezkioga (Christian 1996) shows this struggle over the interpretation of the meaning and the appropriation of the symbolic (and the other forms of) capital associated with the seers and the apparition site. See Claverie (2003) for a similar work on the apparitions of Medjugorje; Rey (2008), for the saints “born out of dreams” on the Greek island of Lesvos.

[14] The latter effect is generally attributed to the modern media: see Apolito (2005). It should be stressed that recourse to electronic media does only help the instantaneous spread of “news from Heaven”; it is also a powerful means of persuasion, through a “re‐enchantment” of the modern world (Apolito 1998: 196–199), as well as for the creation of networks and mental dispositions upon which the production of such “events” is depending (Apolito 1998: 203–223, Margry 2004).

[15] See Christian (1981: 211–212). The pilgrims’ attitudes at the sites of Marian apparitions are further explored by Claverie (1991, 2003: 51–103); see Apolito (1998) and Christian (1996) for their role in the constitution of devotional networks.

[16] For a useful parallel with understanding of “events” under communism, see Long (1996: 33–36).

[17] For the psycho‐physiological and psychic processes in dreaming, see Stewart (2003); in visions and trance states, see Taves (1999: especially 119–249); for near‐death states, Pócs (1999: chapters 3–5).

[18] See D’Onofrio (2002: 54–56); European Catholic “cultures of dream” are delineated in Charuty (1996).

[19] The rhetoric of witness is more characteristic of the late twentieth‐century apparition sites (Medjugorje, Oliveto Citra); for “witnessing” in a Muslim Sufi context, see the fine analysis of Mittermaier (2007: 234 sq). For the figure of the witness as a provider of first‐hand knowledge of the past—and an exemplary figure of memory as opposed to history—see Hartog (2000).

[20] See Taylor (1987); Christian’s (1981: 7) reminder that such legends may stimulate real apparitions.

[21] The paragraph develops a suggestion by Patrick Menget, to whom I express all my gratitude for having attracted my attention to Hispanic American visions and to Gruzinski’s work.

[22] That is, moving, bleeding, sweating images; Christian (1981: 8) consider them a separate category of visions, different from “real” apparitions.

[23] Suggested by A.‐M. Losonczy; see Losonczy (2002: 469).

[24] Anderson (1991: especially 47 sq.), for the importance of holy sites and of religious pilgrimage in the construction of the national space.

[25] See Stewart (2003: 491–493) for Greek, Eastern Orthodox culture.

[26] This effect is attested mainly in the cultures of Islam: see Pratt Ewing (1990), Mittermaier (2007) for saintly charisma, and Rasanagayam (2006).

[27] Adapted from Goddard (2000: 3, 27).

[28] The question of belief is central to the debate on rationality and to the concept of “interpretive drift”: see Luhrmann (1989: 307–323, 345–356).

[29] P. Brown (1995: 68–69) underlines “the difficulty to bring order to a supernatural world … inhabited by religious entrepreneurs of all faiths” for the late antique person living in many conflicting thought‐worlds.

[30] A process illustrated by Christian (1996) for apparitions, by Rey (2008) for dreams.

[31] Quoting Burbant (2006: 421–422); for the concept of embarrassment see Herzfeld (1997: 3 and passim), who theorizes it in relation to “cultural intimacy”.

[32] Divine intervention (2003), “Prix du Jury” at Cannes Film Festival 2003, portrays the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It shows how, in a deadlocked situation of violence, the only hope comes literally from above.

[33] For the issue of temporality in the socio‐historical and anthropological analysis of prophecy and dreams, see Koselleck (1985: especially 5–19 and 213–230); for historicity, see Hartog (2003: 18–19).

[34] See, respectively, Koselleck (1985: 272, 275).

[35] The permanent tension between these two opposites is the precondition of the political use of history, and of past events more in general: see Revel and Levi (2002).

[36] Hartog (2003) identifies three main “regimes”: the past‐oriented one, summed up in the well‐known formula Historia magistra vitae, dominated the understanding of the past till Early Modern times; the future‐oriented or “futurist” one, typical of modernity and all modernist ideologies, from nationalism to communism. Finally, the present‐oriented regime (présentisme) that came to the fore since 1989 is characterized by fundamental uncertainty about both the future and the past (which are increasingly lost into fragments), as well as by struggles around the memory and a commemoration.

[37] Different aspects and characteristics of an apocalyptic Marian cult are discussed in Apolito (1998: 6–45), Christian (1996), Claverie (2003), Matter (2001) and Zimdars‐Swartz (1991).