Political Anthropology and the Fabrics of Resistance
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Papadimitropoulos’ article presents an interesting array of material, ranging from ethnography,
history, ritual studies to biology. His argument captures both the social contexts of the subculture’s
formation, as well as the possible cognitive reasons for the resilience of a specific music and dance
style. This article, audacious in the range of material it presents, acts like a trigger, a direct
provocation to the kinds of literature we would usually read in an anthropological publication, and as
such we hope will give rise to further debate.
Many thanks to all contributors, not only for their submissions but also for their patience. A special
thank to Dr. Claudia Merli and Dr. Stephen M. Lyon, present and former general editors of DAJ
respectively, for their warm support and invaluable guidance. I am grateful to all the postgraduate
peer-reviewers of Durham Anthropology Department for their help. To be the guest editor of an
issue dedicated to political anthropology and the ethnographic fabrics of resistance has been both a
pleasure and a struggle. The necessity of political analyses emerging from fine-grained ethnographic
studies becomes all the more visible as I’m writing this from the ‘field’. I hope the reader will enjoy
this issue and find it inspiring.
As a traveller friend wrote to me: “now more than ever, to resist is important.”
Amilla Maria Anthi Kastrinou Theodoropoulou
References
Asad, T. (ed.). 1973. Anthropology and the colonial encounter. New York: Ithaca Press.
Comaroff, J., and J. Comaroff. 2002. Of revelation and revolution. In J. Vincent (ed.), The anthropology of politics: A reader in ethnography, theory, and critique. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers.
Foucault, M. 1982. The subject and power. Critical Inquiry 8(4): 777–795.
Gledhill, J. (ed.). 2000. Power and its disguises: Anthropological perspectives on politics. London:
Pluto Press.
Gramsci, A. 2006. State and civil society. In A. Sharma and A. Gupta (eds), The anthropology of the state. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Kurtz, D.V. 1996. Hegemony and anthropology: Gramsci, exegeses, reinterpretations. Critique of Anthropology 16(2): 103–135.
Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A radical view. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mitchell, T. 1990. Everyday metaphors of power. Theory and Society 19(5): 545–577.
Ortner, S.B. 1995. Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173–193.
Sahlins, M. 1999. What is anthropological enlightenment? Some lessons of the twentieth century.
It is here that Scott lays out his theory of political resistance, a theory which has received a great deal
of scholarly attention and which remains influential both within the field of political theory and in
closely related fields, including sociology and anthropology. I review and interrogate Scott’s work
on resistance through the lens provided by my own work on seventeenth century (English) Quakers.
The Quakers provide a case which is both interesting and challenging with regards Scott’s work. On
the one hand, Scott himself presents examples from the seventeenth century, on the other hand he
draws only on secondary literature (Christopher Hill in particular) and never develops his discussion
of such cases. There are, I believe, several reasons for his rather half-hearted consideration of such
cases. Firstly, Scott (1985) focuses almost entirely on a single case, the contemporary Malay
peasantry. In this largely ethnographic study, Scott presents an often brilliant account of the modes
of resistance adopted by the Malay villagers amongst whom he lived (during the 1970s). Secondly,
in DAR, it is Scott’s intention to present a comparative and generalised theory, drawn both on his
Malay material and on dozens of other cases which he argues supports his central thesis. Given his
objective – to present a general theory of peasant resistance—he quite rightly eschews the temptation
to present these exemplars in any detail. I suspect, however, that there are other reasons why Scott
merely mentions seventeenth-century cases. Scott is a political theorist and not a historian;
seventeenth century texts are available but their study is time-consuming and requires considerable
knowledge of the period if they are to be properly understood in their context. Finally, Scott is
primarily interested in explaining peasant resistance and it could be argued that by the mid
seventeenth century, England was no longer a feudal society and the peasantry had disappeared (Hill
1972, chapter 3). This is largely, though not entirely, true in that seventeenth century England
remained overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, and manifested a significant political, economic and
cultural residue of feudalism.
The Quaker case, then, is both interesting and theoretically significant for a number of reasons. First,
the social, political and economic context both is and is not like the other key cases presented by
Scott (both in WW and DAR) in that mid seventeenth century England was no longer a simple feudal
society: Quakers were never slaves nor peasants in any typically defined sense. Quaker resistance
can be understood just as easily in terms of religious as political and economic resistance, against an
oppressive, but in the early years, revolutionary opposition: although couched in almost entirely
religious terms, Quaker resistance undoubtedly had significant political overtones, recognised by
both Quakers and their opponents alike. Finally, Quaker records are unusually rich and provide by
far way the most complete picture of the faith and practice of a seventeenth century radical group.3
Scott on resistance
Scott develops his thesis over two substantial books together numbering over 500 pages. However,
setting out his main argument in brief is not difficult since he does so himself on numerous occasions
in both texts. Since the meaning of the term itself is contested, let us begin with Scott’s definition of
‘resistance’ (1985: 290):
class resistance includes any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (e.g., rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (e.g., landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its own claims (e.g., work, land, charity, respect) vis-à-vis those superordinate classes.
3 As is the general custom, in this paper the terms ‘Quaker’ and ‘Friend’ are synonymous.
So, the Quaker movement certainly did not, in itself constitute a class. Indeed, they are most often
defined by contemporary sociologists as a sect, though in some senses they might be described as an
interest group or voluntary organisation in today’s increasingly secular parlance. However, Friends
were at first, drawn from a relatively narrow segment of society and certainly saw themselves as
opposing the elite, the powerful, ‘the establishment’. During the 1650s the group developed mainly
in the poorer North and West of England and consisted mainly of yeoman, husbandmen and rural
artisans and their wives. By 1660, Quakerism was flourishing in the towns and cities primarily
among the poorer sections of urban society. By the 1680s, membership was more varied, with some
friends (notably William Penn and Robert Barclay and Anthony Pearson) welcome at Court (Horle
1988: 92). However, for most of the period in question, the Quaker movement can be identified as
comprising those who were living rural lives in the north west of England, a region which was
considerably poorer than the rest of the country – and certainly saw itself in opposition to the well-
to-do merchants and aristocracy, characterised as mainly southern. Region would seem to be as
important as class, then.4
Quakerism might most easily be understood as a product of the Civil War, which gave birth to
dozens (maybe hundreds) of sects and radical groups of one dispensation or another. However, in
terms of Scott’s argument regarding the slow but steady pressure on the state built up by small acts
of resistance over a long period of time it is worth noting that seventeenth-century Quakerism was
deeply rooted in the religious and socio-economic and political radicalism of the previous century,
and in particular on religious movements which resisted the dominance of Catholicism and Catholic
faith and practice both prior to and following the Reformation. There is hardly space here to trace
these roots in any detail but mention should be made of the Lollard tradition, which ran a parallel
course with Calvinism and the other major threads of religious reform which more obviously brought
about and sustained the establishment of the Church of England under the Henry VIII in the 1530s.5
The Lollards were among the first who separated from the newly established Anglican Church in the
4 Hill (1972) argues convincingly that the North and West was the locus of much radical activity. The Particular Baptists
were strongest in Wales, and the Grindletonians, another Anabaptist group were based in and around Grindleton in
Yorkshire. Leveller and Ranter groups were first of all a northern phenomenon. 5 The Established Church which was by 1600 largely a Presbyterian Puritanism was already far stronger in the South and
bowing and scraping, believing that only God should be so honoured. They would use a particular
form of the third person pronoun (thee and thou) to those socially superior to them who would
expect to be referred to, more politely, as ‘you’.9 Quakers steadfastly refused to doff their hats in the
presence of superiors – perhaps not so unusual in the North but a distinct breach of etiquette in the
Southern counties. To fail to remove one’s hat in court meant certain imprisonment. They treated
each day of the week as one and so continued to trade on Sundays, even on Christmas Day; indeed,
they despised the heathenish names given to the days of the week and months of the year and
preferred to call Sunday ‘first-day’, January ‘first-month’ and so on. Citing scripture (Matthew 5.33-
37 and James 5:12), Quakers refused to swear oaths, a testimony which exacerbated their position
vis-à-vis the legal system, especially when brought to court. Brought to trial for some other
misdemeanour was bad enough, but refusing to swear the oath would mean certain imprisonment and
possible transportation to the Colonies as well as punishment for the original offence.10
Quakers attacked the Established Church as a powerful institution, mockingly calling churches
‘steeple-houses’. They refused to attend divine worship, then a statutory duty and were for this
reason continually prosecuted for recusancy.11
Furthermore, they were far from passive in their
relationship with the members of the clergy (that is, with Anglican ministers). Davies (2000: 23)
notes that Quakers were well-known for pinning ‘scurrilous libels’ on church doors and heckling
clergy in the street.12
They published pamphlets attacking the very grounds of a paid clergy and went
as far as interrupting divine services in an attempt to subject ministers to ‘the Truth’ in a distinctly
public manner. As early as 1649 Fox was beaten for daring to interrupt a sermon in Mansfield-
Woodhouse. His own account (Fox 1952: 44) is typically colourful:
Now while I was at Mansfield-Woodhouse, I was moved to go to the steeple-house there on First-day, out of the meeting in Mansfield, and when the priest had done I declared the truth to the priest and people. But the people fell upon me with their fists, books, and without compassion or mercy beat me down in the steeplehouse and almost smothered me in it, being under them. And sorely was I bruised in the steeplehouse, and they threw me against the walls and when that they had thrust and thrown me out of the steeplehouse , when I came into the yard I fell down, being so sorely bruised and beat among them. And I got up again and then they punched and thrust and struck me up and down and they set me in the stocks and brought a whip to whip me, but did not. And as I sat in the stocks they threw stones at me, and my head, arms, breast, shoulders, back, and sides were so bruised that I was mazed and dazzled with the blows.
9 For a thorough investigation of Quaker speech see Bauman 1983.
10 There were at this time a number of oaths that Quakers chose not to swear. Refusing the Oath of Supremacy,
acknowledging the Monarchs supreme over the Anglican Church was punishable by praemuire, which place an
individual outside the King’s protection, involved forfeiture of all goods and chattels and loss of income from property,
and imprisonment. Refusal to swear the Oath of Allegiance, which judges might require anyone brought before them to
swear, resulted in similar severe punishment (Horle 1988: 49-51). 11
Throughout the period Quakers were involved in a vitriolic ‘pamphlet war’ with those who attacked their stand on the
Established Church. Richard Baxter (1657) published a booklet providing 24 reasons why ‘no Christian, or reasonable
man, should be a Quaker. His first reason is the fact that while they hurl abuse at ‘the Church and minister of Christ’.
they are ‘of no church themselves, they are no Christians...’ 12
Hurling insults such as ‘Serpent’, ‘liar’, ‘deceiver’, children of the Devil’, ‘hypocrite’, dumb dog’, ‘scarlet coloured
beast’, ‘Babylon’s merchants’, and ‘sodomites’ almost suggests that the clergy were the resisters and Quakers the
The testimonies were generally defended either in terms of scriptural prescription or proscription. In
some instances, the testimony against a professional clergy for instance, Quakers argued that the
gospels simply did not mandate such practice.13
Although not a testimony, a common source of
public disgust was the Quaker practice of encouraging women to preach, and to become involved in
the day-to-day organisation of church activities. And certainly, records of ‘sufferings’ include many
case involving women.14
Although several leading members of the movement had served in some
capacity in the Parliamentary army during the Civil Wars, by the mid 1655, Fox and other ‘public’
Friends had established the Quaker peace testimony as a matter of fact.15
This was a serious form of
resistance, not primarily because Quakers would no longer serve in the armed forces, but because
they refused to subsidise acts of war in any sense – this was a costly action for the government both
during the Interregnum.16
Quakers were, on the whole, despised, not only by those in authority (Reay
1985: Ch. 4). They were accused of haughtiness and hypocrisy, they were labelled as Catholics and
witches, and thought to be members of other more extreme radical groups (they were often confused
with Ranters, for instance).17
Public Friends (and perhaps none more so than Fox) could be abrasive,
even aggressive in debate – Richard Baxter, a leading Puritan critic of Quakers and Quakerism,
wrote, ‘I have had more railing language from them in one letter, than I ever heard from all the
scolds in the country to my remembrance this twenty years’ (Quoted in Moore 2000: 110). Their
penchant for enthusiastic displays of metaphorical and embodied critique, especially in the 1650s,
must have proved both frightening and extremely provocative to all who witnessed them. To quote
from Reay (1985: 36):
Several Quakers went ‘naked as a sign’ ... Such ‘signs’ were highly symbolic and clearly intended to shock. Sarah Goldsmith walked through Bristol markets in 1655 with her ‘haire about her eares’, bare legged, and clad only in a ‘long hairy coat’. Richard Sale, a Quaker tailor from Hoole (near Chester), stood clothes in sackcloth with flowers in one hand and weeds in the other, and ashes sprinkled in his hair. Solomon Eccles, a former music teacher from London who had burned his instruments and some books when he turned Quaker, walked through Smithfield naked, with a pan of burning coals upon his head.
However, the two acts of resistance which most provoked the State and Established Church was the
determination of Quakers to establish and attend their own meetings for worship on the one hand,
and their refusal to pay tithes on the other. In both cases the result of their resistance came at a
considerable cost. I will dwell at some length on these two modes of Quaker resistance, beginning
with an account of tithes, before discussing the issue of Quaker worship.
There was, by 1650, a continuing public debate regarding tithes. The Quakers refused payment from
the outset. Quakers were not the only one to refuse payment but their consistent and increasingly
organised refusal to pay set them apart. By 1655 those who called themselves ‘Quaker’ would be
13
There is an extensive secondary literature relating to these testimonies. Broad coverage is provided in Braithwaite
1955, 1961; Barbour 1965. 14
‘Sufferings’ were the punishments meted out to Friends and collected and collated ever more systematically by
Quaker meetings and eventually recorded in ‘the Great Book of Sufferings’ maintained by a central committee in
London. 15
For more on the Peace Testimony see Barbour 1964 Ch 8. 16
The Interregnum is that period which begins with the regicide of Charles I in 1649 and ends with the Restoration of
the monarchy (in the person of Charles II) in 1660. 17
Reading their pamphlets, it would appear that Quakers stood against not only the Church and State, but against
A page from a record of Quaker sufferings (Marsden Monthly Meeting, (Lancashire)
The corporate decision to refuse tithe payment, for whatever reason, was a serious act of resistance.
No matter what reasons Friends offered, the elite comprising both secular and ecclesiastical
authorities say this action as undermining the very fabric of society. As Laura Brace (1998: 35)
notes:
Tithes were embedded in the religious, political, social and legal fabric: the Church, the state authorities and the radicals were all able to use the debates around them as a sophisticated tool with which to gauge the attitudes and normative commitments of bother members and their opponents...For the Established Church, refusal to pay implied dangerous sectarianism, while the state regarded tithe opposition as a threat to the principle of taxation, and by extension to private property itself.
Along with tithe refusal, the determination of Quakers to meet for worship after their own fashion
represented an act of resistance which occasioned brutal retaliation on the part of the authorities.
Such ‘conventicles’ were illegal, under a variety of Acts and older statutes, including the
Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, the Quaker Act (1662) and the Five Miles Act. They were also
charged with associated offences, including recusancy, vagrancy and, more seriously, outlawry
(Horle 1988: 142-46). Charges were also brought by informers, who were encouraged in their
activities by the second Conventicle Act. To make matters worse, Quakers were often unaware of
these charges and were then subpoenaed for non-appearance in court.
During this period there were two forms of Quaker meeting and we can distinguish between the
larger and more anarchic ‘threshing meetings’ which were ad hoc, evangelising meetings held either
indoors or out of doors and sometimes drew thousands, to the far more intimate ‘retired’ or silent
meetings attended primarily by those who were already ‘convinced’. Quakers also rejected the need
for purpose-built premises for their meetings, denying that one place might be more sacred than
another, believing that the True Tabernacle was less a building and more a condition of one’s faith
and practice. The fact that Friends were happy to meet anywhere was a nightmare for the authorities.
(Horle 1988: 6-7; Braithwaite 1955: 184, 377; Moore 2000: 146-50). For different reasons, then,
both types of meeting posed complex problems for the agencies whose role it was to prevent them.
At various times, though particularly between 1660-65, Quaker meetings were perpetually broken up
with varying degrees of violence. Quakers never met in secret, but the legalised use of informants
meant that some retired (or ‘settled’) meetings were prevented by the prior ransacking of premises.
On occasion, such meetings would simply adjourn to the street or some other public place at which
point those Friends present would come under physical attack and or dragged off to prison to await
trial for any one of a number of misdemeanours. Records of Quaker sufferings included hundreds of
accounts of disrupted meetings and Quakers were far more likely to be imprisoned for ‘holding a
conventicle’ than for any other reason.21
Space permits the inclusion here of just one example.
Certain officials became notorious for their persecution of Friends, men such as Sir William
Armourer who harried Friends meeting in Reading soon after the First Conventicle Act. In March
1664 he marched thirty four Friends from meeting to prison (citing the Quaker Act) and then others,
mostly women, during the following fortnight. Children continued to meet in their parents’ absence –
these were subsequently taken out and beaten. The women were released in June but taken again
during the months that followed. The sorry tale continues (I quote from Braithwaite (1961: 227):
The men were never brought up on the Quaker Act, but after forty weeks were tried on the oath of Allegiance and acquitted; but many more were soon taken again, and for some years the principal Friends were in prison, and the meeting at Thomas Curtis’ house was kept by young people and a few stray adults, mostly women. Armourer came one morning in January 1666, and found only four young maids. A servant brought him water, which he threw again and again in their faces, and turned them out. After the Second Conventicle Act, which came into force in May 1670, he illegally padlocked two doors, for it was Curtis’ private house; but Friends met in another room, which he also nailed up.
And so it went on for almost a decade. An important outcome of the continual flouting of the law
regarding illegal conventicles was the constant and entirely public testing of the will and rationale of
the authorities, particularly of the Cromwell during the Interregnum, of the Monarchy following the
Restoration and of Parliament throughout the period. The actions I have described were certainly
counter-hegemonic in so far as they formed a co-ordinated attack on the status quo, but they were
also, pace Scott, entirely public. Quaker acts of resistance, and virtually their entire faith and practice
21
For instance of the 212 Quakers incarcerated in Lancashire between 1660-64, 196 cases were for attending Quaker
during these early years, did not form and were not a part of a hidden transcript, but constituted a
continual reminder to the powerful and powerless alike, that here was an alternative to the status quo
that could not and would not be dismissed, either by law or by unlawful force of arms. The outcome
for Quakers of these acts of resistance were terrible in terms of physical and financial punishment.
They faced trial under a wide range of punitive legislation, chief among them the Conventicle Acts
(1664 and 1670) and the so-called Quaker Act (1662) of the Restoration Period which led to a wave
of anti-Quaker activity.
Conclusions
The central question posed in this paper is ‘in what ways does the resistance practiced by Quakers in
the mid seventeenth century illuminate Scott’s thesis?’ First, although, the Quaker does not comprise
a class, it does represent a class and so is a fair test of Scott’s argument. However, it is difficult to
distinguish between religious and other forms of resistance (political, economic, cultural) in this
instance. Whatever the intentions of individual Friends, corporately, the Quaker movement was
primarily a radical, religious movement. The stated aims of seventeenth century Friends was to usher
in the Second Covenant: they were fighting ‘the Lamb’s War’. Given their belief in the free gift to all
men and women of the inward light (of Christ) the social implication of their faith and practice was
undoubtedly levelling, calling into question the legitimacy of the hierarchical society which
represented the status quo. Their actions whether actually or merely construed as illegal posed a
major threat to those in power (whether represented by Cromwell or the King).
Their resistance was made all the more public through their use of the printing press. Quaker
pamphleteers issued forth a stream of writing both defending their own position and attacking that of
their opponents (more or less everyone else), and generally both simultaneously. Their energetic use
of the printed word may be said to have reached a peak with Fox’s The Mystery of the Great Whore Unfolded...(1659), in which the de facto leader of the movement responded, painstakingly and
belligerently, to 100 of the most widely circulated anti-Quaker tracts in a document numbering over
600 pages.22
At the same time, Fox was developing the organisation of the group which involved a
series of levels of ‘meeting’ from local congregations to central (one might say ‘executive’) meeting
involving representative from all over the country). By 1680 Quaker meetings were receiving a
plethora of prescriptions and proscriptions (‘advices’) on right behaviour; meetings, in their turn,
were sending accounts of the sufferings of local Friends to a central committee in London (‘Meeting
for Sufferings’) in
an attempt to provide documentary evidence for presentation to Parliament and/or the King. Alongside to these organisation strategies, Friends also wrote voluminously to each other – and collections of epistles were distributed more widely.
As Horle (1988: 3) avers, ‘Secular radicalism joined with spiritual Quakerism to produce an
explosive reaction against perceived evils in English society.’ Quaker resistance to what they
considered ungodly laws met an extremely repressive and violent response from both secular and
ecclesiastical authorities. The careful records kept by well-organised Quaker meetings provide a
clear unbroken account of their sufferings under the law during the period under review. Distraints
and imprisonments number in the thousands; Friends suffered verbal insults and regular beatings
both at the hands of the authorities and the public at large. Their places of meetings were regularly
ransacked and at least 114 met their death in prison in London and Middlesex alone (Horle 1988:
22
On the question of whether Fox can be said to have been the founder and leader of the Quaker movement see
284). But did their resistance lead to an outcome that might be termed revolutionary? This is
undoubtedly a complex question but the simple answer is no. The Act of Toleration, became law in
1689 but tolerance of religious dissent unfolded slowly from the 1670s and by 1700 Quakers (and
other less radical dissidents) were allowed to worship, unmolested in a manner of their choosing.
They were still penalised for non-payment of tithes, and had in any case and for over a decade
engaged less and less in acts of resistance. The expansion of religious toleration was more a matter
of evolution than revolution – there was no final, cataclysmic act of defiance which led to the world
being turned upside down.
However, what is most obvious about the Quaker case, most obviously tests Scott’s theory. Quaker
resistance to a series of murderously repressive regimes was almost entirely public. Their transcript
was open for all to witness; their message was free of all disguise (DAR, Ch. 6). Indeed, they
virtually celebrated their radical non-conformity in the face of the authorities, by refusing to
recognise clergy except to attack them in their own churches, by continuing to hold their (silent)
meetings in public, by continuing to refuse tithe payment, by encouraging women to preach and so
on.23
At no point in the early period of the movement did Quakers retreat to a place that could
conceivably be described as off-stage.24
In fact, leading Friends, including Fox, Naylor,
Hubberthorne, Dewsbury, Burrough, Fell, Audland and many others, manoeuvred the authorities into
positions where debate was public and centre-stage (Moore 2000).25
George Fox, in particular,
attempted to juxtapose the ungodly church and state with the godly faith and practice of Quakerism
at every turn. However, a number of commentators suggest that Quaker resistance was less
exuberant after the Restoration. Indeed, one leading light, Richard Hubberthorne, wrote in 1660
(quoted in Morgan 1993: 32) would continue to be
obedient subjects under every Power ordained by God, and to every ordinance of man (set up by him) for the Lord’s sake, whether unto King as supreme, or unto Governours or any set up n authority by him, who are for the punishment of evil-doers, and for the praise of them that do well, …
Morgan is right in saying that, from 1660, Quaker texts increasingly emphasise their tendency to
passive resistance. It is possible that after a decade of continual oppression Friends had grown weary
of the battle. By the turn of the century the movement had already entered what has been called its
‘quietist’ phase. The point in resisting was reduced during the 1670s and greatly reduced by the
Toleration Act of 1689, which granted freedom of worship to nonconformist groups – but not to
Catholics, whose position vacillated even more wildly than the Quakers during the period. For this
reason – and others – subjecting seventeenth century English Catholicism to this kind of
interrogation would prove at least as interesting and as valuable a test of Scott’s thesis. But perhaps
the main point to be made is that general theories such as Scott’s, will contain their scholarly worth
just so long as they provide an incentive for such particular studies.
23
The role of women was crucial to the establishment of Quakerism. Fox and Elisabeth Hooton travelled together ‘in the
ministry’ even before 1650. Margaret Fell facilitated organisation development of the movement by allowing Quakers to
use her house (Swarthmore Hall) as a base (Trevett 1991; Mack 2002; Kunze 1993). 24
Indeed, Quakers seemed almost to revel in their suffering. For example, Isaac Penington, a ‘public Friend’ who,
hoping to reassure Friends that he was well, wrote to them from Aylesbury gaol: ‘[The Lord] made my bonds pleasant to
me, and my noisome prison (enough to have destroyed my weakly and tenderly educated nature) a place of pleasure and
delight, where I was comforted by my God day night and day.’ (Quoted in Braithwaite 1961: 11) 25
Scott’s discussion of charisma is both interesting and certainly apt in relation to Quaker leaders and to Fox in
particular (DAR: 121-3). Certainly, Fox was considered a charismatic man, and as Scott argues, this quality was
undoubtedly socially constructed. However, once again, this construction was entirely open and can not be seen as rooted
Ritual as Cultural Reserve among Sicilian Migrants in Germany Emanuel Valentin European Academy, Bolzano (Italy) http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol16/iss2/valentin.pdf
Abstract
Different theories have underlined the importance of the seemingly anachronistic revitalisation of
traditional forms of saint cults in front of general processes of “overlaying” and “dispersion”. Saint
cults didn’t disappear through modernisation, but created new potential out of it. The recourse on
saint cult and on seemingly anachronistic practices acts in this context and especially in times of
crisis as break handle, as counter reaction to globalization, as cultural “reserve”. The notion of
“reserve” – which stands in the vicinity to notions of “resistance”, “archaism”, “counter culture”,
“fundamentalism” and “regional/local obstinacy” – refers to a seemingly authentic behaviour, which
is oriented to local forms and which is rooted in a back dated culture, social structure and economy.
It isn’t simply a “survival” of the old but has to be seen as a hybrid reaction to actual processes. I
follow an approach which understands the saint cult on the local level as result of a dialectical
process between resistance and overlay. In this sense I interpret also the recourse on traditional
folklore of communitarian and participative character and the reinforced significance of ritual
revitalisation in the migration. So as the oscillation between home and host society, the foundation of
ethnic associations or traditional food habits, which can work as identity anchor and as strategies of
resistance against uniforming processes of adaptation in the migration, the saint cult acts as a
“reserve”, bearing the potential to dampen the cultural effects of the migration crisis and the
alienation from the home society.
Keywords: migration, ritual change, social change, reserve, Sicilian migrants
Introduction
During different periods between July 2003 and March 2006 I conducted non-stationary fieldwork
among Sicilian emigrants in and around an industrial city in southwest Germany called
Sindelfingen.26
These emigrants originally all came from Mirabella Imbaccari, an “agrotown”
(Schneider & Schneider 1976: 32ff.; Gabaccia 1984: 13f.) located between Caltagirone and Piazza
Armerina in the eastern part of Sicily.27
In my research I focussed especially on a Maccarísian saint
26
The fieldwork was carried out for my M.A. thesis in Eberhard-Karls University, Tuebingen, Germany. 27
They call themselves “Maccarísi”, a term which stems from the second part of the name of the town, namely
“Imbaccari”, and which I also have adopted when I refer to them in this paper.
I follow an approach which understands the saint cult on the local level as result of a dialectical
process between resistance and overlay. In this sense I interpret also the recourse on traditional
folklore of communitarian and participative character and the reinforced significance of ritual
revitalisation in the migration. The process of migration, especially the “forced migration” because
of economic misery and unemployment, represents a big crisis stemming from disgregative
processes of isolation, cultural alienation, environmental change, socio-economic insecurity, loss of
familiar bonds and weakening of the cohesion of kin groups (Lanternari 1977: 180ff.). The
revitalisation of a saint cult in the migration bears the potential to act exactly against these processes,
which come along with the migration. So as the oscillation between home and host society, the
foundation of ethnic associations or traditional food habits, which can work as identity anchor and as
strategies of resistance against uniforming processes of adaptation in the migration (Giordano 1984),
the saint cult acts as a “reserve” (Hauschild 2003: 11; 2008) and as “retarding element” (Hauschild
1990: 563f.), bearing the potential to dampen the cultural effects of the migration crisis and the
alienation from the home society. It connects the old with the new and fits into the stress ratio
between adaptation to the new conditions in the host society and the resistance of anachronistic
practices against these processes of adaptation. The matter at stake here is a relation which Giordano
(1984) referred to as “interweavement of processes of uniformisation and differentiation”. This stress
ratio between appropriation and defence is the focus of my analysis of the Maccarísian St Joseph
festival in Sindelfingen.
Mirabella, Sindelfingen: A History of Emigration
Amu ristatu sulu l’impiegati, studenti, buttiari e pensiunati! Un sinnacu assai giùvani vantamu, ma sempri nnà Germania chianamu! Si u Statu nan nni porta i Marocchini, i Curdi, l’Albanesi e i Filippini, ristamu sulu quattru pi semenza e n’affidamu ‘a bedda Pruvidenza!31
(Di Seri 1999: 147)
In Mirabella the “neo-colonial period” (Schneider & Schneider 1976: 115), in which the export of
manpower was the primary energy loss, set in relatively early. The first migration wave began
around 1850 and was directed to Latin America, i.e. to Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela. The size
of this migration becomes clear, when we look at the fact that in 1983 90 percent of the people older
than 80 years has remigrated from Argentina (Horn 1986: 137). The second big migration took place
in the early 20th
century and was directed to the USA (Giordano 1984: 448f.).32
The Italian South
didn’t have any profits of the Italian period of economic development after the Second World War
and didn’t participate in the ongoing process of industrialization. This situation led to the third big
migration wave in Mirabella. Due to the bilateral agreement of 1955 between Germany and Italy,
31
“Only the employed, students, shopkeepers and retirees remained! A very young mayor we have, but always we are
calling to Germany! If the state wouldn’t bring us anymore the Moroccans, the Curds, the Albanians and the Philippins,
then we would just be four for the sowing and would trust in the beautiful providence!” 32
Neef (1986: 407) writes on the contrary, that the first migration wave was directed to North America, while the first
176). Parental networks, which were existent only partially in Sindelfingen, couldn’t give a possible
protection in front of the isolation as before (ibid.; see also Busch 1983: 192ff.).
Social Control
An important element of the “Sicilian home” (“Heimat”) is the public space, i.e. places like the
“piazza”, the many bars or the streets. Through manifold possibilities of occupation, appropriation
and control, public space satisfies socio-cultural and symbolic needs of the inhabitants (Lauer &
Wilhelmi 1986: 162f.). With the mostly open doors even the private room of the household is
separated from the public space only through the threshold. Insofar the South Italian neighbourhood
represents a strong instance of control determining prestige, honour and status of a family according
to its grade of maintenance or rupture with the code of behaviour (Davis 1969; Gabaccia 1984: 45).
Lauer & Wilhelmi (1986: 182) didn’t find any fundamental transformation of the values of Sicilian
migrants, but noticed an adaptation to German cultural patterns. In a test consisting of images
representing houses Lauer & Wilhelmi (ibid.) came to the conclusion that migrants preferred the
alone standing family house because of its privacy, not giving any value to neighbourhood contacts.
This fact leads the two authors to suppose that the house-constructions in Sicily which copy German
housing patterns have to be more than pure money investments or material enrichment. The
migrant’s preference for privacy is indicative for their refuse of social control, which besides the
longing for prestige and social ascension was a possible motive for migration (ibid.: 165; 168):
Social mechanisms of control, which through positive or negative sanctioning of social behaviour stabilise the value system in a familiar environment, are lost with the familiar frame of reference in the foreign space, or the instance of control is now a neighbourhood, are now colleagues, with whom the emigrants are not linked anymore through a common value system. (ibid.: 170)
Senseless rules of behaviour intensify the feeling of estrangement in the migration, which any
migrant tries to escape. In reaction to this an “over-adaptation” (ibid.: 170f.) or at least a partial
adaptation to the host society occurs, for example in relation to child rearing practices and marriage
(ibid.: 178f.). This adaptation manifests itself not only in the withdrawal into the family, but also in
the “permanent wish of return” (ibid.: 171). The authors close with the assumption that because of
the decay of public life through an increased privatisation and a stronger focus on the familiar
sphere, the realisation of the mentioned dwelling ideal will be followed by a impoverishment of
interaction (ibid.: 187).
Maccarísian Migrants in Sindelfingen: Persistence in Change?
Lauer and Wilhelmi (1986) sketch a situation of Maccarísian migrants in Sindelfingen that is too
one-sided and ignores any relations between the processes of uniformity and differentiation which
Giordano (1984) has written about. They draw an image of the migrant, who – imprisoned by his
wish for return – seems to live in a condition of total passivity, putting any social bounds and
relations of reciprocity outside of his family on ice. If Banfield’s “amoral familism” (1965) as ethical
basis of political action was not tenable in southern Italy and especially not in Sicily (Silverman
1968; Miller 1974; Muraskin 1974; Moss 1981; Gabaccia 1984: 10), then Lauer and Wilhelmi
(1986) seem to have found it again in Germany. Because of the “disinterest of the Sicilian in the
political area” (ibid.: 159) Lauer and Wilhelmi came to the conclusion, that for Sicilians the
“informal control of space” stands in the foreground. “More important is the appropriation of free
spaces like the piazza, which at the end has to be seen as place of political action, or the celebration
of traditional festivals” (ibid.).
I disagree with the assumption of Lauer and Wilhelmi (1986). In the year of their publication the two
authors couldn’t know that only one year later, in 1987, an Italian association would be founded in
Sindelfingen. However, even in the early 1970s there were clear processes of “ethnic revitalisation”
(Lanternari 1977; Giordano 1984), testifying against the supposed passivity or lack of appropriation
of foreign space, and standing for the active occupation of it through reactivation of social norms and
institutions stemming from the society of origin. I refer to the religious festivals of Mirabella, which
have been revitalised by Maccarisian migrants in the early 1970s in Sindelfingen, Calw and
surroundings – in chronological sequence of their appearance: the “festa di San Giuseppe”, the “festa
della Maria SS. delle Grazie” and the procession of Good Friday. Through these festivals the
migrants reproduce symbolic-religious spaces of their homeland also in the foreign country and so
create their own “familiar spaces” (Lauer & Wilhelmi 1986) of transnational34
character, in which
they periodically reactivate a “feeling of home”. Hence, the return to the home town must not to be
linked anymore to the participation in these festivals (Giordano 1984: 450f.; Puosi 1986). The
revitalisation of rituals in the migration undermines the idea of the home town as constant object of
longing or permanent place of return. The place of the return nostalgia must not be a physical place.
Fortier (2000) grasped this in the notion of “homing desire”, which is satisfied through religious
festivals far from the home country: “[T]hat is the desire to feel at home, by physically or
symbolically re-membering places as habitual spaces which provide some kind of ontological
security for Italians living in a non-Italian, non-Catholic world” (ibid.: 163). I understand the
reactivation of these festivals in the migration – like the periodical return to the home town
(Giordano 1984) – as “cultural pendular”. Perpetuated through the “interweavement of acculturation
and re-acculturation tendencies” (ibid: 455) it represents a “balance act between two cultures” (ibid.:
453) and bears potential resistance against uniforming processes of adaptation:
Through the oscillation the migrant is not at the mercy of the host society’s alien culture, but deals periodically with the specific collective cognition and with patterns of behaviour of the own community of origin. In intervals the oscillating migrant immerges into his culture of origin and is remembered of its fundamental traits, which probably don’t represent any constituent element of the host culture. (ibid.: 453)
If we look onto the fact, that in part these religious practices have been adopted by the children of the
migrants, and following the argumentation of Giordano a little bit further, then the “cultural
oscillation” acts as identity anchor also for the following generations: the periodical symbolic return
of/to the parental festivals, the oscillation between two cultures represents on one hand marking
points for future orientation but confirms also the actual loss of tradition on the other. Hence, it
serves in discovering (inventing) again the cultural traits of the society of origin (Giordano 1984:
454).
34
“Transnationalism” refers to a process, through which emigrants create social fields, which link their country of origin
to the host country (Glick Schiller, Basch & Blanc-Szanton 1992: 1). „[Immigrants] develop and maintain multiple
relations – familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders“ (ebd.:1) „[and] develop
identities within social networks that connect them to two or more societies simultaneously“ (ebd.:2). I am speaking here
about the “transnational character” of the festival of St Joseph, which I will describe as follows, because it still shows a
high degree of information and resources exchange between home town and place of migration. Following Vertovec
(2000: 12) this is – besides the transfer of money, travels and communication – necessary in order to differentiate
Maccarísian St Joseph Altars and Their Changes in the Migration
The main periods in which Maccarísian emigrants returned to Mirabella were those in which the
religious festivals took place, i.e. the festival of “San Giuseppe” (Giordano 1984: 450f.) and the
festival of “Maria SS. Delle Grazie” (Horn 1986: 136). Their significance as “cultural magnets”
(Turner & Turner 1978: 27), which they certainly still have, decreased gradually, especially when the
process of families joining their emigrated kin came to an end in the early 1970s. At this time the
first emigrants began to celebrate the St Joseph’s festival also in Sindelfingen and surroundings.
Since then the festival was also established in Germany. Probably because of its private character,
the festival of St Joseph was the first festival introduced in the migration. St Joseph, the putative
father of Jesus and elected husband of the Virgin Mary, is celebrated on 19th
of March within the
intimate space of single family households.
Preparations
In the week before the 19th
of March Maccarísian women start with the preparations for the St
Joseph altars. These altars, which are erected in different households, are large banquets: big tables
are covered with a huge amount of comestible goods like fresh and dried fruits; raw, cooked and
partly wild vegetables; fish, flour, pasta, and so forth. The most important elements of the altars are
three devotional breads positioned on the highest point of the altar, ephemeral statues which
represent the persons of the Holy Family. Besides these many other devotional breads cover the altar
representing different symbols associated with St Joseph, some of them of phyto- or theriomorphe
shape. Among the cooked foods are many typical local dishes of Maccarísian or Sicilian origin, like
“sfingi”, “cassateddi”, “pesche”, “impanati”, and many others. Because “St Joseph was poor” the
food and dishes on these tables are regarded as “poor people’s food”. But next to these traditional,
“poor” foods today we can also find a lot of modern consumer and luxury goods like chocolate,
coffee, fruits out of season or exotic fruits like mangos or avocados, representing emblems of
globalisation on the banquets. Additionally, amounts of money can be found, which may reach up to
several hundreds of Euros. The most of these goods are ordered by a transport company, which
brings them directly from Sicily. This is necessary because some goods like the wild vegetables or
the big laurel branches for decoration can’t easily be found in Germany or “just taste better”.
The Vow
Altars in honour of the saint are erected as “ex voto”, that means that they are preceded by a
“prummisioni”, a vow. The aim of such a vow, which an individual person takes in front of the saint
mainly because of diseases, misfortunes or processes of house building, is to achieve a “grazia”
(grace) from the saint. As part of a wider Sicilian system of grace (Di Bella 1992) the St Joseph
altars hence bear a reserve which uses a transcendent instance (the saint) in order to achieve a psychological stabilisation of the individual and a certain security facing especially difficult life crisis. Because St Joseph is regarded as patron saint of the family this reserve shows an explicit
familiar focus: the vows always address the own core family in a narrower or the own kin in a wider
sense. According to the requested grace the vows can be differentiated by the addressee (for oneself
or a third person of the own family), their frequency (the altar can be built once or every year for the
entire life) and their effort (mostly measured on the costs of the altar).
Nevertheless the vow is no longer the sole reason for the erection of an altar. Especially emigrants of
the first generation, who are confronted with their children’s disinterest in the parental traditions,
bound to the distribution of food becomes enlarged. The distribution acts no more as identity
creating moment for the family or the Maccarísian community alone, but includes also migrants from
all over Italy. Hence the Maccarísian St Joseph’s festival seems to have lost its former reference to
locality. It is no more a symbol of intra-Italian diversity but becomes an interregional symbol for
multilayered significances, which are associated by different groups in different situations with
Maccarísian, Sicilian or Italian identity (Orsi 1999: 265).
On the altars in private households in Sindelfingen I noticed a general loss of the charitable character
of the St Joseph altars. Although many altar builders told me about the meal of the poor as being a
fundamental element of this ritual, asking the same people about whom effectively was invited to
their altar, I was often told that they were chosen amongst their own relatives. My informants
justified this often with the difficulty of finding “real poor” today. In this discourse the decay of the
charitable aspect reflects a general improvement of the economic situation of the emigrant’s
community. Hence traditional reciprocal practices towards the poor, embedded in particular forms of
ritualised gift exchange, lost their significance. Rather the meal of the poor as reserve against material poverty has been substituted – both in the society of origin and in the migration – by the
custom of making own family members the primary addressees of the ritual reciprocity.
On the other hand the fact of own family members becoming the primary addressees of the gifts on
the St Joseph altar represents an adaptation of the ritual to a discourse, which doesn’t associate “the
poor” with a nutrition deficiency or hunger, but with a minor degree of participation in certain
aspects of the modern consumer society. This is reflected in one of my informants’ statement when
asked why she invited family members to her altar and not poor people. She gave me the short
answer: “We are all poor!” In this context the banquet as practice of reciprocal solidarity and the
stronger involvement of family members as addressees of the gifts can be understood as reserve against processes of dominance and subordination. In the retreat into the family, the basic element
of human society, lie strategies and reactions to an environment marked by calamities and economic
inferiority (Hauschild 2003: 234ff.): “It is the society of the constant shipwreck, the culture of the
broken, about which we are talking, self-help, mutual help is here the matter and naturally also the
healthy egoism of familism” (ibid.: 234). In this light the offering of the gifts to own family members
seems to be a quite rational reaction to historical, topographic and economic determinants and not a
manifestation of a peculiar form of Sicilian “amoral familism” (Banfield 1965).
Summary
This paper is a short resume of my research about the interweavement of ritual and social change,
exemplified on a local popular-catholic saint cult revitalised in the migration process. Revitalised
rituals through migration don’t have the same original meanings anymore which they had in the
society of origin. Nonetheless, they represent lived religious practices with important factors in
forming identity and integration. As such they are fundamental elements of a “cultural
reconstruction” (Baumann, Luchesi & Wilke 2003: 31). Through the sacral status ascribed to religion
and rituals they offer secure and familiar spaces within an environment which is perceived as
fundamentally changed (Baumann 2003: 171; Baumann 2004). Religion becomes a reserve which stabilises an individual psychologically, not only in order to handle the fundamental dangers of
human life, but also the social change and its cultural effects coming along with the migration
process. Hence, it is especially important for migrants to conserve practices, symbols, images and
contents as much “authentic” as possible (Baumann 2003: 171). This “rhetoric of continuity”
(Sökefeld 2004: 151) hides the many processes of change, reshape and invention lying behind the
assumed continuity of revitalised traditions. Due to the interweavement of continuity and
transformation, the relation between social change and the content of rituals has to be looked on in a
much differentiated way. The dumb rule, that ritual forms generally change slower than their
functions (Tak 2000: 15), and the premise, that there are no direct links between social change within
a society and the contents of rituals (ibid.), must not be valid for the situation in the migration.
Summarising, the most fundamental changes of the ritual praxis fit perfectly into the social change
coming along with the migration process and the settlement in the host society. On more levels
(decrease of the charitable character of the ritual, shift of the ceremonial exchange of chant and food
from the street into the houses) I recognised a strengthened withdrawal into the private room of the family. This process fits into the social withdrawal from the public space into the security of the
“domus” (Orsi 1985) coming along with the family unification, which was the necessary condition
for the revitalisation of the festival in the migration. This emphasises very clearly the strengthened
importance of the family as reserve in the migration. The St Joseph festival re-institutionalises and
perpetuates periodically the values of an ideal type model of core family (the Holy Family), putting
on it a Sicilian model of gender relations which slowly seems to disappear in the migration. While
originally the “saints”, who the family incorporates temporarily during the ritual, originated from the
lines of breakage of the Sicilian society, i.e. the poor and orphans, today most of the families use
these resources for themselves. St. Joseph’s banquet as praxis of reciprocal solidarity and especially
the strengthened familism can be understood in this context as reserve against processes of dominance and subordination. The withdrawal into the family, the elementary component of human
society, is a strategy and a reaction to a catastrophic environment and experienced economic
inferiority (Hauschild 2003: 234ff.), which culminated directly in the migration crisis. In this light
the recourse on the family appears as rational reaction to historical, topographical and economic
determinants, and follows rather a “mentality of superimposition” (Giordano 1992) and a “rationality
of superimposition” (ibid.) than the logic of a Sicilian form of “amoral familism” (Banfield 1965).
Interestingly enough, during the ritual this process of withdrawal into the family is paralleled by a
process of opening and publication: the private room and the family become public, outward
oriented, open realms of the community. This process implicates two interwoven aspects. On one
hand, the opening of the private household acts against the lack of social stages and offers a space in
which Maccarísian migrants can appear as collective community, re-enacting and strengthening a
common identity. On the other side, the ritual re-establishes the traditional link between social
control and prestige, which lost its integrative function in the migration because of the absence of a
collective group. It is the involvement of the collective and the publication of the privileged relation
between individual (and the family respectively) and saint which bears a prestigious reserve for the
family in order to increase its reputation in the religious and hence in the social realm.
Of course, the withdrawal into the private space is due also to a certain opinion regarding the
German society’s reception of the festival, making it “invisible” to the outside world. In opposition
to this, through its “folklorisation” (Boissevain 1992a:11) the ritual becomes a politicised instrument
for shaping a particular “Italian” image. The revitalisation of the ritual bears a twofold reserve against the forgetting: it is not only a matter of bringing the children again closer to the parental
traditions, but also of emphasising the presence of Maccarísian migrants through their cultural
difference from the host society and other migrant groups.
Clear relations between processes of de- and relocation can be recognised. The saint, which was
honoured before as “deus loci”, becomes released from its local town context. His home and sphere
of action shift with those of the migrants. Hence locality, i.e. the home town, seems to lose its
meaning; the saint and its cult become “delocated”. But it is a relative delocation, i.e. the ritual isn’t
totally released from the home town Mirabella, but rather becomes “translocative” (Tweed 1997:
As such it offers surfaces of overlapping linking the old home with the new. Paradoxically, it
is precisely this relative delocation of the festival which allows a relocation of the Maccarísian
migrant’s identity: because of its originally strong relation to the locality (Mirabella) it represents –
especially in the migration – a meaningful factor as identity anchor, point of reference and
orientation. The delocation of the saint facilitates also the expansion of the social unity emerging
around his cult, from Maccarísian migrants alone to the whole community of Italian migrants. The
saint isn’t a symbol of intra-Italian diversity anymore, but becomes an inter-regional symbol with
manifold meanings which is associated according to the situation with Maccarísian, Sicilian or
Italian identity.
In this article’s discussion I couldn’t go into details regarding the ecclesiastical invention of new
ritual elements, showing how new reserves can be introduced and mobilised from outside.
Reformulating “pagan” elements of this popular-catholic ritual in a theologically more “appropriate”
terminology they strengthen the role of the church and the priestly functions in this otherwise domus-
centred religious praxis in which the familiar home becomes a “church”, the banquet becomes an
“altar”, the women of the house become ritual specialists, image breads become statues and
lamentations in Sicilian dialect replace the clerical blessing. Here in turn, the church uses the
traditional discourse about the ritual as “banquet of the poor” as reserve, in order to disconnect the
ritual reciprocity from the family and to reformulate it more generally in the Christian terminology of
charity. With this the St Joseph’s festival regains again its original meaning as reserve against material affliction (for a detailed discussion of this point see Valentin 2007).
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Contracts with Satan: Relations with ‘Spirit Owners’ and Apprehensions of the Economy among the Coastal Miskitu of Nicaragua Mark Jamieson Durham University and University of Sussex
Most anthropologists working among the Miskitu-speaking peoples, ‘indigenous’ hunter-
horticulturalists and fishermen of eastern Central America, have at one time or another encountered
the term dawanka, used variably to mean in different contexts ‘owner’ or ‘master’.38 Dawanka is a
bi-morphemic word, composed of two constituents dawan and -ka. The first morpheme, dawan,
bears the semantic load, capturing the meaning of ‘master’ or ‘owner’, while the suffix -ka modifies
the noun, in this case dawan, to show, in simple terms, that its semantic scope is limited, either by
discursive context or another associative or possessive noun. A dawanka is thus the ‘owner’ or
‘master’ of something. Without the limiting suffix -ka, Miskitu nouns tend to acquire an absolute
semantic scope, in that their meanings are potentially linguistically and philosophically unrestricted
in an almost Platonic sense. Dawan is an excellent example, since this term, without the limiting -ka, is only ever used to mean ‘God’, the absolute ‘master’ or ‘owner’ of everything, whereas
dawanka necessarily means ‘owner’ or ‘master’ of something specific.
38
See Conzemius (1932: 126-132), Helms (1971: 187-188), Barrett (1992: 219-220), and Dennis
of Parry and Bloch’s (1989) conceptual apparatus, one might say that human relations with the
‘owners’ of these animals and other resources constitute ‘cycles of exchange’ within the ‘long term
transactional order’, meaning that they effectively reproduce social and cosmic order. As such they
are worthy of human respect.42
Among the Miskitu of Kakabila, apparently similar beliefs are widely held. Duwindu determines the
available supply of games animals, Merry Maid the supply of fish, Palpa Dawanka the appearance of
manatee, and so forth. However, in spite of the fact that villagers have elaborate discourses about
the importance and significance of ‘respect’ (rispik) between humans and between humans and
Dawan (God), they in no way express the need to respect Duwindu and the other dawanka who
control access to resources. Indeed I have never seen killed animals treated with the respect
reportedly accorded animals by hunters in other Amerindian cultures. Only cooked food, which as
villagers say Dawan supplies, receives respect.43 Gratitude is thus reserved for the absolute, morally
impeachable ‘master’ or ‘owner’, Dawan, rather than for the dawanka, the ‘masters’ or ‘owners’ who
control the particular domains from which foodstuffs come.44 In other words, the supply of raw upan
(meat and fish), made possible by the dawanka, is nothing to be particularly thankful for.45 By their
own accounts, the Kakabila hunters and fisherman have few dealings with the ‘owners’ who
manipulate the supply of meat and fish, who, they deem, are unpredictable beyond their
understanding, and they feel, therefore, that they have little reason to be grateful if they are fortunate
enough to be successful. Rather it is specifically the gift of cooked food (plun or pata), made
possible by God, which demands ‘respect’; specifically, it is the set of circumstances which produce
the cooked meal - notably the existence of people in particular relationships to oneself - that excites
thankfulness before Dawan.46
While relations with Dawan are represented in terms of unconditional gratitude, those with the
dawanka - Duwindu, Merry Maid, and so on - are understood in terms of amorality, for while
Dawan’s bounty is invariably given to ‘the good’, scarcity and misfortune often being rationalised in
terms of ‘sin’ and the ‘worthless’ behaviour of ‘the bad’. The favours of the dawanka on the other
hand seem to be given out almost at random with little regard to the ‘goodness’ of the beneficiaries.
Dawanka are thus seen to be almost capricious in their relations with humans, and most certainly
amoral insofar as it is they who are responsible for the good fortune enjoyed by ‘the bad’.
Not only do dawanka frequently privilege the undeserving; often, villagers intimate, the undeserving
approach dawanka seeking advantage in a variety of ways. Particularly powerful dawanka such as
Duwindu and Sisin Dawanka can offer individuals wealth, fortune with members of the opposite sex,
misfortune to enemies and so on. In the case of Sisin Dawanka, I was told, the supplicant only has to
approach a cotton-tree in which he is supposed to reside and a door in the tree will open to admit him
or her, at which point negotiations (deal takaia) begin. The dawanka may grant the supplicant a
major request but usually demands a price. For example, he may grant the supplicant his or her wish
42
For example, Brightman (1993: 103-135). 43
Children who play around inappropriately with their plates are sternly told:'Respect your food!', while villagers finishing their meal invariably say out loud: 'Tingki, Dawan!' ('Thank you, God!') 44
Dawan, equated with the Christian God, is male. 45
Upan is a category encompassing meat and fish. Breadkind or tama includes root crops,
breadfruit, bananas and plantains. Kakabila people sometimes say, 'Upan apu, plun apu' ('No upan
is no food'), meaning that a meal without meat or fish is no real meal. 46
The gift of cooked food implies a closer relationship (usually one of consanguineal kinship, close
affinity, or compadrazgo) than a gift of raw foodstuffs.
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Gandhi’s Dream of Hindu-Muslim Unity and its two Offshoots in the Middle East Simone Panter-Brick Independent scholar
http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology.journal/vol16/iss2/panter-brick.pdf Abstract This article is a historical exploration of some of Gandhi’s attempts to unite the Hindu and Muslim
populations of India, as well as his political experiments with non-violent resistance. It provides an
outline of the period beginning from his first campaign in South Africa to the eve of the Second
World War. In light of Gandhi’s dream to unite Muslims and Hindus, his defiance to British
imperialism, and the results of his political struggles, it presents aspects of the Mahatma’s political
maneuvering that remain largely unknown until this day – a secret episode still shrouded in mystery.
His intervention in the Arab-Israeli conflict in Palestine has been kept a carefully guarded secret,
decades after Gandhi’s assassination. Within the historical and political timeline of Gandhi’s
political actions, within and outside India, this article analyses the conditions that led him to
intervene in Palestinian affairs, his expectations thereof, and the outcomes of his endeavours.
Keywords: Satytagraha, India, Palestine, Hindu-Muslim unity, Arab-Israeli conflict
Introduction
Mahatma Gandhi aspired to represent all his fellow-countrymen, Muslims no less than Hindus. This
he had achieved in South Africa. It was also in South Africa that he firstly experimented with non-
violent resistance, to which he gave the name of satyagraha. On his return to India (1915), he sought
Hindu-Muslim unity on an all-India scale. He was initially successful in winning Muslim support by
backing and leading the movement for the maintenance of the Ottoman Caliphate (Panter-Brick
2008a). This interference in the affairs of the Middle East was the first incidental offshoot of
Gandhi’s dream. He became involved in the Palestinian conflict in 1937, when approached by the
Jewish Agency in Jerusalem for his support. His involvement was kept secret and did not bear fruit:
success could not be achieved without the Muslims of India, who so heavily outnumbered their
Muslim brothers in Palestine. Moreover, the political environment in India and Palestine was not
conducive to the realization of his dream.
This article reviews the nature and scope of the Mahatma’s original vision, which aimed to achieve a
common Hindu-Muslim cause by means of political resistance against British imperialism. This
vision was a dream that turned into a nightmare in March 1940, when the Muslim League adopted
the so-called ‘Pakistan resolution’. Hindu-Muslim unity remained elusive and Gandhi had to
renounce his ambition to represent Muslim India. Non-violence, however, became under his
leadership a formidable political weapon, well-rooted in a series of prolonged experiments in South
Africa and in India. He never visited the Middle East, but was nevertheless drawn into Palestinian
politics, on one occasion to help the Muslim cause, on another to respond positively to an approach
from the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem.
South Africa, India, and Palestine - each of these countries in turn - saw the development of his
experiments in Hindu-Muslim unity. Four distinctive phases mark the unfolding of the dream.
Firstly, Gandhi led a campaign in South Africa on the behalf of the Indian community, Hindus and
Muslims alike (1906-1914). Secondly, the campaign organized by Gandhi for the sake of the
Caliph’s jurisdiction over Jerusalem grew into a joint Hindu-Muslim campaign on an all-India scale
(1919-1922) – thereby catapulting the Mahatma to the head of the main political party, the Indian
National Congress. Thirdly, the nightmare of the Hindu-Muslim tensions grew unremittingly over
the years, with the expansion of the Muslim League and Jinnah’s meteoric ascendancy as its
president (emulating that of Gandhi twenty years previously). Finally, Gandhi’s quest for Hindu-
Muslim unity underlay his discreet involvement in Palestinian politics in 1937.
Scope and nature of Gandhian resistance
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) forged his new weapon of political resistance in a century of
unstoppable arms race and extensive killing fields. He offered this mode of action, not simply as an
alternative to violence, but as an efficient method of resistance. From the age of 37 to the end of his
life, Gandhi was actively engaged in political campaigns, either against repressive legislation or
against British dominance over India. Except for intervals as short as four to six years between four
campaigns of non-violence, he was devotedly preparing or leading non-violent resistance, or being
jailed as a result. He achieved some of his ambitions, notably in South Africa, with the repeal of the
Asiatic Registration Act of 1906 and of the Immigration Act of 1907, and also in India, with the
emancipation from British rule. However, he made no impact in Palestine.
Non-violent resistance as an experiment in politics
Gandhi was not a political theorist. He was a man of action, not of words (although the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi fill one hundred heavy volumes). In so far as there is a theory of non-
violence, it is an ex post facto formulation, a reflection on practice. It was in South Africa that
Gandhi’s first foray into a political campaign of resistance took place, with little inkling of the future
scope of that experiment.
He ploughed his own way with the help of his ‘inner voice’, in a way that had to adhere to truth and
non-violence, since ‘God is Love and Truth’ (Gandhi’s well-known definition: see Panter-Brick
1963, chapter 1). He was led by intuition, by courage and determination, and by political astuteness.
However, he soon realized the originality of his method of resistance. When people referred to it as
passive resistance, this struck him as a misnomer. Passivity, he rejected. His was not the weapon of
the weak, but that of the strong, not of the coward, but of the brave, not of hatred, but of respect for
the adversary, not of harmful design, but of love. He coined the word satyagraha, meaning
adherence to truth. It is generally translated as non-violence.
Satyagraha as a sequence of experiments
Upon his return to India, Gandhi continued to experiment. He made one ‘experiment’ after another,
applying the lessons of the preceding experience to the next. Indeed this was the way he looked at
Why and how did he intervene? He did it for the sake of Indian Muslims only: “If I were not
interested in the Indian Mohammedans, I would not interest myself in the welfare of the Turks any
more than I am in that of the Austrians or the Poles.” (Shimoni 1977, p.25) Muslims from other
countries were far less vocal and concerned by the fate of the Caliph. Many Muslim subjects of the
Ottoman Empire in the Middle East were either in a state of revolt, or in a state of relief for escaping
the draft into the Ottoman army. Indian Muslims did not see it that way. The brothers Mohammed
and Shaukat Ali, took the lead of a powerful agitation, whipped up by ulemas and maulanas in
villages and towns, organizing khilafatist committees and conferences. One Indian deputation went
to the Viceroy, one to the British Prime Minister, to no avail. Muslims then turned to Gandhi’s
weapon of resistance. They knew about his success in South Africa. When he offered to lead them
into non-violent resistance in exchange for their non-violence, they agreed to promote his strategy
and follow his instructions. It was thus that Gandhi launched a non-violent movement, a new
experiment of satyagraha on an all-Indian scale, for the sake of Hindu-Muslim unity in 1920.
Unity sealed at Nagpur (December 1920)
The non-violent campaign entailed a policy of non-cooperation with the British Raj (rule), over a
wide range of activities – boycotting, to start with, elections, courts and schools. Without waiting for
Hindus to join, Gandhi launched the Non-cooperation movement in August 1920, before asking for
the still questionable endorsement by the Indian National Congress. The largest and predominantly
Hindu party had to be persuaded to fight for the sake of the Caliphate. Two sessions of the Congress,
in Calcutta (September 1920) and Nagpur (December 1920), were necessary to adopt non-violent
resistance and the leadership of the Mahatma. Martial law in the Punjab and the Jallianwalla Bagh
massacre helped the Congress to make up his mind to join the Muslim fight. Moreover, Gandhi
warned that another opportunity, for Hindus and Muslims to join hands, would not reoccur before
‘one hundred years’ (Choudhury 1985, p.25) and promised ‘swaraj (independence) in one year’, an
irresistible bait.
Hindus having joined the movement with Gandhi at its head, the British Government was faced with
the biggest threat to its rule since the Indian Mutiny in 1857. As argued in Gandhi and the Middle East: “Palestine proved to be the unlikely platform on which Mahatma Gandhi was to build his
political power in India itself” (Panter-Brick 2008b).
Indian unity defeated by the Turks (March 1924)
Gandhi’s imprisonment in 1922 put an end to his concern for the holy places. He was arrested after
he unexpectedly suspended the Non-cooperation campaign, as it was about to enter active resistance,
following the murder of policemen in the village of Chauri-Chaura. The movement was never
resumed. The movement was deflated. The Turks buried the Caliphate issue shortly after Gandhi was
released from prison in 1924. They established a secular state, ending the Ottoman Empire and
Caliphate – an abolition the Indian khilafatists refused to endorse.
Hindu-Muslim unity never recovered its strength and became elusive in spite of Gandhi’s continued
efforts. Communal riots increased. However, from this experiment, Gandhi and Congress gained a
strong arabophile profile. Jawaharlal Nehru, in charge of the party’s foreign policy, stood out as a
convinced partisan of Arab nationalism in Palestine. “The Arab struggle against British Imperialism
is as much part of this great world conflict as India’s struggle for freedom.”60
As for Gandhi, after
60
Quoted from Nehru’s presidential address at Faizpur in December 1936, cited in Zaidi (1987), vol.3 (period 1928-38).
mediation in Palestinian affairs. He required the presence of six people, not only that of his
friends Kallenbach67
and Andrews and the assistance of his two secretaries Mahadev Desai
and Pyarelal, but also invited two Jewish personalities to attend. One was the editor of the
official organ of the Bombay Zionist Association and the other, from Tel-Aviv, was
collecting funds in India on behalf of the Jewish Agency.
Nothing transpired of the secret meeting, except that this was the end of the Palestinian road for
Gandhi. Shohet, the Indian Zionist attending the meeting, wrote accordingly to Epstein, his contact
in the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem on 24 March 1939: “He (Gandhi) has
been frank about the part the Muslims play in the question, though it is evident he will not say
anything about it even in the minutes of a private interview” (Shimoni 1977, p.51).
Without the weight of the seventy million Indian Muslims, Gandhi could not achieve his ambitions
in the Middle East. The Mahatma’s dream of Hindu-Muslim unity faded away with the creation of
Pakistan and the civil wars in Palestine.
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In Western African communities such as those of the Fon in Niger, the Dogon in Mali, and the
Shilak in Nigeria, people go into trance by dancing to worship their gods, control the dangerous
forces of nature and call down divine power into themselves. On occasion such a dance in West
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appears that for West Africans76
trance – dance is a very important mechanism which “gives
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function of trance has been observed in various traditional societies like in the Lapps’ shamanistic
rites – where magic drums are again important for inducing trance states (Hultkrantz, 1955) – or for
trance in Bali (Holt and Bateson, 1944).
To believe that non-Western dance represents earlier stages of Western dance is like falling into the
trap to think that modern non-Western peoples represent earlier stages of Western cultural evolution.
Nevertheless, it appears that youngsters in psychedelic trance parties do actually experience what we
call altered states of consciousness, that is experiences that seem to transcend our usual conception
of ourselves77, and can therefore be interpreted as mystical. This is suggested by participants who
often experience hallucinations or synesthesia,78
which is the capacity to experience sensations of
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such experiences are the effects of the drugs young people use and thus reduce such parties to an
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. What we
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modern psychedelic trance subcultures, the use of drugs like cannabis, LSD, ‘magic’ mushrooms and
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76
For an ethnographic account of these groups see Mercel Griaule (1965) for the Dogon; Gilbert Rouget (1985) for the
Fon and the Shilak; and Jean Rouch's ethnographic film Les maitres fous (1955) on the Fon. Lewis, I. in Ecstatic Religion (1989) refers to the Yoruba of Nigeria for similar functions of trance states. 77
For a more detailed description of transcendental states see Neher, 1980. 78
In regard to synaesthesia, Neher suggests that hereditary mechanisms may be important factors in creating it (Neher,
1980:9). 79
Interestingly, De Rios sites Wasson and Wasson (1957) who have argued that “hallucinogenic use is a major factor in
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152). She also refers to Levi-Strauss (1970) who has shown the distribution of American Indian use of psychotropic
mushrooms outside of Mexico to include California Indians, Salish, Kwakiutl, Menomini, Blackfoot, Omaha, Iroquois,
Gé, Mundurucù, Yurimagua, Tukuna, Jicarill Apache, and the Argentine Toba (De Rios, 1974: 151). De Rios herself, in
her article writing about the religion of the Mayas suggests that the particular substances of psychotropic Flora and Fauna
“may have influenced their world view” (Ibid.:148). 80
Mescaline is the synthetic of the peyote cactus which is used among North and South American Indians as a means to
make contact with the spirit world. In Mesoamerica it has been used for more than two thousand years (Barfield, 1997:
132). 81
I am not trying to equate the use of psychotropic substances in different historical, social and cultural situations; rather
I am implying that whereas the activity is to a certain extent the same it is invested by different meanings, and has
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Kapferer, Bruce, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (eds). 2009. Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Reviewed by Julian Kotze Durham University
Edited by two social anthropologists of wide international experience, this book explores the realities
of state power as expressed in war and war zones.
The authors selected by the editors are clearly experts in their specific fields, and, taken collectively,
their works present a disturbing overview of the social impact of war on combatants and non-
combatants alike: they present the reader with depths of analysis which not only impress, but also
assist in unraveling the very complex social conundrum of the relationship between war and
sovereign power. The three sections that this collection encompasses thus offer the reader well-
balanced and comprehensive insights into the topic of conflict; and of the social implications that
ensue during events of crisis and confrontation. The interaction, relationships and cultural rationale
of agents and players, behavior patterns in the field of conflict, is the theme that runs though the
journal articles in this edited book.
Using a diversity of examples, the first section, Transformations of Sovereignty, Empire, State,
covers three issues that can be seen as global manifestations of the phenomenon: the military, state
and market forces that inform and maintain conflict, and which in turn shape the distributions of
political power. The second section, War Zone, describes destabilization in the war zone itself, as a
reality that is experienced by citizens, and as a manifestation of political thinking within a specific
country, Uganda. Detailed analyses of social behavior by the three contributors, gives this section an
additional value for country specialists as well as war researchers. In the third and last section,
Sovereign Logics, political contexts, and interpretations of military action in a number of countries,
are used to explore the dynamics of conflict and violence, and the effect this has on collective
attitudes within the countries affected.
Kapferer and Bertelsen’s introduction states that the purpose of the essays is to explore the
“situations of civil strife, violent resistance and war in the circumstances of shifts in the organisation
of state power and the emerging of new forms of sovereignty.” They locate this focus on specific
states and their powers within the larger arena of the political and economic actions of whole spectra
of social actors. And argue that:
In our usage, the state is a political order or politics machine that is distinguished by a totalizing dynamic whereby it (its agents, agencies and instructions) creates or