How Sweet The Sound

2010.09.11
Days Remaining: 262

1. I just watched (via the magic that is Netflix) the film Amazing Grace, starring Ioan Gruffudd as William Wilberforce, the Evangelical Christian Member of Parliament who spearheaded the effort to abolish the British slave trade, and eventually slavery itself in the British Empire. It took him from 1787 to 1833 to achieve this. The film was enjoyable though it, like so many entertainment-focused biopics, is not particularly historically accurate. What struck me forcefully was the way in which Wilberforce's religion and overall political conservatism were referred to obliquely and downplayed (one almost had to know about these things beforehand in order to catch them as they occurred in the film). In fact, religiously-framed concerns were some of the main forces that initiated and energized the British abolitionists (the first petition to abolish the slave trade was presented to Parliament by Quakers), but you wouldn't know that from the film. Is this because we in the 21st century already "know" that Christianity, a full and active engagement with Christianity, is inimical to social reform? That we simply can't register any evidence to the contrary? I have been thinking about this for a few days now, after Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial and the attempts by some conservatives to align MLK, Jr.'s actions with their own. I have heard various liberal commentators aghast at this. What is fascinating to me is that few liberals have talked much about how Beck's focus on piety and religious behaviors is strongly aligned with MLK, Jr.'s own reliance upon scriptural references and a deeply held faith in human betterment as a specifically Christian responsibility (though my understanding is that MLK, Jr. did not imply that this was only achievable through Christianity - oh, the lost ecumenicism of the mid-20th Century). This strikes me as an impoverishment in our political conversations; I'm not nostalgic for religious participation, but I am frustrated to see how we unconsciously assume that evangelical (and related) types of Christianity are inherently conservative. This parallels the surprise that I've heard from people who hear about Ultra-Orthodox Jews who are opposed to Zionism; we already know the way that very observant religious people ought to feel, behave, etc.

2. Today has been pretty quiet once more. I had a very interesting email from a student who was concerned with some of the things we had read, especially an essay on who has the right to make claims about Native American religions. This is a vexed question in the field, and one which I personally manage to sidestep by usually studying dead people who can't argue back. She was earnestly concerned about whether, or how, a non-Native could study (for instance) a particular group's version of the Thirst Dance (more commonly known as the Sun Dance) and whether a non-Native could ever really understand what that was all about. This is a good question, but I worry that we are, as a culture, moving away from a theoretical commitment to translatability and commensurability in general to a way of imagining human groups as somehow not overlapping in important ways. I suppose it's a dialectic of sorts; the past universalisms in the study of human society were inherently flawed because they assumed that Euro-American cultural assumptions were "normal" and evaluated everyone else in those terms (e.g., "not a monotheist? You are superstitious and less civilized than me.").

3. That sort of narcissistic faux-universalism was justly and incisively critiqued starting in the 40s and 50s (though it took off in a major way in the academy only in the 60s and 70s, a little behind the dissolution of the British Empire in tandem with the death throes of colonialism in general). The pendulum swung away from it, and we saw the rise of group-specific claims of essentialism (a random example of how pervasive these new assumptions are: the often recurring idea of Ebonics as a "natural" way that persons of African descent speak). I'm not a fan of the fallen universalism of the 19th and 20th centuries, but neither do I like the idea of inherent mutual unintelligibility between cultures and subcultures. So what is one to do?

4. My way of thinking about this is to recognize that the fallen universalism was flawed because it confused the individual for the species: Euro-American culture was felt to be a standard, and all other cultures were measured against it. Faced with new data that didn't make sense, scholars would record (without any sort of nuance or incisiveness - I'm wildly generalizing here for rhetorical efficiency, of course) "native" perspectives, but they only asked the sorts of questions they assumed "natives" would be able to answer, and never asked the sorts of questions that they might have asked of themselves or each other if it were a "non-native" event. Then they would tell us what the natives were really doing, assuming that it couldn't be anything as sophisticated, etc. as what Europeans and/or Americans would do. Far, far better to start with the assumption (and it is an assumption, but one that can be tested and which has held up to that testing so far) that human beings have a lot in common, but are not simply identical with one another. So if you don't assume that your objects of study are a) primitive, b) childlike, c) pre-political, d) morons, e) gross, we suddenly discover that they actually do a lot of things that sound like us, but not in exactly the same way as us. Those differences are what I would call "culture," and are discernible if one pays attention to the actual people involved, and not to the theoretical "natives" of colonial-era imagination.

5. Better still, we can ground those similarities and differences in the one fact that we all share: bodies. There's a very interesting approach in the study of religion that makes bodied-ness central to any understanding of what's going on. As Kurt Vonnegut has said (in a commencement speech), our bodies are our first and best tools. I'd push that and say that they are the source of how we perceive and imagine the world (if those are two different things). And since our bodies are 99.999% identical within the species (and 99.9% between us and chimpanzees and bonobos) we probably have an awful lot in common. That doesn't dissolve difference, but it does put the degrees of difference in perspective. They're often tremendously important, but I have never seen one that is inherently insurmountable. I may disagree with someone violently, but I can often figure out where they're coming from. It just takes work. It takes respect (I can't simply assume that someone else is just like me, nor can I assume that we're completely different) and it takes a commitment to the other person's or people's individuality within the context of our shared species. The question that I will always wonder about is how it will work when we meet another species as intelligent and language-using as ourselves. Then we're likely to see some real issues of translation.