David Chidester

American sacred space

1. Introduction, by David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal 2. Dirt in the Courtroom: Indian Land Claims and American OProperty Rights,O by Robert S. Michaelsen 3. Resacralizing Earth: Pagan Environmentalism and the Restoration of Turtle Island, by Bron Taylor 4. OAlexanders AllO: Symbols of Conquest and Resistance at Mount Rushmore, by Matthew Glass 5. Creating the Christian Home: Home schooling in Contemporary America, by Colleen McDannell 6. Locating Holocaust Memory: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, by Edward T. Linenthal 7. OA Big Wind Blew Up During the NightO: America as Sacred Space in South Africa, by David Chidester 8. American Sacred Space and the contest of History, by Rowland A. Sherrill

Religion Education in South Africa: Teaching and Learning About Religion, Religions, and Religious Diversity

South Africa is in the process of introducing a new curriculum for religion education with aims which are clearly educational rather than religious. This is taking place within the context of a Constitution which safeguards human rights and forbids discrimination on religious grounds, thus ruling out any form of ‘privileged’ religious education. The article traces the history of religious education in South Africa and the processes involved in arriving at the new curriculum proposals. It also charts the opposition to these proposals by a number of Christian groups, most of which wish to see the privileged position of Christianity maintained. It insists, however, that the new proposals are the best way forward for religion education in South Africas schools.

Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa

Preface 1. Going Wild 2. Mapping the Sacred 3. Violence 4. Fundamentalisms 5. Heritage 6. Dreamscapes 7. Purity 8. Power 9. World Cup 10. Staying Wild Notes Index

Zulu dreamscapes: senses, media, and authentication in contemporary neo-shamanism

ABSTRACT Reinterpreting indigenous traditions under globalizing conditions, Zulu neo-shamans have developed new religious discourses and practices for engaging dreams, visions, and extraordinary spiritual experiences. Dreams, which we might assume are immaterial, are interpreted through the senses, electronic media, and material entailments that require embodied practices of sacrificial exchange and ancestral orientation. Accordingly, in Zulu neo-shamanism, dreams become the embodied, sensory basis for a material religion. That embodied religion, however, has been radically globalized through electronic media. Considering the case of the Zulu shaman, Credo Mutwa, we find that this material religion has entailed the sensory extravagance of extreme pleasure in eating and the extreme pain of being abducted by aliens from outer space. Sensory derangement and global mediation merge in Credo Mutwas vivid accounts of his encounters with extraterrestrials that circulate through videos, DVDs, and the Internet. While Credo Mutwa has been globalizing the material religion of dreams, other neo-shamans, including white South African expatriates such as the surgeon David Cumes and the singer Ann Mortifee, have followed the path of dreams to come home to the indigenous authenticity of Zulu religion. Whether dreaming of global exchanges or local homecomings, these Zulu neo-shamans regard the human sensorium and electronic media as crucial registers of indigenous religion because senses and media set the limits, evoke the potential, and provide validation for spiritual authenticity.

Stealing the sacred symbols: Biblical interpretation in the peoples temple and the unification church

Perceptions of danger result not only from fear of defilement, but also from competing claims to the ownership of central symbols by forces on the periphery of a society. This article examines two peripheral movements often perceived as dangerous in American society during the 1970s—the Unification Church and the Peoples Temple—by concentrating on their appropriations and interpretations of one central complex of symbols: the Bible. Biblical interpretation is investigated as a strategic attempt to underwrite the legitimacy of acts of appropriation; issues of meaning serve more basic interests in ownership of the power of symbols. Four issues in biblical interpretation are explored. First, in establishing the nature of the text, the Unification Church appropriated the Bible as an open canon requiring closure, while the Peoples Temple claimed it as a closed canon requiring erasure. Second, in appropriating the texts beginning, the Unification Church claimed the primordial garden as a pattern to restore, while the Peoples Temple claimed it as a prison to escape. Third, in appropriating the texts end, both movements claimed to play a central role in the eschatological battle between good and evil, but the Unification Church identified evil in satanic communism, while the Peoples Temple identified it as antichrist capitalism. Finally, both movements can be located as interpretive communities in America of the 1970s. The Unification Church was engaged in a strategic recentering of civil and biblical symbols in order to claim a place in American civil space, while the Peoples Temple was undertaking a strategic decentering of civil and biblical symbols in order to configure an alienation from American society. That conflict of symbols revealed the ambivalence of appropriation and alienation that operates in religion. In this regard, religion may be redefined as the cultural process of stealing back and forth sacred symbols.

Haptics of the heart: The sense of touch in American religion and culture

This essay undertakes a tactile exploration of the sense of touch in contemporary American culture and religion. After briefly recalling the denigration of tactility in Western thought, I consider the usefulness of the work of two theorists, Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin, in recovering the sense of touch—the intimate caress, the violent shock—as deep background for tracking basic modes of religious tactility. By paying attention to sensory media and metaphors, I hope to suggest some features of religious tactility that are not necessarily seen or heard but nevertheless pervade contemporary religion and culture. Schematically, I proceed from cutaneous binding and burning, through kinaesthetic moving, to haptic handling in order to enter this field of tactile meaning and power. Along the way, I touch on specific cases of religious tactility—sometimes caressing, more often striking—that include US President Bill Clinton, firewalking, flag burning, alien abduction, global capitalism, and cellular microbiology. Although this exploratory essay replicates a tactile experience by renouncing visual mapping and verbal argumentation, it points to the presence of a tactile politics of perception that operates at the intersections between human subjectivity and the social collectivity.

Colonialism and religion

As critical research on religion, the study of colonialism and religion directs attention to religious creativity within the asymmetrical power relations of contact zones, intercultural relations, and diasporic circulations. Taking the imperial ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics as a point of departure, this article recalls how the drama of the colonizing Prospero and the colonized Caliban has been a template for analyzing religion under colonial conditions. Like Shakespeare’s enchanted isle, colonizing and colonized religion have been shaped by oceans, with the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds emerging as crucial units of analysis. As a contribution to a symposium on critical approaches to the study of religion, this article indicates some of the important landmarks, sea changes, and analytical possibilities in the study of colonialism and religion.

Christianity in South Africa : an annotated bibliography

Preface Christianity in South Africa Christian Missions Christian Denominations African Initiated Churches Index

The accidental, ambivalent, and useless sacred

Since we are in conversation, I take the liberty of recalling a conversation from January 2013 in Cape Town. At a festive gathering of collaborators on the project, Heritage Dynamics (2011), Irene Stengs inspired us to incorporate Cultural Waste Management, a company staffed by over-qualified heritage consultants, operating under the slogan, “Don’t Waste the Future, Clean Up Your Past!” Cultural Waste Management offers the following services: Memory Cleansing, Identity Recycling, Afterlife Management, and Sacred Waste Disposal. By continuing that conversation, Irene Stengs has given us here a compelling profile of sacred waste. As the old saying goes, “Waste not, want not.” What? What could that folk wisdom possibly mean? My doctoral supervisor, the late and great W. Richard Comstock, was fond of observing the ways in which folk wisdom contains aphorisms that cancel each other out, because it urges us to be early birds catching worms, while also admonishing that all work and no play makes us dull. We cannot possibly understand waste and want, the magnitude of leftovers and uses, surpluses and desires, without engaging what Irene Stengs identifies as sacred waste. The sacred, that which is set apart, but set apart at the center of social relations, can be regarded as framing what people, adhering to the sacred, hold onto in negotiating their relationships with the sacred. The rest they can throw away. But what if there is no away? If there is no place that is away, how could anyone ever throw anything away, let alone deal with the dilemmas of sacred waste that can be neither kept nor discarded? These are profound questions. Here I can only highlight what I regard as three important features of sacred waste: its accidental production, its ambivalent valence, and its uselessness in any political economy of the sacred. Sacred waste is produced by accident. This accidental mode of producing the sacred is a contradiction of terms, an impossibility if we follow the account of the ritual production of the sacred pioneered by Jonathan Z. Smith, because the sacred is produced by factoring out all accidents, creating a perfect pattern of action in which all variables, contingencies, and accidents are controlled (Smith 1982: 63). Sacred waste, however, is produced out of such accidents as a tree falling down, a book growing old, a bunch of flowers fading, or ceremonial gifts being abandoned. Full of sacred aura, these accidental bearers of the sacred are out of control. In some cases, ritual protocols might be developed to contain these accidents, putting them in their place, disposing of them in some prescribed manner, but the accidental production of sacred waste remains a problem for any system of ritual order. As precarious matter, sacred waste carries an ambivalent electricity—highly charged, negatively charged—recalling the account of the sacred provided by the unconventional Durkheimian Roger Caillois, who argued that the sacred was not merely the opposite of the profane but an efficacious force that is “contagious, fleeting, ambiguous, and virulent” (2001 [1939]: 139). As Stengs observes, ritual procedures might be developed to neutralize the hazardous energy of sacred waste, but Caillois saw such rituals operating not at the margins but at the center of religious practice, David Chidester is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (ICRSA) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His publications include Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (University of Virginia Press, 1996), Christianity: A Global History (Penguin, 2000), Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Indiana University Press, revised edition 2003), Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2005), Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa (University of California Press, 2012), and Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA

Against the background of defining, theorizing, humanizing, nationalizing, and globalizing religion in South Africa, this essay recalls the diverse ways in which religious fundamentalism has registered in South Africa as an ‘inauthentic’ claim on religious authenticity. Tracking academic and media attention to religious fundamentalism at ten-year intervals, we find Christian fundamentalism appearing during the 1970s as contrary to the apartheid state, during the 1980s as legitimating the apartheid state, and during the 1990s as resisting the new democratic dispensation. By the 1990s, however, attention to religious fundamentalism, locally and globally, shifted to focus on varieties of politicized Islam. As this brief historical review suggests, the term, ‘fundamentalism,’ whether applied to Jesus People in Johannesburg during the 1970s or People Against Gangsterism and Drugs during the 1990s, has been a recurring but shifting sign of a crisis of authenticity. In conclusion, South African perspectives on religion, the state, and authenticity can be drawn into analyzing the current crisis of fundamentalism in our rapidly globalizing and increasingly polarized world.