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Postcolonial and Subaltern Rethinking of Critical Religion

17 Saturday Sep 2016

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The early 20th century formulations of Indian identity involved using the constructions of specific understandings of religion, and gender. Critical Religion (CR) has provided a crucial methodology to understand the workings of these ideological operators in identity formation within such colonial contexts. In this line, CR has rightly shown that constructions of religion/secular, sacred/profane dichotomies enabled the legitimisation of hegemonic colonial discourses. It is crucial for us to look at the question of ‘how’ these appropriations were carried out by the colonised.

Historical archives show conflicting and complex narratives on the indigenous understandings and usage of religion both as an ideological category and as a term. For instance, the archives show that South Indian nationalists often used the terms religion, sacred, secular, science, and profane in their discourses on Hindu/Indian identity. Much as these terms were appropriated, they were not necessarily used as the colonial narratives intended. Thus, whilst secular was criticised as modern, modern here meant materialistic — that is pertaining to materiality such as corporeality (sex), objects (wealth), etc., and therefore, profane). Science was often seen as a ‘Western value’ that potentially contributed to materiality when it was not thoroughly grounded in spirituality as Hindu philosophy was. Sometimes, science was cast aside as ‘not Indian’ . This understanding shifted when science was used to define Hinduism as superior to Western society. Science when grounded in Hindu philosophy was understood as a body of knowledge. Other times nationalists quoted medical knowledge from the ancient texts (for example, Ayurveda and the Vedas) to show that science was embedded in Hindu philosophy.

Thus, Indian nationalistic discourses used the language (terms and categories) of the colonisers to beat them at their own game, as it were. For CR, semantics are important for our understandings of these discourses, but nationalists’ mere use of these terms should not be seen as their adoption of a colonial, Christian understanding of these categories. The nationalists indeed used these terms religion, secular, science, and materialism in some instances that pointed to a colonial understanding of these categories. However, there were other complex ways in which these terms were used. As we can see from the examples give above, these terms had multiple meanings depending on the contexts within which they were used. These also transformed depending on who the discourses were aimed at, whether the colonisers or the subaltern groups. For instance, the regional linguistic nationalism that was a subaltern counter-movement to the hegemonic Indian nationalist movements in South India often advocated the importance of rejection of religion, and embracing science as the objective method of understanding human nature. Strongly grounded in Enlightenment values, these movements, whilst rejecting ‘Hinduism’ as a brahmanical religion, did not reject other faiths because their primarily objective was to hoist a counter-argument to what they saw as brahmanical hegemony. Arguably, the agenda of these movements swayed the way these ideological terms and categories were used.

This emphasizes the fact that we cannot assume that appropriation of the colonial categories were homogenous. We must delve deeper into these movements to provide a contextualized understanding of identity formations. Deconstructing ideological categories and to do away with them might clear the discourses of modernity clouding our understandings of historical, colonial developments. But it does not fully provide a postcolonial subaltern understanding of historical indigenous discourses. To put it simply, the question should not only be whether the term religion was used, and where they learned the term, it is to also ask how the term was used. To not take that into account is to make the mistake of succumbing to the orientalist discourse of a pre-Christian indigenous era when religion and secular were one and the same, and a Christian/colonial indigenous era where these distinctions were introduced, which the nationalists appropriated. This, then, would be a good example of Aditya Nigam argues as a postcoloniality that is an echo of modernity. If we look at the regional anti-colonial discourses, it is obvious that the indigenous nationalists had more agency than that. Subaltern Studies stands as a testimony to it. Perhaps, I should make a point very clear: I am not suggesting that we should abandon Critical Religion (and given the space this blog post is published in, that would be rather ironic!). But, if we are to provide a historical postcolonial subaltern understanding of religion, then we must move beyond (as in, add to) the scope of Critical Religion to listen when the said subaltern speaks. We now have two issues at hand: a) how do we understand the heterogeneity of anti-colonial, and nationalistic discourses; b) how do we listen when the subaltern engages with these heterogenous anti-colonial, and nationalist discourses?

In an article soon to be published by Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, I have attempted to answer the first question using Dipesh Chakrabarty’s now famous theorisation of histories. Chakrabarty theorises History 1 as the ‘universal history of capital’ that abstracts labor as a function that is removed from its contexts, and Histor(ies) 2(s) as ‘numerous other tendencies . . . intimately intertwined with History 1 . . . to arrest the thrust of capital’s universal history and help it find a local ground’. At the outset, History 1 and Histor(ies) 2(s) can be seen as polar opposites that History 1 is the secular capital and Histor(ies) 2(s) are the indigenous traditions, i.e., religion. However, as Chakrabarty has shown, Histor(ies) 2(s) are present in History 1 in order for the capital to function; rituals invoking the divine, such as worshipping tools for weaving, etc. Thus, within these indigenous contexts, religion/secular categories, with the emergence of capitalism, does not function dichotomously. Rather the ‘religious’ is embedded in the secular to prevent a total takeover of the secular. However, this theorisation provides tools to understand only certain nationalistic discourses. For example, it points to the phenomenological aspects of orthopraxy. There are such multitude of hegemonic nationalistic discourses that need to be acknowledged to understand how colonial categories were appropriated. Moreover, we must also look at how subaltern groups engaged with these hegemonic discourses – both of the nationalists and the colonisers. After all, it is rather evident that the methodological tools used to understand the hegemonic nationalist discourses cannot be used to understand the engagement between the hegemonic and subaltern groups.

Michael Marten’s theorising of ‘religious alterity’ helps us to provide a better understanding of these discourses.* Discussing the missionary narratives in the Middle East in the early 20th century, Marten argues that the Protestant missionaries’ understood the native practices and faiths as an Otherness, an ‘alterity’, that was somehow ‘religious’ in a way. In other words, Protestant missionaries encountered practices and faiths that they saw as definitely ‘religious’, but understood them as an alterity, by Othering these native practices. Christian missionaries in the colonies were by no means postcolonial or subaltern. Nor were their understandings of indigenous faiths and beliefs. But as Marten argues, it is important to understand moments of Othering ‘whilst . . . hearing and respecting the language used by the individuals being discussed’. How does this work pertaining to the discourses of South Indian nationalists, and the subaltern groups? In using the colonial categories, South Indian nationalists were involved in two forms of Othering – a) towards the colonisers through consistent differentiation between their ‘superior Hinduism’, and the colonial ‘Western values’; b) towards the subaltern groups that challenged their hegemony — here the distinction was drawn between their version of Hinduism and that of the ‘degenerative’ versions of the Others. Within these forms of alterity, the nationalists used ‘religious’ in multitudinous ways some of which have been describe above. I acknowledge the risk of arguing that the nationalist discourses involved Othering the colonisers. At a fundamental level, this would be akin to making a case for ‘occidentalism’. That is certainly not what I am trying to do here. Rather, I am pointing to the indigenous nationalistic discourses that used similar, if not the same, language of alterity used by the colonisers (and the missionaries) to assert their position and agency in the domain of colonial politics. In doing so, they certainly indulged in ‘religious alterity’ with the subaltern groups. Acknowledging this would enable us listen to the language of the nationalists, and accept that they had more agency than what we admitted that they did. Acknowledging this would also provide us with a new methodology to listen to the ways in which subaltern groups responded to such alterity.

* Marten, Michael. “Missionary Interaction as Implicit Religion”. Presented at Implicit Religion conference, Salisbury, 2016. The author kindly shared this with me; I understand it is being prepared for publication.

In praise of messiness in writing history (Part II)

25 Monday Jun 2012

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Note that this is Part II of a two part blog entry.  Part I is available here, and should be read first.

Having discussed some examples of mission history in the Palestine context and pointed to ways of constructing knowledge of such histories, I want to explore some of the implications of using Law and Lin’s ideas:

We can see the knowing, knowing well, and knowing differently problematic very clearly when we add the term ‘transnational’ to our thinking about mission.  Of course, all missions were transnational by definition, but this has become a wonderfully trendy term in modern scholarship, and that almost automatically makes me somewhat suspicious of it.  It is perhaps problematic in this context because it presupposes that the people we are studying fit into a transnational context, and that this  term will automatically work when analysing their history.  It interests me, for example, that relatively few scholars who use the term seem to feel the need to define it, which I would argue is key to understanding what we are doing when we use it.  Not defining it means we are ignoring our own personal baggage in our writing, and after all, our historicisations are about precisely this: how do we study history, given that we live and operate in a particular context that is impinged upon by certain understandings of historicisation?

In part, I wonder if this is because we live in what is widely seen as a postcolonial, almost post-national-boundary-world (I should clarify that when I use ‘we’ I am thinking predominantly of Europeans, because that is my own privileged context; I can add that I identify as a white middle-class male which further adds to my societal privileges).  The European project, with all the faults it might have and the problems it is encountering at the moment, is dedicated to, in the very long term, diminishing the importance of national boundaries and moving towards a greater sense of cosmopolitanism, arising from the ashes of the devastation of Europe after World War Two.  In Rumina Sethi’s terms, this ‘decline of the nation’ is accompanied by a ‘corresponding expansion of the metaphor of marginalization’ which has ‘led to the embrace of concepts like diaspora, hybridity, difference and migrancy.’  All this is well and good, except that from a third world perspective – and contra the current fashion I think there is good reason to hold onto the ‘first’ and ‘third’ world concepts – these concepts ‘are all related to the growth of the global economy and have come to be seen in terms of new configurations of dominance.’  These are oriented along neoliberal, capitalist lines, and have included the co-option of postcolonial studies, originally intended as a liberatory practice, but blunted in Western academic circles, as Sethi cogently argues.  We can see this in the work of Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Spivak, to name just three well-known scholars I have used in recent years to explore issues related to missions.  Sethi argues – as I have done – that we cannot simply point to ambivalence (Bhabha) or sameness and difference (Chakrabarty) or particular understandings of reason (Spivak) to explain the world – what we need is a realistic exploration of ‘historically specific acts of resistance’ to avoid silencing the subaltern.  Hybridity and similar terms suggest that the third world is impacting in a meaningful way on the first world, and that the very real boundaries that exist – of global capital, gender, race, etc. – are being traversed, eroded even.  In an historically specific reading, we can see that this is not happening, and that it did not happen in such a clear cut way.

This is not to say that there was historically and is now no contact between the third world and the first world – there clearly was and is.  But the defining and re-defining of this contact is often taking place by the first world, and not the third world.  After all, we (see above!) are writing from the (relative) comfort of our first-world university contexts – and our first-world context has rarely spent much time asking questions like ‘how does this transnationalism look from (e.g.) Palestine?’  To make this point really drastically, we can see this in a contemporary context when we think of the shameful behaviour of Obama and other western leaders, paying obeisance to a 19th century ethnocentric imperial fantasy currently being implemented by Israel, whilst he and they seek to deride or co-opt the acts of popular resistance in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East.  Equally, when we think of some of the contact the missionaries had, we see a similar pattern – for example, Sloan’s lecture to Palestinian Jews about the possible good that might emerge from the murder of their co-religionists in Europe was clearly explained in his terms, and we do not know what they thought.  We might think here of Spivak’s subaltern that cannot speak – but I think her silent subaltern is, or has too often become, a convenient western neoliberal myth – the subaltern always speaks, as Robert Young has pointed out, it’s just that the dominant doesn’t listen.  Stefanie van de Peer, a recently graduated PhD student from my own department, put it very eloquently in her thesis, noting that rather than the subaltern not being able to speak,

It is more likely that as outsiders, we have become so used to defining ourselves as the non-Other, non-subaltern, that we cannot include the Other subaltern in our understanding… I argue that the insiders have learnt to represent themselves, not by finding a voice – because they always had a voice – but by finding a listener, a spectator… Whether the subaltern’s message is communicated effectively depends on the receptiveness of all parties involved in the speaker/listener relationship.  I insist on the presence of a willingness in the receiver of the message to hear the subject speaking, to listen, to empathise.

By claiming the subaltern cannot speak, we are excused even pretending to show we are interested in what she is saying.  The subaltern may be criticising in words, in silence or in action what the dominant is doing, and she may be doing that very cogently in her own terms, but the dominant chooses to ignore her.  The danger with the language of transnationalism is that we ignore the voice of the subaltern altogether, in a self-congratulatory assessment of our – and our historical subjects’ – cosmopolitanism.  After all, we assume that crossing boundaries is always good, but what if transnationalism, through the furtherance of knowledge amongst the dominant or those close to the dominant, increases the ability of the dominant first world to subjugate the third world more effectively?  Is transnationalism still good under such circumstances?

Questions that then arise include: ‘how do we listen?’ and ‘how do we make the transnational element of our historicising work in a way that doesn’t silence the subaltern?’  This, I think, connects closely to the need to differentiate between the kinds of knowledge we are talking about: knowing, knowing well, and knowing differently.  We can point to the ways in which the missionaries did this kind of thing, but in terms of how we study what they did, it is about recognising how we do it in our specific historicisations, oriented as they are by time, space, gender, race, class etc.  The metaphysics of knowledge that implies objectivity needs to be recognised for the ideological position that it is, and we need to subvert it, or rather, allow others from the past or the present to subvert it: the institutional nature of power and its ‘hegemonic truth practices’ need to be, at the very least, revisited.  And we need to move beyond particular subjectivities that supposedly create alterities that want to do away with the real life messiness of participants, not least because these subjectivities are often gendered or racialised (even if we don’t think we see this).

And this messiness is important.  For example, it is not always clear what is meant in mission history by ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ in other contexts, or by the adoption of western-style medicine over against traditional practices, or the export of nursing practice from western Florence Nightingale-style hospital contexts to settings in the Middle East or Africa or anywhere else.  There is a need to see the messiness for what it is – we don’t always understand the religion/secular issue, Western and traditional medicine have co-existed, Nightingale practice was not adapted to specific contexts even when it was claimed it was, and so on.  In terms of ‘my’ Scots in Palestine: they were not formally part of the dominant, but they came very close – but at times they also interceded on the part of the subaltern.  The subalterns communicated with the missionaries, even if the missionaries didn’t want to hear the message (finding a bomb in your garden, whatever else it might be, is definitely a message!).  We might ‘know’ all this, but knowing it well also means knowing it differently and encompassing a broader reality that requires all three forms of knowing simultaneously: sometimes there will be an interpretation, sometimes multiple interpretations, and sometimes – though as Western scholars we have great difficulty admitting this – no interpretations.  Though we might struggle with it, recognising the messiness of historicisation is of critical importance.

Challenging how we think about historicisation is key to the way in which we interpret and understand the complicity of those who were part of the dominant rather than the subaltern, or at the very least, were closer to the dominant than to the subaltern.  Historicising under these circumstances automatically becomes transnational when we begin to try and approach situations we encounter from our archives with a view to thinking about how the subaltern engaged in resistance to the dominant – because in part this was about the subaltern doing precisely what the dominant was seeking to do, but often they were not doing it on the dominant’s terms.  For many subaltern actors, they learnt about the dominant through their encounter, and resisted accordingly by using and remoulding what the dominant was offering: becoming nurses themselves, for example, and taking on responsibilities in the missionaries’ hospitals – knowing, knowing well, and knowing differently, is about understanding and interpreting this kind of subaltern agency, about listening to the subaltern speak.  That this is disconcerting to the dominant should not be a surprise – but is also necessary.

In praise of messiness in writing history (Part I)

30 Wednesday May 2012

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This is Part I of a two part blog entry.  Comments are closed here, but are open for Part II.

Scottish and Anglican missionaries in Palestine during the period from the First World War until the Israeli declaration of the state and the connected Palestinian Nakba of 1948 were determined, they continually argued, to stay out of the controversy and not take sides.  Palestine at this time was governed by Britain under a League of Nations mandate, with the theoretical aim of gradually enabling independence.  The growing Zionist movement and the resultant resistance of the local Palestinian Arab population characterised these years.  The missionaries’ job – to quote one of the missionaries of the time, George Sloan – was ‘to stand between Jew and Arab holding out a hand of friendship and brotherhood to each, seeking to draw each into fellowship and love with the other’.  For nearly three decades, the missionaries thought they could see arguments for both sides: for Jews, Palestine embodied the idea of an ancient homeland and relief from European persecution; for Arabs, there was a deep worry about losing their rights to their land to Zionists (even though the Scots doubted the Arabs’ ability to govern the country independently).  This idea of friendship to both sides was seen as core to Christian belief.  This was also expressed as ‘mutual toleration’ or ‘respect’ for ‘Muslim and Christian, Druse and Jew’.  Maria Småberg’s excellent doctoral thesis, published in 2005 by Lund University, describes the ‘ambivalent friendship’ of the Anglican church in Palestine at this time, and we can point to similar sentiments on the part of the Scottish missionaries.  In terms of theory and analysis, however, I would like to further develop some of her propositions.

Needless to say, the missionaries were rarely successful in their attempts to be ‘fair’ to both sides and to encourage friendship: at different times they were seen by both sides as extremely partial.  For example, some of the Jews in Hebron regarded Alexander Paterson, a missionary doctor, as an anti-Zionist.  Sloan felt himself to be in danger from what he called ‘Arab fanatics’ on at least two occasions, one of these involving a bomb being found in his garden.  In any case, many of their efforts to further ‘friendship’ were unsuccessful.  For example, a visit to Yemen gave Sloan the opportunity to see Jews and Arabs living alongside each peacefully, but when he published an article about this in the Palestine Post, it was prefaced with an editorial comment that it represented a minority view of the situation in Yemen, clearly suggesting it should be disregarded.  At other times, there was great wariness about Zionism, primarily because it was felt it might hinder the work of missionaries as well as make the position of any converts to Christianity from Judaism quite untenable, which was seen as a priority for the missionaries’ continued engagement.  At times this reached extreme forms, as this extract about Sloan from the 1943 General Assembly report of the Church of Scotland shows:

On one occasion he addressed in Hebrew a mass meeting of Jews in mourning for the slaughtered Jews of Europe.  After expressing the Church’s sympathy he went on “to make a challenging call to repentance in the style and partly in the very words of the Old Testament prophets.  This made a tremendous impression and the whole vast crowd listened in deep silence as I drove home to them the message.  I ended up by saying that if these calamities were the cause whereby there would be born again a new people of Israel, which would be in very truth a holy people, as God meant Israel to be, then the calamities would not have been in vain.  My address was widely reported in the Hebrew press next day.”

We might question, of course, the reason for the ‘deep silence’ of his audience, who may have resented somewhat the idea that the mass murder of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps could in any way be seen as a positive sign of God’s involvement with anyone.

In fact, the only space in which the Scots managed to achieve relative harmony and co-operation was in their own congregations, which consisted of a few Jewish converts mixed with Arab Christians – mostly ‘converts’ from the Greek Orthodox, Latin or other Eastern Churches (of course, as with other European missions, this did not make the Scots popular with their fellow Christians!).

It would be easy to dismiss the missionaries’ ideology of ‘friendship’ as naïve and unrealistic, but interpreting the engagement of the missionaries in such a complex situation as Palestine in the Mandate period in this way misses some key issues.

We can use contemporary educational theory, and in particular work carried out by John Law and Wen‐yuan Lin, to offer insights here.  They seek to integrate educational theory in postcolonial settings, reflecting on the differences between dominant and subaltern contexts.  I first came across their work through colleagues in the Critical Religion Research Group (A Jasper and J I’Anson) working on contemporary secondary school education, but it seems to me that this work can also be used in historical contexts.

Law and Lin point out that whilst subaltern contexts vary considerably, there is an overall stability to the Western legacy, which, thought not consistent or coherent, does reveal broad outlines that are similar.  In Mandate Palestine there is, of course, a dominant power – Britain – from whence the missionaries come, and they relate to various gradations of subalterneity in Palestine.  But the missionaries are also part of the subaltern, as I have shown in various publications.  Law and Lin identify the following key aspects to knowledge and communicating knowing from a broadly Western perspective of educational praxis:

  1. firstly, metaphysics: ‘The dominant Western knowledge traditions carry and reproduce a metaphysics that seeks to distinguish the world on the one hand from knowledge of that world on the other… in the Western scheme of things it is generally taken for granted that there is a world out there, a cosmos, that is ordered and structured… it is possible to gather knowledge about that world, to represent it, to debate the merits of different putative representations, and to arrive at provisional conclusions about its structure.’
  2. secondly, institutions: ‘Western knowledge traditions rest in and reproduce specific institutional arrangements.  These take many forms, and have changed profoundly since pre‐Socratic Greece…  Even so, for certain purposes the distinction between truth and power is sustained at least in rhetorical form, and this division is embedded in institutions… that reproduce and are reproduced by specific but hegemonic truth practices and their metaphysics, career structures, statuses, and systems for circulating knowledge.’
  3. thirdly, subjectivities: ‘… the Western tradition and its institutional arrangements also imply particular subjectivities.  Though breaches are legion, the normative expert is often taken to be [a] rational and intellectual subject who expresses truths about the world in symbolic form…  Competent subjects are thus those that reliably find out about and represent the world…  And, though this is a matter for debate and disagreement, as a part of this, in the normative case, the ‘personal’ emotions and bodily states of such subjects are Othered to the subordinate (and often gendered or racialised) category of ‘private life’. In the first instance, the assumption is that messy bodies get in the way of clean thinking.’

These lengthy citations are important: Law and Lin note that this is very broad, and, as they say, there are times when there are no Western-type of explanations and we need to be accepting of the messiness of a situation, even, and perhaps especially, when it doesn’t appear messy to the non-Western participant.  We know that knowledge is situated, and the point comes when the epistemology underpinning our situated knowledge needs to expand to accept something else beyond the confines of what it knows.  For many non-Westerners, holding a broad ontology together is not in the least messy – it simply involves different kinds of epistemology.  For example, there doesn’t always need to be a meta-narrative to a situation (which actually comes dangerously close to a structural determinist perspective on history) but because history as it has emerged as a discipline in the West is teleological in orientation, it usually tries to move towards a meta-narrative, and this can cause serious epistemological difficulties.

Knowing, therefore, is not just about epistemological awareness, which in any case is often gendered: the masculine is rational, cognitive, observational, whilst the feminine is turned into a ‘personal’ alterity.  Rather, we need to ‘know well’, to understand the diversity and confusion that manifests itself to us once we encounter Other worldviews, and to ‘know differently’, in other words, know what we are seeing in a different way.

Part II of this blog posting explores the scope and implications for such forms of knowing in the mission history context, and is available here.

Mission studies, mission history, and the language of religious conversion

23 Monday Jan 2012

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For those of us researching mission history, as much of my own research could appropriately be characterised, there are recurring questions about how to approach the issues raised.  Coming as I do from a liberal Enlightenment university tradition, it is out of question for me that the study of mission history would be connected to the pursuit of mission activity in the sense of proselytism. I am far from alone in this: Andreas Feldtkeller is one of many who have argued coherently against this confusion (e.g. he does this elegantly and succinctly in Sieben Thesen zur Missionsgeschichte, series: Berliner Beiträge zur Missionsgeschichte, Berlin, Heft 1, September 2000).

However, these issues do still intrude.  When, a few years ago, I initiated the Christians in the Middle East research network, now run with colleagues from Balamand and St Andrews, several enquiries came from individuals and organisations who were seeking to ‘convert’ Muslims in the Middle East to (a very evangelical kind of Protestant) Christianity: some sought an academic connection with us, others wanted to use our mailing list to promote their work; one enquirer even suggested we might want to make use of his staff in the region as ‘agents on the ground’ to promote our (supposedly) evangelical mission.  Although one of the areas we are interested in is the study of missions from, to, and within the Middle East, especially historically, pursuing such activity today is emphatically not what the CME network was created for; these enquirers were rebuffed, politely but clearly.

Nonetheless, such interventions raise interesting questions about conversion and what is meant by this use of language. Specifically, we might ask what the proposed conversion is really from and to that these people are now trying to pursue, and that missionaries in the past have sought to bring about.

Simplistically, in this instance, we can point to a change from adherence to a tradition called Islam, to a tradition called Christianity. Indeed, such language of Christianisation is the dominant model for a great deal of mainstream church mission activity around the globe from the 18th into the 20th century; now this tends to be something that is pursued only by certain fringe groups and smaller denominations. In this model, existing beliefs were to be repudiated and replaced with new beliefs – the simplicity of this language conveys the simplicity of the process as many missionaries initially saw it in the past (and some still do so today).  After all, many missionaries reasoned, the Greek New Testament used simple language to describe the transformation that the new believers in the gospels and Pauline letters were to undergo: metanoia is the key term here. This was used in the Septuagint (a Greek version of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible) to mean ‘after-thought, change of mind, repentance’ and is used in the New Testament to denote ‘repentance from sin’.  What was argued on this basis is that the ‘former life’ of the convert was one of sin, and only turning away from that enabled salvation. This becomes a kind of ‘re-enculturation’: the complete abandonment of existing patterns of belief and behaviour and the complete adoption of new patterns of belief and behaviour (for a brief discussion of the problems with the term ‘belief’, see my posting here).

Of course, such ‘re-enculturation’ is impossible.  Enculturation, as a process of socialisation and hegemony-production, is often defined as enabling competent engagement in a specific cultural context; further encounters with other cultural norms move into what is commonly called acculturation.  There is a fluid boundary between these two, ever more so as discerning specific cultures without resorting to essentialist distortions becomes increasingly difficult in our globalised world (such distortions easily elide into racism: I am thinking of conservative writers such as Niall Ferguson, Samuel Huntingdon and others).  In the 19th century, missionaries – representatives of European global dominance, whether they felt this gave them power or not – could perhaps still convince themselves that they were engaging with an alien culture when they left Europe, and that converts should follow their particular understanding of metanoia.  However, as I have shown in the Palestine context (and many others have done so in other contexts), any conversion that might have taken place was always a process of acculturation: converts maintained significant elements of their enculturated norms, and amended or added to these in taking on the missionaries’ new norms.  (Incidentally, I argue that despite the asymmetrical power relationships, it was the missionaries themselves who underwent the most significant changes in the missionary encounter: a process of reculturation.)

What does this mean for the question of conversion from and to?  If, as I have argued in an earlier blog posting, we cannot usefully speak of different ‘traditions’ in a world religions paradigm then questions of conversion also become much more complex (scholars such as Suzanne Owen and our own Tim Fitzgerald have also argued this in other contexts). Following the argument above, we can say that ‘conversion’ is not so much about moving from one enculturated norm to another (what I have loosely called ‘re-enculturation’), but acculturation, and consequently, the language of ‘religious conversion’ becomes rather meaningless.

In conclusion, the most appropriate usage of the term ‘religious conversion’ seems to be – at best – as a descriptor of certain historical attempts to pursue a particular strategy of Christianisation, attempts that we should be glad are largely behind us.