Border Fetishisms

Material Objects in Unstable Spaces

Patricia Spyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136674167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The essays in Border Fetishisms explore the cultural, commercial, political and erotic dimensions that distinguish fetish formations in fractured colonial and postcolonial spaces. Spanning such topics as Surinamese conversion to Christianity to shoplifting in Georgian England, to face the fetish, the contributors neither demagicalize the fetish nor normalize the commodity. Instead, they call for the inclusion of material things -- as fetishes or not -- within the experience of human sufferings and joy. Contributors: Robert J. Foster, Webb Keane, Susan Leg6~ne, Annelies Moors, Peter Pels, William Pietz, Adela Pinch, Patricia Spyer, Peter Stallybrass, Michael Taussig.

1

Calvin in the Tropics: Objects and Subjects at the Religious Frontier

Webb Keane

It is common to treat the various ideas grouped under the word “fetishism” as fundamentally concerned with material objects. Thus William Pietz begins his history of the concept by distinguishing the fetish in its “irreducible materiality” from the idol, which is the iconic image of some immaterial original (1985: 7). But the allure that the supposed fetish holds for some and the anxiety it provokes in others have less to do with objects than with the problems that objects pose for subjects. For example, Marx’s (1967) commodity fetish is not simply a way of misunderstanding goods but a way humans misunderstand themselves. In the process of attributing life to things, they lose some of their own humanity and come to treat themselves as objects in turn.

The imputation of fetishism carries a strong charge; more than mere error is at stake. Indeed, something of the original religious character of the concept of fetishism seems to remain amidst its subsequent, more secular, exfoliations. In its secular uses, talk about fetishism may hint at dangers; in the religious context, the danger becomes apparent. Consider the Dutch missionary D.K. Wielenga’s account of the ancestral ritualists on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba: “The primitives confound that which is a fruit of the imagination with the reality, the objective with the subjective, the outer phenomena with their own spirit life” (1909: 332).¹ As a missionary, Wielenga has the task not simply of education and correction but, above all, salvation. This mission makes evident that the confounding of the objective and subjective has dire, even eternal, consequences.

But talk about fetishism often seems to harbor a sense of thrill and anxiety as well, as if the danger threatens not only the fetishist but also the outsider who, it would seem, should not taken in by the error. For some of the approaches that have been developed since Freud, this may be because the fetish remains a temptation even to those whose knowledge would deny the existence of that which they desire (see Apter and Pietz 1993; Ivy 1995). In the case of some traditions of Protestantism, it may have to do with the way in which other people’s illusions threaten the very autonomy of the subject, for the autonomy of the human subject is not unproblematic even for the Protestants themselves. In this essay I explore these ramifications of the idea of fetishism by looking at the encounter between Dutch Calvinists and the practitioners of ancestral ritual on Sumba. I suggest that the difficulties posed for Calvinists by Sumbanese understandings of the relations among subjects and objects go well beyond the theological niceties beloved of colonial missionaries. They may reveal certain problems endemic to efforts to stabilize the boundaries between persons and things, or to determine the status of language in human activities. To see this means listening to how Calvinists articulate some of the core concerns of the West’s self-understood modernity.

THE FETISH AS HISTORICAL ENCOUNTER

Despite its isolated, even pastoral, surroundings, the twentieth-century colonial mission on Sumba was inseparable from the larger background of Dutch industry and commerce.² Since Weber (1958), of course, the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism has been common disputational coin. Leaving aside the Weberian question of historical causality, it is apparent that when Protestants on Sumba draw on the discourse of fetishism, several aspects of their relationship to their context come to the fore. One is the missionaries’ own ambivalence, torn as they are between economic rationality and spiritual commitment. As I have discussed elsewhere (Keane 1996), the Dutch saw Sumbanese ancestor ritualists as both excessively materialistic and as believing in too many spirits, as too calculating and as irrationally blinded to economics by their moral commitments.

The island of Sumba came under Dutch rule during the final period of the expansion and consolidation of the East Indies early in this century.³ Having little to offer those with more worldly ambitions, the island was left almost entirely in the hands of a small band of missionaries. Official policy sought to prevent competition between rival missions by distributing them among discrete territories; most of Sumba was placed under the tutelage of a conservative sect of the Reformed (or Orthodox Calvinist) Church (Gereformeerde Kerken). In 1947, not long before Sumba entered the independent Republic of Indonesia, the tiny indigenous congregation formed the autonomous Sumbanese Christian Church (Gereja Kristen Sumba), which continues to have close ties to the Dutch church to this day. Despite the efforts of several generations of missionaries and indigenous evangelists, and increasing pressure from the Indonesian state, however, at the time of my first visit to the district of Anakalang in 1985, the unconverted marapu (ancestral spirit) followers formed the majority of the population of West Sumba and remained a strong presence in East Sumba.⁴ Although it was becoming increasingly apparent that Christians would soon be dominant, resistance by marapu followers could be quite vociferous.

Despite the important changes that have transpired over this century’s colonial and post-colonial periods, the encounter between Christians and marapu followers has produced recurrent discourses about their differences. The themes to which these discourses return again and again can be made apparent in two quotations. One is from the early years of the Dutch mission, the other from a conversation I had with a Sumbanese gospel teacher in 1993.

The first quotation comes from D.K. Wielenga. He was the first missionary to spend a long period on Sumba, persevering despite having been wounded in a spear attack and twice seeing his house destroyed by arson. In 1909, not long after his arrival, he described the religion of the Sumbanese in this way:

The two constituents of the nature religion … [are] the dogma that everything has a soul, that is, fetishism, the worship of sensual perceptible objects, as having souls … [and] the dogma that the soul is free in its movement and not bound to a fixed body, spiritualism, the worshipping of the souls of the dead and of the invisible spirits in the air (1909: 332; emphases in the original).

He wrote this passage while still fairly new to Sumba, and thus relied more heavily on the comparative religion of the day than in his later, more ethnographically precise, writing. But this passage is useful precisely in its generality, for it shows in broad outlines what was at stake for the Protestant. The errors of paganism do not lie, for example, in immorality, cruelty, or absence of faith. Rather, the fundamental problem is the pagan’s confusion about what kinds of beings inhabit the world, and how animated material things really are. Their confusion is twofold: first, taking what is really inanimate (matter) to be animate, and second, mistaking the attributes of the visible (that is, material) and invisible. Fetishistic error revolves around questions of animacy or agency, and visibility or materiality.

The second quotation comes from Bapak U.S. Kadiwangu. His father had been a powerful ratu (ritual specialist), and his brother had succeeded to the office. He himself had been among the small number of children of the nobility to be selected by the Dutch for a formal education, and was eventually ordained as a minister. When I knew him, he was an elderly man with the bittersweetness of someone who had spent a lifetime with little evangelical success, only now, in retirement, to witness the emergence of a Protestant majority. With quiet pride he told me in 1993 how he preached in the 1940s and 1950s:

I’d ask them, why are they afraid of the marapu? “Because they created us, and if we don’t respect them, we’ll get sick.” I’d tell them, “Yes, that’s true, we must be afraid. We’re afraid because we can’t see Him. So the ancestors used gold, gongs, spears, those humans [i.e. the spirits of earlier, now deceased, ancestors]—they became signs that Lord God is there—like a king or a ratu—people fear them because of their power. So now we don’t need to pray. God doesn’t want us to bring chickens anymore. God sent me so you can return to God—not that wood, not that rock [i.e. traditional altars]. What saves us isn’t wood, rock, cattle, but Lord Jesus.”

Like Wielenga, Pak Kadiwangu stresses the error of using objects in ritual, attacking their use in marapu ritual, as well as the fallacy of ascribing divinity to ancestors who were mere humans. He sees this in terms of substitution, the material taking the place of the spiritual.

Both men mention the difference between the visible and invisible, which raises the fundamental religious problem of presence. Marapu follower and Christian alike must in some way contend with the fact that the deity is invisible and (usually) silent. Marapu followers are quite explicit about this. Many have told me that they have little understanding of the spirits, since they cannot be seen, and ritual speech often asks whether the spirits are present. Although the ubiquity of God might make presence less problematic for Protestants, the question persists in somewhat different form. Calvinists (already, in some sects, uncertain about their personal salvation) cannot be sure if their sermons and prayers have truly been inspired by the Holy Spirit (see Peacock and Tyson 1989). For both religions, the effort to encounter and interact with an otherwise inaudible and invisible world creates unavoidable dilemmas.

The problem of presence gives rise to another theme mentioned by both men. According to Wielenga, the invisibility of the spirit world explains the fear that permeates pagan life. The source of this fear is twofold, the human’s imputation of agency to external agents (see also Dijkstra 1902), and the invisibility of those agents. Pak Kadiwangu’s remarks pick up the theme of fear and, extending the point, hint at the temptation that fetishism might hold for people. Faced with invisibility, marapu followers turn to material objects. These objects stand for immaterial entities that should be present but whose immateriality puts this presence at any given moment into doubt. Thus, according to Pak Kadiwangu, the objects used in marapu ritual are in truth only signs and thus not actually fetishes—except for those marapu followers who do not recognize their semiotic function.

Moreover, according to Pak Kadiwangu, the use of material signs makes up for something that seems to be missing. But once people become aware that that something is not really missing, they can abandon those signs in favor of the real thing, Jesus Christ. The passage from material signs to full acceptance of the invisible is something that transpires over historical time. Material things seem to have the status of temporary stopgap measures that are now no longer necessary.⁵ Once one can call them “fetishes,” one is in a position to abandon them.

The historicizing view has two further implications worth noting. According to this view, the proper way to understand the material forms of religion is as signs of invisible spiritual presences. But this ultimately leaves the solution of the problem of presence to the inner faith of the beholder. For the weaker members of the congregation, the appeal of some external guarantee of divine presence is likely to persist. Protestants themselves are occasionally made aware of this temptation when they perceive the small Catholic mission to be poaching on their converts by means of the sensuous forms of masses, idolatrous statues, and priestly robes.⁶ In addition, if the historicizing view is carried to its logical conclusion, it also means that the conversion to Christianity implicates the convert in more than just a new set of religious beliefs and practices. The new religion tends to be identified with an entire historical epoch; as even persistant ancestral ritualists were prone to say in the 1980s, the hallmark of the “modern era” (masa moderen) is that “the foreign marapu has won” (taluneka na marapu jiawa). This new era involves transformations in political economy and social organization, which may be difficult for the missionary to keep distinct from spiritual transformation in the eyes of the convert.⁷

AMBIGUOUS ANIMACY

The fetishism that missionaries ascribed to the Sumbanese takes several forms, the most apparent ones being sacralia, offerings, and the distribution of sacrifices. What I here call sacralia are objects known as “the marapu’s portion” (tagu marapu; see discussion in Keane 1997a, chapter 8). Among them are bits of rare imported cloth, metal statuettes, spears, swords, gongs, old Chinese and Vietnamese trade ceramics, and, most commonly, gold ornaments of the type normally used in ceremonial exchanges. Every clan and its major divisions should possess at least one of its own marapu portion, which is carefully preserved out of sight in a designated house. Sumbanese often speak of these sacralia as the true inhabitants of the house, for which the human residents are only caretakers. Sacralia impose on their inhabitants specific ritual prerogatives and obligations. If the rituals are regularly performed, the sacralia remain silent guarantors of the well-being of the living. Should the rituals lapse, however, the living will be reminded of their presence by means of drought, fires, the illness of children, lightning strikes, and infertility. On the rare occasions when they have been transfered to another owner, people say, they have resisted. One such valuable was given away to someone who kept it in a wooden chest. But it banged around so vigorously in there that the new owners returned it to its house of origin.

Such objects have many of the characteristics of the religious fetish. They are material things to which people attribute animacy. They are treated as if they were the ancestor and normally they bear that ancestor’s name. But in what exactly their personhood lies seems to be a matter of ambiguity even to the Sumbanese. The missionary Lambooy (1930: 281) reported that although they were usually identified for foreigners as the marapu itself,

sometimes I ask of a Sumbanese, “is that now really the Marapoe.” Then he looks at me indignantly, for that is not the Marapoe, only the Tanggoe Marapoe, the possession of the Marapoe. “But what is the Marapoe then?” “We ourselves do not know the Marapoe, who for us is concealed.”

In my own time, some people told me that the ancestral body was physically transformed into sacralia; others saw the objects as conventional symbols that stand for the ancestor (see also Kapita 1976: 90). When accused by Christians of idolatry, contemporary marapu followers sometimes respond that the valuables are merely a meeting place (like the altar), a mat of honor on which the spirit sits, or a horse for, or a reminder of, the ancestor.

In conversations with me, people most often said that the object is the “replacement” (na hepanya) of the ancestral body or its “sign, mark, trace” (tada). This suggests that the ancestor is, at best, ambivalently present in it, since both expressions presuppose an absence. For example, the son of a ratu “replaces” his father upon the latter’s death by taking over his office. The word tada can refer to the owner’s mark on a household possession that has been loaned to someone else, or to the token given as a promissory note in lieu of an exchange valuable. Similarly, it is only because the marapu are gone that the living hold onto these objects. The sacralia thus index the absence of the marapu at the same time that they make them present.

The various accounts of sacralia turn on the problem of invisibility and the accompanying uncertainty. One reason these accounts vary is that, since the invisible subject is unknowable, there is no way of knowing exactly how it is present in or connected to the object...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Calvin in the Tropics: Objects and Subjects at the Religious Frontier
• 2. From Brooms to Obeah and Back: Fetish Conversion and Border Crossings in Nineteenth-Century Suriname
• 3. Your Money, Our Money, the Government’s Money: Finance and Fetishism in Melanesia
• 4. The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy
• 5. Stealing Happiness: Shoplifting in Early Nineteenth-Century England
• 6. The Tooth of Time, or Taking a Look at the “Look” of Clothing in Late Nineteenth-Century Aru
• 7. Marx’s Coat
• 8. Wearing Gold
• 9. Crossing the Face
• Afterword: How to Grow Oranges in Norway
• Contributors
• Index