Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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vernacular linguistic worlds and thereby transformed both Christianity and the meanings of old words, often changing this-worldly political concepts into otherworldly religious concepts.18 Understanding the transformative power of translation is an important and worthy endeavor. Yet translation itself is not the only key to understanding the implications of spirits for historical agency. In her study of the Lourdes shrine, Ruth Harris expresses unease with the “totalistic way the ‘linguistic turn’ reduces all human experience to language.”19 Discourses are not closed and contained systems; they engage with sensory, visible, and nonlinguistic worlds that involve work, corporality, violence, and emotions—in other words, those actions, experiences, and interactions that constitute our sensory lives. To understand the agency of spirits, then, is to relate spirits—or spiritual discourses—to this nonlinguistic world.
One way to relate spirits to the nonlinguistic world is to view them as symbols for the sensory, visible world. Indeed, the symbolic form of analysis is a conventional way of reflecting on religious discourses. On the other hand, political discourses are not usually viewed in this symbolic fashion. But, as pointed out, there is no intrinsic reason for treating discourses that we term religious and political differently. Religious ideas, especially when they refer to this-worldly spirits, are also conscious statements on and about power, rather than subconscious or metaphoric reflections.20 The bias toward the symbolic study of religion is not evident in all scholarship. Given the clear role of missionary Christian discourses in creating colonial hegemonies, many scholars have discussed them as sources of power. For example, Jean and John L. Comaroff, J. D. Y. Peel, Elizabeth Elbourne, and Paul S. Landau all discuss the influence and African appropriations of colonial Christian missionary discourses, although they generally conceive of power in a Foucauldian disciplinary sense.21 Efforts to discuss spirits, Christian or otherwise, as sources of power have not been as frequently or as effectively carried out, with a few noteworthy exceptions. Ruth Marshall’s study of Pentecostal churches in Nigeria, for example, treats spiritual discourse as a “site of action [her emphasis]” rather than being reduced to “its function of signification,” in terms of metaphor, metonymy, or symbol.22
Most relevant to this book is Karen E. Fields’s treatment of religious discourses as sites of power in her pioneering study of Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witnesses) during the heyday of indirect rule in colonial Zambia. Fields argues that the colonial state, although purporting to be secular, relied on a range of religious agents, including missionaries and chiefs who claimed spiritual powers. The Watchtower emphasis on a personal relationship with God, through rituals such as speaking in tongues, radically undermined this colonial constellation of power. Political rebellion thus emerged directly from the spiritual claims of Watchtower adherents. By ensuring an independent form of spirit possession and communication, Watchtower members undercut the authority of chiefs and missionaries. While Fields may have proclaimed the end of the chiefs’ authority a little too soon—and overestimated Watchtower agency in ending it—her broader point stands; religion was politics. Political struggle invoked spiritual powers that defied and defined authority. Human agency to transform the world emerged directly from these spiritual beliefs. In this sense, spirits were not symbols or stand-ins for political struggles around “real” resources.23
Two recent studies of cannibalism and vampirism further illustrate the argument. In the first of these studies, Luise White develops metaphoric and symbolic associations between vampire rumors and the colonial “extractive” economy (even while she suggests that such rumors should not be viewed as “false”). White claims that “vampire accusations were specifically African ways of talking that identified new forms of violence and extraction.”24 She links vampire rumors to a variety of colonial relations, including labor relations, missionary rivalries, anticolonial nationalism, and intrusive medical interventions. The strength of this approach is in its ability to relate belief to historical context; its shortcoming is that the scholarly interpretation of metaphors and symbols may differ from that of historical actors.25 The relationship of vampires with the extractive colonial economy is an effective and engaging metaphor, but one developed by White, and not by the workers of the Copperbelt. Instead, for the inhabitants of Copperbelt towns, vampire rumors linked the spirit world to the physical world directly. On the central African Copperbelt, people acted on the knowledge that they were empowered or oppressed by invisible forces.
Stephen Ellis, in his Mask of Anarchy, also has an account of cannibals, but his cannibals are very real, literally those who eat others to gain power. In Liberia, there were rumors of cannibals similar to those found in central Africa. But for Ellis, the act of eating to gain power was more significant than any imputed metaphoric quality. Belief in cannibals, most importantly the belief that eating people gave rise to forms of power, was not a metaphor for social or political relations, although it probably was a conscious form of metaphor and metonymy employed to acquire power (I really eat people, and thus I “eat” people and exercise power over them).26 It was not a description of forms of exploitation as if they were like cannibalism, but instead, according to Ellis, people ritually ingested human body parts to gain power over others.27 The difference in these accounts rests on the emphasis by Ellis on the belief in these practices to acquire power on the one hand, and the emphasis by White on the metaphoric qualities of spiritual beliefs on the other.
If spirits are not metaphors or symbols, however, other ways to explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible worlds, of spirits to the nonlinguistic world of senses and experiences, need to be established. For if spiritual beliefs are only discourse, autonomous from an outside reality, they lose their historical relevance beyond the history of a fanciful and disconnected imagination. A critic of Ellis, for example, could claim that cannibalism was no more than a marginal detail of Liberian belief, hardly central to the unfolding of war and politics in Liberia.28 The actions of bodies and the quotidian interactions between peoples and with their environments become unimportant to the study of belief—or “belief” becomes reified and ahistorical. If spirits are not symbols, historians need to at least find ways of speaking, if not theorizing, about the relationship of spirits to human interactions and environments.
Guidance may be sought in the century-old discussions about the relationship between society and belief among sociologists of religion that cycle through the socioeconomic determinism of Marx’s opium of the people, the ethnocentrism of Weber’s Protestant ethic, and the functionalism of Durkheim’s religion as “social fact.” Each approach holds insight and problems, which cannot be revisited here. Durkheim’s formulation is the most insistent on the social importance of religion, and yet theoretically cautionary and qualified enough for empirical historians. For Durkheim, the context of religion is central: “If we want to understand that aptitude for living outside the real, which is seemingly so remarkable, all we need to do is relate it to the social conditions upon which it rests.” But he also insists that this view is not a “refurbishment of historical materialism”:
Collective consciousness is something other than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological [social] base. . . . If collective consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousness must occur. The product of this synthesis is a whole world of feelings, ideas, and images that follow their own laws once they are born. They mutually attract one another, repel one another, fuse together, subdivide, and proliferate; and none of these combinations is directly commanded and necessitated by the state of the underlying reality. Indeed, the life thus unleashed enjoys such great independence that it sometimes plays about in forms that have no aim or utility of any kind, but only for the pleasure of affirming itself.29
For Durkheim, while the forms of belief engage with social functions, they do not simply replicate, represent, or symbolize them. In a similar fashion, historians can recognize that spirits morph to occupy historical landscapes, but are not determined by those landscapes. These spirits, as Luise White emphasizes, are a human dialogue about nonlinguistic worlds. However, even while they can engage with this world, they do not necessarily represent or symbolize it, and sometimes animate the imagination of people in unexpected ways. Spirits can thus mobilize bodies, summon feelings, and transform lives, not unlike charged and fraught discourses about “race,” in, say, US society.30 Their imagined forms (gods, ancestral shades, nature spirits) and qualities (good, evil, indifferent, jealous, or angry) affect how people conceive of and transform their respective realities.
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