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Wild Religion
Tracking the Sacred in South Africa
By David Chidester UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95157-0
CHAPTER 1
Going Wild
In his harrowing account of South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, which was nearly derailed by political opponents and logistical complexity, Peter Harris, head of the Monitoring Directorate of the Independent Electoral Commission, turned to religious language. As people stood in long lines to cast their vote, he noted that "the atmosphere is almost one of devotion." Especially for black voters, who had been excluded from democratic participation, the election was redemptive, as Harris observed: "No one wants to miss this time, this day of redemption." Sixteen years later, when South Africa hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup, devotees of football from all over the world celebrated a sacred festival during what has been called "holy FIFA month." Wild Religion tracks the sacred in South Africa between these two sacred times marked by the advent of democracy in 1994 and the celebration of the World Cup in 2010.
Religion is important in South Africa: according to a 2010 Pew Forum study, 74 percent of South Africans regard it as very important in their lives. And although nearly 80 percent of South Africans claim allegiance to Christianity, South Africa is a multireligious country, home to a variety of religious traditions—indigenous African, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and others—that have established strong, vital constituencies. With a deep and enduring African religious heritage, South Africa is a country that embraces all the major "world religions." Each of these religions, including Christianity, is a diverse category, encompassing many different understandings of religious life. At the same time, many South Africans draw their understanding of the world, ethical principles, and human values from sources independent of religious institutions. In the most profound matters of life orientation, diversity is a fact of South African national life.
Given the diversity of language, culture, and religion in South Africa, the postapartheid government led by the African National Congress (ANC), which came to office after the first democratic election of 1994, has sought ways to turn diversity from a potential obstacle to nationalism into a national resource, seeking not uniformity but unity, as the new coat of arms urges with its motto "Diverse people unite." Endeavoring to come to terms with the legacy of apartheid, the South African government has worked to find new ways of transforming the vicious divisions of the past into the vital diversity of a free, open, and democratic society.
Under the formula "Unity in diversity," the successive ANC administrations of Presidents Nelson Mandela (1994–99), Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008), and Jacob Zuma (2009–present) have tried to manage religious diversity in the national interest. While maintaining a "religion desk"—the Commission on Religious Affairs, which in 2009 became the Commission on Religious and Traditional Affairs—the ANC has also formed interreligious reference groups such as the National Religious Leaders Forum (established in 1997) and the National Interfaith Leaders Council (established in 2009) to mobilize support from the religious sector. Although religion is conventionally identified with that sector of society occupied by specialized institutions dealing in transcendence, wild religion is not contained in churches, mosques, temples, or synagogues. It is not controlled by traditional authorities, defined by census takers, or managed by modern states.
Wild is not a stable term with a fixed referent; its meanings are situational, relational, and contested. One person's wilderness might be another person's home; one person's wild man is another's shaman. Nevertheless, by focusing on the dynamics of the sacred—that which is set apart, but set apart at the center of personal subjectivities and social collectivities—we can identify certain characteristic features of wild religion in South Africa. Here is my central argument: the sacred is produced in relation to wild forces. Sacred space and time, sacred roles, rituals, and objects, are created by both excluding and incorporating the wild. This dual dynamics of the sacred, excluding and incorporating, exorcising and domesticating, is inherent in the duality of the wild. On the one hand, the wild stands as obstacle to maintaining social order. The wild is untamed, undomesticated, uncultivated, unrestrained, unruly, and dangerous. A sacralized social order, whether domestic, public, civil, national, or global, can be produced in opposition to the perceived dangers of wildly threatening forces. On the other hand, the wild stands as energy for creating social order. The wild is dynamic, natural, extraordinary, enthusiastic, ecstatic, and invigorating. In this respect, a sacralized social order can be produced by appropriating or integrating the perceived vitality of wildly energizing forces.
The chapters of this book give substance to the wild ambiguity of the sacred. As we will see, wild religion encompasses the bad, the good, and the ugly in the sacred dynamics of society.
First, as bad, the wild registers as antagonistic to human projects. The wild appears as opposition in African traditional religion. Distinguishing between home space, which is built up by ongoing relations with ancestors, and the wild space of the forest, veld, or desert, indigenous African cosmologies have associated the wild with dangerous, disruptive forces. The wild also appears as opposition in ideologies of European colonialism. Following the first colonial settlement of the Cape in 1652, the Dutch established a castle, a cannon, and a hedge that were explicitly designed to keep out "wild Africans."
As an oppositional concept, the wild is violent and violence is wild. According to the American philosopher John Dewey, not all uses of force should be defined as violence, since force is necessary for such constructive projects as building bridges and maintaining law and order. Violence, by definition, is force gone wrong, the wild force that blows up bridges, breaks laws, and disrupts order. Since the 1980s, fundamentalism has been widely perceived as a wild religion, a "strong religion" of militant opposition to the modern world that spreads terrorism, threatens public order, and challenges state sovereignty.
Second, as good, the wild registers as basic to human projects. In Rousseau's "noble savage" or Locke's "state of nature," for example, the wild is not necessarily oppositional; rather, it is the baseline for the development of society. In the beginning, we were all wild. Valuing the wild, the Romantic philosopher F.W.J. Schelling identified natural religion as "wild religion" in the sense of "a wildly growing religion," like a wildfire, or a wild olive tree contrasted to the tame olive tree of revealed religion. Modern nationalism has often drawn upon the wild by setting aside wilderness areas as national parks. In South Africa, a wild natural heritage, from the Cradle of Humankind to game parks, has been important to nation building. But a wild violent heritage, now marked by public holidays commemorating pain, suffering, and loss, has also been drawn into the nation-building enterprise. As primal energy, the wild can be used in mobilizing a sense of social solidarity.
Postmodern spirituality, as well, has celebrated the energy of the wild. For example, the North American neoshaman Bradford Keeney, who has described himself as a southern African Bushman shaman, advocates trance dancing and ecstatic shaking as "the practice of wild shamanism, wild religion, wild spirituality, and wild transformative performance." Insisting that the sacred is wild and the wild is sacred, Keeney urges, "Become a wild shaman, a wild pagan, a wild Christian, a wild Buddhist, a wild Jew, a wild agnostic, a wild artist, a wild performer, a wild whatever you want to call it."
Third, as ugly, the wild is mixed and messy, anomalous or monstrous, a hybrid of order and chaos. During the Zuma administration, wild religion has been mixed into sexuality, sovereignty, and economy.
Driven by wild impulses, but essential for domestic reproduction, sex has been subjected to various domains of ritualized purity—indigenous, Christian, and modern—which all came into play during 2010 in the public controversy over President Zuma's alleged sexual improprieties. As he was defended by both Christian supporters and African traditionalists, Zuma became the focus of a wild religion of sexuality.
In postapartheid South Africa, where political sovereignty is constructed as modern, democratic, and constitutional, traditional leadership persists. Although kings, chiefs, and other traditional leaders were accommodated by the Constitution of 1996, a wild political religion is evident in theocratic or theosophic claims about the sacred sovereignty of traditional leaders in South Africa.
During the global festival of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which truly was a wild time, South Africa hosted the "religion of football" by building stadiums and infrastructure but also by deploying wild religious resources. While Christian churches composed prayers for the World Cup, the local organizers of cultural events prepared ritual sacrifices of animals in keeping with the practices of indigenous ancestral religion in South Africa. If football was a religion during the 2010 World Cup, it was a wild religion, mixing modern and traditional, global and local, in a South African political economy of the sacred.
THE SACRED
Tracking the sacred in South Africa between 1994 and 2010, this book explores the bad (wild space, violence, and terror), the good (heritage and dreams), and the messy (sex, sovereignty, and festival) in South African wild religion. But what, exactly, are we tracking? What is the sacred? In the study of religion, the sacred has been defined as both supremely transcendental and essentially social, as an otherness transcending the ordinary world—Rudolph Otto's "holy," Gerardus van der Leeuw's "power," or Mircea Eliade's "real"—or as an otherness making the social world, following Emile Durkheim's understanding of the sacred as that which is set apart from the ordinary, everyday rhythms of life, but set apart in such a way that it stands at the center of community formation. In between the radical transcendence of the sacred and the social dynamics of the sacred, we find ongoing mediations, at the intersections of personal subjectivity and social collectivities, in which anything can be sacralized through the religious work of intensive interpretation, regular ritualization, and inevitable contestation over ownership of the means, modes, and forces for producing the sacred.
Take hair. Ordinary hair on people's heads has been rendered sacred, not only by people with hair, but also by social scientists who have linked "magical hair" with "social hair," exploring the religious, social, and psychological dynamics of what Anthony Synnott called "the four modes of hair change (length, style, colour and additions)."
The American comedian Chris Rock has made a documentary, Good Hair, raising all of these issues in the study of the sacred. While focusing on African American hairstyling, the film provides ample evidence of the intensive interpretation of all the modes of hair change. It thoroughly discusses the multiple meanings of natural hair, the styling and coloring of hair, and perhaps most importantly the additions to hair, the weaves, which dominate hair styling but also evoke the sacred, in Durkheimian terms, because these hair additions are set apart from ordinary contact, forbidden and tabooed, and cannot be touched, not even in the intimacy of sexual relations, as a number of male informants complain. With the development of "interlinked wigs, woven into the hair," as Synnott observed, "body contact sports are out." The sacred, therefore, is not merely meaningful; it is powerful in ritualized practices of avoidance, contact, and exchange.
All of the modes of hair change are on display at the annual Bronner Bros. International Hair Show in Atlanta, where the film shows hairstylists competing in a ritual drama in which four finalists demonstrate their skills. Kevin Kirk, who heads the hair-styling crew of one of the finalists, brings a specifically evangelical Christian approach to this ritual by calling his hairstylists together before the event into a circle of prayer. "We're going to make some sacrifices," Kirk announces, calling upon his hair-styling team not only to pray for victory but also to undertake a fast that will purify them to be worthy of such an extraordinary blessing. When a member of the team objects to going without food, Kirk retorts: "You're not a Christian?" Preparing for the hair-styling event, for Kirk, requires entering the sacred through sacrifice, engaging in a transaction in which sacrificial giving is expected to result in transcendental receiving. As Kirk later explains, he knows that his team will win, not only because of their prayers, but also through "the vision that God gave me."
Sacrificial exchange, as a quick trip to India shows, is essential for producing the raw materials that go into the rituals of hairstyling. At the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Tirupati, we learn that ten million devotees each year sacrifice their hair, participating in the ritual of tonsure, in exchange for divine blessing. "God likes hair," one participant observes. Devotees offer their hair to God with prayers, requests, and vows. As Chris Rock explains, the ultimate meaning of this Hindu ritual of haircutting is the sacrifice of vanity, because "removing hair is considered an act of self-sacrifice." Ironically, this ritual of hair sacrifice serves the vanity of hairstyling. Collecting, selling, and distributing this sacrificial hair is a global business, with active markets in Asia, Europe, and America. God may like hair, but, as one entrepreneur exclaims, "Hair is gold." Sacred hair and profane commerce are thoroughly interwoven in the international hair exchange.
Worship and commerce, however, have always been related in the production of the sacred. Chris Rock's film develops the ironic juxtaposition of African American Christians weaving into their heads hair from Hindu temples that has been "prayed upon" by Hindu priests. A quasi-religious secret society, a weave culture, a weave world, has developed on the basis of an aesthetic that is simultaneously religious and commercial. Weaves account for up to 70 percent of the $9 billion-a-year black hair care industry that depends upon a global trade in human hair from India that transcends race, class, gender, and national borders. Testing this religio-commercial aesthetic, Chris Rock tries to market genuine African American hair, "cut off at a Baptist temple," but with no success.
The Sri Venkateswara Temple in Tirupati, whose industry in human hair Chris Rock describes in his film, has received some attention in the news media as well; one 2008 article describes the temple's priestly monopoly over the transactions of auctioning, preparing, and exporting the sacred hair, which is cut by six hundred barbers and obtained from the sacrifices of the pilgrims who come there—some fifty thousand people per day. The entire process of hair exchange is imbued with the sacred. "It is a holy business," one prominent hair exporter declares. Most of the temple hair goes to China to be used in the production of keratin rather than to Europe and America for wigs and weaves. However, according to this exporter, wherever in the world the hair goes, the entire value chain—from sacrificial offering in a Hindu temple to ritualized consumption in Asia, Europe, or America—is a holy business spreading "happy hair" around the world.
The meaning, power, and ownership of the sacred are inevitably contested. When Orthodox rabbis in Israel learned that hair used in women's wigs came from Hindu temples, they ruled that any use of such hair was idolatry. Since covering their own hair with wigs was an important practice for Orthodox Jewish women, this ruling against idolatrous hair had both a religious and a commercial impact. Recasting the holy business in Hindu hair as false worship, the rabbis insisted that women had an obligation to avoid such hair at the risk of incurring ritual defilement.
In response to this Jewish ban on Hindu hair, Indian entrepreneurs devised an ingenious argument that recast its sacred character. According to one prominent exporter, the hair's sacred significance was not ritual but ethical. Its sacred aura was derived not through ritual sacrifice to the temple deity but through the ethical virtue of humility. "What is ritualistic about humbling yourself in the most basic way?" this exporter asked. "In India, shaving your head equals shedding all vanity and becoming modest." The ethical virtue of modesty, therefore, which was at the heart of the Orthodox Jewish injunction for women to adopt head coverings (such as wigs made out of hair from India), was asserted by this entrepreneur to be the common sacred ground on which Jews and Hindus could meet and do business.
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Excerpted from Wild Religion by David Chidester. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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