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Empire of Religion
Imperialism and Comparative Religion
By DAVID CHIDESTER THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-11743-0
CHAPTER 1
Expanding Empire
The history of the study of religion since the Enlightenment can never be told in full. There is simply too much of it.
ERIC J. SHARPE
In his first lecture introducing the science of religion at the Royal Institution in London on February 19, 1870, Friedrich Max Müller, who has often been identified as the founder of comparative religion, proposed that the real founder was the Mughal emperor Akbar, "the first who ventured on a comparative study of the religions of the world." With a passion for the study of religions, Emperor Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar (1542–1605) convened regular interreligious discussions at his court, bringing together Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians for debates about religion. Establishing a policy of religious toleration in his empire, Akbar also sought to discover the underlying truth in all religions, which he regarded as purely spiritual. His spiritual religion required no prescribed rituals, public ceremonies, or material symbols, except perhaps for the sun, which he saluted in his personal cycle of devotion. Emperor Akbar acquired a library of sacred texts, which he had scholars translate for his own research, and initiated a program of comparative religion.
What kind of comparative religion was this? Based on dialogue between adherents of different religions, it was an interfaith comparative religion. Because it distilled a spiritual essence supposedly shared by all religions, it was a theosophical comparative religion. However, Max Müller focused on Akbar's collection, translation, and analysis of sacred texts. In this academic enterprise, nineteenth-century scholars in Great Britain had a greater abundance than the emperor of India. The original text of the Vedas, for example, "which neither the bribes nor the threats of Akbar could extort from the Brahmans," was now available. Wealthier in texts than the emperor, contemporary scholars were also armed with critical methods of analysis that could distinguish historical layers in the production of sacred texts. Accordingly, Max Müller emphasized a critical comparative religion.
By invoking an emperor as the founding patron of his science, Friedrich Max Müller hinted at the imperial foundation and scope of comparative religion. In collecting the raw material of sacred texts, imperial bribes and threats might not prevail, but the scholars of the nineteenth century nevertheless relied upon imperial expansion, commerce, and force. They depended upon an expanding empire driven by British economic influence and military power, by trade and territorial annexation, by migration and missions, by the steamship and the telegraph, by the law code and the Maxim gun. Where Emperor Akbar had failed, the East India Company succeeded in securing the text of the Vedas. With the company's financial support, Max Müller was able to translate that sacred text for the study of religion. If Emperor Akbar was the founder, he represented a model for the merger of knowledge and power in British imperial comparative religion.
"But this is not all," Max Müller observed. "We owe to missionaries particularly, careful accounts of the religious belief and worship among tribes far lower in the scale of civilization than the poets of the Vedic hymns." Christian missionaries, all over the world, were a crucial source for new texts of savage religion. Turning from India to South Africa, Max Müller devoted considerable time in his first lecture to the religion of the Zulu. Although earlier travelers, missionaries, and colonial agents had reported that the Zulu had no religion, more recent reports from the Anglican missionary Henry Callaway, author of The Religious System of the Amazulu (1868–70), provided new texts for Zulu religion. These texts were not obtained by bribes or threats, but their collection also depended upon an expanding empire. As Callaway transcribed Zulu voices, Max Müller included the Zulu in an imperial study of religion.
Following the lead of Max Müller, if not Emperor Akbar, we will explore the importance of empire in the formation of comparative religion. As an imperial enterprise, a new comparative religion emerged in the 1870s at a specific historical juncture. Realities of empire, which had previously seemed remote from domestic interests, were increasingly supported in Great Britain by an ideology of imperialism, a vision of a global Greater Britain. In the context of European rivalry, British imperialism assumed a new meaning. While attending to that history, we will also have to use imperialism as a generic term, since it will apply to other empires, such as the German empire or the Japanese empire, which were also expanding their scope over territory, people, and knowledge. If we adopt Edward Said's definition of imperialism as "the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating center ruling a distant territory," we will have to look for multidimensional relations between a dominant imperial center and subordinate colonial peripheries, a network of relations of domination—imperium—but also of cultural circulation, theoretical formulation, and knowledge production. In these terms, we will ask, How did the realities of empire and the ideology of imperialism inform an imperial comparative religion?
At the same time, we need to ask, Why is comparative religion a significant index to empire? If this science were merely a supplement to empire, then any other science could do. As many historians have recognized, nineteenth-century science was frequently entangled with the requirements of empire. For example, in his study of the geologist Roderick Murchison, the historian Robert A. Stafford has argued that the "mediation provided by natural science gave Europeans intellectual as well as actual authority over colonial environments by classifying and ultimately containing their awesome dimensions. This new level of control, linked with the technology representing its practical application, also conferred prestige on the metropolitan power as a civilizing force, helping legitimate imperial rule vis-à-vis subject races, domestic masses, and rival great powers." In its practical effects, imperial science was an important element in Europe's "grid of cultural, political, economic, and military domination." Like the natural sciences, the human sciences could also reinforce imperial authority, particularly through the power of representation. During the nineteenth century, the construction of an "English" or "British" national identity depended heavily upon the colonization of others through the process of representing them. As Philip Dodd has noted, "a great deal of the power of the dominant version of Englishness during the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century lay in its ability to represent both itself to others and those others to themselves." These imperial sciences were inherently ambiguous, because they contained not only an implicit sense of global power but also the pervasive anxiety of powerlessness in the face of perceived degeneration at home and resistance to imperial authority abroad. Nevertheless, natural and human sciences in this era were engaged in the imperial project of maintaining, extending, and reinforcing empire.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, comparative religion emerged in Great Britain as an important imperial enterprise, at the nexus of science and representation, which promised to extend the global scope of knowledge and power within the British Empire. This science of comparative religion addressed not only internal debates within a European intellectual tradition but also the intellectual and practical dilemmas posed by increased exposure to exotic or savage forms of religious life from all over the world, particularly those beliefs and practices encountered in the colonized regions of exotic India and savage South Africa. More than any other imperial science, comparative religion dealt with the essential identities and differences entailed in the imperial encounter with the exotic East and savage Africa. Comparative religion, therefore, was a crucial index for imperial thinking about empire.
As the great historian of comparative religion Eric J. Sharpe observed, "The history of the study of religion since the Enlightenment can never be told in full. There is simply too much of it." Likewise for the history of imperialism, there is too much to tell. In a classic review of imperial studies, David Fieldhouse proposed focusing on a single colonial site, but with attention to that site as a "zone of interaction" with the metropolitan center. Accordingly, we will focus the history of the study of religion on one site, South Africa, with special attention to the zone of interaction that produced knowledge about African religion, especially Zulu religion, in imperial comparative religion. Although this specific focus might seem restrictive, we will find that this attention to one zone of interaction has the potential to tell the whole story of the study of religion.
Throughout this book, we will ask, How was knowledge about religion and religions produced, authenticated, and circulated? Not a history of religious beliefs, practices, experiences, and social formations, this book is a history of representations of religion. In tracking representations of religion, we will attend to what I will call a triple mediation—indigenous, colonial, and imperial. In the indigenous mediation, indigenous people negotiated between ancestral traditions and Christian missions. In the colonial mediation, which moved between conditions on the colonial periphery and the demands of the metropolitan center, local experts generated reports about indigenous religious systems. In the imperial mediation, which situated the present between hypothetical reconstructions of the archaic primitive and contested civilizing projects, the indigenous and the colonial were absorbed into imperial theory. Although this triple mediation might raise ethical concerns, my focus throughout this book is epistemological: How do we know anything about religion and religions? Since knowledge is entangled with power, as well as with the contingencies of history, a genealogy of the production of knowledge in imperial comparative religion will reveal important dynamics of the formation of a scientific study of religion and religions.
TRIPLE MEDIATION
In the development of the imperial science of comparative religion, the production of theory—the process of turning raw religious materials into intellectual manufactured goods—involved a complex process of intercultural mediation, a triple mediation between indigenous, colonial, and imperial actors that was crucial to the formation of theory in imperial comparative religion. This process can be clearly identified in relations between British imperial comparative religion and a colonized periphery such as South Africa.
First, metropolitan theorists applied a comparative method, or what came to be known as the comparative method, that allowed them to use the raw religious materials from colonized peripheries to mediate between contemporary savages and the primitive ancestors of humanity. "Though the belief of African and Melanesian savages is more recent in point of time," Max Müller observed in his foundational 1870 lectures on the science of religion, "it represents an earlier and far more primitive phase in point of growth, and is therefore as instructive to the student of religion as the study of uncultivated dialects has proved to the student of language." E. B. Tylor put it this way in 1871: "[The] hypothetical primitive condition corresponds in a considerable degree to modern savage tribes, who, in spite of their difference and distance ... seem remains of an early state of the human race at large." Despite occasional disclaimers that contemporary savages could not be exactly equated with primitive humanity, reports about savages remained primary evidence for any theory of the primitive. Whatever their differences, metropolitan theorists, such as Max Müller, Tylor, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, and James Frazer, deployed a comparative method that inferred characteristics of the primitive ancestors of humanity from reports about contemporary savages living on the colonized peripheries of empire.
For these theorists, the empire was both opportunity and obstacle, simultaneously a context for theorizing and a problem to be theorized. On the one hand, the expanding scope of empire dramatically increased the available data for thinking about religion. As Max Müller observed, the British Empire provided unprecedented access to the sacred texts of the world and accounts of the religious beliefs and practices of colonized people. By weaving this data together, imperial theorists had the opportunity to produce a universal theory of religion. As we will see, the theories that resulted from this opportunity differed dramatically. But they shared the same means of production. Without leaving home, they could accumulate and process colonial texts. But they could also visit imperial exhibitions, from the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 to the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–25, to theorize about religion and religions. As we trace the development of theorizing about religion in the context of such exchanges and events, we will gain insight into the centralized engine of theory production.
On the other hand, as obstacle, the empire was a problem because it raised the contradiction between liberal ideals of liberty and the realities of colonial coercion. As the central contradiction of the British Empire, this gap between liberty and coercion was an enduring problem for politicians and scholars. While politicians generally tried to deal with this problem by proclaiming political freedom at the center and enlightened despotism at the periphery, imperial theorists of the human sciences generated accounts of the primitive, whether African, Indian, or Irish, that could be used to justify coercion while awaiting the long evolutionary delay in their trajectory to civilized liberty. Generally racialized, these accounts of the primitive were useful to empire. As a science of primitive religion, imperial comparative religion might also have been useful, but the linkage between knowledge and power is more complex. In the matrix of knowledge production, imperial comparative religion was simultaneously preparation, accompaniment, and result of empire, an academic enterprise that might provide justification for domination while being shaped by relations of domination, but it was contemporary with the conflicts and confusions of imperial expansion.
Focusing on classic theorists of religion, we will examine their relations with empire. As we have already seen, Friedrich Max Müller, who invoked an emperor as the founder of his academic discipline, developed a British imperial perspective for the study of religion. Although he was a German immigrant, he advanced the British imperial cause with passion. Editor of The Sacred Books of the East, Max Müller also built general theories of language, myth, and religion that were heavily dependent upon the colonial extraction of raw materials from the peripheries of empire. Similarly dependent upon these extractions, E. B. Tylor, the father of anthropology, was a classic theorist of religion who pioneered the psychological or cognitive study of religion. Drawing evidence from savages, such as the Zulu of South Africa, Tylor developed a theory of religion as primitive mentality. Arguing against both Max Müller and Tylor, the literary entrepreneur and scholar of religion Andrew Lang built his theories of religion on the same raw materials but also in conversation with adventure novelists H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan, who had lived in South Africa. As a result, Lang's work raises questions about the relations among religion, fiction, and scholarship. The greatest, or at least the most prolific, synthesizer of imperial comparative religion, James Frazer, produced his monumental survey of primitive religion out of the same materials. The Golden Bough, spinning out of control to twelve volumes, was a compendium of the foolishness of primitive humanity. Ostensibly intended to solve a problem in Greek classics, asking why the priest of Diana at Nemi was killed, Frazer sought data in Africa. As Jonathan Z. Smith observed, "Frazer's use of African evidence constitutes the sole 'empirical' demonstration of his thesis." For example, Frazer used a traveler's report about the Zulu as evidence of Africans who killed their divine kings. Relying on the unreliable account of the British trader Nathaniel Isaacs, who recounted that the Zulu king Shaka valued Rowland's Macassar Oil, which was advertised as preserving, strengthening, and beautifying the hair, Frazer found in 1890, "It seems to have been a Zulu custom to put a king to death as soon as he began to have wrinkles or gray hairs." In his revised and expanded edition of 1911, Frazer added to this report his own conjecture that the Zulu killed their king "by the simple and perfectly sufficient process of being knocked in the head." Imperial theorists in the study of religion, in a variety of ways, were bringing colonized people into the center of theorizing about the nature of religion. Colonial situations at the same time enabled and destabilized their theories of religion.
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Excerpted from Empire of Religion by DAVID CHIDESTER. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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