University of California Press Blog

A Problem of Presence Wins Victor Turner Prize

Matthew Engelke's A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church has been awarded the 2009 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society of Humanistic Anthropology (SHA).

A Problem of Presence is a historical ethnography of the Friday Masowe apostolics of Zimbabwe. Members of this Christian movement do not read the Bible, and instead embrace a live and direct faith in which God's presence is immediate and not mediated by a church, written text, or any other material thing. Exploring wider issues of textual authority and material culture, Engelke examines how the Friday Masowe construct a relationship with the divine.

The SHA awards this prize annually in honor of the anthropologist Victor Turner. “Turner devoted his career to seeking a language that would reopen anthropology to the human subject, and the prize will be given in recognition of an innovative book that furthers this project,” says the SHA. Engelke is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the editor of Prickly Paradigm Press. In 2008, A Problem of Presence won the Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion.

Religious Narratives and the Adaptation of Immigrants

By Margarita Mooney author of Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora

What do religious narratives have to do with the adaptation of immigrants from the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere—Haiti? Is it only in the United States—a remarkably more religious country than other countries of the West where Haitian immigrants have settled such as Canada and France—where Haitian immigrants center their lives on religious communities and found faith-based service organizations to support their adaptation?

In the more than 150 interviews I conducted for my book, I found that many people convinced that their faith can literally move mountains. For example, a 40-year old Haitian woman in Montreal, Marie, told me that in contrast to the social isolation she felt in Montreal, belong to a prayer group make her feel like she belongs somewhere. She explained how “when you feel that you are somebody, [that] you are a person, [that] you are important, you can move mountains, and that is faith.” Even when they are aware that others see them as just needy newcomers who are passive recipients of state social support, their religious narratives and practices allowed them to become givers of support—even if that support was just a friendly smile, a prayer, or helping clean up after an activity at church. In the United States, praying for others in their own ethnic community and the broader host community is a kind of currency that allows Haitian immigrants to become givers. In Canada and France, religion is at best tolerated as a private practice. Consequently, immigrants who are religious, such as most Haitians, find that some of the gifts they bring with them have virtually no currency in their host society and could even serve as a barrier to their integration.

But are such religious narratives of hope in the midst of suffering just an opium for the poor? I argue that contrary: the Catholic Church’s social action on behalf of immigrants is sustained by the active faith in its ethnic ministries and parishes. In Miami, Montreal and Paris, lay leaders and clergy at the Haitian Catholic missions went beyond just created a faith community and founded social service agencies to help all Haitians—not just Haitian Catholics—with the numerous challenges to their new life (learning English/French, finding a job, apply for asylum, obtaining basic medical care, looking for a job, etc.) In exploring the history of these organizations, I learned that, in addition to being morally sustained by their religious communities, frequent interactions with and funding from state agencies were crucial to their success.

In the U.S. cooperation between the Toussaint Center and the local, state and national government hastened many Haitians’ adaptation and improved their well-being. In contrast, in Canada and France, where government social agencies are more reluctant to cooperate with faith-based mediating institutions, the Haitian communities’ own efforts to move ahead are weakened. In other words, if government social initiatives ignore the most important community associations among the groups they are trying to serve, they are not likely to be extremely successful.

Exploring the Treetops with Nalini Nadkarni

In her book Between Earth and Sky, forest canopy biologist Nalini Nadkarni introduces us to a man named Emil, who has traveled from the tundra of northern Canada to experience trees for the first time. At the end of the two-week excursion, he describes his impression of the forest: “You must learn to treat these big trees the way we treat the elders in our village—with great care and respect. Trees are as important to you as our grandparents are to us because they teach you things.” As Nadkarni shows, trees are indeed wise teachers, providers, healers, and friends. They are the common thread between chewing gum, turpentine, allspice, maple syrup, vitamin packets, charcoal, toothpaste, and Chanel No. 5, and they are present throughout our lives, from birth and childhood (cradles, building blocks, tree houses) to death and beyond (memorial trees, coffins, gallows), and everything in between. Nadkarni illustrates how trees support every human need, from food and shelter to health, creativity, a sense of history, spirituality and religion, and mindfulness.

The relationship between people and trees, particularly the forest canopy, is at the center of Nadkarni’s book. She shares her personal story of how trees shaped her life: her childhood in the treetops, her life's work as a canopy researcher, her marriage in a tree, and her wish to ultimately become part of the canopy itself. Nadkarni has transcended the borders of academic science to become a forest ambassador and teacher, connecting people with nature in creative ways. In her talk at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, above, she describes some of these projects and partnerships, including music, dance, and art collaborations, and a program where incarcerated men and women learn to cultivate endangered canopy moss. Her Forest Canopy Lab also created the Treetop Barbie, to inspire the next generation of adventurous tree climbers. But the ultimate partnership is the one between humans and trees: "There are trees in our hearts. There are trees in your hearts. When we come to understand nature, we are touching the most deep, the most important parts of our self," she says. Nadkarni's story illuminates the path toward mindfulness, and a rediscovery of our relationship with nature.

Tales of God's Friends

John Renard is Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. His many books include Seven Doors to Islam: Spirituality and the Religious Life of Muslims, Windows on the House of Islam, and Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood, all from UC Press. His most recent endeavor was writing Tales of of God's Friends: Islamic Hagiography in Translation, which was published by UC Press in April 2009. Below, he shares the inspirations for his books.

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By: John Renard

One of the best ways to get to the heart of a religious or cultural tradition other than your own is to encounter, in person or in stories, truly exemplary characters from that religion or culture. Six or seven years ago, I began searching for material I could use to teach a university course on popular and influential religious personalities in Islamic history and tradition. There were plenty of studies on individual characters from specific cultures and times. To my surprise, I could not find - in any language - a single broad global thematic overview of the immense subject of the kind of religiously important Muslims that some other traditions call "saints." As I worked on Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood, published by UCPress in 2008, it was equally apparent that no single volume provided English translations of classic stories of Friends of God from across the world and through Islamic history. Tales of God's Friends: Islamic Hagiography in Translation offers a collection of marvelous stories, from the ninth to the twentiety centuries, and from Morocco to China. It is my hope that these stories will put readers in touch with the "human" dimension of Islam so often missing in the daily blare of negative stories about Islam and Muslims.

Podcast with Neil Smelser, Author of The Odyssey Experience

On April 21, 2009, Deborah Harper, President of Psychjourney, interviewed Neil J. Smelser. Smelser is University Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis, Problematics of Sociology, and Social Paralysis and Social Change, all from UC Press. He is also the author of The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys, which was published by UC Press in February 2009.

Listen to the audio interview with Smelser on psychjourney.com

Download and listen to the Smelser podcast

Christianity and Colonial Empire in the 19th Century Philippines

John D. Blanco is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, San Diego. Blanco's latest endeavor, Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century Philippines was published by UC Press in February 2009. In Blanco's blog entry below, he talks about how his book examines the history of the Philippines and how the country was effected by imperialism.

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By: John D. Blanco

While most students of Philippine culture and history know the archipelago to consist of a mélange of interconnected peoples belonging to different languages and indigenous cultures, concentrated in one of the most ecologically bio-diverse regions in the world, and suffering from the long-term effects of conquest and colonization by Western powers, few pause to consider that for the past four centuries the Philippines has also been a crossroads of globalization, where competing visions of world hegemony have been played out in dramatic fashion.  If standard textbooks of Spanish or US textbooks mention the Philippines at all, it is only to highlight the furthest reaches of imperial Christendom in the sixteenth century, or US imperialism in the twentieth.  Yet it is on the frontiers of these histories and empires that the limits of global hegemony, as well as new approaches to the “worlding of the world” were staked.  I began with this simple premise in my research, which led me to the question: how did the actors involved in these arenas of early global rivalries and conflict understand the colonial past?  How did they imagine the future of the Philippines, and what kinds of values and attitudes did these imaginaries produce?  How was the idea of modernity refracted not only through divergent responses to Spain’s reforms in colonial economy and society, but also through the changing role of Christianity in Spain’s concept of empire? 

Frontier Constitutions concerns the cultural transformations, adaptations, and innovations of peninsular Spanish colonists and native-born Creole, mestizo (Chinese and Spanish), and indigenous colonial subjects around crisis of colonial hegemony in the Philippines between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the resulting social anomie that arose from this crisis in law and politics. The crisis of colonial hegemony engendered new political and cultural expressions, which, in turn, sanctioned the formation of new political communities around the precariousness of Spanish rule. The basic argument I develop is that, in the invocation of political communities around the future of colonial hegemony – an imperial order formed by the temporal and spiritual authorities around the twin objectives of conquest and evangelization from the sixteenth century – the colonial state comes to rely on an authority that individual colonial institutions could neither control nor successfully channel.  That was the authority of “common sense” in the realms of patriotic sentiment, public opinion, aesthetic reflection, and the articulation of social norms in literature and the novel.

From a methodological perspective, what excited me so much about this period and the rise of Philippine literature that occurred within it, was the prospect of intervening in certain debates that have emerged from a multilateral dialogue involving scholars in Philippine, Latin American, Indian subaltern, and US border studies around the colonial transformations that took place during the long nineteenth century.  From a personal perspective, I found it a joyful exercise to excavate the lost dreams of a period marked by the end of Spain’s Renaissance Empire and the onset of US imperialism. 

Speaking of Jews

Lila Corwin Berman is Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies and Mal and Lea Bank Early Career Professor in Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is also the author of Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity, which was published by UC Press in January 2009. In her blog entry below, Berman discusses her and her brother's experiences growing up Jewish in America.

By: Lila Corwin Berman

When he was in fifth grade, my little brother decided to start wearing a yarmulke to school.  Our great-grandmother had just passed away.  Although not old enough to be counted in the daily prayer services, he had been impressed by the men in our family who woke early each morning for seven days after her death to pray together.  So once back home, he donned the yarmulke, ate breakfast, and then climbed on the bus that took him to his public elementary school.  None of his classmates knew what to make of his new hat—and, really, he did not much know what it meant.  But over that school year and the next and the next, he explained it to them, each time adding something new, sometimes coming home with a question for our parents.

While researching and writing Speaking of Jews, I thought often about my brother’s yarmulke.  It was a visible sign of his difference that demanded explanation—at least in our town.  In the process of explaining it, he came to new ways of understanding what it meant for him to be Jewish.  The subject of my book is not so unrelated.  I explore how Jews in the middle decades of the twentieth century explained themselves to non-Jews.  Language—the way Jews talked about themselves—became crucial to Jewish life in the United States.  I argue that Jews explained themselves to non-Jews out of a sense of necessity; they believed doing so was a strategy for survival in a new homeland. 

The voices I chose to explore were the ones most self-conscious of the project of Jewish self-explanation.  Rabbis and Jewish intellectuals felt themselves purveyors of Jewishness to the American public.  Many stepped into university classrooms, radio and television studios, and publishing houses so their words would reach a wide audience of Americans.  The search for a proper language through which to explain Jewishness to non-Jews itself became a mode of Jewishness.  To be Jewish was, on some level, to speak about being Jewish to non-Jews. 

European Jewish Enlightenment thinkers had more than a century earlier sought to remake Jewishness as a tool for encountering and sculpting modernity.  Yet whereas the course of modern European history thwarted those efforts, the course of American history encouraged them.  In the United States, Jewish leaders and thinkers suggested that Jewishness was vital to the success of American democracy, thus attempting to guard their survival without isolating themselves from modern American life.  Through this book, I hope to contribute to a larger historical and political discussion about how people, communities, and nations have encountered the tension between humanism or universalism on the one hand, and particularism or distinctiveness on the other. 

On the bus ride home, after his first day of middle school, my brother noticed an older boy staring at his head.  “What’s that?” the boy asked.  A girl sitting close by chimed in, “Oh that, that’s because he’s the Pope’s son.”  And the conversation ended.  Which is to acknowledge that our explanations of ourselves always exist in dialogue with others’ perceptions of us. 

In God's Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity

Matt Tomlinson is Lecturer in Anthropology at Monash University in Australia and co-editor of The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity. Tomlinson's latest book, In God's Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity was published by UC Press in January 2009. In his blog entry below, he talks about religious politics.

By: Matt Tomlinson

In the US, talk about a “wall of separation” between church and state has been challenged over the past several decades by religious leaders trying to smash it. Creationists have stood for election to school boards, hoping to impose a biblical narrative in public science education. Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson tried to shape national politics, and had some notable successes, with Robertson considered a serious candidate in the presidential primaries of 1988 and the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition gaining influence and visibility. From 2000 to 2008, President Bush occasionally seemed to believe he was divinely chosen to lead the country.

This kind of religious politics has always fascinated and troubled me. In my training as an anthropologist I decided to study a different culture with strong indigenous traditions, one in which Christianity is an overt and potent political force. In this regard, many places qualify, but Fiji is especially resonant. Talk of religion’s political role is common in Fiji, and church leaders have had national political influence since Fiji achieved independence from Great Britain in 1970. Fiji has suffered four coups since 1987, with three of them strongly supported by Christian ethnonationalists opposing the interests of Fiji’s non-indigenous citizens, most of whom are Hindu and Muslim descendants of South Asian indentured laborers. Non-Christian and non-indigenous citizens have suffered as politicians and other leaders promoted a national Christian identity that included the banning of commerce on Sundays, calls for Fiji to be declared a Christian state, and the desecration of Hindu temples.

I’ve conducted research in Fiji since 1996, always trying to understand the intricate relationships between the indigenous chiefly system and the Methodist Church, which had enormous influence on politics until the most recent coup in 2006. What struck me during fieldwork was how the relationship between the chiefs and the church—that is, between political and religious authorities—has generated a pervasive sense of loss. In my research site of Tavuki Bay on rural Kadavu Island, people regularly compared the present negatively to the past, in which people were stronger, everyone worked together, customs were intact, and mana (effectiveness, often with a spiritual aspect) was present. I came to realize that these statements were not nostalgia, at least not in the usual sense: people were not just recalling the past fondly, but expressing persistent anxieties that lost power was a curse. In this sense, Fiji’s repeated coups seem, paradoxically, like self-destructive rituals of redemption. That is, people who value their identities as good Christians feel pushed to recuperate what they feel they’ve lost. This sense of loss is generated and made manifest in church sermons and prayers, chiefs’ speeches, and casual conversations at nightly sessions where the narcotic beverage kava is drunk.

I’m still trying to apply the lessons from Fiji to America, and to Australia, where I am now based. And my research in Fiji is continuing, as I am beginning a new project on ecumenical institutions in the capital city, Suva.

The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys

Neil J. Smelser is University Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis, Problematics of Sociology, and Social Paralysis and Social Change, all from UC Press. Smelser's most recent title, The Odyssey Experience: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys, was released by UC Press in February 2009. In his blog entry below, Smelser talks about his experiences on his inspirational trip to Austria.

By: Neil J. Smelser

In 1951, as a junior at Harvard, I was selected as one of four undergraduates to participate the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies.  This meant living six weeks in an eighteenth-century schloss outside Salzburg, Austria, along with about 50 young European scholars and a half-dozen other Harvard students.  The essence of the experience was to attend a number of courses offered by eminent American faculty in the areas of American history, society, and culture and to mingle with the others.  The seminar had been founded several years earlier by a number of idealistic American undergraduates, thinking that such an institution could help America-European relations and contribute modestly to rebuilding a war-ravaged Europe.

I knew in advance that this was going to be a romantic adventure, but I did not realize how profound it would be.  All the participants found themselves engulfed in a journey that was far more than intellectual.  Deep personal attachments were formed; the scholars found themselves swept into a community with an unimagined solidarity; everyone seemed equal and equally involved; and the closing party was at once euphoric, sentimental and tearful.  I shared fully in these experiences, and emerged with a feeling of personal regeneration and a deep nostalgia that has never weakened.

The experience in Salzburg was a remarkable one, but I always regarded it as an event in itself, not really comparable to other experiences. Over the years, however, in living kindred experiences, and in my research as a social scientist, the idea gradually grew on me that many different episodes constitute a genre of human behavior that is widespread if not universal in personal and social life, and touches what is deepest psychologically and spiritually in the human condition. As the idea developed in my mind, I came to call it The Odyssey Experience.

As my imagination and thinking developed, I came to appreciate that the logic of the odyssey experience covered a galaxy of  experiences—religious and secular rites of passage, pilgrimages, religious conversion, intense involvement in social movements, travel and tourism, academic leaves, psychotherapy, and initiations and ordeals.  The essence of the odyssey experience is this:  a finite period of disengagement from the routines of life and immersion into a simpler, transitory, often collective and often intense period of involvement that often culminates in some kind of regeneration. 

Now, in the twilight years of my career, I have written a general book on the subject, puling together all my wanderings and thoughts on the subject, and have in that book developed a comprehensive theory of the odyssey experience.  I hope the book will contribute to our understanding of human affairs, and will excite readers’ ideas about their own involvements in life’s odysseys.

UC Press Podcast Featuring, Jerome Rothenberg, Jeffrey Robinson and Adam Frank

We are pleased to announce that Episode 9 of the UC Press podcast series is now available. In December's episode, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews two English professors, and a professor of Astrophysics.

First, he interviews Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson, authors of Poems for the Millennium, Volume 3: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry. Second, it's Adam Frank, author of The Constant Fire: Beyone the Science vs. Religion Debate. You may subscribe to the monthly podcast feed that contains the individual episodes using your RSS aggregator or directly via the iTunes store.  You can listen to individual author interviews from the episodes at www.ucpress.edu/podcast or on the individual book pages using the embedded player.

Listen to an interview with Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey Robinson, authors of Poems for the Millennium.

Listen to an interview with Adam Frank, author of The Constant Fire.