Religion and the Transnational Imagination

Abstract

The transnational turn has generated new ways of thinking about borders and phenomena that cross them, including religion. Nevertheless, there is little agreement on what kinds of processes the terms “transnationalism” and “globalization” refer to and to what extent they represent something new. As the articles in this special issue examine, however, these terms refer not simply to actual changes in geographical scale but to distinct ways of imagining the world and specific claims about how the world should be. This introduction discusses the ways that the contributors to this issue attend to the role that the transnational imagination plays in religious discourse and practice.

Full text

Religion and the Transnational Imagination
Author(s): Stephen Selka
Source:
Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions,
Vol. 16, No. 4 (May
2013), pp. 5-10
Published by: University of California Press
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Religion and the Transnational
Imagination
Stephen Selka
ABSTRACT: The transnational turn has generated new ways of thinking
about borders and phenomena that cross them, including religion.
Nevertheless, there is little agreement on what kinds of processes the
terms ‘‘transnationalism’’ and ‘‘globalization’’ refer to and to what extent
they represent something new. As the articles in this special issue
examine, however, these terms refer not simply to actual changes in
geographical scale but to distinct ways of imagining the world and spe-
cific claims about how the world should be. This introduction discusses
the ways that the contributors to this issue attend to the role that the
transnational imagination plays in religious discourse and practice.
KEYWORDS: religion, transnationalism, transnational turn, globalization,
imaginaries
By most reports, the much celebrated transnational turn has pro-
foundly influenced the humanities and social sciences. Indeed,
it has prompted us to rethink polities, borders, and mobility, not
to mention space itself. As the focus of this special issue indicates, the
transnational turn has also influenced the study of religion, which is
reflected in the current concern with the ways in which religions cross
national and cultural boundaries.
Like the closely related concept of ‘‘globalization,’’ ‘‘transnationalism’’
is a notoriously slippery term. Empirically speaking, the problem
with both concepts is that there is little agreement on what kinds of
processes they refer to and to what extent they represent something
Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Volume 16, Issue 4, pages
5–10. ISSN 1092-6690 (print), 1541-8480. (electronic). ©2013 by The Regents of the
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DOI: 10.1525/nr.2013.16.4.5.
5
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new. Are globalization and transnationalism linked with increasing
cultural heterogeneity, or homogeneity, or both, and how? If we accept
the definition of ‘‘globalization’’ as increased time-space compression,
1
for example, then are the past few decades something qualitatively
new or just a continuation of processes that have been at work for
centuries?
Many critics maintain that globalization essentially refers to the
spread of capitalism around the world, most recently in its neoliberal
form, along with the receding of its alternatives.
2
Certainly this fits with
the impression that globalization is largely driven by multinational cor-
porations and the transnational organizations that represent their inter-
ests, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. As
Fredrick Cooper points out,
3
however, like the discourse of moderniza-
tion that came before it, the understanding of globalization as the dawn-
ing of universal capitalism—or any sort of universal project for that
matter—assumes a coherence and teleology that is not self-evident.
Cooper writes, ‘‘What is missing in discussions of globalization today is
the historical depth of interconnection and just what the structures and
limits of the connecting mechanisms are.’’
4
This calls for both greater
skepticism and greater specificity.
In addition to these empirical issues, it is equally important to con-
sider what kinds of analytical work the terms ‘‘transnationalism’’ and
‘‘globalization’’ perform. Some uses of the term transnationalism, for
example, refer to the micro movements and everyday practices of people
in contrast to macro-level global processes and power structures—
transnationalism from below versus transnationalism from above.
5
Central here are the oppositions between dominant and subaltern, cen-
ter and periphery, hegemony and resistance. A potential problem with
these distinctions, however, is that they set up globalization as something
going on at a level above everyday life that actors either uncritically
accept or actively resist. By contrast, much of the recent work on glob-
alization and transnationalism has attempted to shed light on the com-
plicated ways that people engage the multiple and sometimes
contradictory global forces that shape their everyday lives.
6
Clearly, discourses about globalization and transnationalism are
caught up with certain ways of imagining the world and specific claims
about how the world should be. As Stephan Palmi´e points out in his
discussion of the genealogy of the terms ‘‘nation’’ and ‘‘religion’’ in his
essay at the end of this special issue, considering the amount of work in
the past few decades devoted to showing how nations are imagined and
that religion as a category is a recent historical construction, it is remark-
able that we would take ‘‘transnationalism’’ (or ‘‘transnational religions’’)
at face value. Along these lines, a theme that runs through all three of
the articles in this issue is that globalization and transnationalism are
largely a matter of perspective and imagination.
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With respect to studies of transnational religion, most have tended to
focus on the global expansion of religious institutions and organizations
and/or on the movement of ‘‘local’’ or ‘‘popular’’ religious practices—
those in contrast to which ‘‘world religions’’ or ‘‘official religions’’ have
long been defined—across borders.
7
The spread of evangelical Chris-
tianity around the world is a paradigmatic example of the former. Yet, of
course, religions with global or universal ambitions are nothing new.
Arguments for what is distinctive about the current wave of evangelical
Christianity, however, include its affinity with neoliberal capitalism, its
experiential nature that appeals to those disenchanted with mainstream
religious institutions, its central emphasis on healing, and its ability to
integrate the use of new media.
8
Elizabeth McAlister’s article in this issue, ‘‘Humanitarian AdHocracy,
Transnational New Apostolic Missions, and Evangelical Anti-
Dependency in a Haitian Refugee Camp,’’ which focuses on a Pentecostal
congregation in Haiti with ties to a mission based in the United States,
complicates the picture. She examines religious responses to disaster
and displacement in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti in 2010,
emphasizing how this congregation makes a rightwing evangelical
critique of dependency on international aid. Thus, here we have
a transnational religious community taking up a particular anti-
transnational stance, one that may be consistent with conservatism to
the extent that it emphasizes self-help and opposes dependency on
foreign aid, but also dovetails with leftist critiques of globalization. This
prompts us to think about transnationalism not only as an empirical
phenomenon, but as a set of ideologies that may be manifested in unex-
pected ways at unexpected sites.
One of the major issues in discussions of transnational religions is
what Thomas J. Csordas in the introduction to his edited volume,
Transnational Transcendence,
9
refers to as transposibility. For Csordas, this
refers to the ability of a religious practice to be ‘‘transformed or reordered
without being denatured.’’
10
Elsewhere, Paul Johnson
11
specifies a num-
ber of processes involved in the transposition of religious practices that
cross borders from one context to another. Examples include ‘‘hook-
ing,’’ which involves the re-inscription of rituals onto new maps, such as
the substitution of a local site or geographical formation for one back in
the homeland, and ‘‘additivity,’’ which involves the increased focus of
some aspect of the religion when it disperses, or the incorporation of
elements of other religions in the new context.
As one might expect, issues of transposition are often hotly contested
within and between religious communities, particularly those associated
with diasporas. With respect to African diaspora religions, for example,
discourses of African purity maintain that African religious practices
were directly transcribed from Africa to the Americas, thereby glossing
over the processes of transposition and transformation that were
Selka: Religion and the Transnational Imagination
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involved in these religions crossing the Atlantic. This issue is at the heart
of long-standing debates about African retentions versus creolization.
12
A major problem here is that claims to direct continuity between ritual
practices located in different contexts often obscure the transpositions
and re-contextualizations that have taken place, not to mention that
claims to African purity rest on strategically constructed notions of both
‘‘African’’ and ‘‘purity.’’
13
Along these lines, Elizabeth P ´erez’s article in this issue, ‘‘Portable
Portals: Transnational Rituals for the Head across Globalizing Orisha
Traditions,’’ concerns ritual changes in Black Atlantic religions, focusing
on the Ori ritual in particular. She focuses on re-Africanization in vari-
ous sites in the diaspora, thereby stressing not only transnational
connections—between Africa and the Americas and also within the
Americas—but also the ways in which practices are made meaningful
in terms of their imagined spatial relations. On the one hand, P´erez
examines how practitioners wrestle with questions of authenticity and
origins. At the same time, she calls for re-grounding discussions of ritual
changes in Black Atlantic religions in the analysis of questions about
‘‘care of the self,’’ since this is the frame through which most of the
initiates in Chicago with whom she worked view their practice. P´erez
argues that the concerns about tracing (or debunking) transnational
connections and continuities that may be important to religious leaders
and academic researchers may be practically irrelevant to practitioners.
This makes sense to the extent that African diaspora religions are more
focused on dealing with affliction than with issues of identity, especially
in Latin America but also in the United States. P´erez’s article calls atten-
tion to the fact, as Palmi´e emphasizes, that transnationalism is in the eye
of the beholder.
From this perspective, taking account of transnational imaginaries
needs to go hand in hand with the analysis of transnational phenomena
themselves, since the latter are constituted largely through the former.
The focus on the transnational imaginary is implicit in each of the
articles in this issue, but it is most explicitly developed in Kelly E. Hayes’
contribution, ‘‘Intergalactic Space-Time Travelers: Envisioning Global-
ization in Brazil’s Valley of the Dawn.’’ Hayes’ article focuses on Vale do
Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) in Brazil, a new and eclectic religion
whose pantheon includes spiritual entities from a wide array of times
and places, and represents one of the few studies published in English of
this complex religion.
14
She discusses globalization, following Harvey, in
terms of time-space compression and deterritorialization, but less in
reference to actual movements than to the circulation of representa-
tions and images. Thus, she does an excellent job of illustrating global-
ization not simply as an empirical transformation in the quantity and
quality of different kinds of relations across time and space but also as
a transformation of subjectivities. At the same time, she manages to do
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this without lapsing into idealism; these changes in the transnational
imaginary are in fact grounded in—but not reducible to—changes in
connections and relations between people.
A distinctive focus that ties these articles together is a concern with
transnationalism not as a taken for granted analytical frame but as an
object of inquiry itself. Indeed, any discussion of transnationalism must
attend to how spatial relations and connections are imagined in the first
place, and any discussion of transnational religions must reflect on the
historically accumulated assumptions behind the idea that there is some-
thing called religion that can be carried from one place to another. And
just as importantly, these issues have to be situated in the context of lived
lives, as each of these articles does so well.
ENDNOTES
1
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cul-
tural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 240.
2
See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2001); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007); and Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay
on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002).
3
Frederick Cooper, ‘‘What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An
African Historian’s Perspective,’’ African Affairs 100, no. 399 (2001): 189–213.
4
Cooper, ‘‘What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For?’’ 190.
5
See Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); and Michael Peter Smith and Luis
Eduardo Guarzino, eds., Transnationalism from Below (Piscataway, N.J.: Transac-
tion Publishers, 1998).
6
See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
7
See Thomas J. Csordas, ed., Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and
Globalization (Berkeley: University of Califorina Press, 2009).
8
See Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New
Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007);
Candy Gunther Brown, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011); and Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff,
‘‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,’’ South Atlantic
Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 779–805.
9
Thomas J. Csordas, ‘‘Introduction: Modalities of Transnational Transcen-
dence,’’ in Csordas, Transnational Transcendence, 1–30.
10
Csordas, ‘‘Modalities of Transnational Transcendence,’’ 5.
11
Paul Christopher Johnson, Diasporic Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the
Recovery of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 55–59.
Selka: Religion and the Transnational Imagination
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12
See Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture:
An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Stephan Palmi´e,
‘‘Creolization and Its Discontents,’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (October
2006): 433–56.
13
See Stephania Capone, Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and Tradition in
Candombl´
e(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Beatriz G ´ois Dantas,
Nago Grandma and White Papa: Candombl´
e and the Creation of Afro-Brazilian Identity,
trans. Stephen Berg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009);
J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matri-
archy in the Afro-Brazilian Candombl´
e(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2005); and Stephan Palmi´e, ‘‘Introduction: On Predications of Africanity,’’ in
Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic
Religions, ed. Stephan Palmi´e (Boston: Brill, 2008), 1–38.
14
See also Massimo Introvigne, ‘‘Field Notes: A Visit to the Vale do Amanhecer,’’
CESNUR: Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni,’’ <http://www.cesnur.org/2011/
mi-vale.html>.
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