In this installment of the Rites and Responsibilities dialogue series, I met with the Boston University anthropologist and scholar of Islam Robert W. Hefner. A world renowned expert on Muslim culture, politics, and education in Southeast Asia and beyond, Hefner is the author or co-editor of more than a dozen books, including

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: If we consider concepts like “Muslim democrats” or “Muslim democratic formation”—I don’t know if you use that phrase—it seems clear that these concepts have either been under-acknowledged or under-recognized. Given these conditions, can you give us an example of democratic formation in a Muslim-majority country that would be an instructive example to and for the West? An example that says, “Here is a vibrant form of democratic life, and it took place or is taking place within the Islamic world, not despite Islam.” I think one of the bad-faith narratives about Islam says that democracy happens in the Muslim world despite Islam, despite what Islam wants for itself.

RH: Well, I think there are two striking examples. And then there are a number of still important but, for a variety of reasons, less salient examples. But the two most striking examples of Muslim democracies today are Indonesia and Turkey. People will point out that the Turkish state was until recently Kemalist, and was therefore a largely laicist state. On these grounds some would say that the Turkish case is too exceptional to figure in any discussion of Islam and democracy. But since the 1970s Turkey has experienced an Islamic resurgence comparable to that which we’ve seen across most of the Muslim world. In Turkey, as the political scientist Ahmet Kuru has so insightfully argued, the state structure that was put in place during most of the twentieth century was more aggressively secularist than that in the great majority of Muslim societies around the world. Inevitably, then, Turkey’s democratization shows some path-dependent contingencies and imperfections, not least of all with regard to ethnic minorities like the Kurds or religious minorities like the Alevis. That said, the continuing relaxation of military controls, the growing openness of electoral competition, and the preference among observant Muslims for an ethicalized profession of Islam rather than a woodenly formalistic implementation of sharia codes—all this bespeaks a political development of global importance.

The path-dependent nature and imperfection of democratization in Indonesia is somewhat different. Indonesia is sometimes described as a secular-nationalist state, but the reality is more complex. The country’s constitutional framework is a multi-confessional, “confessionalized” state, in the sense that the state is actively committed to the promotion of religion as a public good.

But the way in which this confessional commitment has been realized has varied over time, in a manner that both expressed and influenced Indonesian politics. From ‘65-‘66 until 1998, Indonesia was ruled by an authoritarian and, at first, conservative, nationalist ruler, President Suharto. However, in the last fifteen years of Suharto’s New Order government, the country witnessed an unprecedented resurgence of Islamic observance in society. Although, in the last five years of his rule, Suharto attempted to deflect the growing opposition to his rule by cultivating ties to anti-democratic Islamists, in the 1990s the country nonetheless developed a lively pro-democracy movement at the forefront of which were Muslim activists and intellectuals. Since Suharto’s fall, conservative Islamists have been consistently rebuffed in national elections. But small alliances of radical Islamist militias have taken advantage of the post-Suharto spring to press, sometimes violently, for curbs on Christian church-building as well as non-conformist Muslim groupings like the Ahmadiyah. So yes, there are path-dependent peculiarities and imperfections to democratization in Indonesia, as in Turkey, but this is par for the course in the democratization game, including here in the West. Democratization is always characterized by heightened levels of public participation, and at times this participation may result in massification that undermines rather than strengthens citizen rights and democratic institutions.

DKK: By massification, I assume you mean, not just popularization, but a sort of populism that can infuse democratic systems. As you know, there is an anxiety even among democratic theorists that thoroughgoing democracy—not quite radical democracy—in that sense, isn’t necessarily a good thing, insofar as there are popular formations that are primarily concerned to establish the authority of a particular mindset.

RH: That’s right. Indeed, I use the term to refer to a situation in which one sees, in whatever sphere—be it religion, politics, cultural life, the economy, etc.—heightened rates of popular participation, but without that participation necessarily being regulated or regularized by democratic or pluralism-embracing norms. So, massification can lead in some instances to democratization, but it need not: it can team up with highly uncivil and anti-pluralist movements or imaginaries. The challenge in any modern democratic system, then, is to take that heightened mobility and mobilization that characterize so much of modern society and canalize them in ways that reinforce a culture of democratic proceduralism and citizen rights for all. The history of mass politics in the mid-twentieth century West reminds us that the outcome of efforts like these is never a foregone conclusion.

DKK: You have written that Suharto had, at one point, sought out either moderate or even liberal Muslim leaders as he was trying to re-think what Indonesia was as a nation. And then he moved away from these moderates and liberals toward more conservative, traditionalist, and dogmatic figures. How do you explain this move? Would you ascribe Suharto’s shift in policy to anxiety about massification, and the anxieties about the loss of control?

RH: There were issues related to massification, but Suharto, actually, was a fairly effective administrator and, more importantly, a brilliant if at times ruthless tactician, a master of selective mobilization, which in many instances took the form of “divide and conquer.” As the Islamic resurgence gained momentum, in the mid-1980s, he realized that it posed a threat to his rule. Indeed, as one of his advisers told me in 1992, he looked at what had happened in Iran, and he realized that, for tactical reasons, he’d better engage the organized Muslim community more effectively. But his first tack, as you said, was to reach out to Muslim moderates, if you will—indeed, even Muslim liberals, such as a dear friend and teacher of mine, Nurcholish Madjid, who died a few years ago, and who was really one of the great thinkers of late twentieth-century Islam. So, Suharto first reached out to Madjid, as well as to other Muslim reformers who were linked to mass organizations, thinking that intellectuals and leaders of Muslim mass organizations would allow him to co-opt and control the Muslim community.

DKK: Normatively speaking, in terms of these moderate or liberal Muslim political theorists, what were they telling Suharto, particularly in contrast to the conservative views he sought out later on? I’m curious about that difference.

RH: What those leaders told Suharto is that he had to take steps to contain corruption, including that of his children, and to transition to a democratic political order. Nurcholish Madjid was quite explicit about this in his speeches and writings, though he was not a vociferous, street-fighting opponent of Suharto—other people, like Abdurrahman Wahid, the now-deceased head of Nahdlatul Ulama, and the man who was president of Indonesia from late 1998 to 2001, played a more complex and mass-politics game. Both men, however, spoke of the importance of free elections, a deepening of citizen rights, religious freedom, and civil society, and both too saw parallels between Indonesia and the earlier processes of democratization in Taiwan and Korea.

DKK: “Five Tigers.” That sort of rhetoric.

RH: That’s right. Indonesia has always been unusual in that, although it is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, on matters of politics and economics many in the political class have looked as readily to East Asia as they have the Middle East for political and economic lessons.

In any case, because Madjid, Wahid, and others continued to press for democratic reforms, from about 1994 to 1998 President Suharto reached out to hardline Islamists who had earlier been his critics, and he succeeded in winning them to his cause by alleging that the democracy movement was really a kind of Christian-influenced organization, and that democracy itself was antithetical to Islam. But the great majority of Muslim leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s had already concluded that constitutionalism and democracy were not merely compatible with Islam but required by the circumstances of modern life and politics.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

In May of 2010, I sat down for a conversation with the legendary human rights advocate Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. Jones and I had just come out of an intense two-day workshop at the SSRC on religion, peacebuilding, and development in Mindanao, organized in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Participants in the workshop included scholars and peacebuilders from the United States, Mindanao, Japan, and Indonesia.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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David Kyuman Kim: This is David Kim from the SSRC’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. And I have the pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Sidney Jones from the International Crisis Group, in a segment for the Rites and Responsibilities series for The Immanent Frame. We have just come out of a two day SSRC workshop on the crisis in Mindanao, funded by the Luce Foundation, and part of the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Sidney, before we get into your work, and because the conversations from workshop are still fresh in our minds, I’m curious to hear your perspective on and your characterization of what the Mindanao crisis is. Speak, if you would, not just as someone who’s been involved with the Mindanao crisis for some time. How would you describe the situation to someone who knows nothing about it?

Sidney Jones: I would say that, in some ways, we’re dealing with a fundamentally ethno-nationalist insurgency, but what makes it so much more complicated than many other areas is that there are several insurgencies going on at the same time, including the old Communist insurgency, which spills over into Mindanao. We have three guerilla groups that identify themselves as Moro, plus the NPA [the National People’s Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines], which is still active. We also have three different peace processes going on at the same time, and any success on one track will have negative implications for the others. So, trying to fit all those things into some kind of overarching peace process is extraordinarily difficult. And on top of that, even if you were to settle all of those insurgencies, you would still be dealing with clan conflicts and structural problems of warlordism and feudalism, which would continue to account for what is currently 30 or 40 percent of the violence in Mindanao even if you got the peace processes signed, sealed, and delivered. So, that’s what the crisis in Mindanao is about.

DKK: As you know, the Rites and Responsibilities series is focusing on questions of sovereignty and authority and religion. And among the things that the folks in the workshop seemed to be wrestling with was how to account for the religious factors and influences in Mindanao. You yourself had very portrayals of the religious factors and influences, specifically, your insistence of not wanting to stick to an account in which the portrait was primarily about the disputes between Muslims and Christians. How would you describe the role that religious groups play, how religious actors play in Mindanao? What language would you use to describe them? What are the inadequacies of the characterizations that have been put forth?

SJ: There’s no question that there is a fundamental issue of religious identities involved. But it’s also true that the fundamental conflict is not religious. It’s about control over power and resources. And that control issue extends beyond Christian and Muslim communities to different ethnic identities among people who are Muslims. It also, like many of the conflicts in Indonesia, has an overlay of “indigenous-versus-migrant.” Some of these fundamental power relationships relate to people from upland areas in Mindanao who have been displaced by people from northern parts of the Philippines, who are mostly Christian, coming in and taking over land and political power from the Muslims themselves. The problem, for instance, in the agreement that failed in August 2008, which was trying to define “the Bangsamoro homeland,” was that the MILF [the Moro Islamic Liberation Front] was basically including Lumads, or indigenous people, in their definition of Bangsamoro. And the Lumads objected to this! They didn’t want to be part of the Moro concept of who was defined as a Moro. They wanted a separate identity. There were very definite ancestral land issues that were at the root of why they wanted a separate identity, and the MILF didn’t understand, or didn’t appreciate it fully. So that’s another part of the complexity of the whole process. And it’s why it’s a mistake to see this conflict as “Christian versus Muslim,” or to believe that appealing to religious leaders, such as the Catholic Church or Muslim ulama, will somehow be able to settle it.

DKK: As I hear you describe it, and also and on my reading of the white paper that Myla Leguro and Scott Appleby wrote for the workshop, there seems to be a structural problem that is fed by religion. Right? In other words, there is the structural problem that determines which groups are recognized, and which are not recognized. I think you objected at one point, in your response to their papers, saying “Well, it’s not even simply questions about conversion, but it’s claims about re-version.”

SJ: Yes.

DKK: Which is to say, it is a set of disputes over claims about original identities, originary identities. And these disputes involve appeal to religion to fortify the respective claims about identity. I guess I’m a little stuck, then, on the following. It’s one thing to say, “Well, there are all sorts of mischaracterizations of and misuses of religious identities.” But there are certainly resources in religious communities and religious traditions that could be used as sources of resistance––sources that don’t have to subsumed under the broad dichotomy of “Muslim v. Christian.”

SJ: Yes, let me give you a couple of examples. We had a major massacre in Maguindanao, in central Mindanao, in November 2009, in which one clan killed fifty-seven people—actually, fifty-eight, but one victim was never identified. And there was a sense that, first of all, it was Muslim-on-Muslim violence, in that this one clan leader carried out the massacre as a way of sending a message to his political rival, who was head of another Muslim clan. But there were thirty journalists killed in the process, and most of the journalists were Christian. And some of the Muslims in Mindanao were saying, “If there hadn’t been Christians killed, this issue never would have gotten the international attention it did, because there’s a sense that Muslims are always killing Muslims. So it would have been a horrendous massacre, but it wouldn’t have gotten the same level of attention.”

DKK: There’s a difference in the moral indignation or moral valence in the global community in response to violence against Muslims versus violence against Christians.

SJ: Yes! And then, afterwards, I was talking with the Archbishop of Cotabato, who was saying that there was a sense among his parishioners that the massacre intensified stereotypes of Muslims as violent.

DKK: Hm.

SJ: And therefore it would intensify resistance to any peace agreement that involved power-sharing with the Bangsamoro. So, in that sense, there was definitely a religious element, and stereotypes, involved, and it suggested that there was a role for the church, for example, to try and diminish the force of those stereotypes.

DKK: Yes.

SJ: But it was also true that there was a clear issue of clan rivalry among Muslims that wasn’t necessarily going to be able to be addressed by Islamic ulama. One of the people at this workshop was saying last night that he is a victim of one of these blood feuds among Muslim clans, or between two Muslim clans, I asked him if there was any way that the ulama could play a role in settling those feuds. And he said “No, because the ulama are all situated within the clans. And they wouldn’t accept somebody coming in from outside the clan.” So where is the role of religious leadership in settling that aspect of the violence in Mindanao? And it’s a critically important part of the violence, because the clan structure perpetuates it.

DKK: But when you say “religious leadership,” do you mean local religious leadership? Do you mean transnational religious leadership?

SJ: When I talk about religious leadership in Mindanao, I’m talking about local leadership—except that there’s a big difference between the Islamic and the Christian leadership, or at least the leadership within the Catholic Church. And I think it’s also important to underscore that inasmuch as we’ve been talking about Christians, we’ve only been talking about Catholics. There is also the whole issue of Christian evangelicals, which is a growing community within Mindanao, and their impact has been completely ignored. But when we talk about Catholic leadership, we’re often talking about priests or bishops who come from outside the community. The Catholic Church has a way of posting priests where they’re not necessarily native sons. But within the Islamic clergy, if it’s fair to use that term, there’s no tradition of having anybody from outside the community. And not only that, but one’s sphere of influence is much, much more limited than that of the equivalent role of a priest in the Catholic Church, because the priest, by definition, is part of a broader hierarchy. One of the problems I often see is that Catholics tend to view their Muslim counterparts in their own image, and to assume that Muslim leaders have the same ability to exercise this hierarchical chain-of-command structure, down to the village level, that the Catholics do. It’s a huge mistake to see it in those terms—and it’s one of the weaknesses of the Bishops-Ulama Conference—because they’re not equivalent.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

Credit: Sheila Vemmer/Army Times

In the historic presidential election of 2008, then candidate Barack Obama distinguished himself from the other candidates in the Democratic primaries in part on the basis of his record of having publicly opposed the war in Iraq. After winning the election, President Obama, though attempting to make good on a campaign promise to withdraw American troops and hand over control of the military campaign to the Iraqi government, has escalated the American global war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, in a mid-term election season marked largely by its rancorous tone, it is sobering to note that opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan appears to have diminishing traction in the American imaginary. In this light, the following dialogue with Andrew Bacevich appears especially timely. Author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, The Limits of Power: the End of American Exceptionalism, and, most recently, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, Bacevich is a celebrated veteran as well as a fierce and indefatigable critic of American militarism and imperial policies. A self-described “Catholic conservative” and an admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., Bacevich is a social critic of note as much for his independence of thought as for his insistence on grounding his public remarks with a clear sense of moral principles and purpose.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: This is David Kim from the Social Science Research Council, and I am at Boston University, on April 2nd, 2010—Good Friday—for a conversation with Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations, for the next installation of Rites and Responsibilities. Professor Bacevich—may I call you Andrew?

AB: Please, yes.

DKK: As I mentioned in my invitation to you to participate in Rites and Responsibilities, the series is about questions of sovereignty, accountability, authority, and religion. In reading your remarks from various forums, including TomDispatch, among others, and given the array of your interests, I thought you were someone we very much needed in this discussion.

AB: I’m very pleased to participate.

DKK: I appreciate it. As a way to get us started, and to think a little bit about these different issues of sovereignty, religion, accountability, and authority, could you tell me a little bit about yourself? I know you grew up in the Midwest.

AB: Right.

DKK: And you’re from a military family?

AB: Well, no, I’m not. I mean, only in the sense that my parents both served in World War II. They served for the duration, as it were, but they were not career military people. My dad was actually briefly in the Army again during the Korean War, but that was simply because he had finished medical school in Chicago and he needed someplace to do an internship that would help put food on the table. And so he became a First Lieutenant Army doctor, but, again, just for one year. So, by no means am I from a military family, if that implies career military service. There’s nobody I know of in my background who fits that definition.

DKK: You have had several phases in your own career, but would you consider yourself someone who is, or was, a professional soldier?

AB: I would say that I was a professional soldier, though I don’t think I’m a professional soldier any longer, and I’ve tried to set aside that identity and go on to other things. I mean, from time to time I get referred to or introduced as “Colonel Bacevich,” and I don’t correct people, I’m not going to make a fuss about it, but I don’t call myself “Colonel Bacevich.” I used to be that, some time ago now. You know, I left the Army in 1992. I think that I’m now “Professor Bacevich,” and, frankly, I’m very happy to be Professor Bacevich.

DKK: Tell me a little bit about that transition from being “Colonel Bacevich” to becoming “Professor Bacevich.” I’ve read several profiles of you in which you talk about going to West Point, serving in Vietnam, and then remaining in the military. None of these phases of your life and career appeared to be particularly comfortable for you, at least in the portrayals that I’ve read.

AB: Well, I probably wasn’t entirely comfortable with the life that I was living. Although I would want to emphasize that a soldier’s life does provide many satisfactions: comradeship, a sense of purpose, and it can be a very stimulating environment. But the truth, I think, is that I was never really cut out for that life. And, in retrospect, I would say that the reason I lived that life for as long as I did—I was a serving officer for 23 years—quite frankly, I don’t think I had the courage to cut the umbilical cord and venture out into the big, wide world. I remember when I got to the fifth anniversary of my commissioning, which was the time when my initial obligation had ended, and I could have gotten out of the Army. At that time, my wife and I had had our first child, the economy was doing badly . . .

DKK: Now, what year is this?

AB: This is 1974.

DKK: Okay.

AB: Post-Vietnam. And the Army said, “Would you like to go to graduate school for two years, and we’ll foot the bill?”

DKK: Right.

AB: And it seemed like a great opportunity, so we basically kicked the can down the road. We got to the ten-year mark of service, and I actually went through the entire State Department Foreign Service Officer recruiting process, and the State Department said, “We’ll hire you.” This is roughly 1980, by which time we had three children, and they were going to hire me, but I would have had to take a pay cut! So my wife basically said, “We’re not gonna do that!” And by then we’re sort of marching our way up to twenty years of service, and at least some small pension as a consequence of that. But, in retrospect, I wish I’d had more guts to say, “This is not for me. I can do other things.” But I didn’t.

DKK: But backtrack a little bit. I’m thinking of you as a young man at West Point. The folks I know who’ve gone to West Point did so for a variety of reasons: sometimes out of family obligations . . .

AB: Yeah.

DKK: . . . many out of a sense of genuine service and obligation and duty. But there is a particular culture of character formation . . .

AB: Yes.

DKK: . . . that is prevalent at West Point.

AB: Yes, it’s a very strong process of socialization that I think really is the principle driver of the West Point experience. Its purpose is really not a particular “education”—that’s sort of ancillary, I think—but it is, rather, to force you into a mold.

DKK: Right. An education of a certain sort, in that sense.

AB: Yes, but it’s an education that really leans more towards training than real education. I mean, it’s not really about “free inquiry.” It’s not really about exploration. It’s about exposure to a body of knowledge, with the expectation that you will achieve, not mastery, but familiarity. And that body of knowledge, in my day, though I think it’s different today, was quite broad, but also leaned heavily towards math and science, as opposed to the liberal arts.

DKK: Can you talk a bit about the culture of the military? In terms, not just of the mastery of math and science, as you say, but also in regard, as I’m hearing you, to the policies of the American military and to the way it’s run. There appears to be, to use your language, a lack of critical reflection in the military. There is, as you say, a command structure there. Did you feel discomfort with that early on? Or is this something that, in the context of a process of deep socialization, was determinant of who you were as a young man?

AB: I’m not sure that I know, even at this point. One thing that I would say about my personal makeup—and I’ve only really come to appreciate this later in life—is that I value order, and that I am uncomfortable with disorder and uncertainty. And this can be manifest in very simple ways—you know, an orderly home, though I know you would not say that, looking at my office!

DKK: It looks quite tidy compared to my own!

AB: But one of the things that military life offered me, and that I think kept me in it, despite the fact that I wasn’t a good fit in many respects, was that it offered order and predictability and security—again, not to be dismissed when you’re a young guy with a growing family. And, so, all of those aspects of military life, I think, helped to draw me to it, or at least to keep me in it for a period of time. That said, from this distance, I would say that there are many other important aspects of what makes life within the officer corps what it is, and I would never want to imply that the values of duty, honor, and country are absent from that life, because they are there and they are important. But less positive, I think, is an implicit definition of success, or of personal fulfillment, which is tied to upward mobility.

DKK: Right.

AB: Again, I only say this in retrospect, and I know that many of the people I served with, I think, would probably disagree with me, but it became apparent to me over time that even when the officer corps spoke the language, and sincerely spoke the language, of duty, honor, and country, that, at the same time, it placed even greater value on the competition to get ahead—that to be a good soldier, to be seen to be a good soldier, was, in many respects, to be seen to be somebody who was going somewhere . . .

DKK: Right.

AB: . . . somebody who was making the promotion list, who was getting the plum assignment, who was getting opportunities, who was receiving awards and recognition. In that sense, it’s not really all that different, I think, from many other hierarchical organizations. But I think that within the officer corps, at least in my time, and maybe just in my part of the officer corps, the part in which I served, there was a great emphasis on that. And I think I conformed to that ethic in ways that I would say today that I regret, because it’s pernicious, and it’s not conducive to honesty. It’s actually conducive to dishonesty, because in many respects the way you get ahead is to be sensitive to which way the winds are blowing and to conform. And in that sense, it is an environment that is not at all conducive to critical thought and, I think, self-understanding. I’ll give you a specific example right now, which is one of the things that I’ve been writing a little bit about, and thinking about, and that is—I don’t want to make this sound too much like inside baseball here . . .

DKK: That’s okay.

AB: There has been an underappreciated, radical transformation in American military thought over the past four years, roughly. The implications of this change are monumental, and it is the very fact that there’s this tendency towards conformity within the officer corps, and an absence of critical thought, that I think creates barriers that prevent us from understanding the significance of what has happened.

Now, what has happened? Well, what has happened is that the officer corps in which I served, the officer corps that grew out of the Vietnam experience, and whose collective mindset was very much shaped in a negative way by Vietnam, determined after Vietnam that it would embrace rather fiercely a conception of warfare that would prevent us from ever getting stuck in another Vietnam. And that conception of warfare was one that insisted that the United States would fight short wars, producing decisive outcomes and preventing the alienation of the officer corps from the affections of the American people. In other words, no more counterinsurgency! That’s the Army in which I served in the 1970s—or, excuse me, in the 1980s and 1990s, for the most part—and that’s the Army that invaded Iraq in 2003. And in Iraq, of course, these expectations of short, decisive, economical wars were demolished. Indeed, the expectation was based on a false conception of what war is all about. But what was the reaction of the officer corps to that failure? The reaction was to rediscover counterinsurgency, and to make counterinsurgency the new American way of war, now ostensibly applied successfully in Iraq and at the moment being applied by General McChrystal in Afghanistan. And to somebody of my generation and my perspective, this was an astonishing development, because in essence we now have an officer corps that really doesn’t believe that war works.

If you listen to people like General Petraeus and General McChrystal, they say that there is no such thing as a military victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, that what we need to do in places like Iraq and Afghanistan really amounts to a project of armed nation-building, and that armed nation-building is now really the American way of war. That is the military response, as it were, to the problem posed by violent anti-Western jihadism. Well, let’s think about this a second: if indeed counter-insurgency, or armed nation-building, is the new American way of war, and if we are engaged in what the Pentagon calls a “long war” in order to deal with the problem of jihadism—well, how many other counterinsurgencies are we going to be required to undertake after Afghanistan? Where to next? Pakistan? Iran? Syria? Saudi Arabia? Egypt? I mean, it is a preposterous notion that this new American way of war—counterinsurgency or armed nation-building—can possibly offer a coherent response to the problem we’re facing. And yet, there’s this general acceptance that the idea is a good one, the implications of which condemn us, if we continue down this path, to permanent war!

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

At a March 2010 conference, “Gendering the Divide: Conflicts at the Border of Religion and the Secular” (sponsored by Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict), I had the great fortune to speak on a panel with groundbreaking cultural historian and gender theorist Joan Wallach Scott, the Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. The conference was the fourth and final meeting of ASU’s Ford Foundation-funded project on “Public Religion, the Secular, and Democracy

Scott is the author of numerous influential essays and books, including the widely cited 1986 essay “Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” as well as The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth Century City, Women, Work and Family (with Louise Tilly), Parité!: Sexual Difference and the Crisis of French Universalism, and, most recently, the timely and highly praised The Politics of the Veil. Scott’s books are regularly reprinted, and they have been translated into several languages, including French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Korean.

There will be a panel on The Politics of the Veil at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta, featuring commentaries by Carl Ernst and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, along with myself, as well as a response from Scott.

An indefatigable advocate for and defender of academic freedom of expression and speech, Scott served on the American Association of University Professors’ “Committee A” on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 1993-2006, which she chaired from 1999-2005. As Chair of “Committee A,” Scott helped to produce the 2003 report “Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis.”

At the conclusion of the ASU conference, Scott and I met for the following wide-ranging conversation, part of the SSRC’s Rites and Responsibilities dialogue forum.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: Joan, because people know you as many things—as a theorist of gender, as a cultural historian, as an inveterate advocate for academic freedom and defender of the rights of the professoriate—I’m curious how you would describe yourself to someone who had never met Joan Scott.

JWS: That’s really hard . . . I don’t know. I would say I was a historian . . .  Somebody who—despite the fact that I’m at the Institute for Advanced Study—likes to teach, and has tried to keep teaching graduate students, even in this position where I’m not required to do so. I guess I think of myself as somebody who’s critically engaged with the work that I do, and whose work—even before I read Foucault and learned about the history of the present—always had a political dimension to it. There was always a reason, beyond just curiosity, that drove the work that I did.

DKK: Well, let’s pursue the question of what the work is. How would you describe the work that you do? Not just the topics, but the approaches you take, the methods you have adopted.

JWS: I would call it critical. I think we now have a term—more and more people are using it—which is “critical history.”

DKK: Yes.

JWS: And that suggests that the point of doing the history is to critically engage some conceptual or theoretical or taken-for-granted notion about why things are the way they are, and how they got to be the way they are. “Critical historian” is, in fact, what I call myself in a piece I did a couple of years ago in a volume edited by John Gillis and Jim Banner, which is called Becoming Historians. The University of Chicago Press published it. They asked twelve people to account for their lives! I called my chapter “Finding Critical History.” In it, I try to account for the way in which I came to do the sort of history that I think I do.

DKK: So that’s a really interesting question, about finding critical history. One of the curiosities I have about you concerns your influences. Who and what were critical formations for you? Not just ideas and texts, but the people who were formative for you: family, colleagues, students, and so on.

JWS: Right. Well, I talk about it a lot in that essay. First, I grew up in a political household. My father was a high school teacher in New York City, the president of the New York City Teachers’ Union in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He was called before various congressional committees, and he was among the first group of New York City schoolteachers to be fired in 1953, when I was twelve. So, you know, my life was defined by growing up as somebody in a kind of embattled family in the 1950s—”embattled” just vis-à-vis the political culture, not within the family itself. My mother was also a teacher, but she wasn’t ever fired. They were both history teachers—he, economics and history, and she, history.

DKK: So, from a young age you had an acute sense of what politically fraught conditions were like, but also of the significance of history.

JWS: Yes. Their bible was Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization. That was the way they taught their history. That was the history that we learned. And, you know, dinner table conversation was about politics and history and teaching, because both of them were dedicated teachers. But I think the reasons I became a historian have less to do with following in their footsteps than with the subsequent influence on me of teachers when I was in high school and college.

DKK: Wow.

JWS: But there was no question that I was going to teach, because teaching was the family profession.

DKK: Can you speak a bit more about that? How did they speak to you as a child?

JWS: About teaching?

DKK: Yes.

JWS: Well, my mother clearly loved to teach. She’d come home . . . it was the way she told stories about the kids she was teaching—about this one who was so smart but never did any work, and that one who asked these amazing questions. And my father was didactic!

(both laugh)

JWS: I mean, my father was a teacher. You know, you didn’t want to have to always be taught everything, and that was his mode, to always be teaching. So there was more of a kind of resistance to him and a kind of admiration for her. Teaching was not only about communicating things, not only “raising the young to become better than they otherwise might have been.” It was also—because it was history—about social change: there was some way or another in which communicating exciting ideas to young people was an investment in the future.

DKK: But in that context there was, first of all, the volatility of the situation around Left politics, and then, at the same time, there was the influence of, say, Dewey, on democracy and education. In other words, there was a concerted effort to say, “Education is in the service of democracy,” while, at the same time, there were events like your father’s firing.

JWS: Right, right.

DKK: Did you talk about that as a child?

JWS: No, we didn’t talk about it. But what went without saying . . . well, I actually have another article! It’s in that Louis Menand book on academic freedom, in which I say that from a very young age I heard the words “academic freedom” without fully knowing what they meant, because what my father always said when he was fired was that his academic freedom had been violated, that it had been lost. It was less the loss of his job than the loss of his academic freedom that was at the heart of his refusal to accept the punishment he got for refusing to cooperate with these investigating committees.

DKK: Did he ever get his job back? Or did he find that he could redeem himself as an educator?

JWS: Well, in different formats. For a while he worked for an educational filmstrip company, and so he got to teach in another way. And then, the last job he had was in some ways the most interesting: he was the administrator of a unit for the diagnosis and treatment of what are now called developmentally disabled kids. Then, it was “mentally retarded” kids. And he was doing that at the moment of de-institutionalization following the scandals around Willowbrook, when Geraldo Riviera was an investigative journalist, rather than a sensationalist journalist!

(both laugh)

JWS: And he was very active in those movements. I always thought that his political skills came to the fore around those kinds of things. He was somebody who worked very hard for the setting-up of group homes and all of that kind of stuff. There it was both the politics and his sense of commitment to kids—even though these were not kids whom he was teaching in quite the same way. Nonetheless, that was really exemplary and quite impressive.

DKK: You’ve maintained that co-incidence yourself between being a teacher and a scholar and an activist.

JWS: Yes, and that, I think, was the model. It was a model that somehow always made sense, and something that I always tried to do, or something that, without thinking about it consciously, I just did, as the fulfillment of the legacy of these parents who were doing both of those things at once too.

DKK: So, what are the forms, what are the expressions of that co-incidence for you, in terms of your teaching and your activism?

JWS: Well, for a long time, they were at odds. When I was an undergraduate in college—I went to Brandeis—I did my scholarly work and I did my politics, and I always felt divided. Schizophrenic is the wrong word, because I could do both, but I always felt that they were two separate things. Then I started graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in 1962. William Appleman Williams was there; Studies on the Left was there. I found a world in which doing scholarship was of a piece with doing politics. I mean, we did anti-Vietnam War protests and Civil Rights activism. There was all of this political activity, but there were also people who were thinking about history in those terms as well. That was, I think, a hugely important influence for me—to be able to see that you could do the two together, and that history was relevant, not in the immediate sense of proving a political point, but in that there was the possibility of an engagement with history that could feed into politics or activism of one kind or another.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

Professor Ramadan’s most recent publication is entitled What I Believe (Oxford University Press, 2009). His other books include Western Muslims and the Future of Islam; Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation; The Messenger: the Meanings of the Life of Muhammad; To Be a European Muslim: a Study of Islamic Sources in the European Context; and Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University (Oriental Institute, St Antony’s College). He also teaches at the Faculty of Theology at Oxford and is, at the same time, a Senior Research Fellow at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.

In July 2004, Professor Ramadan, under contract to teach at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, had his work visa revoked by the U.S. Department of State, under a provision of the Patriot Act. The ACLU and various academic organizations contested the government’s refusal to issue Ramadan a visa. In January 2010, the Obama State Department reversed the earlier decision, issuing an order allowing Ramadan to enter the country.

Professor Ramadan grew up as a practicing Muslim in Geneva, Switzerland, in a family with a widely known and—for many—controversial history of Egyptian religious and political leadership. Before we began the formal part of our conversation, Ramadan indicated that in nearly a dozen interviews during his visit to Montreal, he had repeatedly been asked to respond to various controversies surrounding statements he had made in regard to the Middle East and about his grandfather’s role as a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Rather than recapitulate these issues, forcing Ramadan to reiterate a series of refutations that he was clearly tired of making, I began by asking about his immediate family and his relationship with his parents. I wanted to know whether and how his parents had cultivated his identity as a Muslim. In a somewhat surprising turn, Ramadan told me of a childhood marked less by an insistence on becoming and being Muslim than by the instilling of the fundamental value of love. We begin the conversation below with a discussion of Ramadan’s education and his ongoing work as an advocate for Islam in the West.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: I’m fascinated by your attraction to Nietzsche as a student. You wrote your dissertation on him, and I can certainly understand the appeal of his engagement with suffering, as well as the eventual affirmation that you find in his work. But what attraction was there for you in Nietzsche’s wrestling with nihilism and his characterization of the implosion of Christianity?

TR: You know, many people misunderstand this, because they think that I was coming to Nietzsche because he was very critical towards Christianity, and that, as a Muslim, I was very happy when he said, “God is dead.” It’s exactly the opposite, in fact. I read Nietzsche for other reasons. I read everything that was published. I had to do this. I wanted to add to the concept of suffering in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which was Nietzsche as a historian of philosophy. Because he was, as Heidegger said, the last metaphysician. And he took a very strong and critical look at everything which was coming out of the Western tradition. But he was distorting Socrates, Hegel, and even Schopenhauer and other scholars.

DKK: Sure.

TR: But this was very important. I wanted to read what they said, and to read what he said about what they said, and how he was interpreting them. And then there was a point that was quite critical for me, which was that Nietzsche, when he was young, was a believer; and then at one point, he asked the question: “Does your faith help you to avoid the very essence of who you are? Is it, at the end of the day, a question of a power struggle with others?”

So, from where do you get your power? From where do you get your confidence? And, more importantly, from where do you get your answers? Is it, per se, an answer that you are getting out of your own quest? Or is it a power struggle and a relationship with the Other? He was asking a very critical question for me that was…

DKK: Deeply existential!

TR: Exactly! This was an existential question. But, in the end, it’s really saying, “Tell me what you are doing with your suffering, and I will tell you who you are.” So, are you using the suffering to transform it into a sense of guilt? Or are you using the suffering to be a better human being? And this was the very question, because he said that we are innocent—so use your suffering to be an artist, and not to be someone who is deeply obsessed with the sense of guilt.

DKK: Ressentiment.

TR: Exactly: le ressentiment and le mépris, and this power struggle. So I would say that this is essential, because in the name of religious love, in the name of this connection with God, we can translate this quest for meaning into a power relationship, and I don’t like that. But I think that he was asking the critical question, and the central one as well, which was about innocence. What is innocence in our lives? And this is a very deep question for the Christian tradition.

DKK: Yes, of course.

TR: What is innocence? And in the Muslim tradition, the classical Islamic tradition, we say, “the starting point is all about innocence and permission,” but it’s very often distorted by people of power, by people of rules, and I think that Nietzsche is philosophically asking the right question to people dealing with the legal dimensions of religions.

DKK: You see the kind of agonistic struggle that Nietzsche was advocating, in the Islamic context, as a challenge to the literalists. But Nietzsche was contrasting strong notions of good and evil, inflexible conceptions, and the ways in which those over-determine the self and over-determine possibility.

TR: Yes.

DKK: So that, on the one hand, there’s the romantic Nietzsche, who, as you just said, would proclaim. “I am free to make myself who I am and who I want to be!” But then, on the other hand, there’s a grounded Nietzchean reading that says, “I only read myself over and against these traditions that I have to resist,” which is to say that the death of God moment is a temporary moment, that the nihilistic moment is a temporary moment of freedom, and that there has to be a kind of strenuousness to one’s resistance and one’s criticism.

TR: Yes, but I think that this is disputable, because Nietzsche had many stages. And I think that this power of will and the will to power—everything that he was connecting to art and to this dimension of…

DKK: Music.

TR: Yes, music, being something which is beyond human being and beyond morality. And even beyond this are the jails and prisons of human conscience and consciousness. I think that this is not only a matter of resisting, or of indicating a tension within Christianity. Nietzsche was really asking, “What is the essence of a human being?” It’s ultimately about who we are.

You know, when he came back to the Greek tradition, he was looking for innocence beyond anything else. If the Olympian gods are acting or behaving like this, it means that we are innocents. We do what they do, and they cannot blame us for doing what they are doing. So, this innocence is something you find at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, in the French poet Rimbaud. It was exactly the same for him.  He was looking at coming back to Greece—the classical Greek and Hellenistic traditions—to avoid nurturing a sense of guilt. But I would say that it’s not only against tradition. It’s really the deep question of who we are in this being and how do we deal with life, since life means suffering.

This interview has been edited and condensed. To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

In making this claim, I am looking for a way to open a space for a disposition and an outlook that I believe can help mourn the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism. Let me be clear: I do not think that the myth of American exceptionalism has gone away quietly in the twilight of the Bush administration. In my estimation, the disenchantment of giving up the myth of American exceptionalism will involve experiencing the lived effects of the catastrophic, of coming to terms with cultural nihilism, and even with worldly collapse. It will involve relinquishing the comforts—metaphysical and otherwise—of being an imperial power.

With these severe conditions in mind, let me refine the idea of adopting a poetic disposition in the face of crisis, and propose that an effective and important response to cultural nihilism and worldly collapse will require the cultivation and adoption of what I call an elegiac temperament. The moral psychology of enduring and surviving the catastrophic—which is to say, the conditions that motivate the self, that allow the self to enact agency—requires considerable maturity and courage.  It beckons an acknowledgment of what is lost, as well as a vision for making the move from one way of life to another, from one world to another; or, to use Jonathan Lear’s phrase about surviving cultural devastation, surviving the catastrophic requires “radical hope.”

So why call for the cultivation of an elegiac temperament for our times? A simple answer is that the catastrophes and crises of our times demand strategies to make sense of the cataclysms unfolding before us: namely, moral crises of war, of ecological disaster, of economic meltdowns, and the like. More specifically, the catastrophic also has the potential to set in motion a re-evaluation of political and moral commitments, whether those follow the conventions of civil religion (e.g., piety about constitutionalism) or those attending the ethos of American exceptionalism. In other words, the elegiac temperament evokes an attitude and disposition of humility and lament—one that spurs efforts to rethink the present in light of a revised view of the past and future. One finds expression of the elegiac temperament—though not quite elegy itself—in W. E. B. DuBois’s lament in “The Passing of the First Born” from The Souls of Black Folk, when he writes of “a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.” More specific to the condition of the exhaustion of American exceptionalism, the elegiac temperament registers in the concluding passages of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, where he writes of his ambivalent “love” of America:

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty?

And later:

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

The elegiac temperament, as well as the modern elegy itself, begins and ends in thoroughgoing skepticism about conventions and received practices, and does so in counterpoint with the travails of the late modern self. In other words, the late-modern mourning and memory work of the elegiac temperament—akin, really, to a register of melancholia—works with and against the late modern self’s struggle for freedom, agency, authority, and identity.

So let me pose my vexing question once again: how do we effectively mourn the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism?

There is a paradox here: on the one hand, there appears to be increasing popular recognition among Americans that America is an empire. This, in turn, comes with the further recognition that the animating ethos of the American imperial project—namely, American exceptionalism—has exhausted itself. This is a situation akin, as I suggested above, to worldly collapse. On the other hand, this world (here, the world of American exceptionalism) collapses, and yet it goes on. Hence the paradox.

A fundamental challenge becomes how to evaluate and judge the best means of working with the remnants of a tradition—here, the tradition of American exceptionalism and perhaps that of civil religion—after the catastrophic has done its work. In the case of mourning the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism, the analysis is twofold.  First, of course, is the need for acknowledging that the myth has indeed been exhausted, if not altogether “lost.” This is the strenuous work of reckoning with the catastrophic. I for one am relieved that the language of crisis and catastrophe has been re-introduced and reclaimed in American public and political discourse. Bursting bubbles, rising tides, bearish markets, homes foreclosed, dreams deferred, and abounding terrorism are just a few of the markers of our dark times, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase.

The second move is the tougher one—namely, the task of finding a language, a means of intelligibility, or of making sense in a way that will help to brace the spirit through crisis, through the catastrophic.

I should also note that I am invoking the double meaning of “exhaustion” here in regard to the myth of American exceptionalism. On the one hand, I am referring to the exhaustion of the idea and the ethos of American exceptionalism, in the sense that it has played itself out and has been used up. On the other hand, I also mean exhaustion as depletion, as draining, and as extreme mental and physical fatigue.

I am dispatching the call to cultivate an elegiac temperament in response to an acknowledgment that the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism comes at a price—call it pride, call it a sense of public dignity—and knowing, also, that the stakes are quite high given that empires tend not to relinquish pride and dignity gracefully, but will often resist their own imperial decline with lethal brutality.

In regard to the elegiac temperament and to civil religious traditions, let me cite the example of one robust tradition and myth of American exceptionalism—namely, the ambiguous legacy of Emerson.

So, what, if anything, survives of this tradition/myth of American exceptionalism? Perhaps the most obvious and telling example of the enduring power of what I would call a debased-Emersonian strand of American exceptionalism, finds its most prominent, and arguably most articulate, proponent in the person of President Barack Obama.

Obama is fond of invoking the language of debased Emersonianism. Its simple version finds expression in the use of Emerson’s language of self-reliance and self-determination as bromides of American distinctiveness—indeed, exceptionalism. It is an ethic that is of a piece with the providential view of America as a nation of destiny. There have been deeply problematic and widespread effects on American foreign policy and American self-conception that have yielded and been guided by the ego-ideal of debased Emersonianism. America has been a nation guided by the arrogance characteristic of empires. We are now at a moment in which the fractures and tensile relations rendered by the long war on terrorism and other catastrophes have ostensibly revealed that the myth of American exceptionalism can no longer bear the weight of the American imperial enterprise.

Obama consistently appeals to the ethic of self-reliance, often couched as a charge for “self-responsibility.” The overwhelming evidence of Obama’s electoral victory last year, and the broad resonance of his campaign, should be sufficient proof of the durability of this aspect of the Emersonian legacy. What I want to argue, though, is that it is a legacy of ambiguous expression, at least as it is articulated by Obama and reiterated by the American populace—both of whom seem to yearn for the reinvigoration of the singularity, and presumably of the supremacist qualities of American exceptionalism. Consider Obama’s election night declaration: “To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you.” Now couple this with the legacy of American supremacy, and it should be evident that we have before us a troubling brew. This is not to say that I think we shouldn’t be fighting terrorism. Of course we should. Nonetheless, I have deep concerns about the ways in which Obama could end up, not turning America away from imperialism, but instead enabling the transformation of America into a more efficient and, frankly, a “friendlier” empire.

Now, given what I have identified in terms of American imperial practices and attitudes as promoting the myth of American exceptionalism as their horizon of meaning, it is fair and right to ask: “why would we want to mourn that world view?” After all, isn’t it a good thing, one might ask, that this imperial ethos is dead or dying? Isn’t this a cause for celebration rather than mourning?  I am certainly one to argue that we as a nation not only should but must comport ourselves in the world in fundamentally different ways. And it is my hope that someone like Obama will help to render that a reality. Having said that, history teaches that the U.S. is a nation that has enormous trouble resisting the urge to act with arrogance, rather than humility. Even in his speeches, Obama incants the ringing tones of songs of American exceptionalism: “Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes […] from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.”

Let me put it more forcefully: I am trying to engage and join a project that recuperates these values of democracy, freedom, and hope. Nonetheless, I think that such recuperation can only take place through a reckoning with American complicity with evil in the world and with the acknowledgment that it will be difficult to be different from what we have been––as a nation, as a people––for the last two-plus centuries. Again, I worry that America is a nation that is too prone to arrogance, to over-confidence, to the indulgence of self-interest. And I also worry that once we realize as a people—the social imaginary of “the American people”—that we are in fact living through a catastrophic age, the relinquishing of the myth of American exceptionalism will leave us prone to reactionary forces rather than to moral and ethical ones.

So, how do we recoup a constructive Emersonian ethos from the legacy of its debased version? My strong sense is that if we are to avoid repeating the arrogance of the American exceptionalist project, it will require somehow revealing and uncovering values and virtues of redemption in the Emersonian ethos after the catastrophic. This work can begin by asking: To what remnants of this tradition does the elegiac temperament attune us? What resources can we bring to bear to render the elegiac temperament effective and generative? In contrast to what I was earlier calling “debased Emersonianism,” consider Stanley Cavell’s project of Emersonian perfectionism—in my view, one of the most effective and most fecund transpositions of the tradition. This is a legacy of Emerson that seeks deep democratic expression, rather than radical individuation and triumphalism. It finds genius in ordinary people and in the everyday. There is a hermeneutics of humility at work in this version of the Emersonian legacy, and it is one saturated with what I am calling the elegiac temperament. It finds expression in Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionist ethic and aspiration, which demands the commitment to becoming intelligible to oneself (and, collectively, to ourselves) through an active refusal of presiding norms of conformity and authority, such as an unflinching piety toward the providential view of American exceptionalism.

I am arguing for sober reflection and consideration of the debilitating, yet constitutive ethos of American exceptionalism on the parts of political liberals and conservatives alike. The challenge is finding a way to lift up the version of Emersonianism that I want to claim—call it Emersonian perfectionism, strenuous Emersonianism, or even Emersonian attunement—as a remainder worth retrieving and distinguishing from the debased Emersonianism that has served as a core of the myth of American exceptionalism. In this sense, the elegiac temperament can clarify what is often a confused (and confusing) practice of discerning honor and integrity amongst competing moral genealogies of American values and virtues.

Cultivating the elegiac temperament of the future perfect possibilities of lives not yet lived, and the sobering absorption of the past conditional of memories hard won constitute a set of pre-conditions for mourning the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism. It may be that we will only be able to mourn as we live through the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism if we are able to self-elegize ourselves against this myth; that is if we can engage in the Socratic practice of self-knowledge—in the spirit of Cavell’s ideal of aspiring to become intelligible to oneself—and subsequently come to realize an elegiac temperament that reflects a candor about each of our commitments and beliefs that will reveal, through psychic interrogation, contradictions that reside within each of us. Certainly, we all find contradictions within ourselves, as well as with the people that we love. I certainly know how hard it is to reconcile who I say I am, for example, and what it is that I love, with the ability and willingness to act on these claims about myself. To adopt an elegiac temperament is to embrace an ethic of aspiration, as well as the commitment to self-cultivation and attunement. It is, finally, also to acknowledge that one has to die a little in order to live fully, freely. This is an elegiac move because it requires acknowledging that with change there is loss, especially a loss of love. It requires sacrifice.  And it requires courage, conviction, and the willingness to leave one world behind in order to lay claim to another world, and, further, to leave a love behind by claiming a new love.  Disenthralling ourselves from American imperial ideology may mean that we will make a world with heavy hearts, but hearts that have turned, converted, shifted to a world worth dying for and living for.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: Jean Comaroff, tell us about the role of religion in your work.

JC: For me, as a scholar, religion has always been an exercise for a left hand. I started out working on these issues because I was interested in the relationship between politics and religion and the uneasy ways in which anthropologists at the time separated them. I was interested not least because, if you went to Africa in the 1960s to study religion, religion was assumed to be a matter of “tradition.” Already I felt that this term, in its then unproblematic usage, was less than helpful.

When I got to my field site, in rural northwest South Africa, the religious lingua franca was Christianity, African Christianity, which was inseparable from anything else you might call spiritual, religious, or moral life. I was Jewish in my upbringing, but the kind of Christianity I encountered was profoundly unlike the Christianity I had known about growing up in white South Africa, or when I subsequently lived in England.

There was concern among my advisors at the London School of Economics [LSE] because Christianity was regarded as a topic for comparative religion or sociology, not for anthropology. There was no anthropology of Christianity at that time, so it was really quite a struggle at that point to find relevant interlocutors.

At the same time, it was obvious that Christianity had long been a key dimension of local history. In South Africa, Christianity was inseparable from the whole logic of the way colonialism had been made and was then being unmade.

DKK: So was that the initial appeal of working on religion as an anthropologist for you?

JC: I grew up in South Africa under the apartheid regime and the universities were very depleted by the time we got there—they’d been segregated. In the universities, there was plenty social protest, but no access to intellectual radicalism, no Marx on the shelves. South African universities were an environment dominated by a larger story. In particular, the ethical problem of having the privilege of an education, by virtue of being white, bore in on us very heavily.

At that stage, there was already a lot of government repression of politics with a big “P.” Yet already there were forms of religious communal life stepping into the void, as it were. The churches, particularly some of the mainline, former mission churches—the Anglican Church, some Methodist congregations, many of the independent African churches—were places where people could aggregate to raise issues of social justice. By the time the 1960s rolled around, you needed special permits for meetings of more than 12 people; only religious gatherings and funerals were exempted, which was why funerals became such amazing politico-ritual sites.

Many of the churches stepped up. There was the sort of impetus you would find in Christian base communities in Latin America soon after: an effort to re-interrogate the message of Christianity from the point of view of the meek and the oppressed. This, of course, had deep roots. The founding of the African National Congress in South Africa in 1912-13 came out of the African Independent Churches, whose leaders had taken the Bible—which had entered the community as a colonizing, civilizing text—and read another message out of it. So they “liberated the message from the messenger,” and made of this a struggle for human dignity. This was a way of saying, “let us make this text live up to its promises, because there’s a dramatic contradiction between what we were promised when we were ushered into the global fraternity of the church, and what we have experienced as citizens of this racially segregated society.”

In the mid-1960s, when I was at university and studied a number of disciplines, I found anthropology especially interesting because it was relevant to these sorts of issues in Africa. Most other fields at the time —psychology, English literature—did not have one read a single writer from the Global South. You read Conrad on Africa, but you didn’t read African writers. That was soon going to change dramatically. In the mid-1960′s, anthropology was uniquely relevant in acknowledging the value of non-Eurocentric knowledge and life-ways.

The fine scholar who taught us anthropology, Monica Wilson, was a missionary’s daughter. She herself had been involved in quite explicit criticism of the government through her academic work, through documenting the implications of poverty in the countryside. She had made anthropology into a kind of vocation—to use the Weberian term—one that came from where she had grown up, on a mission station in the Eastern Cape.

Somewhere in our readings, which were largely about African traditional rituals, witchcraft, and kinship, there was something about “separatist” churches—African movements that had broken away from the mission churches in the name of another kind of religiosity. These churches had become communal sites for a kind of moral reconstruction in the countryside. Some were more overtly political, some weren’t. But they were amazingly inventive in terms of their ritual practices. The book Bantu Prophets in South Africa, by a very perspicacious Swedish missionary named Bengt Sundkler, explored the way that the prophetic, millennial possibility within the Christian tradition was being acted upon in the South African countryside. The acuity of this insight grabbed my attention and it never left me.

DKK: That’s fascinating. Even in this brief, rich background you’ve just given, you’ve brought up a number of the themes that we’re addressing in the forum: namely, questions about tradition, questions about authority, questions about inheritance, and questions about sovereignty. I want to come back to each of these. For the meantime let’s stay a little bit longer on the question of tradition. In describing your experience with African Christianity, you depict it as both constitutive of who you became and also as an object of study. It would be helpful if you could talk a bit about the difficult relationship in which you know and are embedded in traditions and cultures of inheritance, while at the same time these traditions and cultures also become the object of your intellectual work.

JC: What was so instructive about growing up in apartheid South Africa was that God was on everybody’s side. We had something called “Christian national education” when I was growing up, which was really apartheid as religious pedagogy. Of course, it was a cynical mode of maintaining power for a minority, an experiment in social engineering.

There was always a dimension of the enterprise that was highly theological, especially among national religious leaders who argued for a certain kind of Calvinist tradition. They tried to reconcile a rather literal sense of the Salvation of the Elect with the forms of modern “democracy,” which was ironic, because it came from descendants of radical Protestants, many of whom had come to South Africa as Huguenots in 1688, and who as followers of Calvin suffered severe persecution in Catholic France. In the context of the Cape Colony they had developed a mode of reading the Bible and an understanding of Protestantism that remained separate from some of the liberalizing tendencies that accompanied the impact of industrialization, and the rise of a class-based society and secular liberal democracy in Europe. I did meet people who sincerely thought that they could make it work in a relatively humane way, even though the more the system became entrenched, and its contradictions became apparent, the more people became invested in simply maintaining it against all odds, and terrible things were done in its name. So there was that specific tradition, and it had a great influence on apartheid theology.

My family, at least on my father’s side, was Jewish. They had run from the pogroms in Eastern Europe and had come to Africa. My mother was from a lapsed Lutheran family that had also known political exclusion in their native Bavaria. In my parents’ generation, there was a kind of accommodation to the fact that, while most had run from systems of ethnic-political-racial persecution in Europe, by the mid 20th century in South Africa, they were seeing forming around them just such a system: one being validated in theological terms and in terms of fidelity to “tradition.” Afrikaners often saw themselves as the more faithful keepers of a Calvinist “tradition” that had been watered down in secular Europe. But there was also another kind of African Christian “tradition”—a tradition in the sense that it stemmed from a particular kind of teaching of theology, and sought to perpetuate itself as such.

Most of the missionaries who came to southern Africa in the nineteenth century were not elites from the established churches. They were people often from working class communities in the north of England and Scotland. David Livingstone, after all, had been a mill worker, and had educated himself to become a doctor. So they were part of a dissenting strain, and there again you have tradition, but a reinterpreted, reformed tradition. This turns on the key question of where authority is located. This was a crucial matter in the non-European mission field, which required the adaptation of “tradition” to local circumstances. What accommodations pose no threat to established authority? At what point does one question that authority? Where does one draw the line and say: “This is a sovereign truth about which I/We can’t compromise?”

This is an especially salient issue within Protestantism, of course. The whole point about the Protestant tradition is that Providence has given you not only the means, but the obligation to constantly test sovereign truths against the world, against experience, and thus to bring it up to date, to make it speak truth to the world in which you live. This was how the liberal humanist tradition emerged within Protestantism in Europe. When the nineteenth century missionaries had come to South Africa, all of that gets left in Europe.

In Africa, they become the representatives of authoritative tradition in the church, declaring: “There can be no polygamy, there can be no ‘traditional’ ritual.” “Tradition” now gains special ideological meaning as that which is heathen, unenlightened. One has to put all that superstition behind one, leave the extended family, and become an individual believer, one who reads the text and takes a self-willed decision to convert. Now the missionaries represent orthodox, uncompromising authority. And it is Africans who struggle with this question: “How do we make that truth relevant to our lives? Are we indeed purely sinful, purely evil, and living in darkness? And how do we reconcile the fact that the church into which we’ve been brought doesn’t actually live up to formal tenets of its own tradition?”

And so it is that missionization is always a process of reform, some of it explicit, but a lot of it not explicit. Because in making real a “tradition,” in making it live in the world, in putting things into practice, in translating it (in every sense of the word translation), you’re also reforming that tradition, whether it’s an actual declaration of reform, or through the pragmatic re-vision of its components, which renders it almost the same, but not quite, to quote Homi Bhabha. So the key analytical question was: Is Africa becoming Christianized or was Christianity becoming Africanized? And what was at stake in that process? And the whole matter of what constituted a “tradition” was a complicated methodological problem, for both would-be theorists and their subjects were continually confusing ideological and analytical uses of the term.

Making claims in relation to “tradition” can be very powerful: Africans would oppose laws instituted by the apartheid government, for instance, by saying: “Look, everything I’ve been taught about justice, about equity, about any kind of sovereign truth in the Christian tradition is belied by what I see here. And on the authority of that commitment and conviction I protest.” But at the same time, they would resist certain other things that were done in the name of tradition, the Calvinist tradition, for instance.

This slipperiness of the term “tradition” weighed very heavily on me when I started my own research. There was a very strong sense in which both classic anthropology and our everyday colonial culture in South Africa accepted an overarching distinction between modernity and tradition. In colonial society, tradition was primitive, indigenous, something that had to be cast off. The missionaries sometimes referred to traditional African society as a state of “primitive communism,” from which the autonomous, self-determining subject had to be set free. Anthropologists reversed the signs, seeing traditional societies as valuable in and for their difference, even if ultimately doomed by the process of modernization. But anthropologists shared the basic idea of “tradition” as pertaining to an unchanging world, outside of history—not as a living tradition, one that would have acknowledged that African societies might have internal reform, or understood that “customary law” might evolve with social conditions, and so on. Tradition and modernity constituted a kind of Manichean divide—one that was integral to the ideological apparatus of modernity itself, especially as a rationale for colonization and “civilization” (and more recently, for “development”).

Beginning in the late 1960′s, many of us social scientists felt that such a concept of tradition had no place in social analysis. It was ideology parading as theory. We felt we had to show by every means that those putatively static “traditions” were live and that, in fact, they had been produced by modernity, that the very word “tradition” in this sense didn’t exist in African languages until called into being by a discourse of inter-dependent colonizing dualisms. As a discipline, anthropology was itself invested, not always willingly or wittingly, in the preservation of that idea of tradition, and even though they valued it positively, anthropologists were adding a certain kind of ontological legitimacy to the colonizing project because of that. What is more, in subsequent efforts to counter that effect, there has been a move to disestablish the status of “tradition” altogether. All tradition comes to be seen as “invented,” which throws out the baby with the bath water. We have tended to lose the recognition of how authoritative bodies of precept and practice are actually maintained and reformed over time in colonial societies and elsewhere.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).

UPDATE: Listen to audio of the event here.

As Craig Calhoun summarized in his closing remarks, the four speakers addressed in different ways the problem of the secular. For Taylor and Habermas, this is centrally the challenge of inhabiting a common world without universally shared absolutes, and of respecting the past while maintaining openness to the future. Butler emphasized the need to start from alterity and the recognition of non-belonging. West added the centrality of poetry, prophecy and empathy for suffering. Habermas launched the discussion by challenging the meaning of “the political” as it has been inherited from the tradition of political theology and argued that a “democratic process is also a learning process.” This plea for democratic life undergirds his call to engage the voices and values of religious citizens in public deliberation. “This proposal includes complementary burdens on both sides,” Habermas explained. “Religious citizens who regard themselves as loyal members of a constitutional democracy must accept the translation proviso as the price to be paid for the neutrality of the state authority toward competing worldviews. For secular citizens, this same ethics of citizenship entails the duty of reciprocal accountability toward all citizens. Reciprocity in this sense also entails not dismissing religious utterances as mere nonsense in the public sphere.”  Ultimately, he argued, “This proposal achieves the liberal goal of ensuring that all legally enforceable decisions can be formulated and justified in a universally accessible language without having to restrict the polyphonic diversity of public voices at its very source.”

Taylor made a strong case for maintaining this “polyphonic diversity” within a secular public sphere, while suggesting that secularism is not really about religion: “We think that secularism (or laïcité) has to do with the relation of the state and religion; whereas in fact it has to do with the (correct) response of the democratic state to diversity.” An argument justified by reference to Marx or Kant, he suggested, is no more universal than one justified by reference to scripture. Drawing on his experiences negotiating cultural diversity in Quebec, Taylor argued that citizens must engage in a good faith effort to shape political institutions that do not simply “remain true to hallowed tradition,” but rather, “maximize the basic goals of liberty and equality between basic beliefs.”

Butler took on the centrality of difference and alterity, in concert with equality. She underscored the multiplicity of Jewish values and experiences and offered a courageous critique of Israeli state violence. Working with and against concepts of exile and diaspora, Butler introduced the concept of “co-habitation.” Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Edward Said and Walter Benjamin, she argued, “it is not only that we may not choose with whom to co-habit, but that we must actively preserve the non-chosen character of inclusive and plural co-habitation: we not only live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the plurality of which they form a part.” In regard to the Jewish experience, she urged people to maintain a critical remembrance and to “reanimate certain ideals of co-habitation as the ethical basis for a public critique of those forms of state violence that seek to produce and maintain the Jewish character of the state through the radical disenfranchisement and decimation of its minority, through occupation, assault, or legal restriction.  These are attacks on a subjugated minority, but they are also attacks on co-habitation.”

Finally, West gave a rousing talk imploring those gathered to recognize suffering in the world and to muster the courage to bear witness to the catastrophic. He spoke of the indispensability of prophetic politics for the expansion of empathy and imagination, and asked the audience to imagine a public discourse that spurs “righteous indignation against injustice, not just anger at persons.”  His call to engage in prophetic citizenship directed hearts and minds to the conflict in the Middle East, the financial scandals of Wall Street and the unfulfilled promise of the Obama administration. Each of these powerful speakers advanced an understanding of politics as making a world in common, but always in relation to historically constituted diversity and connections, including competing claims to and refusals of universality. The symposium as a whole, Calhoun concluded, addressed the common question, how do societies establish systems of mutual belonging, recognition and care?

The Immanent Frame welcomes your comments, in the hopes of extending this critical conversation beyond the event itself.

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

In his Inaugural Address, President Barack Obama called upon Americans to “reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”  Analysts of various political stripes have noted that Obama’s speech sought to distill for the American people, and the world, a new set of civic virtues—rooted in an ethic of the common good—posed as guides to Americans in their daily lives as citizens.  Some observers have gone further and proclaimed the dawn of a new American civil religion.

Consider these words from the President’s Inaugural Address:

Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old.  These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

These are heady aspirations, and perhaps the kind of message a nation in crisis and in transition needs to hear.  It would appear that this is a moment that is paradoxically imbued with a sense of clarity and ambiguity.  And so it is that we at The Immanent Frame have chosen to honor and interrogate this moment—generated by the event of Obama’s presidency (and its corollaries “the Obama generation” and “the Obama era”)—by launching a new series: “These things are old.”

In a manner of speaking, Obama appears as both a question and an answer.  As president, he poses an open invitation as well as a concrete proposal.  He strongly makes the call to engage in the renewal and revival of a conversation about the common good.  Yet while Obama used the civic space of the inauguration to dispatch the call to engage these values, he also offered a sanctification of “American” values and virtues as well as a particular historical narrative of American time and space.

We have invited an august group of scholars and public intellectuals to respond to Obama’s invocation of a tradition of common good and virtues.  Asking our contributors to step back from the words, “these things are old…these things are true,” we have asked them consider the values Obama names— “honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism”—and to situate these values within moral, philosophical, religious, and secular traditions.  Further, we ask: Is it possible to parse these virtues and values into distinct categories of “the religious” and “the secular”?  What intellectual genealogies serve as the moral sources for these virtues and values?  What historical processes have led to their incorporation into the American political lexicon and possibly rendered them the bulwarks of “the American ethic”?  While the inspiration for the series begins with Obama, we have encouraged our contributors to look beyond Obama’s words and to examine the traditions themselves as an opportunity to think through the meaning of this moment in American civic life.

Obama has been quite effective and persistent in his attempts to tell a meaningful public story about America and American virtues.  He has proven to be a master of public rhetoric—a form of engagement understood by the ancients as the art of persuasion.  As with the classical art of rhetoric, Obama enacts the basic principle that one needs not only well-reasoned argument but also a sufficiently deep and engaged understanding of an audience’s values. Why? In order to effectively persuade them of something like a sense of shared and elective affinities or a mission of common purpose.  In this regard, Obama, as expert rhetorician, is also a master of the mythopoetic, an expert maker of myths: especially myths about the meaning of “America,” and of the values and institutions that constitute a common national tradition.  With his combination of charisma and the attribution of elevated purpose to the work of politics, Obama has proven astonishingly effective in generating an enchantment about new possibilities, about a renewed American dream, and about the centrality of a public language of hope.  To this end, an alluring quality of Obama’s rhetoric of common purpose and good is his invitation to participate in public service and to consider the possibilities of an expansive and engaged conception of citizenship.

Nonetheless, by casting certain values as “old” and as “true,” Obama has enjoined the American public in an affirmation of a tradition that may or may not be in fact be as “common” as he claims.  For while he invites the American citizenry to think of ourselves as part of a common conversation that makes for a tradition, he presumes a common inheritance.  And yet: there will no doubt be those who feel left out of this inheritance and from this invitation.  They will feel so for a host of reasons: differences over political positions or moral points of view, or disputes about the master narratives that have rendered the lives of various people invisible or “insignificant.”  This is one of the perils of making an appeal and a claim to “the common good” and to shared values. When a tradition aspires to be encompassing, if not universal, in its moral claims, it will inevitably leave many feeling excluded.  If, as the philosopher of tradition Alasdair MacIntyre argues, a tradition requires, through shared narratives and stories, a sense of accountability to a historical community of past, present, and future, one might ask: what are the conditions for the possibility of rendering a plausible and animating “American” civic tradition?

MacIntyre famously elevates “tradition over genealogy” as a project of moral inquiry because of what he sees as inherent instability and contradictions found in the genealogist’s suspicion over truth claims.  Nonetheless, as a proposition made to a democratic polity, critical engagements of traditions and contestations offered by genealogical inquiries seem not only apt but also necessary for this political and historical moment.  The Obama era presents us with the hope for unity and commonality.  By taking Obama’s own cue for the need for accountability through critical opposition, we have enlisted our contributors to explore both tradition and genealogy.  Those who seek to uncover genealogies in the mode of Nietzsche and Foucault often come to traditions with an interpretive frame of suspicion.  Which is to say, so the criticism goes, they are seeking to uncover historical and structural forces that have operated to generate systems and structures of value, not only of “honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” but also the normative traditions of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and class conflict.  In the end, MacIntyre eschews the genealogist’s mode of suspicion for the constructive purposes of tradition.  Adapting the title of one of MacIntyre’s books, it seems quite reasonable to ask of claims about American common good and purpose, about common values and virtues: “whose values, which tradition?”

Obama lays claim to what sounds like the definitive core of values and civic virtues that are constitutive not only of an American political tradition, but also an American moral tradition.  By asking our contributors to identify genealogies and traditions for Obama’s claims about American civic virtue, the common good, and the order of things, our new series begins a critical conversation about tradition in American public life.  Indeed, we have conceived “These things are old” as a series that engages in an open and public inquiry over a contested social imaginary—one which asks not only “What is America?” but also about the meaning of “America.”  As such, our hope is that the conversation will serve not only as one answer to Obama’s “question,” but also a questioning of his “answer.”