David Murray - Matter, Magic, and Spirit: Representing Indian and African American Belief

Matter, Magic, and Spirit

Representing Indian and African American Belief

DAVID MURRAY

Copyright 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 191044112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murray, David, 1945

Matter, magic, and spirit : representing Indian and African American belief / David Murray.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-3996-6

ISBN-10: 0-8122-3996-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. United StatesReligion. 2. Totemism. 3. Magic. 4. Race relationsReligious aspects. 5. African AmericansReligion. 6. Indians of North AmericaReligion. I. Title.

BL2525.M87 2006

200.8996073dc22

2006050903

This book is about material objects and the belief in their nonmaterial powers. It is also about race, and the ways in which the discourses and hierarchies of race have intersected with those of magic and religion. In particular, it is concerned with those distinctive conjunctions of racial and religious categories that have linked and divided Native Americans, African Americans, and whites in America. In the first part of the book I trace in some detail the ways in which certain forms of belief were ascribed to particular races prior to the twentieth century, and what this reflected about the changing beliefs of white Americans. In the second half, I move into the twentieth century and focus on the ways in which some African American and Native American writers and artists have dealt with traditional beliefs in the context of these prevailing discourses, and the implicit hierarchies of matter and spirit that come with them. So the book is addressing several large and rather separate bodies of scholarship on Native Americans and African Americans, but with two distinctive and unusual angles of approach, which are closely related throughout the book. The first angle is an attempt to deal comparatively with Indians and African Americans, and specifically their beliefs, and the second challenges the very common invocation of spirituality as an unexamined and privileged concept in relation to these groups.

While there is a huge range of materials on Native American and African American beliefs, there are remarkably few attempts to deal with them together or comparatively. Their very different histories and cultures do militate against this, and there are real methodological difficulties in trying to do so. One difficulty is knowing how far we are comparing like with like in dealing with religious or magical practices, given not only the different contexts but also the different methodological and ideological lenses through which the practices have been seen and represented. Another is trying to locate examples of the interaction and mixing of practices and beliefs when racial terminologies obscure the degree of actual mixing and blending of the races. There are also political implications in assuming a position from which to make the comparison at all. Recent postcolonial critical accounts of the comparativist method in general have sometimes viewed it as a totalizing gesture that organizes similarities and differences within an overall framework or overview that is available only to the supposedly objective outsider. To the degree that this overview relies on knowledge gained, for instance, by colonial structures of power, it replicates that political situation of inequality. The claims that are implicit within many comparativist enterprises for the existence of universal or underlying values could then also be seen as suspect, in the same ways that some larger Enlightenment claims for universality may be suspectnamely that they may incorporate ethnocentric Western values, which are simply assumed to be universal. According to this critique, the comparativist impulse, rather than decentering the West, always comes back to reconfirming a center, or an overall intellectual structure established by that center.

I hope what follows avoids this pitfall, if only because one fundamental theme of the book is the way that the dominant American culture has used other groups to understand and justify its own place and changing beliefs. My aim is to show a triangulation of beliefs, or rather of representations of those beliefs, that undermines the position of privileged observer claimed by whites, even while my own skeptical approach could perhaps be said ultimately to reinscribe an overall Enlightenment authoritya point to which I shall inevitably return. My argument is that at key points in the past the assumption that different races had very different capacities and qualities has meant that they have been conceptualized and treated differently, in what might be called a differential racism in America, and that this remains a real issue. The different political and legal status of Indians and African Americans was often reflected, or paralleled, in the assertion of a clear distinction between the mental and spiritual capacities of the two races. This distinction was not always explicit but operated differentially, and I want to argue that, for instance, much of the theorization of the so-called primitive, which tends to concentrate on Indians in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, needs to be seen in relation to African Americans, even whenand perhaps especially whenthey are absent from the discussion.

It is instructive, though, to look at the way earlier theorizations and representations of the spiritual capacities of different races developed in the particular circumstances of America. The existence in America of successive generations of newly arrived Africans and a wide range of Native American societies presented white observers with the opportunity for comparative observation of both racial difference and the processes of cultural change and adaptation, but what is noticeable is how little of this we find recorded. Thus, while we have masses of contemporary accounts of Indian religions (and considerably fewer of African American practices and beliefs), we have very few that either bring them together for discussion or record any cultural interchange or borrowing. This lack of contemporary observations is perhaps one of the reasons for a corresponding shortage of later critical commentary that brings together Indian and African Americans comparatively or deals with the mixing of cultures and races. For a long time, where it was to be found at all, academic interest in the mixing of races was more likely to be in folklore studies,

Jon Butler, who has traced the stages in the development of African American Christianity, has noted the scarcity of comment on slave religion from colonists, in contrast to the interest shown in Indian religion. Writing of Jefferson he points out that the philosopher who otherwise took an interest in natural religion and mined both the classics and the New Testament to uncover universal religious precepts wrote nothing about slave religion. One reason for this, which I will be developing in the first chapter, is the early characterization of Africans as a sort of zero point in the development of religion, so that there seemed to be simply nothing to write about, whereas Indians were seen as having recognizable and distinct beliefs that corresponded in varying degrees with what was recognized by Europeans as religion.