Religions Reviewed

It took me a few recent bus rides to get through Perkinson’s article in the new AAR journal on the topic of “Constructing European Race Discourse as Modern Witchcraft Practice.” I found it a very entertaining and engaging read, since I tend to share the anti-racist agenda of the author, and I appreciate the stylistic license that he took in his confessedly polemical approach. Here is a most extreme example:

The ferocious God of Moses and Ezekiel, of John and Jesus, had to be reformulated as the very image of Roman aristocracy. The Backer of Revolting Laborers, the Angry Author of Exilic Upheaval, the Chopper of the Tree of Genealogy, the Closed-Mouth Father Watching the Son “Fry” on Cosmic Prime Time was “transfigured” into the soft crumbling bread of bowing believers, the paper-thin host of a blessed adoration. (p. 625)

Which is not to say that the entire article was on the lines of rant (as it might well have been if that sampled style were maintained throughout).

The article has nothing to do with neo-Pagan witchcraft, and only an etymological concern with European and American witchcraft as ordinarily understood (e.g. Salem trials). Instead, it takes sorcerous social processes in Africa (i.e. “witchcraft”) as a possible mode for understanding the social process of racialization perpetrated by European societies. There is a recurring hiccup involved with the terminology, because when Perkinson writes “white witchcraft” in this article, he does not mean benevolent or sanctioned witchcraft (as the phrase is employed in so many European idioms), but rather witchcraft by whites.

[An aside: My moment of struggling to follow this phrasing reminded me of my own prior sensitization to stupid racist phrases like “white trash” and “white slavery.”]

The central gist of the paper is one with which I agree. Perkinson writes:

In this compass European liturgy and African sorcery constitute a difference not in religious kind but in degree of rapacity. The first frontier of historical encounter between Europe and Africa is a theater of occult combat, a labor of competing witchcrafts, organized by a virulent new discourse of malaise. The “supremacy” of white over black that is made to emerge from the encounter is finally one of appetite. (p. 620)

I like the “reversing” project of Perkinson’s article, and I think it is worthwhile to consider the possiblity that the Cameroon tfu belief that he details “better grasps the real human meaning of the wage nexus than most western economic theory.” (p. 617)

Perkinson makes some provocative observations about the Christian eucharist as a magical ceremony of European empire, and he shares some insightful points regarding the gestation of racializing discouses and European/African encounter in premodern Spain. But he loses me with his categorical insistence that “Reality experienced as Terror, as Indecipherable Nightmare, as the Mystery that Shatters, pushes indigenous cultures into a labor of ‘knowing’ that is unlike anything that the West has had to fathom.” (p. 626) Unless he is using some highly etic and “spiritual” definition of “the West,” I don’t think that we can pass over the horrors of the intra-European wars and enslavement of the 20th century so blithely. There may be a difference in duration and degree, but no continent or complexion has a monopoly on “Reality experienced as Terror.” To believe otherwise only leads to disaster for the designated “victims” (witness racist Israel as ‘victim’) and the putative “invincibles” (the American ‘victors’ of Abu Ghraib).