Author: Aditya Chaturvedi

T. M Luhrmann sets out to explore and explain how God becomes and ‘remains’ real for evangelical Vineyard Christians in contemporary U.S.  She argues that this happens through a complex learning process called the ‘theory of attentional learning’ and it functions through “learning to do something than to think something”(p.xxi). This learning transforms the way these people use there minds and perceive reality. This spirituality, says Luhrmann, “is all about the relationship” (p.274) and hence, the ultimate goal of Vineyard churches is to develop an intimate relationship  with the God. 

 The first chapter of the book provides as brief historical context for the shift in the American imagination of the God from a distant and impersonal God to a “buddy”- a friendly and loving. However, it is not easy to inculcate faith in God as it requires a committed Christian, Luhrmann argues to learn to  “ override three basic features of human psychology: that minds are private, the persons are visible, and that love is conditional and contingent upon right behavior” (p.xxii).  In the second chapter this process is spelled out clearly and she suggests that the learning in this setting actually involves unlearning. The process leads congregants to develop interpretive tools of knowing the presence of God and recognizing when the thoughts in their minds are not theirs but God’s. Once the God has been found, the person develops ways of interaction with him as an imaginary companion, and then learns to develop a relationship with him. This involves ‘pretending’ as if God was real and responding to congregants as their “buddy”. She compares this to a play which becomes real through practice (p.99). Once this has been accomplished, the last process involves experiencing the unconditional love of  God and this is done through six practices like crying in presence of the God . She argues that the evangelical Christianity that developed in 1960s is psychotherapeutic (pp.296-297) and the six “emotional practices” share a lot in common with psychotherapy (p.101). She points out that one of the many roles that God plays for the practitioners is that of a therapist (p.120). She then moves on to discuss prayer as a “faith practice” with potential of bringing about mental transformation. This is premised on her argument that there is a psychological skill to prayer with real potential psychological changes. Through what she calls the “participatory theory of mind” those participating, “heighten and deepen internal sensation: seeing, hearing and touching above all” (p.161). Luhrmann concludes through her study that “people stay with God not because theology makes sense but the practice delivers emotionally” (268). 

Luhrmann’s stated objective behind writing this book is to bridge a growing gap between believers and skeptics. In the last chapter of the book (Bridging the Gap) she suggests that Americans are increasingly disconnected from important social relationships and as a result feel lonelier and isolated and in such situations they develop a relationship with God to overcome the loneliness and isolation and to feel happy (p.324). She provides a good combination of evolutionary psychology and ethnography in the book. At the very beginning she makes her project clear to the readers by stating the limitations of its scope and outcomes. She calls herself an ‘outsider’ and engages with the community as a participant-observer.

Don Seeman’s essay “To Pray with the Tables and the Chairs” deals with prayer and materiality.  His analysis of Chabad contemplative practices show that these practices are transformative facilitate practitioners to see the material world as divine. Prayer for both him and Luhrmann is the in-between where this transformation occurs. Seeman argues against universalizing and generalizing the binary of material and spiritual and for being context-specific in studying traditions that offer a different conception. Luhrmann psychological analysis, since is evolutionary, makes no room for sudden and unconditioned experiences which might be real to the practitioners ( or may be not); it certainly overpowers the voices of the practitioners themselves. So my questions are : a) if this approach succeeds in “bridging the gap”, because while the psychological approach might convince skeptics, it may fail to convince the practitioners’ such a representation of their own practices? b) How do we make sense of the ‘in-betweens ’ like prayer in our writings? How useful is ‘as if’ in representing a world that is seemingly different from ours?      

 

Précis of Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

Aditya Chaturvedi

Maya Deren’s account of Haitian Voudoun tradition results from her own experience of the “reality which had forced” her “to recognize its integrity and to abandon” her “manipulations” (pg.6). In her preface, she admits her inability to comprehend this tradition purely as an artist and subtlety, to me, ascribes it to “the reality that mastered it”. The book, thus, is not a systematic/conventional anthropological or ethnographical study, but, a presentation by the Haitian Voudoun in its own terms. However, throughout the book, she actively responds to possible modern academic engagements with rituals and beliefs of Haitian Voudoun practitioners, and thus, addressing possible criticism that might arise from such engagements.

She begins the book with an introductory note discussing the demography of the practitioners and the general outlook towards these practices from different sections of the Haitian society, making it clear that while the upper and middle classes remain ignorant about them, it is very much a way of living for the peasants. She goes on to explain the fundamental terms and concepts of Voudoun including gross-bon-range, loa, houngan, espirit, and honour. Instead of alienating these concepts from their original context, she presents them before her readers as they are by her interactions with practitioners and her own experiences. Voudoun is based on the premise that the human material body is animated by non-material soul, psyche, or spirit. While the material body decays after the occurrence of death- live and death are just transformative moments to that which is immortal. This individual soul or grow-bon-range is after death, through rituals, raised at higher levels of being – making an ancestor archetype and sometimes a loa too. These loa mount human bodies and this phenomenon are called possession. Gods and humans have a symbiotic relationship in Haitian society- while the former is revered and honoured by the latter, he never forgets that “he was made god by humans” (pg.33). The constellations of loa are reflective of shared Christian and African heritage of Voudoun. Deren brings out complexities of metaphysical assimilation Christian divinity and saints in Voudoun and geographical origins of African loa lucidly.

Deren argues that while Voudoun might seem to be an animistic religion, on close analysis it quite doesn’t fit in the orthodox arrangements of animistic religions. She, then, engages with a category of ‘primitive culture’, loaded with some derogatory connotations, to re-interpret it and argue that what is often understood as ‘mystical’, or a result of unknown/mystical occurrence by Europeans is attributed loa by Haitians (pg. 88&297). It is important to note here that, rather than simply rejecting or presenting them in a ‘reasonable’ way, as might be expected of an academic, she takes indigenous categories and concepts very seriously. This engagement becomes clearer in her discussion of Haitian reliance on loa for healing and their reservations about modern medical facilities. She substantiates her arguments with vivid examples- of La Merci (pg.167) in this case, for instance. In her discussion on possession also, she provides possible ‘modern/logical’ views on it only to prove them unimportant to a Haitian. She writes: “List all those intellectual and moral qualities- vision, inspiration, imagination, – which most distinguish the poet, the philosopher, the scientist; catalogue them, name them, count and differentiate and ‘explain’ their origins their operation, mechanisms, and their motivations. The Haitian will not dispute you …..All that we call to have loa. ” She repeatedly compares religion with magic and argues while the former is for the community, the latter is personal; the rituals of the former are public, of the latter are kept secret and are mysterious; and in the former serviteur is changed while the world changes in Magic. This comparison reflects the assumptions she might have had about the readers who would simply term voudoun rituals ‘magical’, overlooking their deep meanings and effects.

Deren presents Haitian ritualistic dances as meditative practices done for the loa in contrast with secular forms which are more stylized and lay emphasis on acrobatics. The dance controlled by drum-beats in Voudoun rituals is considered is treated as a collective creative endeavour – a way of the negation of the individual self. However, it is not understood in complete denial of the individual genius, rather it is attributed to the collective act or the loa in control of it. She also discusses the presentation and reception of these dance forms out of their ritual context in an industrial culture.

Liminality- ‘in-betweens, neither this nor that, bridges’- seem to be of importance in Voudoun rituals and also emerges as a metaphor for the larger content of the book itself. Deren begins the book by calling myth the “twilight speech” (pg.21), then goes on to discuss elaborate Voudoun rituals involving symbolisms acting as bridges between the two worlds; houngans as the intermediaries between humans and the loa; and finally, before discussing possession properly, she places the readers at the ‘threshold to the unknown’ (pg.247). Some of these concepts are similar to Hindu notions of the potency of liminal spaces and times and their importance in the ritual. She emphasizes the negation of the individual self to possess the loa and impossibility of being the two i.e.the human and the God simultaneously. This is yet another notion found in some South Asian religious traditions including Hinduism. Deren’s book seems very bold and different to me when I compare it with dominant scholarship on India from her time as it would dismiss most of the indigenous categories as ‘irrational’. The last chapter of the book was most impactful to me as Deren almost recreates her experience of losing the ‘self’ to loa, as it were and being transformed, through a very poetic language.

Maya Deren poses a problematic in her introduction when she asks if the scientific or scholarly detachment – which is based on manifold dualities- be even valid as a means to truth in examining the Oriental and African cultures which are” predicated on the notion that the truth can be apprehended only when every cell of  brain and body- the totality of human being- is engaged in the pursuit? (pg.9 ) In the book by recognising the limitations of modern western analytic categories, she challenges their supposed universality across time and space as valid epistemic apparatuses.