This publication is freely available for scholarly or educational use.
Video cameraLecture delivered 2017-03-28Standard date values are given in ISO form: yyyy-mm-dd.Library of CongressEnglish.When I read the title of this talk, Religions, Imperial Pasts, Global Futures,it made me think I had this strong personal resonance with the title.Because both of my father's parents were Methodist missionaries.They went independently to India and met there and got married about 1915.And then, my father was born in India and grew up in India.And then, he went back to India later on andI was actually conceived in India when he was there.So when I think of these kind of religions, imperial pasts and globalfutures, when I grew up I thought that was a normal life for everybody, that wehad all these people from India visiting all the time in Springfield, Missouri.But it turned out that wasn't normal, but it'skinda been amazing trajectory for these people who traveled the world like that.So I am gonna turn things over to Brian.And I look forward to hearing the talk.>> See if I can do that.Does that work?Yes, welcome, everyone.And thank you, Dean Auner, for that introduction.It is a real pleasure to be able to introduce our speaker, but before that,I would also like to thank Lisa Lowe and the Center for Humanities forproviding a really wonderful years worth of events around this Sawyer seminar andthe exploration of comparative global humanities.It has been a wonderful year, andI think this event will prove to be a great addition to it.And it's really nice on this occasion.I want to make kind of an announcement.The religion department was, of course,pleased to be invited to join the non-seminar and to have religiousstudies sort of identified as an analytic matrix within that framework tothink about the humanities and what it means to be human, etc.And it has been a wonderful collaboration butwe've also just completed another wonderful collaboration that's issued intoa new higher that we're all very excited about.And on this occasion seems particularly appropriate to announce that higher,the religion department will be welcoming a new member in the fallElana Jefferson-Tatum who is an expert on Africana religious traditions andthe traditions of Vodun as they circulate aroundthe Atlantic Ocean diasporic communities.So she'll be offering for those students out there, a new course in the fallcalled Africana Sacred Matters and I hope you'll look up her work andlook up that course and think about taking it and help us welcome her to campus.I think it's a really great moment and it marks a kind another set ofcollaborations between the department of religion and the consortium on studies andrace colonialism and diaspora.So I'm very pleased to make that announcement.Look for the religion department brochure.Shameless plug.>> [LAUGH] >> Sorry.Let me turn into the proper introduction.I'll take a little time doing this begging my guests' forgiveness here.But it feels incumbent upon me to provide some framework forthinking about a Professor Chidester's work which is both extensive andimpressive in its depth and its sort of analytical focus.He is, of course, internationally recognized scholar,of what we would variously call comparative religion,the study of religion, the history of religions, religious studies.We have a lot of rubrics by which we call what we do,by which we identify our field.But no matter what we call it, certainly Professor Chidester has earneda great deal of recognition within our field.Earned his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara,in the program in Religious Studies, which is itselfa highly distinguished program with a long roster of very important scholars faculty.He went on very early to establish himself as an innovative thinker in our field.I think particularly well suited to unsettle some of our accustomed habits.And I think it's for that reason that he is twice, not once, but twice, beenawarded the American Academy of Religion's Award for Excellence in Religious Studies.That would be nice to get one time, quite frankly.[LAUGH] So Professor Chidester's list of published works I think is too long andtoo rich to rehearse here, but it spans everything from early studies ofJim Jones and the People's Temple, to the religions of southern Africa.To comparative explorations around ethics, death, dying, transcendence.Well, let's just say in our age of fake news and alternative facts,he's maybe someone you could look to if you wanted to understanda snake oil salesman such as we have recently elected, if I can say that.You might wanna look at his book, Authentic Fakes,which offers a kind of dizzying romp through religion and popular culture andtakes in another celebrity president, Ronald Reagan, along the way.So I send props out to that book.It won't be the focus of today's discussion, I don't think, butit is a fun book and it's one that challenges conceptions of religion andpopular culture.What we wanna call attention today I think are to two books,David's book Savage Systems, Colonialism andcomparative religion in southern Africa from 1996 andthen empire of religion, imperialism and comparative religion from 2014.These two books marking substantial intervention in the rethinking of what itmeans to do religious studies and what the history of our discipline has been.To think about the history of that discipline andjust provide a little back drop, let me run through a prepared kind oftext here and I hope, again, crave your indulgence.I'd begin by calling attention to an important textbook written byone of the leading scholars at University of California Santa Barbara, Walter Capps,who wrote a book called Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline,published in 1995.It runs to nearly 350 pages.It's a substantial book and it's a very valuable book but I was noticing thatit's only on page 339 that you notice the word colonialism appearing.And if I'm correct, that's the first andonly time the word colonialism appears in a book on the making of religious studies.Rather remarkable, in light of what we're about to hear, I think.And it comes, notably, in a chapter entitled, The Future of Religious Studies,or a brief section, I should say.The Future of Religious Studies.So Capps was looking in the right direction,but only just barely registering on his radar as it were.In that context, he refers to the work of Charles Long,who had recently garnered attention within the field for demanding that scholarsattend to the ways that colonial, social, political, and cultural structures had ledto the privileging of certain views of religion within a discipline.Long had written in 1986, an important book called Significations.And it represented its own kinda groundbreaking intervention forits attempt to bring a measure of reflexivity andpolitical accountability to the study of religion.Because according to Long, it would no longer be enough fora scholar of religion to simply bring the otherness of religion home foranalysis, Long called upon scholars to actively attend to thissituatedness of their own frameworks, categories and modes of knowing.And among the most prominent structures that he identified shapingmodern western understandings of religion was European colonial oppression.If you turn briefly to Long's book, I find it rather interesting,if you look at the index, you see a series of entries under C,bracketing some entries on Colonialism, colonization, colonized people.Now what brackets those entries?On the front side is an entry for the cogito of Rene Descartes.And on the back side, if you will,is an entry for color, parentheses, see also, race.I think this immediately suggests something really interesting andsignificant about the moment marked by Long's book.A moment in which the long andhallowed genealogy of religious studies as a strand of modern European intellectualhistory, where in pride of place is given to the cogito of Descartes.Is suddenly brought up short, not simply by the abstract issue of color, butby the very embodied histories of peoples of color under colonization.Long, in a sense raised a question that was yet to be answered,which was how would the field of religious studies respond to the hitherto forgottenplace of color, colonialism and oppression within its own disciplinary development?Well, change takes time of course, anddisciplinary change may take even more time.You sense this again if you look at Capps' book.In Capps' narratives,interestingly enough you actually begin with the cogito with Descartes.In the sense that he tells the story of the origins of modern religiousstudy as the story of modern European thought.For Capps, one of the distinguishing elements of modern religious studies hasbeen the quest to identify the so-called essence of religion.The quest to find the sine qua non,that without which religion would not be what it is.Capps tells us that is a fundamentally Cartesian project in its temper.Insofar as in Descartes, we have what Capps calls the starting point forthe making of the discipline of religious studies.Now, while the cogito and its European legacy serves to launch Capps survey,it would be another decade orso before commentators really inspired by a range of new developmentsaround what we today think of as post structuralism and post colonialism.Would begin to suggest that the methodological standpoint occupied byDescartes was not in fact one of scientific objectivity.But one that might better be described using Walter Mignolo's phrase,the hubris of the zero point.Or the illusion that western intellectual history was the only fair andaccurate game in town and what a game it was, or is.Here's how one of the founders of modern religious studies,Cornelis P Tiele, spoke of the discipline in 1897.All she desires, she, the science of religion.All she desires to do is to subject religion to unprejudiced investigation,in order to ascertain how it arises and grows andwhat are its essentials, and in order to thoroughly understand it.Talk about hubris, I guess.Now with his call to attend to the darker side of western modernity,Walter Mignolo directs us back to the work of Charles Long.Here it's interesting to note that Long was deeply grounded in the traditions ofwestern phenomenological study of religion.And he was himself something of a card carrying memberof the so-called Chicago School of the History of Religions, which owed somuch to the grand theories of.But even while Long was comfortable drawing on Descartes, Kant, Hegel,he proved able also to query the vaunted westernintellectual posture of methodological transparency, if you will,that zero point, the illusion of objectivity.In the phase of this European transparency,Long invoked liberationists, black, native American theologiansto counter transparency with what he called the opaque.For him, it wasn't white, European, Protestant, theologians and scholars butfigures like James Cone and Vine Deloria who brought the reality of suffering andoppression to the foreground.And thereby challenged historians of religion to deconstruct their comfortableand comforting hermeneutics of religion to a more rigorous engagement with race,colonialism, and what Long called the concrete embodiments of matter.So Long was one of those who helped to see how the modern study of religion wasimplicated in the project of what we call European Self Fashioning.And he did really what we would think of today as a kind of Saediandiscursive deconstruction of this tradition of Western thought.But without invoking Saed, Saed yet had not yetreally made his impact within the field of religious studies I would suggest.And the way, I think, someone like Professor Chidester to come along and putthese pieces together and really reveal to us, in sometimes harrowing detail,this history of a darker side of our own discipline.But turning quickly to David's work, I want to let him speak.[LAUGH] You can note that one of the two teachers to whom hededicated his ground breaking book Savage Systems was none other than Charles Long,who was one of his teachers.And as he told us yesterday,whom he valued as the bringer of problems, the one who continually posed problems.And you can see how Long's books signification really is that.It's a problem-inducing book, it causes a crisis.Well, in Savage Systems and other works from around the mid-1990s,Professor Chidester began calling for the academic study of religion toitself be interrogated as a set of historically situated practices.Savage Systems and his more recent Empire of Religion, set themselves the task ofbringing into view the ways modern approaches to the study of religionare from the very beginning, caught up with the dynamics of colonial frontiers.The disciplinary history offered by Savage Systems comes to us appropriately enough,given Long's earlier tension to the oceanic transits of colonialism.This argument comes to us, I think, in waves almost.Not the waves and phases of familiar, temporal typology but more spacialcycles and circuits of transit between frontier outpost and imperial metropolis.As emergent categories of knowledge deployed in sites like southern Africato exert local control were then supplemented orinflected by modes of imperial theorizing taking place in the metropolis.Where the metropolis' goal, he argues,was to come up with these universal taxonomies to make sense of the world.Well, like all the trading ships and military vessels that sail back andforth across the oceans, the metropolitan and the local wash back andforth in Savage Systems.Fostering in time what Professor Chidester has memorably andsomewhat terrifyingly dubbed, comparative apartheid religion.And modality of apartheid religion, we see such purportedly transparent andglobally valid categories as fetishism, totemism, primitivismdeployed to undergird local systems of colonial control, segregation and other.At the same time, the disciplinary history of Europe's encounter with other religionscan be viewed as the sinister conjugation of conceptual categories with social,racial and political borders.Thus, Professor Chidester explores how Europeans vacillatedbetween remarking on the absence of religion in southern Africa, andsuddenly discovering it as inactive, if primitive presence.In the end, the invention of religion itself serves tobolster colonial conquest and missionary conversion, while the closure orfixing of taxonomies supports the closure of real colonial boundaries.This is the imperial past, I imagine we'll hear something about today and I think itleaves us to ask that pressing question, what is the future of religious studies?And I look forward to hearing both about the past andabout the future from Professor Chidester.I hope you'll join me in welcoming him.[APPLAUSE] >> Thank you, thank you, thank you.Thank you to Mel and Sawyer.Thank you, Brian.Thank you all for being here.I feel like I was attending my own funeral, there.Thank you very much, that was nice, anyway, it was wonderful, thank you.I used that line yesterday, also.So I've been asked to speak to you, and I'm happy to speak to you.Thank you for being here, about religion.A recent scholarship, In the academicstudy of religion, shows us that religion is a modern invention.A western construction, a colonial imposition, and an imperial expansion.So religion is made up.The very own notion of religion is a fabricated category, butthere it is, acting like it was something.Like race, which does not exist, butit's everywhere, has real consequences in the real world.So what do we do with this fabricated, yet real religion?Here, I want to dwell on this question by exploring three formations of religion,colonial, imperial, and global.I'll introduce formations by examining a ship wreck, a war dance,and an alien abduction in South Africa.Historical fragments, these cases reveal the historical contingency of the basiccategory religion, by tracking in circulation through colonial situations,imperial appropriations, and globalizing transmutations.These cases also suggest how the concept of religion, as well as beliefs,practices, and social formations that might be regarded as religion have emergedwithin the shifting power relations of colonial, imperial, and global formations.By the way, I'm from Cape Town, South Africa.Nice to meet you. This is great, I came here for this.Anyway, here's my whole story.I'm gonna tell you the whole story very briefly.The anchor.During the early 19th century, an anchor cast ashore from a shipwreck onthe Eastern Cape Coast of South Africa became a focal point for colonialmissionaries, travelers, and government agents to formulate a theory of religion,in order to assert that indigenous people in the Eastern Cape had no religion.Instead of having a religion,Africans exhibited abundant superstition, the defining opposite of religionwhich was displayed in their superstitious worship of the anchor.For their part, Africans of the Eastern Cape developed a conceptualopposition between sea and land.Distinguishing not only between people of the sea, the alien intruders who came fromthe sea and should have remained in the sea, and the people of the land.But also between gods of the sea and gods of the land.Which articulated the colonial situation in highly charged symbols.They could be designated as religious.The second thing I wanna look at is a war dance.In 1905, the British Association for the Advancement of Science visitedSouth Africa where they beheld an authentic Zulu war dance.That was organized, staged andperformed on the sugar plantation of one of the association's host.The display of religious savagery reinforced the theoretical distinctionbetween the primitive and the civilized in theorizing about religion.As the leading anthropologist of religion on the trip Alfred C Hayden observed,and I'll come back to this, South Africa affords a most favorable field forthe study of, now listen to this, division of labor.The ethnology of the lower races and the sociology of the higher races.So this will be the great divide between the citizens of world religions,civilized, and the remnant, the left over, the primitive, the savage sort.Of course, we'll see that authentic Zulu war dance,it was staged intentionally to illustrate the distinction between savagery,the same people performing in the war dance,then changed their costumes and Christian civilization.So shipwreck, a war dance, last but not least,as we look to the future, an alien abduction.During the early 20th century, the Zulu used to call himself a witch doctor,then he called himself sangoma, then a sanusi and now Shaman Credo Mutwa,the master of Zulu dreams, prophecies, and mysteries.He emerged in the global circuit of neo-shamanism as the bedrock of Africanindigenous authenticity to underwrite a variety of projects including new agespirituality, alternative healing, encounters with aliens from outer space,testifying to his own experience of alien abduction, which he found traumatic.Credo Mutwa related indigenous African knowledge about extraterrestrials,especially, focusing on the Chitauri,the evil race of shape-shifting alien reptilians.Drawing on local African traditions,Credo Mutwa reinforced a global conspiracy theory.So that's what I wanna do, that's the whole story.Is that all right?We don't know, we could quit there, actually, that is the whole story.I've written about these things, the shipwreck in Savage Systems.The war dance in Empire of Religion.The alien abduction in Authentic Fakes and Wild Religion.Talk about shameless promotion here, these books will be available in the lobby.>> [LAUGH] >> But here,I wanna see what happens when we bring these three things together.First, the shipwreck.In 1800,the first representative of the London Missionary Society in Southern Africa,the former soldier, farmer, linguist, and biblical scholar, J T Van der Kemp.So he goes to the Eastern Cape, first missionary representingthe London Missionary Society and he reports back on the Eastern Cape.In a preliminary assessment of indigenous religion,of the clauses speaking people of the region,Van der Kemp had made a surprising discovery, he found no religion.An absence, and you know what, it's a remarkable discovery of an absence.If by religion he said, we understand reverence of God andthe external action by which that reverence is expressed,I never could perceive that they had any religion nor any idea of religion.So a total absence of religion in the Eastern Cape.Obviously, he's operating with a certain Protestant definition of religion,Christian assumptions about the content of religious worship.But nevertheless, he reports back this remarkable discovery of an absence.As evidence of this denial, Van der Kemp pointed to the presence,so the absence of religion, the presence of superstition.And so here we find religion as the oppositional term.It is defined in opposition to its absence,except superstition's not an absence.Going back to the very notion of religio, what did it mean in ancient latin?No one knows.Etymology of religio, what did it mean?To pay attention, to repeat, binding relations, no one knows.It's a big argument.But everyone knows religio was the opposite of superstikeo.Conduct based on ignorance, fear of the unknown andthe fraud of devious priestcraft.So in any case, this is what Van der Kemp finds in the Eastern Cape.An abundance of superstition demonstrated by the local regard foran anchor that had been cast ashore by a shipwreck off the Eastern Cape Coast.There lays near the mouth of the Cayascaman, an old anchor.Belonging to a ship, which was lost on the coast.Cacabey, who governed the country as far as I could find out, about that year 1780,ordered a piece of this anchor to be cut off.The African who was employed in this work, died soon after.The accident was enough for these people who've taken their heads that the anchorthe power punishing everyone who should treat it with disrespect andalso some dominion over the sea.In order to reconcile it, it has been honored with a peculiar name andwhen any African passes by, he salutes it.So absence of religion, presence of superstition,demonstrated by this regard for an object, for this anchor.By the way, this is not a photograph of the anchor.It's a woodcut from the 1850s.This anchor persisted as a symbol of the absence of religionin the Eastern Cape for decades.Now, the act of preserving, naming andsaluting the anchor, what is that all about?If people actually did that, it might have signifiedsome measure ritualized control, over the unnatural death.The unnatural violence that had been unleashed in the eastern cape duringthe early part of the 19th century.After all one source of this unnatural violence anddeath, could in fact be located as coming from the sea.From the European invaders andcolonizers were like the anchor did not belong on the land.The distinction between sea and land is symbolic opposition that the anchor couldeasily have marked was an important aspect of Paulza King 's political vocabulary.In reports from 1815 the Paulza King is quoted as saying,that the people who have come from the sea,should have kept in their own land,meaning the sea, should have stay in the sea.But they had risen from the bottom of the sea.Seeing the top mast first gradually more and more, until they beheld the hull.And then, come out the natives of the water.The colonial official, who was reporting this, that the Paulza king said always,Europeans are people of the water, was citing it as an example ofsuperstition of ignorance, of causes fear of the unknown.Anyway, it could just as easily have been read as a political statementresistant to European colonizers who had no business in this country and shouldhave of kept it in their own, it could of easily been read as a political statement.But what proliferated after this were forms of religious discourse andpractices based on the opposition between sea andland, for both alien and indigenous people in colonial contact zones.A new orientation of the land was often articulated precisely in terms ofthe opposition between land and sea.Drawing on earlier mythic themes, the identification of Europeans with the seabecame a symbolic template for interpreting the colonial encounter.We find the case of the war leader, and religious visionarywho died in 1819, also known as the Lynx.He developed this observation of sea andland into an indigenous theology that identified two gods.The god of the white people, that's kinda [INAUDIBLE].So it was one god, the god of the white people, who had punished white people forkilling his son by casting them into the sea.And the god of the deeps, who dwelled under the ground buthad ultimate dominion over the sea.So there's a way in which leading actually a militaryopposition against colonial settlements developed a religiousvocabulary much like the anchor mediating between sea andland, dominion over the sea, but dwelling in the land.So this recurring colonial thematic of sea and landwas developed in the early part of the 19th century throughout southern Africa.For example, a Zulu creation myth in 1850s.According to one account of this myth,[COUGH] God made human beings, black and white.To the white human beings, he said,you must live in the midst of the water in the sea.We also said, you must wear clothing, carry guns, and live in the sea.And then, to the black human beings, you must go naked,carry spears but live on the land, live in this land.So anyway, my point in this first part as we look at a shipwreck, here's a materialobject, caster saw on the ship, subject to multiple interpretations.It was used by colonial missionaries, travelers, andgovernment agents as a sign of absence,the absence of religion, and abundant superstition that signified that absence.Now, if we look at the other side of that colonial divide,you find African innovators, African thinkers, African strategizers,who are reading this anchor as a fundamental opposition between sea andland which has incredible range of symbolic andmaterial residence in the conflicts in the Eastern Cape.So to conclude this section, under colonial formations, I'm suggestingthat religion is an oppositional term in colonial conflicts, is that all right?Can we stop there?How are you doing, are you okay?You all right?This is a nice room, I like it here.Just one more thing in the Eastern Cape.As I develop in the book, Savage Systems, every European reporter from this regionReported that the local people had no religion until 1858 when the colonialmagistrate JC Warner reported that they had actually a religious system.They have a religious system.Beliefs and practices that are local,indigenous religious system is a religious system.Well, this followed the emphasis of the magisterial systemto keep colonized people in place.And so, JC Warner, in that context discovered they had a religious systemthat provided psychological security, and social stability that did what?Kept them in place.So this cause a religious system was like the colonial magisterial systemkeep people in place.Local administrative system of management and control.Here`s a lovely picture of, here's J.C. Warner.Who discovered.He doesn't look so big, does he?Anyway, he was the first to discover religion.All right, that`s the anchor.Can we move on to the war dance?So the colonial formation is opposition religion opposed superstition sea,opposed to land is an opposition term.Leading eventually to the role of religion as a colonial history of containment.Management and control of local populations.The War Dance.On August 23, 1905, delegates of the British Association forthe Advancement of Science were received by Marshall Campbell,owner of the Mount Edgecomb Sugar Estate near Durban.As they approach this extensive plantation, the astronomer J Stark Brown,recall they saw bands of Zulu men in all their savagery andwar array, approaching, singing and shouting.All with very weird effect.After a guided tour of the sugar refinery, the delegates proceeded to an open fieldwhere they witnessed a dramatic display of Zulu savagery.According to Brown the authenticity of this performance,something that needed to be seen to be properly appreciated.Was certified by the savage costumes, savage rhythms,savage ferocity of Zulu dancers in their barbaric array of skins, ornaments,feathers and most wonderful variety of headdresses,some nearly naked, others in fantastic costumes, as quite to baffle description.The dancers appeared grotesque in the extreme.For over an hour, these dancers enacted wild dancesthat Brown found almost equally impossible to describe for their full meaning.Even a sightseers' was difficult to grasp.First the whole line, he said, three and four deep, began to stamp and move about,rhythmically keeping time to a monotonous chant which they all intoned together.While this is going on, the chiefs and braves,one after another dashed out of the ranks, and went through the presence ofsanguinary conflicts with imaginary foes shouting and capering wildly andstabbing with their sticks with devilish voracity all the time.Browns spoke of this wild dance with its pretended conflicts was a war dance.Now we'll get to this in a bit but there was no such thing.Which was no such thing.War dance was a colonial category, anything that the,colonizers found threatening and weird and dangerous.So there actually was no such thing as a war dance we'll get to that.But what was remarkable about this is that the representativesthe British Association for the Advancement of Science reportedback to London what they had witnessed was an authentic Zulu ritual,an authentic Zulu war dance and all of these leaders of the association,especially is leading anthropologists of religion.AC Hayden and.No, this is Sidney Hartland.They gave reports of what they had witnessed was an authentic,indigenous Zulu ritual.Dangerous, frightening, savage, frenzied.This was part of the measure of it's authenticity.It was wild, and they were brought back, we witnessed this wild thing.And then over and over again, they say, we were frightened by this wild thing.But we would have been more frightened,if their spears had not been replaced by sticks.Over and over again in their reports they show,like Hartland says, a war dance was first performed.It was of most exciting description for the member gradually broughtup what looked like a perfect fury, dancing, leaping, and yelling.Had they had spears as they would in their natural condition instead of long thinsticks or wands which they waved about, it would've been really terrifying.AC Hayden, also the natives dance war dances,we were very grateful they didn't have spears.What's going on here?Here was an opportunity for imperial scientists, imperial researchers,imperial theorist, to do all kinds of field work.Although it was staged andmanaged by the owner of this sugar plantation, Malcolm Campbell.Although it was carefully orchestrated to scare the **** out of them.That's part of a measure of its authenticity in an environment in whichsix or seven months later war did break out, the so-called Bambatha rebellion.One of the reporters of that said there is noact passive in it's nature which a native can commit that portrays hostile intent.There is no act passive in it's nature.You know a religious ritual,a religious ceremony, symbolic, let's just say pretend conflicts.There is no act passive in it's nature which a native can commit that betrayshostile intent more plainly than a war dance.So this colonial focus on Zulu religious ritual, it could be a cleansing ritual,a purifying ritual, a gathering ritual.Why war ritual?It was scary.Now the whole point of this display for the British Association forthe Advancement of Science, was that the participants in the war dancewent backstage and dressed upin European Christian clothing.They were representative of native Christians dressed in European clothingand performing such popular songs as God Save The King, Home Sweet Home.Anyway as Brown, the astronomer himself recognized this wasall done to show us the contrast between the heathen and the Christian Zulu's.So now we still have colonial construction of religion as an opposition,in this case between Christian and heathen, civilized and savage.There's a kind of expectation however,in the imperial register that the heathen can become Christian.That this religious opposition can be transposed,transformed, changed.And there's a kind of proposition,expectation that the savage can become civilized.You know so we're moving now from a construction of religion as opposition toa construction of religion as opposition and transformation.The notion of progress.Of course, in the case of the progress fromsavage to civilized it is infinitely postponed,infinitely delayed.You can never get there.So that's my war dance.There were many other people.There's John Dube, one of the founders of African National Congress.He was there also and he reinforced this idea to the British Association,the whole point of what you saw was to show the difference between savagery andcivilization.He had been trained at Oberlin College.He was a minister.And he raised money from the British association for his mission.There was another fellow named Mohandas Gandhi, who was also present at this.Who said that John Dube is somebody you really should get to know.So I guess here we've got religion as opposition,religion as transposition, religion as this kindof diverse Different religious interests are all coming together here.When the report went back to London, all that was erased.And all that was left was this stark opposition [COUGH]between savagery and civilization.And then one last thing, E S Hartland was so impressed at the wardance by a witch doctor, a ritual specialist,who had a lovely necklace, like a really beautiful necklace.And so Hartland goes to a local dealer in Africanartifacts and purchases this necklace.Yeah, it's nice, it's in the Pitt Rivers Museum at the moment.Anyway, here's the authentication for it.The witch doctor's necklace made of horns, etc., belonged to a Zulu well-known tomyself, those are from the dealer, the dealer says this.He belongs to a tribe near the doctor was on a visit to Durban forthe purpose of trading, he was wearing this necklace.When I purchased it, he was not willing to part with it.And so then Flinder sold it to Hartland, andit ends up at the Metropolitan Center of Theory Production.So now we've got another layer to this history,colonial opposition, imperial transmutations here,imperial appropriations.Where now, this necklace becomes raw materials toappropriate from the colonial periphery, takes the Metropolitan Center.So, in South Africa, religion has persisted as an oppositional term,marking the opposition between savage and civilize.But imperialism rendered religion as an evolutionary process,a progression from savagery to civilization.However, a promise infinitely deferred which disguised imperialambitions of appropriation.I got one more, are we all right here?I see you, I don't see any of you, you're all over here out of my field of vision.All right.Alien abduction.While indigenous religion has been denied and contained under colonialconditions and collected and managed within imperial ambitions.Indigenous religion has undergone a reevaluation in a globalizing era,now I hope we start to move towards the future.Credo Mutwa has been described internationally as a Zulu shaman,the keeper of Zulu tradition.Although, in South Africa some years ago,he was also widely characterized as a fake, a fraud, and a charlatan.An extremely creative and imaginative author, artist, sculptor,Credo Mutwa has been celebrated within the global network of contemporaryNeo-shamanism as the High Sanusi of the Zulu nation.The highest grade of African shaman, andofficial historian of the Zulu people of South Africa.Over his long career, Credo Mutwa has been adept at reinventing himself inrelation to various alien appropriations of his authenticity.During the 1950s, Credo Mutwa was used to authenticate African artifacts fora curio shop in Johannesburg.I say you think back to this Flinder who authenticated a Zulu necklace forE S Hartland, this is what Credo Mutwa did for a living in the 1950s.Through his writings in the 1960s, his tourist attraction in Soweto in the 1970s,and his cultural village in Bophuthatswana in the 1980s, he wasused to authenticate the racial, cultural and religious separations of apartheid.I quote Credo Mutwa, apartheid is the high law of the gods.He wrote that in the early 1960s, it is the highest law of nature.Continuing to support the apartheid regime in the late 1980s,he wrote the foreword to a book, South Africa the 51st State.This is a great book arguing that the US should not have sanctions againstSouth Africa, but should welcome South Africa as its 51st State of the Union.And as Credo Mutwa said, South Africa was the only hope in the region todefend against communists, militants and rebels such as the ANC terrorists.Now then, during the 1990s, as he acquired the label, shaman, through interventionsof Bradford Keeney, Steven Larson and other exponents of New Age spirituality.Credo Mutwa's authority was invoked to authenticate a diverse rangeof enterprises in saving the world from human exploitation,environmental degradation, epidemic illness, endemic ignorance,organized crime, and this is what I'll focus on, extraterrestrial conspiracy.In all of these things, he was the pure voice of indigenous authenticity.One of Credo Mutwa's supporters, the New Age conspiracy theorist David Icke,produced a five hour video, The Reptilian Agenda,based on interviews with the Zulu shaman.In this video, Icke explains, where it enters into a unique human being,the most incredible man has been my honor to meet.Mutwa is the keeper of the ancient knowledge, the truth of history,as opposed to the nonsensical version of history we get from universities.The true history confirmed by Icke's recent research and Mutwa'sancient knowledge, centered on a global conspiracy of aliens from outer space.You know David Icke, right?He was a former sports broadcaster in Britain.He developed a distinctive blend of New Agespirituality with political paranoia.In which he identified the central secret, a conspiracy rulingthe world as the work of shape-shifting reptilians from outer space.According to Icke, these extra terrestrial reptiles interbred with human beings,establishing a lineage that can be traced through the pharaohs of ancient Egypt,the Merovingian dynasty of Medieval Europe,the British Royal Family, and every President of the United States.>> [LAUGH] >> There you go.Although they plotted behind the scenes in a secret society, the Illuminati,the aliens are these hybrid bloodlines who are in prominent positions of royal power,political power, economic power,all over the world, occasionally shifting into their lizard-like form.Yeah, that's right.These aliens maintained a human appearance by regularly drinking human bloodwhich they acquired by performing rituals of human sacrifice.So this is David Icke's story, he finds confirmation,authentication from Credo Mutwa.So, invoking the African authority of Credo Mutwa to confirm this conspiracytheory about blood drinking, shape-shifting reptiles from outer space,Mutwa declared, to know the Illuminati, Mr David, you must study the reptile.In The Reptilian Agenda, Credo Mutwa confirms that extraterrestrials,the Chitauri, a shape-shifting reptilian race that has controlled humanity forthousands of years.They actually joined up to save the world.They went to the great pyramid in Cheops to stop the Illuminati fromperforming a human sacrifice.Anyway, been very helpful to us.But my point here is in this new construction of religion,we're not finding an oppositional term, we're not finding a progression.There's something else going on here.This quite extraordinary mobility now of local authority,anchored authority, indigenous authority,Zulu authority being mobilized in this imagination of a global conspiracy,even extra-terrestrial conspiracy, we're definitely getting big here.Now, Credo Mutwa has personally experienced alien abduction.According to Credo Mutwa, Zulu tradition provides wisdom on how to capture aliens,prepare aliens, cook aliens, eat aliens from outer space.We all know this, right, we know how to cook a good alien from outer space.In 1958, a UFO crashed in the mountainous area of Lesotho.A friend invited Mutwa over fora meal, promising that they would be dining on something holy,which turned out to be the meat of an extraterrestrial known as a Grey.Following African tradition,they had to eat this meal in a deep hole in the ground.As Mutwa reports, the meat of the alien was tough anddry, requiring much chewing, and it had the same taste as a copper coin.After eating the flesh of a God, Mutwa andhis companion became deathly ill, suffering intense pain fora week, which seemed like 100 years, blind to death and unable to breathe.After a week, they went stark, raving, laughing mad.Then suddenly, Mutwa recalls, he was a person reborn.All his senses were expanded.I could see colors beyond colors.I could hear voices in my head.Taste buds souped up.Ecstasy of trans extraordinary sensory experience.We were one with the entire universe.By eating the alien, Mutwa had acquired an extraterrestrial sensorium.David Ike asked him in the video, do you think those senses you experiencedare like the senses of the Chitauri, these reptilian aliens from outer space?Yes, senses like no human being has.So, by contrast to this extra-terrestrial ecstasy, in 1959,Credo Mutwa underwent another alien abduction, the agony of alien abduction.While looking for medicinal herbs, in what is now Zimbabwe, Mutwa wastaken into a spaceship of the Chitauri, disappearing for a period of four days.Again, as a kind of alien abduction pays meticulous attention to the senses,to embodiment,to this visceral experience, he hears a strange humming sound the whole time.Pictures flood his mind, horrible metallic Chemical smells.He says, I have smelled them.I have personal experience of them.He goes through an eternity of pain during this alien abduction andis returned to earth bearing a horrible non-human smell, and missing his trousers.Mutwa was attacked by dogs, but saved by local villagers who recognized this odor.And so since that time, I've been a very confused person.Now Credo Mutwa is a brilliant author, artist, sculpture,very imaginative, creative, innovative in Zulu tradition.Here you him innovating in the idiom of outer space,of extra terrestrial encounters and abductions.Quite an extraordinary transposition of alien traditions.Anyway, he says we should look out for these aliens.>> [LAUGH] >> There's one Soship wreck, war dance, an alien abduction.These historical fragments show how religion has registereddifferently in colonial, imperial, and global formations.First, in the colonial register, we find religion as an oppositional term definedby its opposite superstition, which was allegedly abundant amongst Africans,signifying the lack of religion in South Africa,as we call that opposition did not go unchallenged.Africans reconfigured the colonial oppositionas an opposition between sea and land.It goes on.That's a Walmart arriving in South African shores.A new encounter between the aliens from the sea and the people of the land.The oppositional character of the term religion might very well go back toancient Roman usage.But we find it even during the European enlightenment,where definition of religion as an oppositional termwere developed by key thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, moral reason.That sounds all right, an essential definition of religion.How do you define moral reason?By pointing to its absence amongst Jews who suffer from superstition,repetition of meaningless rituals, and [INAUDIBLE] still opposition.[INAUDIBLE] profound feeling absence of religion, sounds like,how did he define that profound feeling by pointing to its absence amongst Jews.So we find even during the enlightenment period, this colonial oppositionalusage of the term religion persisted.Second, in the imperial register, we find religion as an evolutionary term.Position our timeline from primitive to civilized,best illustrated by the stadial theory of progression, from primitive huntergatherers to pastoral culture, and settled agriculture to urban civilization.So you've got this sort of evolutionary trajectory of religion.In this developmental scheme,indigenous religion had to be pushed along towards civilization, but imperialdomination control required an infinite deferral, postponing indefinitely,entering into citizenship within the imperial world of world religions.In the meantime, indigenous religions were subject to what I've called the triplemediation, linking indigenous people, colonial middlemen, andimperial theorists in the production of knowledge about religion.And so, this triple interchange of different actors engaged in producingknowledge about religion, the transaction between the Zulu Sangoma,the middle man Flinders, and the imperial theorist Hartland,who appropriated the Sangoma's necklace for the Pitt Rivers Museum,it's just one example of this ongoing process of producing knowledge, butalso exercising force since the Sangoma did not want to part with the necklace.And this imperial legacy lives on and the reappropriation of the appropriations.This imperial legacy lives on and the reappropriation of the appropriations,generating new forms of indigenous sovereignty and indigenous spirituality.Third, in the global, that's an authentic Zulu war dance.This is my president.This is a authentic Zulu wedding dance,or war dance, I'm not sure.Third, in the global register which is characterized by the increased pace andscope of the movement of people, money and technology, butalso ideals of human solidarity, images of human possibility.Religion is a transposable term replaced by other terms such as spirituality butalso transferred to a range of apparently nonreligious activities,such as sports or capitalism.So, we have this new fluidity with the very usages of the term religion,as a transposable term.The global register has also produced a commodification of religion.In these transpositions, religion by any name signifies sensory immediacy,promising direct experience butalso technological mediation through electronic media.Global religion is religion in motion defined by mobility, fluidity,and circulations, unanchored from any stable bedrock whether on land or sea.Unanchored from any necessary relation between statements of,unanchored from any necessary relation between statements andfacts in a proliferating swirl of signs.I conclude now.I'm not sure how this is gonna work, let's see, shall we see how this works?I could just stop, no let's see what happens.Global religion, now I'm going into the future here, signalingthe future of religion in the present, is a mix of authenticity and fakery.In a book on religion in American popular culture, I argue that even fakes, frauds,and charlatans can do real religious work.By religious work, I mean symbolic labor.In the fields and factories of the transcendent andthe sacred dealing with gods and ancestors,producing sacred objects, sacred times, sacred spaces.Thamsanqa Jantjie, the fake signer at the Nelson Mandela Memorialof December 10th, 2013 was an authentic fake.Remember this?Okay, operating in the realm of free signifiers.Perhaps signifying nothing, but revealing South Africa's,what I'm gonna call spectral governance,a ghostly governance that merges religion, law,and politics, with respect to religion.In his home in Bochabela, in the free state,John Chi was known as a songdoma, a shaman.He was a ritual specialist, except everyone knew he was fake songdomapretending to be a traditional religious healer,using sacred medicines to treat ailments and holy water to chase away evil spirits.Although he had been employed by the African National Congress at other events,John Chi was reportedly hired for the Nelson Mandela Memorial bya company owned by the head of the African National Congress Religious andTraditional Affairs Desk.So this signing, swirl of signs,relates to religion.He was a fake songdoma.He was appointed by the ANC religious affairs desk.Of course, that was run by the office of manager of ANC spokesman,Jackson Mthembu, who certified him to participate in the memorial.Although religious imagery certainly featured in John Chi's spectral vision ofangels descending on the stadium during the Mandela Memorial.Religious significance, traditional, Christian,inter-religious floated freely inside African public life.So I'm using him as a signifier, signifying nothing butperhaps signifying this circulation of traditional religion,Christian religion, inter-religious.Relations floating freely in South African public life.With respect to law and order John Chi reportedly was also a fake lawyerin Bochabela, dressing up in silks and taking cases to court.His own encounters with the law,which included charges of housebreaking, malicious damage to property, theft,rape, kidnapping, and murder, never resulted in conviction.Not even when he allegedly committed fraud against the Department of Justice.Charges were apparently dropped because he was deemednot psychologically fit to stand trial.Nevertheless, John Chi's freedom from consequences seemed symptomatic ofa regime of spectral governance that pretended to enforce law and order.Finally, by spectral governance I refer to the ghostly appearances,the haunting traces or the ceremonial performances of government.Now of course, it's not unique to South Africa, this governance byfakery was brought into a certain kinda focus by the work of Tommy John Chi,in his cartoon Fraudsters of the Nelson Mandela Memorial.Our cartoonist Zapiro, plays John Chi gesticulating wildly,surrounded by angels, next to South African president Jacob Zuma andUnited States president Barack Obama.Seriously, Obama asks.Next to me on the world stage was an incompetent fraud?As Obama's adviser explains, yes, sir.And the sign language interpreter was no better.South African political commentator Richard Poplak,in article paying tribute to the only honest man in the stadium of fools,found that John Chi's fakery highlighted the pretense of the event.Well, international public philosopher Slavoj Zizek argued that the fakeinterpreter called attention to the ceremonial pretense of care forthe people, because his message was the dignitaries don't really care about you.To his fake translation, John Chi rendered palpable the fate of the entire ceremony.Now lets give John Chi the last word here.In an interview, he seemed to adopt this position, this analysisof his performance by saying that he was faking to expose a bigger fraud.Even if they call me a fake, he exclaimed, I am the great fake.Because I expose what is going on in the government and the system.In conclusion, Is Barack Obama still President?Did anything change while I've been away?In conclusion, colonial, imperial, and global.In a globalizing age, the formations of religion that we've considered are writtenon top of each other.While religion is transposable, diffused, anddisbursed through popular culture, social networks,political mobilizations, economic transactions,so a religion is transposable and diffused,religion retains its oppositional character and developmental promise.Religion provides resources and strategies foropposing aliens, converting heathens,expanding empire, and transcending the fact Based world.Merging with law, politics and economics, specters of religion bear traces ofcolonial and imperial legacies, suggesting that global futures of religionare already inscribed in colonial and imperial past.Thank you. >> [APPLAUSE]>> There's food in the back.>> I actually have a question which was partially answeredby your last conclusion which is whether or not colonial,imperial, and global couldn't be co-terminus in a way,you've narrated this as if it's chronological in some way.But it seems to me that you're also implying that the colonial continueswithin the very study of religion itself,so I just wonder if you could talk about that.>> That's absolutely right.I think what I said at the end was these registers,which are kind of arbitrarily distinguished as colonial,imperial and global, are written on top of each other.Of legibility, so they persist.And so it's cumulative,but also disjunctive, I mean depending on where you are andwhen you are, you may engage this religious formation different ways.But I was just saying that they are written on top of each other, retained,so the colonial and the imperials retained, the colonial and imperials,the globals retained, and so you have these three things, yeah, retained.>> [SOUND] >> Thank you,dude, my mind is kind of still reeling butseveral questions, but just one to start out at least.With the colonial and the imperial,you've shown quite clearly how western interpreters of religionare creators of a category that has been used to do real work in the world.So with this global category are we not also still co-creators ofa category that fosters the kind of global transpositions that you're talking about?Thinking about even just this rubric of ultimate concern that became popularin the 60s and 70s after Paul Tillich and people like that.And become a way of thinking about everything from sports to Marxism,etc., as religion.So to what degree does the story continue that we are the fabricators ofcategories that then are picked up by the Mutwas as in others andused to create new religious rules?Is that a fair question?>> Yeah, are we the fabricators of categories?Yes we are, where ever we are, butI wouldn't want to give us too much authority orsense of control or that we're in charge.So I think about these things like in pre-colonial situation.A lot of what we might think of as religiousactivity, ritualized activity, invocation of ancestors,sacrifice of animals, purification rituals.A lot of religious activity went into building up a home, so that's what we did.Under colonial conditions of disposition anddisplacement driven from home, now what do you do?How are those religious, if you want to call them religious activities,deployed and struck by different strategies orwere developed under colonial conditions of displacement to deal with dislocation.How you make a home away from home, how do you bring the ancestors back to that home?How do you re-purify that home?How do you stop the demands of the ancestors when they appear in dreamsasking for sacrifice of cattle, when you've got no animals?So under those different, shifting conditions.So to move quickly here, again these things are writtenall on top of each other in different situations and circumstances.Here's Credo Mutwa, he's also building a home.[INAUDIBLE] so there's, now, I guess I'm imposing this category home, buthe is building a home.He built a home in Credo Mutwa village in Soweto, andduring 1976, due to an uprising, they threw him out, burned down his home,right-thinking students, because he seemed to represent tribalism, apartheid,justifying the bizarreness of African traditions.Then he went to and built a village there, he got driven out.Went to [INAUDIBLE] game reserve, built a village there, got kicked out.He's had a hard time finding a home untilhe was discovered in cyberspace as his new home.He's alive and well in cyberspace, he's alive and well in electronic media.Celebrated through publications, videos, proponents of new age spirituality.He's home.Now the resources and strategies by which he built up that home are differentthan what I'm imagining were pre-colonial, colonial.So global increase pay sense scope of the movement of all these things.There is something going on herethat's worthy of our attention as we look to the future of religion.I painted a dark future of spectral governs, law, politics and religion,that is ghostly, it's no where.But I wish I had a brighter vision of the future.Partly because all of these things are written on top of each other,the colonial stage, the imperial stage, even patriarchal.Yeah.>> Thank you so much.[COUGH] I really enjoyed this and it also got me thinking about other kind ofexamples of Captain Cook in Hawaii and also things like this.>> Yeah.>> But I was wondering, I know this is terrible oversimplification of things, butin some ways it got me thinking about religion as a mode of performingpolitical alterity.That then gets misrecognized by those in power across this cultural divide,and I'm wondering if you think that kind of a phenomenon can happen alsooutside of a colonial context across other lines of power and difference.I mean I was thinking perhaps of speaking in tongues in the United States orother places, I'm just wondering about other kinds of religious rituals thatpotentially get misread in this way.>> Probably happens everywhere doesn't it?I mean understanding is misunderstanding, butthen is there an understanding?Where is the bedrock of authentic understanding?So I'm sure it happens everywhere, andit's fascinating to wonder aboutThe specificity of the locations of these breakdowns in communication.And one thing when I started looking at travelers, missionaries andcolonial agents entering into these zonesof intercultural contact, relations, exchanges,profound misunderstandings, was first it kinda sound strange,but when Africans laughed at missionaries.So the missionary, Robert Moffat, comes in and says, I've learned enough of yourlanguage to know that Mudimu is God.Now that term in [FOREIGN] languages has many multiple meanings.It's a much disputed term, indigenous term, what about me?Missionary Robert Moffard, he latched onto one meaning.He appropriated that term as the god of his Christian mission.And he took the term for ancestor, bedemu, and said that's the term for devils,demons, and so on.So it's an engagement.It's a translation.It's an appropriation.Anyway, over and over again he reports.When he tells people this, they laugh at him.They laugh uproariously at him.They think this is the funniest thing they have ever heard, thisridiculous absurd transposition of basic categories.And he would say to them, well, I'll get the last laugh after you die.You're not gonna laugh when you go to hell and things like that,but to me, it's more than misunderstanding.That laughter resonates for me as an engagement with the incongruity.You know, that in between space of where things just don`t fit together.And many of these travelers, missionaries and so on,would say that laughter was evidence that Africans can`t think.That they are incapable of thinking.But it`s a kind of thinking.It`s a kind of reflection on the incommensurability, the misunderstanding.But the mismatch, the misfit, in these contact zones of incongruity.But taking, I don't know where else, I always love these questions.And you found that in South Africa.Is it anywhere else?Well, I'm not everywhere, so I don`t know.People must go and find it, what they find.Other thoughts?>> [INAUDIBLE] I wonder about media.So for example, you as a writer, primarily.We saw photographs.I did think of Nimetrafu the film.Thinking about these different media of representing these kinds of ritual andreligion and, well if you think that there are different ways in spaces ormedia through which that increments our ability.Shines through or is allowed to sort of glimmer in the background of sort ofinterpretations that might get shut down along the way or something like this.>> Yeah, I'm sure that is.I am sorry I left out a part where Credo Mutwa explains to us that modernelectronic media is ushering in the return of these aliens from outer space.So they're preparing us to accept the Chitauri's return.So now, there he's using electronic media, especially films.By the way, he blames, what was it?ET, the extra-terrestrial.He said, it all starts there.And then we're gonna get ready for their return.Now that's a particular religious reading of media, of film.So I don't know where else.Incommensurability, I'm sure glimmers everywhere.I don't know how things actually fit together.I laugh a lot, cuz the laughter comes from a sudden perception of incongruity,things that don't fit.Sigmund Freud wrote a book on jokes.Have you ever read it?It's the least funny book ever.There are only two jokes.Do you know this?One is metaphoric condensation.Where two increments or things are jammed together.You know this, right?Metaphoric condensation.Where poor man goes, meets rich man.Poor man comes back and talks to poor friends.Poor man says to poor friends, rich man treated me famillionarily.See it's not a funny joke, but it jams together familiar and millionaire.And then metonymic displacement.From the expected to the unexpected, there are only two jokes.And that's when rich man slips on banana peel and falls down.Those are two jokes.Freud and two jokes.But these are forms of incongruity that we also find in religion.These condensations and displacements.>> I'm really struck by the contrast between the first two cases andthe final case in the way that science is this sort of engine of knowing, butalso of establishing these categories in the first two cases.And these are science sort of expeditions under the sign of science.And then in the latter case, I know on the one hand it seems like science kind ofturns into something else or goes away.And so I have a couple of questions related to that.One is on the disciplinary one, the point at which religion,religious studies like anthropology becomes a humanities orhumanistic social science something but it's not science in the same way.But the other is the figuring of the fake and I was reminded, I can't remember.It was the late 90s, early 2000s, there was some sort of scandal inthe Cancer Research World in South Africa where there was a researcher.I knew him, cuz he was my sister in law's PhD adviser who made up data.So all of the sudden all of these findings andall these careers were sort of destroyed.And so thinking about the figuring of the fake at this particular moment notonly interrogates the political and those categories, but science itself.>> Yeah, right. Right, yeah, yeah.>> It's interesting to think here how you see science as either continuing ordisappearing or going somewhere else in this trajectory.>> That's a really interesting question.You're absolutely right about,we live now in this new era of the fake, which affects everything.>> [INAUDIBLE] >> No, it's all right.>> Different kinds of fakes.>> Different kinds of fakes, yeah.Like degrees of fakery.We can do a scientific scale ofdegrees of fakery from 0 to 10.0 is no fakery.10, fakery resulting in death.I'm adopting that from the scale of analyzing violence, butanyway, back to scientific continuum of the paper.But you ask a really profound question.Just quickly, I think you're right.During the colonial era, scientific expeditions,data gathering of various kinds.The imperial era collating these Data forscientific enterprise and create a moot with science.It is an indigenous knowledge system.You could break it down into biology, psychology, and other sortsof things if you wanted to, knowledge of plants, and herbs, and things.He claimed it as a science, not the kind of science taught in the universities,but indigenous, local, acknowledged systems, scientifically.This would be recognized as scientific as we decolonize our curriculum.I suppose, from the science still featuresin here as a signal of authentic knowledge production.But the thing is, I suppose, with [INAUDIBLE] what I was stressing was,is on personal immediate visceral experience of eating an alien from outerspace and then being abducted by an alien from outer space.But at the same time, he does cloak this with a kind ofappropriation of the legitimacy of science and the authenticity of science.There was a researcher just a couple of weeks ago fromour [INAUDIBLE] Institute for Advanced Studies,who recommend [INAUDIBLE] as a guide for South African political life andintellectual life and a kind of rejuvenation of South Africa.So he`s still percolating and alive and well, old.>> Thank you so much for your lovely talk.I had a question and a comment.My question was more related to translation andinterpretation and the role of African, sort of,interpreters in this sort of [INAUDIBLE] that Belen said that you speakabout in religion as opposition, religion as evolutionary.And the other comment I had was related to sort of the alienabduction experience and the age of the reptilians.Unfortunately, for [INAUDIBLE] this has made its way to American TV screens.There's a series, People Appear, that is about people who havebeen abducted by reptilians and greys and Nordics.So maybe that's something you would want to look at.>> Your first question was about African interpreters.>> The role of sort of, in this collection of knowledgeof religion and collision of knowledge.As the sort of interpretation changes, what is the role of African interpreters?Specifically, I'm thinking of, for me,I've looked more closely at Eastern Africa and looking at even at,sort of, colonial expeditions, or missionaries going in.Their interpreters were often the same sort of key people.>> Okay, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, interpreters.Okay, so on that, in both savage systems and empire religion,I have really tried to work hard to foreground indigenous actors,indigenous agents, indigenous interpreters.Not as translators, but as thinkers in their own right,as theorists in their own right.So one of my key texts is published in 1868 and1870 under the name of Henry Callaway, who was a great missionary.But it was actually mostly written by the Zuluconvert catacus and later deacon [INAUDIBLE].He wrote most of the thing.It's signed by him.There's one column in Zulu and one column in English.So you could say he was an interpreter, you could say he was a translator.You could say he was a native informant, I don't know.I like to think of himself as an important thinker strugglingwith the contradictions of the colonial situation.And so I'm gonna work really hard to seethe role in all these situations of,African thinkers and theorists and so on.Now about alien abduction, and it's one of [INAUDIBLE] arguments,is that the electronic media has stolen African traditions.He said we know how to capture aliens from outer space, bury space rubbish.We know all these things.We were the original Men in Black, whatever that is, butgetting back to the science question anyway, alien abduction.Have you ever seen the alien abduction test?There's a scientific test to see if you've been abducted by aliens.Do you know this?One of the questions is, do you remember being abducted by an alien?If you say, because what they do is they erase your memory, so, if youdo not remember being abducted by an alien, you were abducted by an alien.Now if you do not remember, how many of you do not remember if you were?>> [LAUGH] >> Scientific proof that you were abductedby an alien.All right, thank you all so much.This was great.>> [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you.>> [APPLAUSE]