2021-1&2 Religious Pluralities and Subjectivity in Lusophone Societies
Coordination: Christophe Pons (UMR IDEMEC - CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université)
How do lusophone societies, and especially those within the “Atlantic triangle” (Africa-Europe-America), articulate religious pluralism and the politics of subjectivity? In seeking to answer this question, we suggest that societies in the lusophone world exhibit two specific characteristics that make them fertile ground for observation and analysis.
On the first point, contemporary lusophone societies are characterized by a highly diverse range of coexisting religions and denominations, all of which have nonetheless gained legitimacy. Yet, it is important to recognize that this pluralism, which accompanies and generates specific politics, has its own history distinct from histories found elsewhere, such as in Europe and North America. What we see here is a form of religious pluralism that is not exclusively monotheistic and that has allowed for the emergence of modern esotericism and original forms of pantheism. Strictly speaking, its origins are not to be found in secularization (as is often the case in Catholic Europe), nor is it tied to a history of ascetic enlightenment giving rise, as it did in northern Euro-American forms of Protestantism, to a need for tolerance of, and openness to, religious pluralism. On the contrary, the kind of pluralism that interests us here established itself in the breeding ground of a Catholic matrix that was not only heavily dominant but also non-conciliatory, albeit also facing significant competition and accommodated to the point of producing original religious forms. As such, the politics of religious pluralism in the lusophone world exhibits surprising variations, both historically and in the present, ranging from laissez-faire to repression and from overt proselytism to clandestine devotion practiced away from prying eyes.
Turning now to the second part of the question, lusophone societies exhibit another key characteristic, which is to have never excluded from their way of thinking a conception of the Acted Upon-Subject capable of undergoing the phenomenological experience of being other. While in the “Western naturalistic ontological matrix”, being other tends to be conceived in negative and subtractive terms as a “loss of self” or even as an “absence from oneself” (Wieworka 2012; Le Breton 2015), in the lusophone world the same idea tends to be conceived, by contrast, in positive and additive terms, such that “being several” has long been accepted as a possibility. François Laplantine (1994) speaks of the idea in precisely these terms when viewing the Euro-Afro-America as a world characterized by pluralism and by a transatlantic history of the displacement, addition, splitting and transformation of the self. Laplantine seized on Fernando Pessoa as a paradigmatic figure of this conception. Like the figure of the “writer as a medium” who preferred to speak of heteronymous agents rather than of spirits – but who also confessed to “being several” (Pizzaro & Ferrari, 2016) – lusophone worlds are societies in which a dual phenomenological experience of “being-in-the-worldness” easily finds its place – in other words, both the experience of a thinking subject as a free, agentive self and the experience of not being so at all or not entirely, a process that often results in a troubling sense of alterity and internal plurality.
In recent years, many studies in religious sociology, political history and social anthropology have sought to rethink questions of subjectivity in the religious sphere. Studies in this area generally use a supposedly “modern” version of the concept of “subjectivity” by speaking of “the thinking subject”, i.e. man as both the subject and agent of thought. In other words, they apply what has now become a traditional conception of the theory of the subject according to which, following Michel Foucault (2001), it is assumed that subject and agency have recently become synonymous and given birth to the idea of the “political man” (Mahmood 2005). However, the idea of agentive subjectivities is not in any way exclusive. The philosophy of anthropological conceptions of man (Descombes 2014) challenges the historicist assumptions surrounding the creation of the subject-agent, as well as its identity. First, the subject-agent of thought is neither a modern creation nor a recent psychological concept, nor is it even Descartes’s creation. Rather, it is thought to have its origins in a far more ancient history already in evidence in Late Antiquity in the dialogue between theology and philosophy (de Libera 2007). Moreover, as Claude Lévi-Strauss reminded us from Brazil (1973), the agent of the thinking process may indistinctly be an “I” or an “it”, i.e. possibly a distinct external subject, enabling us to reconsider another politics altogether – the politics of “acted-upon subjectivities”, something that Friedrich Nietzsche underlined by positing “that a thought presents itself when ‘it’ wants and not when ‘I’ want (…)” (1887).
It is precisely in the light of this other political perspective of “acted-upon subjectivities” – a question largely ignored in current social science research – that we may view lusophone worlds as fertile ground for research, albeit not, of course, because there is something specific about these societies that exists nowhere else, but rather – and more simply – because we find within the lusophone plurality of religious experiences plural forms of political governance that are evidence of a fundamental structuring tension: a tension between, on the one hand, a process of creation or formation of Subject-Agents appropriating divine law as a matter of practice and shaping themselves – or even liberating themselves – as “Subjects with God” (Keane 2007) and, on the other, a movement of Acted Upon-Subjects conforming to the Law as part of a voluntary desire to engage in an ethical “submission” and seeking to perform as “other”, as if a “Subject of God”. In other words, the issue is a highly political matter, whether at the individual level of shaped/shaping Subjects or at the level of institutions in tension, coexisting divine and spiritual regimes, and actual political practice, including, even, in the ballot boxes of real-world elections.
To explore the question of religious pluralism and subjective politics in the lusophone world in more detail, we need only look at the many contexts that provide evidence of the structuring tension set out above. For example, consider the case of Catholicism and its political practices, both historically and in the present, whether in Marian apparitions or in the place granted to saints and temporal or spiritual figures having performed the role of an acted-upon agent. We may also consider practices of popular piety which, whether institutionally legitimate or clandestine, illustrate the tension between attachment to Catholicism and the attempt to contest it, or even the persistent and paradoxical tendency to combine anticlericalism and loyal respect for the institution. In this vein, research might focus on dissident, esoteric or other currents and practices associated with unofficial figures, whether “recovered” by usage or simply “illicit”, found throughout the history of popular piety, often in therapeutic and prophylactic roles. In turn, the possibility of “being other” is not always experienced as a positive since it may also highlight a fear of being acted upon, as a recurring motif of attendance in places of worship, devotion, healing, exorcism and spell-breaking. Indeed, there is ultimately nothing exotic about the logic of sorcery, which is not foreign to the hypothesis of being other. On the contrary, evidence of it can even be found if we consider the possibility of not strictly being the only subject-agent of thought. In other words, the point is that, in theory, evidence of it can be found in every corner of the Atlantic triangle. Inevitably, the dual analytical perspective proposed here finds an obvious echo in the broad range of “mediumship” religions, which have long held a prominent place in lusophone societies. It is important here not to restrict the scope of studies, but rather to give them room to breathe and to view them in relation to each another, from white Spiritism to black Candomblé, but also Christianity in its many forms. Indeed, what we are speaking of here is a Euro-Afro-American continuum, apparent not only from a historical perspective of course, but also in the present. While the case of Brazil and mediumship might immediately spring to mind, we should not forget the past and the European origins of phenomenological experiences that emerged elsewhere. Likewise, it is important to acknowledge the transnational dynamism of Afro-Brazilian religions, which are currently “feeding back” significantly into Europe (including, among other places, in Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy) owing to their ability to make accessible (and consubstantial) a spiritual world that grants a new and different form of agency to believers.
More broadly, we are also seeing the renewed influence of Spiritism in its various forms spreading beyond the boundaries of the lusophone world and highlighting the increasing legitimacy and acceptance of the two forms of phenomenological experience. As evidence of this trend, we need only consider the current importance, in Europe, of the various forms of alternative therapy postulating, as a dual principle, both the ontology of the Self as substance and the belief in spiritual relationism according to which what happens here on earth is assumed to be tied to the timeless afterlife. Consider the various types of New Age spiritualism, such as neo‐shamanism, meditative neo-Buddhism, reiki, and family and transpersonal constellationism, but also medical spiritualism, which is gradually taking root in the health professions (whether in psychiatry, psychotherapy, palliative care and support in hospitals, etc.). To these, we might add the rise of neo-Protestant (especially neo-Pentecostal) churches, which, operating on the same dual principle (of substantialism and relationism), are seeking to meet the demand for care and healing by opening spiritual support centers in an increasing number of neighborhoods across lusophone cities.
In short, the aim of this issue is to extend as far as possible the range of possible routes into the field set out here by documenting it extensively, without ever overlooking the need to relate the experience of being other with that of being an agentive self, as a common thread signifying, at a local level, specific lusophone contexts, whether from the point of view of their economies, politics or histories.
Abstracts for articles (500 words) must be sent at the latest by June 15, 2020 christophe.pons@idemec.cnrs.fr.
After acceptance of the abstracts, complete articles are expected by September 30, 2020.
Lusotopie publishes articles in French, Portuguese and English.
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