Holy Hustlers, a documentary film by Richard Werbner, opens with a young Apostolic prophet dancing himself into a rapid spin. As the prophet dances, his sacred robe fades into an almost mystical blur of red swirling color on the screen. Caught by the Holy Spirit, the congregants of Eloyi Church sing, clap, and pray in harmonious unison. Upon ending his dance, the dizzy prophet warns a fellow churchgoer that the “bullet” of witchcraft and misfortune has been hidden in one of their “dolls.” This opening vignette captures the purpose of the rest of the film perfectly. The viewer does not have to wait long to observe the prevailing power of those magically blurred boundaries that dominate Holy Hustlers. This theme is further strengthened in two companion films, Counterpoint One and Counterpoint Botswana, wherein Werbner opens himself and Holy Hustlers to criticism in a brilliant effort to dismantle the comfortable wall that often protects the ethnographic filmmaker from his or her viewers. In this review, I will draw on the theme of “blurring” to highlight the ways in which Richard Werbner uses film to underscore both the fluidity of religious well-being and ethnography more broadly.
From beginning to end, Holy Hustlers’ primary contribution is in challenging the imaginary boundaries that exist between self and other while encouraging the viewer to ask, how can one be both holy and a hustler? It is in this paradox, which Werbner calls the “certainty of uncertainty,” that Holy Hustlers and its companion films make their mark. We follow a segment of Bishop Boitshepelo’s life as he moves from empowering “streetwise, unemployed, young men” to be prophets in the Eloyi Apostolic faith-healing church, to being forced to resign from his family’s church, and to forming a new church focused on “busting” witches and riding their communities of demonic evils. As Boitshepelo struggles to find acceptance in his family, we see how, as Birgit Meyer has argued, Christianity in Africa has the potential to challenge the family structure (Meyer Reference Meyer1999). In Holy Hustlers, Werbner shows his viewers how congregational families rally together in their desire to fight against witchcraft and are subsequently emboldened, just as are diviners and priests of autochthonous gods, by evidence of a prophet’s or ritual’s efficacy. Whereas a priest of the “old gods” might develop trust in a shrine that answers his or her wishes (Landry Reference Landry2016), Boitshepelo’s prophets find confidence in their capacity to predict impending storms, illnesses, and misfortune. In the film’s final and most provocative scene, Boitshepelo and his followers descend upon a Botswana refreshment bar that has purportedly been infiltrated by evil witches. The prophets exhume “traditional charms” buried at the establishment’s gate; consecrate the “unholy” ground with sacrificial ashes; destroy a mattress in order to exorcise the presence of witchcraft hidden under the stitching; and even decapitate a venomous snake found in the bar to be sure their connection to witchcraft is severed and connection to God invigorated. As the prophets work themselves into a trance and focus on what they believe to be the evil of witchcraft, the viewer is repeatedly reminded of Christianity’s ability to localize and absorb the religious truths that have, for generations, permeated their social worlds. If these themes were all that Werbner uncovered in his films, they would have tremendous anthropological value for undergraduate students seeking to discover the complex religious lives of African peoples and for more seasoned researchers inspired by the films’ ethnographic nuance. Remarkably, drawing on decades of ethnographic research and engagement in anthropological discourse, Werbner is able to do so much more as he takes his viewer on a parallel journey to also explore what it means to do anthropology and create ethnography.
In an act of filmmaking genius, the viewer is taken on an interwoven trip in which we are encouraged to explore religion in Botswana and what it means to do ethnography. The viewer never feels pulled toward one story over the other. Instead, we are allowed to experience these simultaneous voyages just as the anthropologist presumably experiences them in the field—all at once. How Werbner is able to examine two interwoven story arcs successfully, on what appears to be a rather low production budget, is astonishing and only speaks to his careful attention to ethnographic details and his deliberate use of commentary. The success of the films’ ability to achieve this is in part due to Werbner’s keen awareness that cultural meaning is always multivocal and often paradoxical and contradictory. Anthropology should attempt to consider how we derive meaning from our contradictions, paradoxes, and uncertainties. In Holy Hustlers, Werbner demonstrates that when religions collide and even coalesce, groups are inspired to negotiate access to the religious worlds of the other. In so doing, individuals artfully, and in some cases, magically, distort the boundaries that seem to exist between what is seen as “ours” and “theirs.” Like the magical blurring that occurs between so-called Abrahamic and traditional religions in Africa, Werbner uses film to highlight the ways in which ethnography can be used to underscore the fluidity of one’s social life. Some European critics, such as those seen in Counterpoint One, found the voice-overs in which Werbner describes the prophets’ fluid lives to be distracting and excessive. Werbner poignantly counters their criticisms by arguing that the voiceovers provided him with a space to be reflective and allowed him to highlight those times in which his Botswana collaborators exerted power over him by shaping the film. In this way, Werbner was able to highlight the fragile relationship between film and power, therefore acknowledging that ethnographic filmmakers must struggle to find the right moment to comment and know when to allow the film to speak for itself. It is in these moments, when Werbner courageously exposes his vulnerability, that the collection of films reveals to the viewer that ethnography, even when conducted by anthropology’s most seasoned ethnographers, is beautifully messy and productively problematic.
Since Malinowski stumbled upon the value of long-term fieldwork, ethnography has been at the center of anthropology as a discipline. The relationship between anthropology and ethnography has become so profoundly intertwined that the terms have, for better or for worse, almost become synonymous. Not everyone has seen the blurring of those boundaries that separate anthropology and ethnography as a positive development, however. In his Reference Ingold2014 critique, Tim Ingold argued that the lines that separate anthropology and ethnography have become so opaque that ethnography “has lost much of its meaning” (Reference Ingold2014:383). He asserts that in many cases, and increasingly so in disciplines outside of anthropology, “ethnography” has become a “modish substitute for qualitative” where “‘ethnographic interviews,’ with a sample of randomly selected informants,” are expected to yield “results” (Reference Ingold2014:384). While I appreciate Ingold’s attempt to encourage anthropologists to think about what it means to do ethnography, I am not sure that I agree with his claim that the solution is in the development of a precise definition of ethnography, “so that [to] those who ask us . . . what [ethnography] means, we can respond with precision and conviction” (Reference Ingold2014:384). By contrast, Werbner’s films encourage viewers to look to ethnography’s indefinability, its fluid borders, and its shapelessness to be the very places from which we ethnographers draw our most meaningful and provocative inspirations.
Reflecting on my own work in the Republic of Benin, I see similar themes unfolding. There is an understanding among scholars and practitioners alike that Vodún, a system of spirit worship, is best left undefined (cf. Rush Reference Rush2013). Like Vodún, which has for hundreds of years absorbed gods, rituals, and religious agents from emerging locales and communities, ethnography too has benefited greatly from a similar amorphous flexibility in which new theories, methods, and practitioners have all, over time, changed and empowered what we have come to know as ethnography. Appreciating, and even embracing, Vodún’s indefinability came about when ethnographers stopped asking, what is Vodún? and started experiencing Vodún as a system that is empowered by religion’s paradox and contradictions. Anthropology could learn a great deal from this nuanced understanding of Vodún in Benin. Just as Rush has found the various attempts to define Vodún to be antithetical and even detrimental to identifying what Vodún is and what it is not, I worry that defining ethnography too rigidly would have the same damaging and stifling effect on anthropology’s methodological and theoretical core. As the films seem to demonstrate, if culture is meaningfully paradoxical and contradictory, then so too should be our methods. While I would have liked Werbner to have made more frequent appearances in Holy Hustlers, he does, on occasion, move in front of the lens to speak with Boitshepelo’s prophets and spends a considerable about of time being filmed as he converses with European, Japanese, and Botswana critics. In these instances, in all three documentaries, film captures Werbner as he moves effortlessly between ethnographer and participant. In these vulnerable moments, in Holy Hustlers and in the subsequent films, Counterpoint One and Counterpoint Botswana, Werbner is able to spotlight the ways in which his interlocutors move quickly and meaningfully between different ways of being in the worlds they have constructed.
A real appreciation arises from Werbner’s documentary three-part harmony when one watches Counterpoint One and Counterpoint Botswana following Holy Hustlers. In these two subsequent films, Werbner engages with critical audiences in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Botswana. In all cases, he asks them for their reflections on both style and content, and the filmmaker profits a great deal by exposing himself to a barrage of questions, criticisms, and critiques. In so doing, he is asked to defend some of the editorial and production choices he made along the way. Perhaps not surprisingly, each audience came to this collaboration with different questions, critiques, and observations. While Werbner’s European audience focused almost exclusively on film production and the uneven power differentials that exist between Werbner and his Botswana collaborators, the Botswana panelists struggled with the meaning of belief, the discourse of so-called fraudulence in religion, and the necessarily mutually transformative relationships that exist between the self and the other. His European panelists were most certainly inspired by significant trends in anthropology that have encouraged European and American anthropologists to critique the politics of representation and challenge the colonial legacy of foreign anthropologists in Africa. It was his Botswana panelists, however, who captured the meaning and paradoxical complexity of Werbner’s argument. Indeed, the European audience, made anxious by the politics of representation, missed Werbner’s most important point entirely. For Werbner, these films were about showing that “the other and the self are in dynamic involvement with each other.” Taking on the position of the other, whether as a prophet who takes on the pain and misfortune of his follower or as an ethnographer who acquires a Weberian level of understanding and empathy for the other, affects the self in profound and meaningful ways. While I believe strongly in the value and importance of discussions within anthropology that focus on issues of representation, these films made me wonder if anthropologists have begun to be dangerously blinded to the cross-cultural value of social meaning by our own politics.
These films, especially when taken together, reinforce an observation within anthropology that while life is messy, it is also empowered by the value of paradox and contradiction. Before watching Holy Hustlers, I remember deciding that the title was too problematic for my taste. I asked myself, “how could an anthropologist with the longitudinal expertise of Richard Werbner select a title that seemed to position Apostolic prophets as capitalist hustlers looking to profit off of the misfortunes of others?” Looking back, I am embarrassed by how quickly I judged the film’s title. After watching the films, I now realize that I, like Werbner’s European panelists, had reacted too harshly to the potential problems of the post-colony that focused too tightly on representation. Simply put, my politics prevented me from seeing the compelling question embodied in the film’s title: How do young streetwise men simultaneously become both holy and hustlers? For Werbner, and I hope for anthropology, destabilization produces the most successful ethnographies, as they teach us that when one knows something better, complete with its messy contradictions, it appears “to be something else.” In this way, ethnography is like prophecy—the more ethnography reveals about a situation, the closer one is to the truth, but the nearer one comes to the truth, the more complicated that reality becomes. In these films the viewer sees this firsthand, as the boundaries between holiness and hustling become blurry. But, more relevant to anthropology, Werbner also shows us that there is a great deal of meaning to be found in our lives as the boundaries that divide ethnographer from subject, filmmaker from anthropologist, and self from other all blur, encouraging anthropologists to find value and power in our vulnerabilities and in our shared humanity. Paul Stoller once argued that “If . . . we find a way to draw strength from both sides of the between and breathe in the creative air of indeterminacy, we can find ourselves in a space of enormous growth, a space of power and creativity” (Reference Stoller2008:4). When applied to Werbner’s Holy Hustlers and its two accompanying films, Stoller’s call for anthropologists to hustle and draw on our “two or more apprehensions of reality” takes on new meanings. Perhaps Werbner is right. Maybe it is time for anthropologists to lean more heavily on ethnography as we don our sacred robes and dance and spin ourselves into a mind-altering trance where the worlds that divide the self and other are allowed, once again, to dynamically and meaningfully blur.
