MARKETS ON THE GLOBAL/LOCAL FRINGE The appeal of goods from distant places is an ancient aspect of trade. The value of the foreign object—the perforated shell necklace, polished stone tool, exotic fabric, or rare breed of livestock—is enhanced by its movement across space, yet the distance at which local objects become exceptional is hard to predict, as is the point at which foreign things become strange, or undesirable. In the contemporary world of market exchange, a commodity's status as local or foreign can shift in ways the logic of trade cannot fully explain. Why, for instance, is tobacco global in its distribution and appeal, while the qat leaf is confined to East Africa and Southern Arabia? When people themselves travel abroad as immigrant labor, how do their patterns of consumption, at home and abroad, reshape local understandings of the global, and do these patterns affirm the value of the local, or degrade it?
Christine Folch explores the market history of yerba mate, a caffeinated drink akin to coffee and tea. Long popular in the southern countries of Latin America, yerba mate is largely unknown in other parts of the world. As a global commodity, its largest external market is in Syria and Lebanon, where it is drunk by Druze and other Levantine populations with ties to Arab immigrant communities in South America. Folch traces the movement of yerba mate from its origins as a commodity monopolized by the Spanish Crown and cultivated on Jesuit-owned plantations, to its current status as a novelty drink sold in North American organic and natural food stores, where it is marketed as an exotic, healthier alternative to coffee and tea. Diverse factors have prevented (and now aid) the global spread of yerba mate. The character of the tree itself, which could not be easily transplanted, the aesthetics of yerba mate consumption, which uses a communally shared filter/straw, and explicit anti-yerba campaigns run by coffee and tea merchants backed by colonial interests at odds with Spain, confined yerba mate to South American markets. Its reputation as a local beverage associated with Amerindian cultures and the Southern Cone is now the basis, Folch argues, for yerba mate's success as a global commodity that is defined, almost everywhere, by its strong associations with regional identities, distinct ethnonational communities, and medicinal and psychotropic alternatives to the worldwide hegemony of coffee and tea.
Caroline Melly examines the housing market in Dakar, Senegal, a zone of investment poised on the edge of global and local political economies. Dakar is filled with unfinished houses, old and new, and many of them are owned by Senegalese who live abroad. These structures often take years to build. Some are open and barely cared for; others become homes to the workers who build them, to immigrants from the countryside, to relatives of the owners, or to expatriate renters. The impression this unfinished landscape creates for local Senegalese, Melly contends, is one of dislocated citizenship, in which the Senegalese who flourish and are full members of local society are actually absent. The architectural evidence suggests that to live well, in a home of one's own, one must find work abroad, and this message is producing a steady flow of emigration to Europe, North America, the Arab Gulf, and to Dakar itself, where rural Senegalese prepare themselves for (often illegal and dangerous) travel abroad. The boom in partly, barely, and never finished houses, Melly concludes, shows the extent to which Senegal is caught between a growing population of transnationals, who slowly construct dream homes in Dakar, and a local population that must make sense of a nation whose model citizens seem increasingly to reside elsewhere.
DISCERNING SPIRITS The belief in spiritual powers, in prophecy, revelation, and miracles, has found its strongest critics among religious people, for whom false prophets and malign spirits are not only possible, but real. The secular skeptic, who sees divine healing as fraud and demonic possession as delusion, offers only a watered down version of the believer's critique of bad faith. Principled disbelief turns the world of supernatural claims into a theater of sham performance, where miracle workers and stage magicians engage in the same craft, using similar methods. The tactical alliance between modernity, Christianity, and Western civilization that fueled European expansion and overseas missionary movements has subjected alternative religious forms to both secular and spiritual contempt. The result is a globalized blend of skepticism and intensified belief, in which the secular has become a target of (spirited) postcolonial critique and the realm of spirits—variously dismissed as folklore, animism, and idolatry—has been strengthened by Christian and Muslim reformers who equip their followers to perceive it as a (real) threat.
Graham M. Jones revisits the case of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a French magician who toured Algeria in 1856, at the request of the Bureau of Arab Affairs, to perform tricks and marvels. The great illusionist was on a mission of magic; his primary objective was not to entertain, but to disenchant. French authorities were disturbed by the appeal of Algerian marabouts, holy men who performed miracles and led anti-French revolts. Of special concern were the ‘Isawiyya, a Sufi order who specialized in spectacular displays of bodily mortification, drinking poison, eating glass, stabbing themselves, and so on, all without discernible negative effects. By showing credulous Arabs that he could match and better these feats, and explain how he had done it, Robert-Houdin would unmask the ‘Isawiyya as charlatans, striking a mighty blow for rationalism and France. Jones takes us through Robert-Houdin's Algerian performances, which the magician himself considered a great success, then follows the career of the ‘Isawiyya in France, where the brotherhood soon became a popular stage act. Their performances triggered derision, mostly, but also curiosity among spiritualists and mesmerists, who saw alternative forces at work. Few people, it seems, could credit the ‘Isawiyya belief that their powers were a form of divine blessing. As Jones argues, the encounter between magic and Sufism was constructed so as to confirm magic as a modern tradition, reflexive and alert to its own artifice, designed to inspire wonder, but not belief.
Birgit Meyer explores another case of competing enchantments, this time shifting our focus to contemporary Ghana, where Pentecostal Christians are reinterpreting the power of spirits and the image of Jesus. In many ways, Ghanaian Christians are working out an old set of Christian problems, expressed in prior disputes over idols and icons, and Meyer explains how Protestant and Catholic missionaries waged spiritual wars of elimination and accommodation with local notions of spirits and supernatural forces. Mainline Protestants were averse to fetishism, but in denouncing false spirits they re-established the spiritual order Christianity would replace. Pentecostal movements, more attuned to charismatic worship and gifts of the spirit, have grown quickly in Ghana. Like other Protestant churches, they reject idolatry, but as Meyer points out, they take the malign power of demonic spirits much more seriously, and in struggling to combat it, they find the enemy in unexpected place. Pictures of Jesus, ubiquitous in Ghana, are now a focus of suspicion, and many Pentecostals believe that dark forces can inhabit portraits of Christ, hijacking the image and using its eyes to control the unsuspecting believer. Meyer shows how this anxiety compresses several complex trends in local Christian and non-Christian cosmologies, rearticulating them with the global spread of Pentecostal movements.
A MORE PERFECT COMMUNION When Benedict Anderson described the nation as an “anonymous communion,” he was dabbling in political theology. The genre, more often associated with writers like Agamben, Schmitt, and Derrida, has evolved as a language in which to speak critically of citizenship and sovereignty as moral systems. The tension between popular sovereignty and the sovereign power of the state, which no ordinary citizen or combination of citizens can control, has sent political theorists in hot pursuit of human equality beyond state politics, a broader communion expressed in human rights, unconditional hospitality, “whatever being,” or “the democracy to come.” The likeness between these ideas and messianic notions of “the hereafter” and “the kingdom come” is unmistakable. Also salient is the role played by love, nurturance, friendship, and their opposites in political theology. Its morality is oddly elemental and, unlike political science, its practitioners are rarely interested in policy. As two of our authors show, the ethical impulses that drive political theology are continually worked out in social movements that combine explicitly religious and political ideologies in creative, highly specific ways. In these settings, issues of sovereignty and subjectivity are addressed with a practical clarity, and a sense of urgency, that political philosophy can seldom provide.
Kevin Lewis O'Neill brings us again to the dynamic world of Pentecostalism and its distinctive blend of politics and piety. Focusing on contemporary Guatemala, O'Neill examines the spiritual development of second- and third-generation Pentecostals, young Christians who grew up in the church, have always been believers, and who cannot use tales of conversion from Catholicism, or accounts of their own escape from immoral lifestyles, to explain or legitimize their beliefs. O'Neill argues that children of the movement are attracted, instead, to a flagrantly erotic style of worship, in which they must come to desire Jesus and develop a loving relationship with him. Examining the lyrics of praise songs, testimonial styles, and the sermons of popular preachers, O'Neill documents the budding romance between Guatemalan Pentecostals and Jesus. It is an intensely personalized, even lonely romance, in which individual Christians are taught to perfect themselves first, after which the redemption of the larger society will follow. The link between the new Pentecostal eroticism and popular political styles is obvious. Many candidates for local and national office run as Pentecostal Christians, and their emphasis on spiritual self-help and the inward struggle is consistent, O'Neill argues, with dominant trends in neoliberal democratization, a political trend that has flourished in tandem with Pentecostalism.
Vicente Rafael finds political theology in a more confidently Catholic and revolutionary setting. Reconsidering the ideologies and motivations of the Filipinos who took up arms against the Spanish empire in 1896, Rafael looks at several tendencies in the way Spanish overlords (especially the religious orders) and their Filipino subjects understood sovereignty. The privileged relationship between the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church created, in the Philippines, a model of sovereignty that was absolutist but in which royal power required constant delegation and representation. Many leaders of the Filipino revolution, especially those who were backed by the United States, continued to pursue politics within this tradition. According to Rafael, their goal was to replace Spanish authority with that of an indigenous elite. Other revolutionaries, however, saw the Filipino cause in more universal terms, likening it to the French and American revolutions, and struggling to attain a popular sovereignty oriented toward “freedom,” a notion captured in the Tagalog word, kalayaan. Rafael takes this word apart, showing not only that it was a neologism, but also its roots in ideas of mother-child intimacy, loving acceptance, and lack of stricture. The translation of kalayaan into popular sovereignty was itself a miraculous accomplishment. Rafael singles out the fleeting moments when revolutionaries caught glimpses of it. The sovereignty on display in these moments was not that of a nation-state, Rafael argues, but the power of mutual compassion, of human kinship and its transformative potential.
STRANGERS WITH NEEDLES The government-sponsored vaccination campaign is a pillar of modern biomedicine. In much of the Third World, these campaigns are facilitated by health organizations based in Europe and North America, and the legacies of colonialism framed the logistics of large-scale inoculation in “backward” nations from the start. The purveyors of immunity were often (white) strangers with needles. They brought hope, but also fear, as they inserted odd fluids into the bodies of the sick and vulnerable, subjecting newly independent nation-states yet again to the potentially exploitative powers of Western science. The mechanics of vaccination are simple, yet bizarre; even in the metropoles, people tend to be suspicious of government efforts to inject foreign substances into their bodies, as recent misgivings about the H1N1 vaccine prove. Resistance to vaccination campaigns is surprising not because it is ill informed, or superstitious, or deadly, but because it materializes less often than we might expect.
Christian W. McMillen and Niels Brimnes discuss early attempts to combat tuberculosis through mass vaccination in India. Beginning in 1948, the World Health Organization and the government of India collaborated in an effort to eradicate TB in India using the new BCG vaccine. The first vaccine to use attenuated live bacteria, BCG was still controversial, and it immediately inspired opposition in India, despite full government backing. McMillen and Brimnes explore the methods and motivations of key anti-vaccine activists, suggesting that they were not simply anti-science or illiterate in medical matters. Often, they were medically trained themselves. More problematic, to these critics, was the logic of biomedicine, which promised apolitical cures to health problems that had social causes; also pronounced was the suspicion that Western powers were using Indians as guinea pigs to test an unproven vaccine. Opponents of the BCG vaccine were eventually overwhelmed, logistically and rhetorically, by what McMillen and Brimnes call “the global health regime.” Similar misgivings, however, are likely to resurface, in India and elsewhere, when new diseases and new vaccines appear, and these anxieties are shaped by the concerns that pervade other essays in this issue: the tensions of the local and global, the limits of national sovereignty, and the uneasy articulation of secular and spiritual powers.
