A historian by training, Strathern is the author of a study on the encounter between Catholic Portugal and Buddhist Sri Lanka in the sixteenth century (Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka: Portuguese Imperialism in a Buddhist Land [Cambridge University Press, 2007]). This history focused naturally on King Buvanekabahu VII of Kotte, who established diplomatic relations with Portugal and had his grandson, Prince Dharmapala, baptized as Don Juan. In a larger comparative study, Strathern follows up his interest on the conversion of rulers, using examples from early modern Congo, South Asia, Japan, and Oceania as case studies. While that comparative historical study is still forthcoming, Strathern has published this present volume, which serves as a theoretical precursor to that study, although Unearthly Powers stands on its own for its theoretical ambitions and far-ranging scholarship.
In a brief introduction and chapter 1, Strathern defines his understanding of “religion” and “Axial Age,” roughly the one thousand years between 800 BCE and 200 CE when Buddhism, Confucianism, Indic religions, Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Christianity emerged to transform fundamentally the world. Strathern describes this as the displacement of immanentism by transcendentalism: when religions, hitherto focused on linking humans to meta-persons (gods, ancestors, spirits) by rituals and myths primarily for the promotion of health and wealth in an immanent, this-worldly existence, was gradually displaced by an otherworldly, doctrinally, ethically, and individually focused transcendentalism. Conceding the highly abstract and theoretical nature of his argument, Strathern promises the reader he will focus on Buddhism and Christianity, although in subsequent chapters there are many references to the religious systems of Mesoamerica, Africa, Oceania, Islam, Judaism, and Confucianism as well.
Strathern's main interest is the social power of religion: how it could form the fabric of the state and what the centralization of political power might look like under immanentist and transcendentalist religious regimes. He follows up this general point with a theoretical reflection of the two forms of sacred kingship: the divinized kings in immanentist religions, functioning as the intermediaries between humans and meta-persons, often acquiring the status of meta-persons themselves; and the righteous king, who has yielded his divine status to a transcendental meta-person (Christ as the King of kings, Buddha as the King of Dharma) and whose legitimacy and power now lie with his claim to righteousness. In the next chapters, Strathern analyzes the economy of ritual efficacy and the empirical reception of Christianity, the function of ritual, Christian missionaries achieving the impression of ritual superiority over indigenous immanentist priests, and, finally, the prophetic, millenarian, and cargoist responses to the missionary stimulus.
Moving to the subject of kingly conversions, Strathern uses the conversion of Constantine as a model of ruler conversion. If the figure of the first Christian emperor is familiar to readers of this journal, far less known is that of King Cakobau of Fuji, who converted to Christianity in the nineteenth century and reorganized the political and social structures of his realm. Deploying his vast historical and theoretical knowledge, drawn from his vociferous reading, Strathern analyzes religious conversion as a process that redefines the relationship between kings and subjects.
Unearthly Powers is a veritable tour de force. While highly abstract in argument, it is written in a logical, structured, and lucid prose that attempts to present a unified theory of cultural anthropology, historical sociology, and comparative history. Omnivorous in its theoretical appetite, it devours anthropological fieldworks, archival based historical monographs, and sociological theories to analyze politics and religion, kingship and conversion. The question of sacred kingship has been a main focus of scholars of mythology and anthropology, and Strathern has drawn extensively from their theoretical writings and fieldworks, including those from his parents who had studied Papua New Guinea. A strong theoretical imprint is also left by Durkheim and Mauss, in that Strathern argues strongly for the social-functional nature of religions (especially immanentist ones) and identifies exchange as its chief mode of operation. The comparative impulse owes much to historical sociology, and Max Weber's name is invoked throughout the book. There are few works by historians in which the anthropological and sociological impulses are so well integrated as in Unearthly Powers, and it will be stimulating for all scholars interested in the historical role of religions.
Its virtues aside, Unearthly Powers is a book with arguments that are open to challenges. Most importantly, Strathern's theoretical model is based on Christianity and Buddhism, although he makes some references to Islam and Confucianism. With Islam, the transcendentalist conversion model falls short because the existence of a “clerisy” was by no means comparable to that in Christianity and Buddhism. While there might have been a strong tradition of divine kingship in Mesopotamia and Persia, it is problematic to project ideas of divinized or righteous kingship onto the caliphate. For most Ottoman rulers, the title of caliph carried little real import in their exercise of authority, thus partially explaining the space opened for challenges to their political authorities by Sufis and self-appointed Mahdis. With Confucianism, we are dealing with an ethical, philosophical, and ritual system that had only a tenuous relationship with the supernatural and meta-persons. Despite the efforts of Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BCE) to promote Confucianism as a cosmological religion in the service of the Han dynasty, Confucianism never became a religion in Chinese history or served as a political theology for imperial regimes.
I imagine there will be other voices criticizing the relative neglect of theology, especially soteriology, and of the substantial differences between Christianities (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, etc.) and Buddhisms (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, etc.). Specialists may disagree with the interpretation with this or that historical case study. Nevertheless, Unearthly Powers presents a powerful, articulate, and stimulating argument that challenges us to deeper reflections.
