The Limits of Vocabulary

NEW FACES OF GOD IN LATIN AMERICA: EMERGING FORMS OF VERNACULAR CHRISTIANITY. By Virginia Garrard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 289. Cloth, $110.00. WORLD CHRISTIANITY AND INDIGENOUS EXPERIENCE: A GLOBAL HISTORY, 1500–2000. By David Lindenfeld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 415. Hardcover, $110.00. Paperback, $39.99. THE CHURCH OF THE DEAD: THE EPIDEMIC OF 1576 AND THE BIRTH OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE AMERICAS. By Jennifer Scheper Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Paperback, $35.00. SEDUCTIVE SPIRITS: DELIVERANCE, DEMONS AND SEXUAL WORLDMAKING IN GHANAIAN PENTECOSTALISM. By Nathanael J. Homewood. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. Pp. 279. Paperback, $30.00. David Lindenfeld's World Christianity and the Indigenous Experience, A Global History, 1500–2000 explores Christianity on a global scale and aims to capture the role of agency of indigenous groups while in cross-cultural contact with Christianity during the colonial era and onward to the twentieth century (7). In order to interpret agency further, one of the main arguments Lindenfeld makes is that the study of world Christianity requires an updated vocabulary of strategies beyond the usage of inadequate terms like “syncretism” and “hybridity” in order to better understand the complexities of cultural contact between Indigenous groups and Europeans (7–8). While Lindenfeld is suggesting the use of an updated vocabulary, he understands that the creation and use of any definitions in a study that engages multiple cultures can be fraught with challenges. With a cautionary tone, Lindenfeld himself states that the use of this limited vocabulary is “ordered on analogy to a spectrum, ranging from rejection at one end to acceptance on the other. [Yet it] ... cannot be overstated that this is an analogy, nothing more. It should not be taken to mean that different cases can be neatly lined up on a linear continuum” (12–13). Lindenfeld is cautious because he understands that “religious interactions are typically multileveled,” thus a vocabulary that works to create neat and static definitions will always be limited in the study of religion (13). Nonetheless, Lindenfeld provides scholars with a useful “tool-box” of terms to reassess the Indigenous experience of Christianity during colonial encounters. His own critical view of this toolbox reminds us of the limits of constructing a vocabulary. Putting Lindenfeld in conversation with Virginia Garrard, Jennifer Scheper Hughes, and Nathanael J. Homewood, who also all consider Christianity in colonial and/or postcolonial contexts, is illuminating. While Lindenfeld's work is primarily historical and interprets an array of ethnographic work with the use of his vocabulary of strategies, the works of Garrard, Hughes, and Homewood remind us that the scholarly work of Christianity in the colonial or postcolonial eras cannot be easily defined or classified, but rather the indigenous experience of Christianity needs to be understood in its own terms. Indeed, Lindenfeld is correct to criticize the limits of constructing a vocabulary since scholars also need to prioritize the use of indigenous languages, their lived-theologies, lived-religious experience, and worldviews or ways of knowing. Moreover, rather than just demonstrating indigenous agency, these latter authors propose arguments for the decolonization of Christianity. The task of capturing a global history involves being knowledgeable of multiple histories, cultures, and languages. In order to weave together such a global history, Lindenfeld went against his own discipline as a historian and did not rely on primary sources. Rather, for his study, it “seemed more prudent to rely on the work of other scholars who have mastered the languages and sources and write from long familiarity with the cultures they study” (8). He admits the limitation of capturing Indigenous experience when native scholarly voices are not prioritized. He writes, “The vast bulk of world history that is written today comes from the West, a fact ameliorated in part by the increasing presence of non-Western scholars in Western colleges and universities. Nevertheless, this is bound to produce limitations on insights that a greater number and prominence of native scholarly voices would provide” (8). Lindenfeld's work is undoubtedly informative, insightful, rich, and complex. Yet, his acknowledgment of the limitations of insights from “native scholarly voices” affirms that something can be lost when Christian history is studied purely in Western frameworks. The list of strategies that Lindenfeld uses includes eight points: (1) Resistance and Rejection, (2) Selective Incorporation, (3) Concentration of Spirituality, (4) Conservation of Form, (5) Vernacular Translation, (6) Dual Religious Participation, (7) Selective Acculturation, and (8) Acceptance and Commitment. By briefly noting Lindenfeld's use of a few of these strategies in conversation with Garrard, Hughes, and Homewood's work, this review will underscore how insights from ingenious perspectives and experience may be further incorporated into such studies. Unlike Lindenfeld, included in these other scholars' works is the exploration of lived theologies, insights from lived religion, and/or direct ethnographic work. Lindenfeld assessments of earlier indigenous and colonial encounters are carefully studied through the use of his strategies. For example, after describing the colonial period in Latin America and the Spanish conquest of Mexico—specifically the Aztec Empire and the Nahua people—Lindenfeld asks in this chapter what is the “best ... [way] ... to characterize the Nahua's interactions with Christianity?” (37). He intentionally moves away from simplistic definitions like syncretism. Analyzing these interactions, he proposes three of his strategies: conservation of form, selective acculturation, and selective incorporation (37). In relation to conservation of form, Lindenfeld notes that the “Nahuas absorbed much of the content of Catholic imagery and ritual imported from Europe, while adapting it to the formal structure of their previous beliefs about the world in the supernatural ... expressed in their practices rather than words” (38). One of the examples Lindenfeld recalls here is the adoption of the veneration of saints, “which ... [became] ... a focus of communal identity much as local deities had been in preconquest times.” (38) In regards to selective acculturation, Lindenfeld highlights the “veneration of Mary, which eventually culminated in the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac—just outside Mexico City” (40). Introduced to Mary by Cortes, Nahuas may have associated her to the “war goddess Catolicue” since Cortes portrayed her as a “victorious conqueror” (40). Yet, Lindenfeld also expresses that the image of Mary was transformed by friars, and Nahuas instead viewed her as “a tender and merciful intercessor”; he goes on to highlight that this image filled “a need that other divine figures could not provide” (40). Nonetheless, the degree of devotion toward Mary by Nahuas could be contested. This brings in the term selective incorporation. Citing another scholar, James A. Taggart, Lindenfeld notes how Taggart's ethnographic work examines fifteen accounts from “renowned storytellers in two villages in Sierra Puebla” (41). One of the villages consisted of a majority ethnic population of Nahuas, whereas the other village was composed of Nahuas with a combination of ethnic origins. Lindenfeld explains that “Taggart compared a number of stories from the two villages, as well as the Aztec versions found in Sahagun. The differences in the stories reflect the degree of Spanish influence” (41). In the stories, Jesus and Mary were identified and discussed in different ways. For example, demonstrating selective incorporation, “one story of the origin of the sun and the moon, once again identifies the Sun with Jesus and the moon with Mary” (41). Whether Lindenfeld's assessment is the “best ... [way] ... to characterize the Nahua's interactions with Christianity” is questionable. If vocabularies are used merely to define Nahua's “interactions” with religion, yet lose sight of how and why their theologies are integrated into their particular social world, their unique experiences, voices, and theologies can be underrepresented in a study. In the example above, Lindenfeld's strength is that he included a study of the vernacular translation prior to his case study; however, keeping them front and center of one's study is crucial. Scholars of religion may create and use terms to try to define the exchange of ideas between groups, yet in the process, may lose sight of the indigenous voice. A scholar's definition may be unrelated to a practitioner's perspective; at stake are theologies and worldviews that influence and shape their decisions. Studies of the colonial encounter can benefit by focusing on the lived theologies on the ground, to capture the religious ideas of both parties as they circulated in the colonial encounter. Similarly writing on cultural contact in Latin America, Jennifer Scheper Hughes's work entitled The Church of the Dead, The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas, offers a rereading of Christianity's early history in the Americas. In this work, Hughes interprets indigenous and colonial archives as modes of resistance amidst the activities of colonial institutions and a catastrophic epidemic. Similar to Lindenfeld, Hughes also emphasizes indigenous agency (7). Yet, Hughes relies on a lived-theological interpretive method. Early on in her work, she writes “I am writing about ... [Spanish and Indigenous] vernacular, lived, or feet-on-the-ground theologies ... This is a work of theological forensics in that it excavates the many religious ideas that were fomented and circulated in the colonial cataclysm” (26–27). With these theologies in hand, after exploring how Spanish priests attempted to re-territorialize a landscape devastated by the mortandand, Hughes demonstrates how the pueblos de Indios resisted and rejected such landscapes and produced their own “Catholic countermap” (134). This is primarily developed in Chapter Four, where Hughes theologically interprets the Map of Teozacoalco as a cartographic representation that became “a new collective Christian identity and a proposition for the structure of Catholic territory in the New World” and as an anchor for the Mexican Church (139). For Hughes, the indigenous mapas becomes emblematic of “one of the original Christian charters in the Americas,” predating the “the Puritan settlers' covenant at New Plymouth” in 1620 (140). Decolonizing long-established narratives, Hughes contends: “The vision of Teozacoalco decenters Anglo Protestantism from the story of American Christian beginnings and posits indigenous appropriations of the faith as foundational and formative” (140). She rereads the maps not as merely nostalgic, but as “future oriented” (141). With this view, the indigenous maps projected a future in which the Mexican church declared their “autonomy and independence” by claiming Catholic structures as their own. She interprets these mapas of bodies, roads, temples, ghosts, and ancestors as “the animating life force” of the church and as “sacred art of counter conquest, contraconquista, an act of redemption” (173). Centering indigenous theological concepts, Hughes allows them to pervade her interpretation and reads them as resistive and decolonial strategies. Similar to Hughes, Virginia Garrard's New Faces of God in Latin America: Emerging Forms of Vernacular Christianity turns to studying religion on the ground in modern Latin America and puts the theologies of the West into conversation with indigenous theologies. In one example, Garrard focuses on the measures Protestants and Catholics took to develop a Mayan Christology through inculturation theology. She writes: “What inculturation theology sought to do was to identify points of potential conjuncture and enrichment between the two systems and to build bridges between them” (58). Though it was unsuccessful, Garrard saw the task as one that held decolonial significance for Mayan Christians. She wrote, “This is likely the path forward for Mayanized theology” (72). While Lindenfeld explores the Latin American context and captures the experience of the Nahuas in relation to the twentieth century, he shares very little on two significant moments: liberation theology and Pentecostalism. He defined the strategy “Resistance or Rejection”—a term often identified with postcolonial discourse—as “the ability of indigenous cultures to survive in the face of oppression” (Lindenfeld 13). Liberation theology has often been connected to histories of resistance in Latin America and around the world and would have added much to the Resistance or Rejection strategy. Likewise, Pentecostalism in Latin America should have been used expansively by Lindenfeld in connection to resistance. Can Lindenfeld's strategy of resistance be applied to Latin American Pentecostalism? Garrard's focus on the modern and contemporary Latin America context provides a nuanced answer to this question. Relying on both historical and ethnographic methods to study “religion from below,” Garrard utilizes an interdisciplinary method that explores the role of everyday religion (17). Like Lindenfeld, she is specifically concerned with how faith grants individuals and groups agency in the process of engaging a global religion, but specifically, to deal with “challenges” in their own lives (17). Further, Garrard seeks to demonstrate the possession of agency among indigenous converts as they specifically reappropriate the global religion of Pentecostalism in their own social contexts. Her study pays close attention to the particular belief of spiritual warfare prevalent among Latin American Pentecostals (29). Slightly similar to Lindenfeld's use of strategies but less defined, Garrard perceives Latin American Pentecostals' belief system of spiritual warfare as an “adaptive strategy” to confront and navigate personal and social issues (85). Garrard's use of adaptive strategy echoes Lindenfeld's assessment of the multilayered experience of religion—including resistance, vernacular translation, and diffused spirituality (Lindenfeld 92). Yet, Garrard keeps at the center a specific set of beliefs—spiritual warfare—and incorporates a lived religious perspective. The belief at the heart of this theology is that the source of the society's or a people's ills is demonic forces that are present today, either because of some sort of ancient Satanic pact, such as, in this case, devotion to indigenous religious practices and images, or because of an individual's or group's flawed, spiritual, DNA. (82) As an adaptive strategy, Spiritual Warfare is highly malleable to local conditions, and its discursive elements often directly reflect the most volatile cultural fault lines within a given society, which the movement systematically accesses by conducting “spiritual inventories” of a given place. (85) In this reading, Garrard perceives Pentecostal beliefs and worldviews of spiritual warfare as an “adaptive strategy” that confronts and navigates personal and social issues. Unlike Lindenfeld, Garrard's direct connection of “spiritual warfare” as an “adaptive strategy” allows her to consider from the perspective of lived religion how Pentecostals confront challenges on their own terms. Lindenfeld's strategies of resistance, vernacular translation, and diffused spirituality can be seen here, but Garrard's continual focus and emphasis on “spiritual warfare” as a strategy takes the voices and theologies of practitioners as the focus, rather than merely placing multiple definitions on them. When centering theology, theological implications complicate the idea of choice in general. Theologies produce unique worldviews, which may instigate unexpected actions. Thus, the use of a vocabulary of strategy to define agency can become problematic when third parties—like active spirits or demons—are involved in such encounters. With this in view, Lindenfeld's strategies that imply an active role, like selective incorporation, selective acculturation, dual participation, or even resistance and rejection, become limited by other factors prompted by unseen agents. Furthermore, when theologies are centered on, they may still carry strong traces of Western influence. The work of Nathanael J. Homewood takes into consideration these issues, providing further insights into the limitation of vocabularies to define indigenous experiences of Christianity in a postcolonial example. Homewood's Seductive Spirits, Deliverance, Demons and Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism examines Pentecostal beliefs and rituals in Ghana that involve sex with demons, bodily sensations, and its decolonial implications within Protestant and Western theologies. As a work of ethnography studying Ghanaian Pentecostalism, Homewood offers a more complex view on agency, demonstrating how spirit worldviews of Pentecostalism complicate decision-making. As Homewood writes, while describing one of his interlocutors' experiences of possession with a spirit of masturbation: “One's existence is always in assemblage, in one way or another, with the spirit world. Subjectivity is necessarily relational, and agency is always negotiated within these various relationships.” (104) Such an ambivalence of agency is important to note when considering how Pentecostal worldviews reinterpret “self-determination or self-definition” when a spirit or spirits are involved (104). With co-presences, how much agency should an individual claim to have? Though agency remains ambivalent in this case, it remains an important consideration when studying global Pentecostalism and other spirit-filled religions and cultures. Homewood's work reminds us that constructing a vocabulary of strategy to define levels of agency during religious experiences becomes a difficult task when invisible agents—like spirits—are influencing one's decisions. Centering worldviews, scholars need to also take into account how practitioners describe such visible agents and their relationships with them. Taking a further step, in reading the worldviews of Pentecostals as possessive of decolonial possibilities fueled with resistance, Homewood views Ghanaian Pentecostal worldviews of with and their factors as ideas of Early in the Homewood “The significant decolonial ... experiences by Pentecostals is a for Thus, Western theological are used to indigenous agency, may significant of resistance. Homewood how with its Pentecostal elements of the and ... challenges the theological order of the the of its and Thus, is as one focuses on the and the For Homewood, bodily and ways of the world are up as sex with is taken Lindenfeld, of is not constructing a Western Christian in his work seeks to such a By a of the role of agency of indigenous groups, Lindenfeld moves away from such a of a of a Western history, Lindenfeld aims to present a from which multiple can be Indeed, the religious history of Christianity needs to always in this multiple are and given This that the colonial or postcolonial not to a set vocabulary but always to understand religion on the ground and the lived theologies and unseen worldviews that influence actions. Lindenfeld's work is and to the of Global yet scholars like Hughes, Garrard, and Homewood remind us that particular to be centered and not to and understand the complexities of agency but to Christianity

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