Rituals and Spirits
Interdisciplinary conference will explore religious encounters in 16th-18th century Americas
This article was originally printed in the November 1999 issue of CLASnotes.
Cuban
Santeria, Hopi Catholicism, Brazilian Pentecostalism, and storefront church
revivals are no religious oddities in a rapidly-changing modern world.
They are new religions, echoes of a distant time, the fruits of five centuries
of spiritual evolution and invention in the Americas. Like all faiths,
they grow and attract followers because they meet someone's spiritual
needs. Together, these and many other vigorous forms of worship show how
the European arrival in 1492 ushered in one of the most dramatic eras
in world religious history.
To explore the impact of that period, the Department of History will sponsor a two-day symposium on October 6-7, 2000, on religious encounters in the Americas during the early modern period, roughly the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Called "Rituals and Spirits: Religious Contact and Change in the Early Atlantic World," the symposium will bring together scholars from history, religious studies, art history, and anthropology to consider the implications of the confrontation, melding, and adaptation of belief systems wrought by European colonization in the Americas. The funneling together and clashing of diverse and often antagonistic religions in the western hemisphere changed forever the way millions of people worshiped.
For many years, early American religious history kept largely to a familiar narrative of Puritan founders establishing their "City on a Hill" in Massachusetts as a model of divine law for the world. That storyline, worthy and powerful though it remains, has given way in recent years to a more complicated and morally ambiguous one. Instead, we might conceive of a long "religious frontier" between Canada and Florida and—to extend both the metaphor and its geographic boundaries even further—stretching as far south as Argentina. Along this frontier, a huge array of people met or, more often, collided with each other: indigenous people, Europeans, and enslaved Africans, all of them the products of many religious worldviews.
That encounter between people from three continents, unprecedented in world history, gave early American history its dynamism. For virtually all those natives and newcomers in premodern times, there was no dividing line between secular and religious culture; to exist was to be religious. Their encounters in the Americas, therefore, largely involved both the clash and reconciliation of spiritual ideas played out in the arena of conquest and colonization. At the same time as thousands of European immigrants founded settlements of religious sanctuary in America, many Indians adopted Christianity in defensive response to the invasion of their lands. Numerous Africans, survivors of the slave trade, likewise began to blend their spiritual traditions with both Catholicism and Protestantism, creating dynamic Afro-Christian hybrids. On the other hand, in Brazil, Muslims from West Africa, clinging to their faith, staged one of the largest religiously-inspired American slave rebellions. The confrontation, fusion, or reworking of all these beliefs created new faiths for a new world.
To help explore what this blending of religions meant to the Americas, we have the rare opportunity to offer our symposium in conjunction with an exhibition at the Harn Museum of Art, "Intimate Rituals and Personal Devotions: Spiritual Art Through the Ages," on display from July 16, 2000, to January 14, 2001. That exhibition of about 140 objects culled from numerous collections will feature religious art from the past two millennia used in personal worship and ritual in many world religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the religious traditions of Africa, native America, and Asia. These objects are as diverse as Congolese carvings, Turkish prayer rugs, Byzantine crosses, Peruvian altars, and Hopi dolls. The symposium will use the exhibition as a backdrop to explore the era of spiritual collision, loss, and renewal in the early modern Americas by examining spiritual art as a mirror on religious change.
Participants will address such dimensions of religiosity as the implantation of Catholicism in Indian communities, the flourishing of African sacred art in a hemispheric context, the impact of Islam on the Americas, and comparative perspectives on changing practices of ritual and worship. The "Ritual and Spirits" symposium won't be able to discuss all the world religions represented in the exhibition, nor can it begin to address the continuing creative influence of American religious diversity in more modern times. But by shining a spotlight on that earlier world of the spirit, we can perhaps reconsider how that era still shapes us today.
Credits
Writer
Jon Sensbach, CLAS historian
