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The Historyless Heathen and the Stagnating Pagan: History as Non-Native Category?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Abstract

This article asks whether and how J. Z. Smith's contention that religion is a “non-native category” might be applied to the discipline of history. It looks at how nineteenth-century Americans constructed their own understandings of “proper history”—authenticatable, didactic, and progressive—against the supposed historylessness of “heathen” Hawaiians and stagnation of “pagan” Chinese. “True” history, for these nineteenth-century historians, changed in the past and pointed to change in the future. The article asks historians to think about how they might be replicating some of the same assumptions about forward-moving history by focusing on change over time as a core component of historical narration. It urges historians to instead also incorporate the native historical imaginations of our subjects into our own methods, paying attention to when those imaginations are cyclical and reiterative as well as directional, and letting our subjects' assumptions about time and history, often shaped by religious perspectives, orient our own decisions about how to structure the stories we tell.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1967

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References

Notes

My thanks to the editors of and anonymous reviewers for Religion and American Culture; the Religion in the Americas Workshop at Princeton, especially commentator Rachel Gross, and Judith Weisenfeld, Jessica Delgado, Wallace Best, and Daniel Rivers; fellow panelists and attendees at “Historiographical Heresy: A Conference on the Legacy of Jon Butler,” especially Jon Butler, Kathryn Lofton, Alison Greene, and Molly Worthen; the Junior Faculty Reading Group in the History Department at Stanford; Charlotte Fonroberts's Theories and Methods class in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford; and Kate Bowler, Katherine Moran, Paul Harvey, and Sang Ngo for their valuable feedback on this article.

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46. Ibid., 5, 3.

47. See Maffly-Kipp, “Engaging Habits and Besotted Idolatry,” for a close analysis of Loomis's Overland Monthly articles.

48. See Wheeler, Roxann, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Conroy-Krutz, Emily, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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72. Ibid., 2-3.

73. Ibid., 17. Underlining mine.

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83. Ibid.

84. See Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage, 1991) for a field-changing example of this work.

85. On repeated rituals of repentance, see Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt, and Lum, Kathryn Gin, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 3.Google Scholar

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87. See again Bendroth, The Last Puritans, and Rachel Gross, “Objects of Affection: The Material Religion of American Jewish Nostalgia” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2014; manuscript in progress).

88. Modern, , Secularism in Antebellum America, 6 Google Scholar; and Modern, “Did Someone Say ‘Evangelical Surge’?” 630-32.

89. Hazard, Sonia, “Agency, the Idea of Agency, and the Problem of Mediation in America's God and Secularism in Antebellum America,” in Forum on Antebellum American Protestantism, Church History 84 (September 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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92. Kerwin Klein makes a similar critique of the turn to “culture” in Frontiers of Historical Imagination. When some scholars decided that the way to deal with history's colonial imbrications was to jettison it and instead focus on non-European peoples' cultural constructions and aesthetic productions, Klein says, they inadvertently facilitated the continuance of “history” as a white-focused, white-driven narrative. Rejecting the label of “history” ensured that whites remained people with history, while “people without history became people with culture” (297).

93. Johnson, “On Agency,” 120-21.

94. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” 281-82.

95. For instance, Joan Scott's move “is to subject what was formerly seen as stable or fixed to the dissolving powers of history” (quoted in Nancy Levene, “Sources of History: Myth and Image,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74 [March 2006]: 86). But, Levene asks, why hasn't history itself been more deeply subjected to destabilization? Why is history's “own supremacy… often taken for granted”? She contends that history is just “one particular way of being in, and seeing, the world” (79).

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98. See Shahzad Bashir's “On Islamic Time: Rethinking Chronology in the Historiography of Muslim Societies,” History and Theory 53 (December 2014): 519-44, for another example of how this might work. Bashir argues that “the whole notion of a single timeline as the central repository of Islam needs to be jettisoned in favor of a thoroughly pluralistic view in which all internal Islamic propositions with respect to the validity and authority of the past are appraised with an eye toward the ideological and affective intentions of the individuals and classes that had a hand in producing them.” He advocates paying more attention to “the role of human agency in creating ‘time'” and to consideration of multiple timelines instead of a single chronology.

See also Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999) and Xupeng Zhang's “In and Out of the West” for further reflections on how indigenous theories of history are needed to challenge and transform Western theories. Tuhiwai Smith warns that, even as people engaged in the decolonization of Western categories seek to “make their own history,” they need to avoid becoming enfolded in European constructions of what history is. As she puts it, “Under colonialism indigenous peoples have struggled against a Western view of history and yet been complicit with that view.” She “challenges the discipline's very foundations”—including the “idea that there is a universal history,” that “history is one large chronology,” that “history is about development,” and that “history as a discipline is innocent”—and urges indigenous people to develop their own native methodologies that put emphasis on oral testimonies, storytelling, healing, and reclaiming (30-31).

Zhang, meanwhile, shows how Chinese historians enthusiastically embraced Western theories of historical progress in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, “keen to borrow from the West the idea of a linear, progressive history, much needed for China to reform and to catch up” (52). Zhang concludes, “For a long time, Chinese historians have been benefiting from, and they will continue to benefit from, Western theories, but now it may be time for them to make their own original theoretical contributions to the West” (63).

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