Robyn d’Avignon: Levi, the prompt for our conversation suggests that dialogue between science and technology studies (STS) and religious studies has been minimal because of scholarly adherence to a narrative of secularity that justifies their distinction. This rings true, at least for a great deal of STS work on the North Atlantic, which has roots in the sociology of laboratory sciences and large-scale technological systems. But I struggled to wrap my head around the prompt, in part, because the genealogy of this dialogue is distinct in my own discipline of African studies, where there has been more interest in understanding scientific and technological practice in dialogue with the enchanted world of spirits, goblins, witches, and the ancestors.
Since the late 1950s, African anthropologists and philosophers have debated the relationship between “religion” and “science” in African societies. It is notable that Bruno Latour’s first overt engagement with the gods was his analysis of the “fetish,” an English gloss of the Portuguese pidgin derivative of “fetiço” that emerged from Portuguese encounters on the West African coast with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Latour’s On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods can be read as an attempt to translate into actor-network theory (ANT) a long genealogy of debates about how Africans and Europeans created commensurability between people and bundles of goods alongside religious beliefs and objects.
I wanted to consider Latour’s brief foray into West African history to ask you where your engagement with STS, as a scholar of religion, begins. Did it emerge from the concerns of your own fieldwork? Or of novel incorporations of STS into conversations of religious studies?
Levi McLaughlin: Robyn, I’m grateful to you for your opening thoughts. I will cheerfully admit that I enter this dialogue from a naive perspective on science and technology studies that I think is fairly common among religion researchers. There are so many in my field, such as Jason Josephson Storm, John Modern, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and other innovators who defy the stereotype I exemplify, but I think ignorance about STS remains common, particularly among those of us with an area studies focus. When I now read Latour and other representative “material turn” scholars, I find myself essentially agreeing with many of their grounding premises, having previously reached resonant conclusions myself through chaotic fieldwork experiences and otherwise through thinking past frustrations about reductive summaries of religious/secular splits that don’t in fact play out in real life. Basically, I don’t think I’m alone among those trained at the graduate level in religious studies who were irritated by clunky academic, legal, and popular divisions of religion and the supposedly non-religious only to find purchase in ANT, usually at an embarrassingly late stage. Following Latour, I am relieved that we can just admit that actors, irrespective of their material or immaterial statuses, are agents.
Related to your opening comments along these lines, I recommend Sarah Hammerschlag’s excellent overview of “fetish” in the newly published second edition of the Critical Terms for Religious Studies in which she takes up Latour’s work on the “factish gods.” She notes the importance of Latour’s suggestion that it is precisely the conceptual ambivalence of “fetish,” its lack of distinction between that which is enchanted and that which is fabricated, which makes the term analytically useful. Ambiguity about lines between the numinous and the manufactured certainly prevails within the ideologically motivated communities where I spend time in Japan. The devotees I know are usually reluctant to consider putatively important distinctions between religion and nominally “secular” spheres such as business, education, or politics unless I push them, either on purpose or inadvertently, to think about categorical divisions. I haven’t thought to apply “fetish” to these situations, but now I’m wondering what would happen if I did. The category “fetish” may provide more descriptive clarity than “religion” does to explain ways ideologues move strategically between varying institutional forms to inspire commitments to practical and transcendent objectives. “Fetish” may be an apt way to conceptualize concerns about the divine at work in party policymaking, law, and other realms. But using the term may also be greeted with dismay by the people I spend time with, given that they seek to distance themselves from stigmatized terms.
I want to know more about what your work in Africa tells you about fuzzy divides between the ostensibly disenchanted and the enchanted, transgressions between the supposedly rational and the intervention of the spirit world in the human realm, and what STS lets you analyze at hazy categorical intersections.
d’Avignon: My first book, A Ritual Geology, introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for environmental history by uncovering a set of techniques and cosmological engagements with the earth developed by agrarian residents of gold-bearing rocks in savanna West Africa. Though set against the ongoing corporate enclosure of these goldfields, the book tracks ritual engagements with gold-bearing rock from the medieval period to the present day. My initial questions for this project were motivated by far more secular concerns about law, the exchange of geological knowledge, and state formation on West Africa’s goldfields. But the interviews I conducted—and the archival record—were saturated with concerns about the haunting of gold-bearing lands by malevolent spirits and the movement of ancient spirited snakes through subterranean paleochannels that also contained gold. At first, I was deeply reluctant to tackle these narratives of the occult and of the otherworldly, in part because I felt my training in religious studies was inadequate. But also because of the long and troubling history, dating back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, of outsiders dismissing or denigrating technological practices and expertise in Africa as saturated in mysticism, ritual, and belief.
But I slowly realized that the only way to do justice to what gold-bearing rock, and gold discoveries, meant to the hundreds of men and women I interviewed for this project was to delve into varied regional histories of religion—ranging from “Indigenous African religions” to the dynamic history of Islam on the goldfields of Senegal, Mali, and Guinea. This exploration led, in my view, to some of the more interesting insights in the book about subterranean property rights and goldfields as longstanding spaces of political and ritual autonomy.
I built out a conceptual toolkit for thinking about the contingent relationship between ritual and techno-scientific practices in different episodes of West African history by drawing on scholarship on West African religion, such as Jean Allman and John Parker’s work on Toognaab and the archeologist Ann Stahl’s scholarship on shrines. I have also found traction in Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s work on Shona hunting technologies in the realm of the sacred, Projit Mukharji’s work on “occulted materialities,” and the far-ranging conservations curated by Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Pablo F. Gómez on science and technology studies from the “out there.” These are some models—emerging at the intersection of religious studies, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies—for blurring the boundaries between secular and non-secular worlds.
How, if at all, do you see your own work in Japan working at this borderland?
McLaughlin: Your response reminds me of an encounter I had a few years ago with a prominent nationalist activist in Japan. He is a leader within a dynamic network of ideologically motivated conservatives who aim to rid Japan of the 1947 Constitution, which was drafted under the US-led Occupation government following World War II. Japanese nationalists are aggrieved by this document for multiple reasons, but one prominent point of contention is Article 1: “The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the People, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power.” Affiliates of Nippon Kaigi [Japan Conference], an unincorporated lobby group that has fostered intimate ties with prominent conservative politicians, organize study sessions at Japan’s parliament and in local chapters to encourage political and popular support for returning the Japanese nation to reverence of the emperor as sovereign. They seek to foster what I think we can constructively think of as a legally and politically powerful “sincerely held belief,” following Charles McCrary, in the imperial sovereign as a direct lineal descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess upheld as the imperial ancestor in the Japanese religion Shinto.
The activist I was speaking with told me about a seminar he had just overseen at the National Diet (Japan’s parliament) at which more than one hundred lawmakers were instructed on the need to pass legislation requiring that emperors be of direct patrilineal descent from Amaterasu and that a woman or matrilineally-descended male heir not occupy the throne. He paused for a moment, looked at me, and chuckled as he said, “You know, none of this is logical. I guess it might be religion.” He, like many in Japan, appeared uneasy about applying the label “religion” to his undertakings, given widespread anxiety about ways the term is stigmatized in Japan today. He seemed to equate illogical commitments with religious ones, contrasting them to work on law and policymaking—broadly sanctioned undertakings that conventionally fall into the realm of the logical. This way of relegating religion to the illogical, and therefore suspicious, is at work in Japan’s courts and is common in political discourse, as scholar of Japanese religion and law Ioannis Gaitanidis points out.
Your African interlocutors are frank about their relationships with other-than-human powers who intercede in their affairs. Their apprehensions of the scientific require engagements with the divine as materially manifest. It is the scientists from afar who need to adjust their “science” and “religion” understandings to keep up with the West African goldminers. The divine is certainly alive for Japanese nationalists. However, presuppositions that deity will be understood in a straightforward way as religious, really by anybody, requires reappraisal by religion scholars, like that pursued in Japanese religious studies by Jolyon Baraka Thomas. It’s clear that all of us need to nimbly recalibrate our portrayals, especially of those who are leery about “religion” as a descriptor, with an eye to ways interlocutors describe “religion” and its others.
I do wonder, though, about my simplistic West Africa/Japan comparison. How should we preserve on-the-ground specifics, such as what you outlined in your work with the gold miners or the ambivalent attitudes of Japanese nationalists I engage, while still allowing analysts to apply lessons about unresolved religion/science fuzziness to other cases?
d’Avignon: You’ve struck on something really important here, Levi, which is the distinction between what we, as analysts, understand as relationships between “science” and “religion” in our data and how our interlocutors understand this relationship. In my fieldwork, I encountered immense anxiety about the appropriate relationship between “religion” and gold mining. In contrast to the Japanese activist—who worried that any reference to a religious pretext in the political sphere could be stigmatized as illogical—everyone I encountered believed that gold mining was ritually fraught. The major debate was whether gold mining, which was historically associated with Indigenous African religions, was compatible with Islam, now the religion of most gold miners in West Africa. Stated otherwise, the issue was not if science was compatible with belief but if ritual engagements with Islam or Indigenous African religions shaped technical outcomes in the mines differently.
This is where I think my own take on “actor debates” over science and religion in West Africa departs from the model offered by Latour or even by most critical works on “the fetish” that attempt to understand how ideas and cultural norms from Afro-Atlantic and European groups competed, diverged, or were made legible at the ritual and commercial interface of enslavement. In my work, I attempt to move beyond African-European binaries in scientific practice to understand how different groups of Africans debated over religion and technology—at times violently. This work is indebted to an earlier generation of scholars who struggled to prove—against centuries of misinformed racist thought—that African environmental practices were rational and that Africans contributed to the rise of global science and medical theories.
Fortunately, we can now move beyond questions of African scientific capacity to ask how different African societies prior to colonialism developed new epistemological frameworks. Research by Kathryn de Luna and Amanda Logan on long-term strategies of food collection in Central Africa and food preparation in Ghana, respectively, shows how some African societies eagerly adopted techniques from neighbors and overseas, while others forged new ways of making and doing through localized experimentation. As evidenced in studies of metallurgy and pottery, the occult and the otherworldly loom large in many contexts of material transformation in Africa’s vast precolonial past. Moving forward, more scholars of science and technology in Africa will need to engage with histories and theories of religion. Promising new scholarship at this intersection, such as the work of Nana Osei Quarshie, places long durée African political, ritual, and medical histories of harming as a counterpart to work on public healing.
This brings me to my final question for you, Levi. What direction do you think work on science and religion ought to be taking in East Asian religious studies? Or what new questions are scholars in your field asking that those of us working in Africa or elsewhere should be paying attention to?
McLaughlin: What I see in your innovative push beyond binary analyses and in your first question, Robyn, is something that animates the most generative work in what gets called “area studies.” This is a call for historians and fieldworkers to make two essential moves. First, to stop treating research on topics outside Europe and the United States as curious case studies in which to plug Euro-American models but to instead treat Africa, Asia, and all other places as sites of theory making. It isn’t, depressingly, but I think this should be an obvious first step for anyone. But it is a vital second step that moves us past hidebound binary thinking. We need to appreciate epistemologies on their own frustrating, unresolved terms without worrying about fixing their geopolitical identities. We need to abandon what my colleague Aike Rots terms “methodological nationalism” to let dynamic transcultural actors—aren’t all actors transcultural?—teach us to undermine our categorical chauvinisms. Let actors and their networks guide our analyses.
I have tried to make this second move in my work on the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai, which I characterize as mimetic of the modern nation-state in ways that resemble other formulations across the globe. My work with Aike Rots, Jolyon Thomas, and Chika Watanabe on what religious studies can teach analysts about the “corporate form” has similarly attempted to move beyond a problematic here is a non-Western epistemological framework we should learn fromapproach to advocate for the more mature method I see you championing. Basically, we need to let subject-centered approaches rooted in specific histories lead us past categorical concerns to make meaningful contributions for scholarship and advocacy.
Thank you for this productive exchange, Robyn!