8

Guns Against Drums: Imperialism Encounters Ecstasy

The reader might justifiably accuse me of eurocentrism in my emphasis, so far, on European developments—except for one thing: It was the Europeans—not the Chinese or Aztecs or Zulu—who forcibly imposed their culture and beliefs on people throughout the world. The centuries, roughly the sixteenth through the nineteenth, in which Europeans discarded and suppressed their festive traditions are the same ones in which Europeans fanned out all over the globe conquering, enslaving, colonizing, and in general destroying other peoples and their cultures. Technological advances—in navigation and of course in weaponry—made the European campaign of global conquest possible; perhaps the psychological changes discussed in the previous chapter—toward a more driven and individualistic type of personality—helped make it seem necessary and appealing. No doubt there are many reasons (economic, demographic, ideological, even sexual) to explain why Europe’s embrace of the new puritanism coincided with such a frantic burst of expansionism—a drive, it almost seems, to get away.

But it is the immediate consequence, rather than the sources, of European expansionism that concerns us here: The Europeans who explored and conquered and colonized were, certainly from the late sixteenth century on, fresh from their own experience of harsh cultural “reform” and had little tolerance for the exuberant rituals of other peoples. For example, a historian of Tahiti described the Protestant missionaries who settled on that sunny island in the early nineteenth century as followers of a “dour and cheerless creed,” who routinely dressed in black and “never laughed, never made a joke or understood anyone else’s, never enjoyed what they condemned as unseemly levity, and never let themselves forget for a moment the awful burden of the sins of the world.”¹ Even in milder forms, the Christianity Europeans attempted to export to the world frowned on anything that looked to them like “emotionalism.” As an early-twentieth-century American professor wrote in condemnation of “primitive” religiosity, “The mature fruit of the Spirit is not the subliminal uprush, the ecstatic inflow of emotion, the rhapsody, the lapse of inhibition, but rational love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness—self-control.”²

Sometimes the Europeans’ destruction of “native” rites was incidental to the physical destruction of the natives themselves: It would be shortsighted to complain about the abolition of Tasmanian or Carib traditions, for example, when the people who might have been carriers of these traditions no longer exist, having succumbed centuries ago to European weapons and diseases. In Australia, the missionaries’ efforts to uplift and “civilize” the Aboriginals were often overwhelmed by the more pressing business of burying them. One missionary outpost was abandoned with the explanation that “the termination of the Mission has arisen solely from the Aboriginals becoming extinct in these districts.”³

On the whole, though, there was nothing “incidental” about the European campaign against the communal rituals of other societies. Most Europeans had little use for any aspects of non-European culture; African religions, for example, were described by an English promoter of the missionary effort as “little more than loose collections of ideas, vague and puerile, arising from a superstitious devotion to the life of Nature around.”⁴ Especially repellent to Europeans were the rituals of indigenous peoples, since these almost invariably featured dancing, singing, masking, and even the achievement of trance states. In large parts of Africa, for example, the identification between communal dance and music, on the one hand, and what Europeans might call “religion,” on the other, was profound. The term the Tswanas of southern Africa use for dance (go bina) also means “to venerate,”⁵ and in the Bantu language group of southern, central, and eastern Africa, the word ngoma can mean “ritual,” “cult,” “song-dance,” or simply “drum.”⁶

The anthropologist Jean Comaroff noted that of all the “native” customs and traditions in southern Africa, “collective song and dance were especially offensive to Christians.”⁷ As we saw in the introduction, Europeans tended to view such activities, wherever they found them, as outbreaks of devil worship, lasciviousness, or, from a more “scientific” perspective, hysteria. For example, a Jesuit missionary among the Yup’ik people of late-nineteenth-century Alaska wrote:

I have great hopes for these poor people, even though they are so disgusting on the exterior that nature itself would stand up and take notice … In general their superstitions are a fearful worship of the devil. They indulge profusely in performances and feasts to please their dead but in fact to please and corrupt themselves, in dancing and banqueting.⁸

So whether the goal was to pacify indigenous peoples in a military and administrative sense or, more generously, to impose upon them the supposed benefits of civilization, Europeans generally found themselves in furious opposition to the communal pleasures and rituals of the people whose lives they intruded upon.

The existence of a widespread European campaign against indigenous ritual is beyond dispute; some scholars mention it almost in passing, as if little elaboration were required. The anthropologist Jon P. Kirby, for example, tells us that missionaries in West Africa “were too busy suppressing traditional rituals and beliefs” to find out what they were and meant,⁹ while another anthropologist, Beverly Stoeltje, explains that the distinction between ritual and festival “evolved as a consequence of modern religious systems’ attempts to obliterate native religions.”¹⁰ Apparently, if native religious rituals could not be tolerated, they could still sometimes survive as “secular” festivities.

But it is frustratingly difficult to find blow-by-blow accounts of conflicts over specific native practices. One exception is Hawaii, where a three-way conflict—among white missionaries, white sailors, and native Hawaiians—has been documented. The Hawaiians, for the most part, wanted to continue their traditional pleasures; the sailors wanted to drink and exploit local women; the missionaries wanted to establish a kind of puritanical theocracy. Although the Hawaiians were organized into socially complex kingdoms, the white American missionary Hiram Bingham saw them as “almost naked savages,” having “the appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism.”¹¹ He and succeeding missionaries fought, with mixed success, to suppress both the sailors’ carousing and such Hawaiian customs as surfing, canoe racing, lei wearing, and that “depraved native dance,” the hula.¹²

I could find only sketchy and scattered accounts of the encounters between high-minded Europeans and native “devil worshippers” elsewhere. What they suggest is that the global campaign against festivities and ecstatic rituals in many ways resembled the post-Reformation campaign against festivities within Europe: It was a sporadic undertaking, carried out by both secular and religious authorities, and subject to frequent setbacks. In some settings, repression had the force of law, taking the form of edicts against drumming, dancing, and masking, for example, with penalties of flogging or even mutilation. As Kirby notes, “Most missionaries considered the colonial administrations as allies in the essential task of destroying existing structures,”¹³ just as religiously motivated reformers within Europe could generally count on the assistance of secular authorities.

In other settings, where the colonial administration was still underdeveloped, individual missionaries usually attempted to halt the “devilish” native practices single-handedly, much like the puritanical preachers who took it upon themselves to tear down maypoles and disrupt festivities in their native England. Missionary accounts include many tales of such courageous, reckless, and, from a non-European point of view, surely ridiculous behavior. Early Catholic missionaries in Africa reported that, at the first sound of drums, they would “immediately run to the place to disturb the hellish practice.”¹⁴ A Capuchin friar in the Portuguese fort at Massangano, in what is now Angola, was almost stoned to death by an angry crowd “for endeavoring to oppose these people in their wicked ceremonies.” ¹⁵ In the mid-nineteenth century, a Presbyterian missionary found black Jamaicans engaged in what they called a myal dance, and rushed out to stop them, only to be told that the dancers were not, as he supposed, “mad.” “You must be mad yourself,” they told him, “and had best go away.”¹⁶

Again, as in Europe, collective rituals became what Comaroff called an “arena of contest” between the contending cultures—sites for the exchange of insults and threats, if not actual violence. Colonized peoples might use their rituals to mock the European intruders or, as the Europeans usually suspected, to whip up armed resistance. Or they might be attracted by Christian teachings, only to be repelled by Christian forms of worship. Nxele, a nineteenth-century Xhosa diviner, was originally drawn to Christianity, then decided that the right way to worship was not “to sing M‘Dee, M’Dee, M’Dee all day and pray with their faces on the ground and their backs to the almighty—but to dance and enjoy life and to make love, so that the black people would multiply and fill the earth.”¹⁷ For their part, the Europeans “focused their challenge on communal rites”¹⁸ and often judged the progress of their “civilizing” efforts by their success in suppressing such rites. A Methodist missionary in southern Africa, S. Broadbent, wrote in 1865: “I feel happy also in saying that the Bechuana customs and ceremonies are considerably on the wane. The native dance is, in some instances, kept up; but I frequently go at the time of the dance, oppose it, and preach to those who are willing to hear.”¹⁹ Among the Namaquas of South Africa, it was said of someone who converts to Christianity that “he has given up dancing.”²⁰

European observers sometimes noted the parallel between the crackdown on native rites worldwide and the crackdown on carnival and other festivities within Europe. Recall their tendency, as mentioned earlier, to equate the “savages” of “new” worlds with the lower classes of the old world, and the occasional analogy drawn between European carnival and the ecstatic rites of distant peoples. The parallel extends, in part, to the motive for repression: One of the goals of the crackdown within Europe was to instill the work ethic into the lower classes and apply the time “wasted” in festivities to productive labor. Similarly, European colonizers were often appalled both by the apparent laziness of the natives and by the energy they invested in purely “superstitious” ritual activities, and to such a degree that their irritation sometimes extended to the flora that supported the supposedly easygoing, native way of life. The poet Samuel Coleridge, for example—surely a liberal by nineteenth-century British standards—once suggested that the South Sea Islanders’ breadfruit trees be destroyed, so that the islanders would be forced to learn hard work.²¹ Along the same lines, the historian Thomas Carlyle was incensed by the West Indian pumpkin: “Where a Black man, by working about half-an-hour a-day … can supply himself, by aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work!”²² Short of eliminating these psychologically debilitating plants, Christianity could solve the problem, as proposed by the English promoter of missions quoted above: “One of the chief difficulties experienced by employers of labour in Africa is the unstable and undisciplined character of the native labourer. Christian teaching and industrial training can do much to remove this trouble.”²³

But the parallel between repression within Europe and the cultural repression visited by Europeans on their colonial subjects in distant places goes only so far. Within Europe, elites recognized the human objects of repression—generally peasants, laborers, and artisans—as fellow Christians and, increasingly over time, as people who shared with them a sense of nationhood. Not so with the “savages,” whose skin color and facial features combined with their unfamiliar beliefs and customs to render them almost entirely “other”—to the point where their very status as humans was open to question. English settlers in Australia thought of the original occupants of that subcontinent as “a species of tail-less monkeys” or, if human in any sense, clearly the kind of human “nearest of all to the monkey or orang-outang.”²⁴ Georges Cuvier, the noted early-nineteenth-century Swiss comparative anatomist, judged that “the negro race … manifestly approaches to the monkey tribe. The hordes of which this variety is composed have always remained in a state of complete barbarism.”²⁵ This attitude helped justify a casual, even lighthearted, approach to genocide. “I took no more notice of a hundred armed Indians than I would have of a handful of flies,” wrote a Spanish conquistador,²⁶ while an English bush ranger boasted he would just “as leave shoot [Tasmanians] as so many sparrows.”²⁷

Within Europe, the intent of post-Reformation cultural “reform” was not to destroy the celebrants, only the celebrations. There, the overriding political-economic context was the rise of absolutism and, later, industrialization, within each of which emerging systems the European lower classes had an important part to play: as soldiers in the mass armies of absolute monarchs, and as workers in manufacturing enterprises. Their fate was to be disciplined, not necessarily to die. But the colonial context was, in large portions of the world, unabashedly murderous, comprising, as Tom Engelhardt wrote, a “single, multicentury, planetwide exterminatory pulse.”²⁸ The analogue of the European worker was the colonial slave, and in places like South America and the Caribbean, slaves who were worked to death could readily enough be replaced. In settings where the conquerors and colonizers had no use for the indigenous population even as laborers—in Australia or the western part of the United States, for example—the natives were simply in the way, and the progress of “civilization” could be measured by their disappearance. In a recent book, Mark Cocker puts the death toll from four centuries of European imperialism at 50 million, an impressive figure even by twentieth-century standards of genocide.²⁹

In this context, the missionaries who almost everywhere accompanied the conquerors sometimes appear almost as noble and altruistic as they imagined themselves to be. Their mission, after all, rested on the belief that native peoples had souls to save, meaning that they were in fact human. British missionaries often opposed the slave trade and sometimes slavery itself; in Australia they protested settler rapes and massacres of Aboriginals. In South America, Jesuit missionaries were seen by colonial authorities as too protective of the mission Indians they had converted, and were expelled from the entire continent in the late eighteenth century. For their part, secular authorities sometimes opposed missionary efforts, particularly those directed at African slaves in the Americas, out of the fear that slaves might take the liberatory themes of Christianity to heart. Until the religious revival of the mid-eighteenth century, many North American slave owners vigorously resisted the conversion of their slaves, who could be flogged for attending Christian prayer meetings or even praying in private.³⁰ Or they offered their slaves only a twisted form of Christianity, as in this sample from a “catechism” devised for North American slaves:

Q. What did God make you for?

A. To make a crop.

Q. What is the meaning of “Thou shalt not commit adultery”?

A. To serve our heavenly father, and our earthly master, obey our overseer, and not steal anything.³¹

In some instances, secular authorities irritated missionaries by failing to suppress “heathen” collective rites with sufficient consistency and vigor: In Jamaica and Brazil, slave owners often permitted nocturnal dancing on the grounds that it kept the slaves content and, given its evident “lasciviousness,” possibly encouraged them to reproduce.³² In India, English colonial administrators initially opposed the entry of Christian missionaries, fearing that any challenge to Hinduism would threaten stability and hence imperial profits.³³

But what is striking, in any overview of colonialism as a global enterprise, is the degree of concordance between conquerors and missionaries, between those who would exploit non-European peoples, their habitats, and their resources, and those who would “merely” destroy their cultures.³⁴ “Imperialism is a matter of religion,” argued the English promoter of the missionary effort. “We need a Christian imperialism and a Christian commercialism. We also need an imperial Christianity and an economic religion.”³⁵ Slave owners and colonial administrators may have cared little what gods, if any, their slaves and subjects worshipped, but they shuddered at the collective strength such rituals invoked and represented. Dance was “particularly distasteful to the Europeans, not only for its ‘salacious[ness],’” Comaroff writes, but because of the sheer “vitality of the system it represented,” a vitality that directly defied the aims of the white exploiters.³⁶ And while individual missionaries may have had little concern for the profits of their fellow countrymen, they shared their dismay at the group unity so powerfully embodied in native ritual. John Mackenzie, sent to southern Africa by the London Missionary Society, wrote enthusiastically of “weakening the communistic relations of members of a tribe among one another and letting in the fresh, stimulating breath of healthy individualistic competition.’”^37m

Black Carnival

The victims of European expansionism did not usually relinquish their traditions as swiftly and completely as the Europeans would have liked. Even under the crushing weight of imperialism and slavery, under circumstances of the most minute surveillance by colonial authorities, subject peoples sometimes found ways to preserve bits and pieces of their communal rituals and to invent new ones. The African diaspora to the Americas provides particularly striking cases of such cultural resistance, traces of which persist to this day, in the form, for example, of African-derived American music: blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and jazz.

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, at least 10 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas under conditions that would seem to have precluded the preservation of any cultural traditions at all: They arrived in the “new” world virtually naked, stripped of all cultural artifacts and kinship connections, thrown together with Africans of entirely different national groupings and languages: Yoruba, Dahomeans, Ibo, and others. Once settled on the plantations of white European and North American slave owners, they were worked almost ceaselessly and often forbidden to engage in any of their “heathen” practices, including dancing and drumming. Yet these tormented peoples managed, with great courage and ingenuity, to preserve some of their traditional forms of communal celebration and, beyond that, to use them as springboards for rebellion against white rule, much as the European lower classes had deployed carnival as an occasion for armed resistance to their rulers and landlords.

For the most part, Africans of the diaspora carried out this work of cultural preservation under cover of European institutions. Carnival, for instance, transported to the Americas by Catholic French, Spanish, and Portuguese settlers, was originally a white-only event, but appropriated by slaves for their own purposes. Christianity itself provided another disguise for African traditions and—when combined with remnants of African worship—a vehicle for ecstatic ritual. Both the secularized tradition of carnival and the Africanized versions of Christianity that arose in the Americas—Vodou,ⁿ Santeria, Candomblé, and so on—became sites of black defiance and, inevitably, targets of white repression.

Let us begin with carnival and other, somewhat secular festivities brought by Europeans to the Americas. These celebrations, which Europeans expected to carry on as vigorously—if not more vigorously—in the “new” world as in the old, posed an immediate problem in the colonial setting: What about the slaves? When Europeans caroused or simply feasted, there were always dark faces watching, waiting for some particle of generosity to come their way, or waiting perhaps for some moment of weakness to present an opportunity for revolt. In Protestant settings, such as Jamaica and the southern United States, where Christmas was the highlight of the social calendar, slaves used it as an opening to establish their own, probably African-derived festivity: Jonkonnu. As early as 1688, Jamaican slaves were celebrating Jonkonnu with costuming and dancing with “Rattles ty’d to their Legs and Wrists.”³⁸ A little over a century later, they had won a measure of white respect for Jonkonnu, with whites agreeing to do their own chores during this brief period of black celebration. A white contemporary reported that during the holidays “the distance between [masters and slaves] appears to be annihilated for the moment, like the familiar footing on which the Roman slaves were with their masters at the feast of the Saturnalia, to which a West Indian Christmas may be compared.” ³⁹ In the Carolinas, where Jonkonnu had spread by the nineteenth century, slaves marched to the big house, where they danced and demanded money and drinks from their masters. Thus a moment of white weakness—Christmas—was transformed into a black opportunity.

In Catholic settings, slaves encountered, and quickly exploited, a more robust version of the European festive tradition: a carnival period extending from Christmas not just to New Year’s Day but nearly to Ash Wednesday. The case of Trinidad is particularly well documented. There, carnival was initially a white celebration, imported by French settlers, and an occasion for so much uninhibited revelry that from 1800 on, martial law was imposed at Christmastime in order to contain the white mischief.⁴⁰ People of color—slave or free—were barred from participation or confined to their own celebrations away from public spaces.

The free persons of Colour were subject to very stringent Regulations and although not forbidden to mask, yet compelled to keep to themselves and never presume to join in the amusements of the privileged class. The Indians kept entirely aloof, and the slaves, except as onlookers … had no share in the Carnival which was confined exclusively to the upper class of the community.⁴¹

For slaves who dared to break the law by wearing masks at carnival time, the prescribed sentence was “one hundred stripes … and it being in the night time, the punishment is doubled.”⁴² Perhaps these dire prohibitions were not entirely necessary: Slaves and freed blacks may have been sufficiently repelled by the peculiar white carnival custom of dressing as slaves—as “mulatresses” (slave women) or Négue jadin (male field hands).⁴³

No doubt unwittingly, the Trinidadian whites had broken the rule propounded almost two millennia earlier in Rome: that elites do not engage in uninhibited celebration in front of their social inferiors without compromising their legitimacy as rulers. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Trinidadian blacks showed their disrespect by moving in on the white institution of carnival, finally achieving full participation in 1834, on the eve of emancipation, with an event transformed to suit their own culture and purposes. Blacks brought their own music to the celebration, along with African-derived symbolic imagery and their own mocking rituals of inversion. In the 1834 carnival, black Trinidadian marchers presented a parody of the island’s (white) militia—which whites, newly sensitive to racial caricature, found to be “in very bad taste.”⁴⁴

A similar takeover of carnival took place later in Brazil, where, beginning in the 1880s, blacks used drums and tambourines to “initiate a new kind of carnival parading,” apparently derived from the slaves’ earlier practice of dancing at the funerals of African princes who died in slavery.⁴⁵ In both Trinidad and Brazil, whites responded to black participation just as elites had responded to the disorderly lower-class celebrations of carnival in Europe: by retreating indoors to their own masked balls and dinner parties, which were invariably described as “elegant” by the local newspapers, in contrast to the “barbarous” celebrations of the blacks.

One strains to imagine the vitality and color of the great blackdominated carnivals of the nineteenth-century Caribbean. Unfortunately, we have only the disapproving accounts of white observers to go by, and these downplay the artistic creativity that went into costume making and choreography, to focus instead on the perceived violence, disorder, and lewdness of the events. A Trinidadian newspaper account from the early 1870s, for example, mentions the “brutish cries and shouts” of the celebrants, as well as the “horrid forms running to and fro about the town with flaming torches in their hands, like so many demons escaped from a hot place not usually mentioned in polite society.”⁴⁶

We cannot even discern, in white accounts, what aspects of carnival were derived from Africa rather than Europe, since, as they grew more and more estranged from the festivities, whites tended to label any disagreeable elements “African.” In reality, some of the features of black carnival that whites found most disturbing would have been thoroughly familiar, at least in form and intent, to a celebrant of French medieval carnival—notably the rituals of inversion and mocking attacks on authority. Gender inversion, in the form of cross-dressing, seems to have been a common pleasure of Trinidadian carnival, with a (white) newspaper reporting in 1874: “As for the number of girls masked and in men’s clothing, we cannot say how many hundred are flaunting their want of shame. As many men, also generally of the lowest order, are in like manner strutting about in female dress, dashing out their gowns as they go.”⁴⁷ In a more directly threatening way, black carnival participants used the occasion to insult the virtue of well-known white ladies and send up the entire plantocracy. As one historian reports, “Elaborately costumed revellers impersonated the Governor, the Chief Justice, the Attorney General, well-known barristers and solicitors, socially prominent cricketers, and other props of society.”⁴⁸

In another striking parallel to the European festive tradition, Caribbean slaves and freed blacks put carnival to service as an occasion for armed uprisings. The historian Elizabeth Fenn reports that 35 percent of all known slave plots and rebellions in the British Caribbean were planned for the Christmas period, noting that “in this regard the slaves of the Americas differed little from the French peasants and laborers studied by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Natalie Zemon Davis.”⁴⁹ An early Trinidadian slave revolt, on Christmas 1805, was blamed on slave societies, called convois, organized “for the purpose of dancing and innocent amusement.”⁵⁰ In Cuba, similar groups known as cabildos, which were responsible for organizing carnival processions, hatched uprisings in 1812 and 1835.⁵¹ Even gentle Jonkonnu aroused white fears of rebellion. An 1833 novel by a former resident of Jamaica described the pre-Christmas military preparations undertaken in Kingston “in case the John Canoes should take a small fancy to burn or pillage the town, or to rise and cut the throats of their masters, or any little innocent recreation of the kind.”⁵²

In Trinidad, carnival and any form of public black festivity came in for harsh repression in the 1880s. Fearful of the black response to an outright ban on carnival, the British attacked it piecemeal, itemizing their prohibitions on drumming, parading, dancing, masking, and even the carrying of lighted torches. Attempts to enforce these rules often led to violent clashes between revelers and the police, as at a celebration in Princes Town where dancing women mocked the police while others in the crowd of five hundred hurled missiles, “some containing foul-smelling substances.” The police opened fire, killing two, and a few months later attacked another festivity celebrated by East Indian immigrants as well as blacks, killing “many.”⁵³

The Preservation of Ecstasy

Carnival provided one vehicle for the preservation of African traditions, religion another. How much of African theology and religious ritual survived the Middle Passage is a subject of keen scholarly debate. Uprooted from their shrines and holy places, deprived of opportunities for collective worship, slaves could not have brought much more than memories of their West African religious ideas and practices. Yet uprooted Africans, who were intended to occupy much the same spiritual—and often physical—space as domestic animals, cobbled together bits of Christianity and remembered fragments of their original religions to create entirely new ones: Candomblé in Brazil; Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and Shango in the Caribbean. Even North American black Protestantism, to the extent that it offered (and continues to offer) a rhythmically engaging variation on the white version, served to keep alive African musical and communal approaches to worship.

Theologically, the larger “syncretic,” or hybrid, religions—Vodou, Candomblé, and Santeria—are defined by their use of the Catholic saints as a cover for a pantheon of African-derived deities. But it is the collective practice of these religions that concerns us, and this was, and remains, Dionysian, if we understand that word in the most ancient religious sense. These are ecstatic, danced religions, in which music and the muscular synchrony of dance are employed to induce a state of trance interpreted as possession by, or transcendent unity with, a god. To most European observers, the danced rituals leading to possession trance looked like madness, complete abandon, or sexual frenzy. A 1929 novel about Haiti, for example, offered the following overwrought description of a Vodou ritual.

In the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.⁵⁴

For all their ambivalence about ecstatic experience, anthropologists agree that the rites of religions like Vodou and Candomblé are in fact quite disciplined and focused. Alfred Métraux, the ethnographer of Vodou, whom we encountered in the introduction fretting over whether Vodou rites represented a form of hysteria, more accurately observed that

they are more like difficult exercises to which one applies one’s whole being, never allowing oneself to succumb to disorderly gestures. Ritual dictates that the gods be present at various times during the ceremony, and they never fail to turn up at the appropriate moment. Possession is therefore a controlled phenomenon obeying precise rules. It is considered to be unseemly for a god to “mount” a person who does not belong to the family giving the fete, and if he does so he is asked to go away.⁵⁵

Participants know under what circumstances trance states should appropriately occur, and achieve them only through practice and training. As a scholar of Caribbean literature writes, again of the Vodou rites: “This experience of election [possession trance], its shock of communion, is not evidence of psychic disruption, or proof of pathology, but rather a result of the most intense discipline and study. Not everyone can be possessed, for not everyone can know how to respond to the demands and expectations of her god.”⁵⁶ So the ecstatic rites of these diaspora religions were not mad orgies, as whites often perceived them, but deliberately nurtured techniques of ecstasy, derived from ancient traditions.

For the most part, it was West African religions that inspired the rites of blacks in the Americas.⁵⁷ In the Caribbean, the ecstatic tradition preserved in diaspora religions is almost entirely African, since African slaves were imported only as the indigenous Caribs and Arawaks rendered themselves unfit for labor by dying off from European diseases and mistreatment. Brazilian Candomblé, however, also draws on certain indigenous Brazilian Indian ecstatic rites observed by Europeans when they first started arriving in the sixteenth century. For example, an early French traveler found Brazilian Indian women (of what locality or tribe I do not know) gathering to dance and sing in a circle, after which they would begin to foam at the mouth and “suddenly become possessed with the devil.”⁵⁸ But the African connection remains strong in Brazil, where particular candomblés (meaning religious subcommunities) are sometimes distinguished by their Yoruban or Dahomean roots and possession is believed necessary to physically summon the gods from their homes in Africa.⁵⁹ If the slave could not escape back to Africa, her religion could bring Africa to her—or, at the very least, the memory of freedom. As one nineteenth-century observer put it, “In dancing and singing, they forget their ills and servitude, and only remember their native country and the time that they were free.”⁶⁰

Like carnival, diaspora religions provided a springboard for rebellions throughout the nineteenth century. Some of the reasons for this are obvious even in the most rationalist European terms: Religious rituals offered an excuse for slaves to congregate; religious institutions fostered organization among slaves belonging to different owners; religious training nurtured leadership, often among women as well as men. So we find the candomblés serving as “centers for insurrection” in early-nineteenth-century Brazil⁶¹ and Santeria gatherings in Cuba linked to slave revolts on that island. In Trinidad, where Obeah prevailed, some revolts were led by religious leaders, or obeah men.⁶² Haiti provides the most spectacular—and successful—case of insurrection inspired in part by diaspora religion.⁶³ The nocturnal danced rituals of Vodou served to rally slaves to the cause and were, until the achievement of independence in 1803, a constant target of French repression. Samba Boukman, one of the revolution’s first leaders, was himself a houngan (Vodou priest) guided by a loa (spirit) of African derivation. As the case of Haiti demonstrates, the memory of freedom—kept alive in ecstatic dances and visions—could also be its source.

Ecstatic Revolution

But the response of subjugated peoples to colonialism was not only conservative, in the sense of keeping old traditions alive. As anthropologists have often noted, imperialism seemed, perversely, to encourage the emergence of new and often defiant ecstatic religious cults. Perhaps we should count diaspora religions like Vodou among the “new,” since these involved creative amalgams of African and European religions, but there were many more such inventions—often short-lived and usually at least implicitly opposed to white rule. Imagine the distress of the missionary who had, with the help of colonial authorities, stamped out indigenous religious practices, demolished local shrines, pulled the children into his mission schools—only to find the “natives” forsaking Christianity for some fresh form of “deviltry.” The explanation often given by anthropologists is that collective ecstasy serves as a form of escapism: Sorely stressed by colonialism, the colonized people sought, through ecstatic forms of worship, a fleeting alternative to the horrors of their actual situation.

Whatever the explanation, we find ecstatic and millenarian cults springing up from the era of first contact almost into the present time. In Africa, some of these took institutional form in the so-called Independent Churches, which, like the diaspora religions of the Americas, drew on Christianity as well as indigenous religions. Frequently led by women, these were “often contrasted to the mission-founded Churches by their wearing of flowing white garments and headgear, their use of drums and responsive chanting, and their emphasis on spiritual healing.”⁶⁴

Ecstatic responses to white conquest were a global phenomenon, arising in Indonesia, Melanesia, and North America as well as Africa. In North America, the Menomini Indians of upper Wisconsin launched their “Dream Dance” cult in 1879, in which the central rite was a dance revolving around a large drum embodying the Great Spirit: “The rhythmic beating, gradually speeding up to a climactic pitch, produces a state of excitement and frenzy strongly imbued with the dancers’ feeling of oneness.”⁶⁵ Better known is the Ghost Dance, which arose in the late 1860s among the Paiute and spread from them to the Cheyenne, Shoshone, Sioux, and others. Here, too, the central ritual was a dance leading to trance states.

The Ghost dancers, women as well as men, paint their bodies to indicate the revelations they have received, and arrange themselves in concentric circles, the arms of each dancer resting on the shoulders of both neighbors, so that the vibrant rhythm of the dance sways the worshippers as if they were a single body. The mood quickly created by the dance is conducive to collective exaltation and trance, the dance being usually performed at night.⁶⁶

For a more explicitly revolutionary case, consider the Maori Hau-hau cult that arose under British rule in 1864, a time when many of the Maori had converted to Christianity. The British settlers, irritated by the continuing Maori presence on land that could be more profitably used for farming, had begun to behave in a decidedly un-Christian fashion—driving the Maori from their villages so that thousands died of exposure and starvation. The Maori responded by taking up arms against the whites and deconverting from Christianity en masse. In its stead, they embraced the new Hau-hau cult, which combined traditional religious themes with bits of missionary learning, or at least songs sung in “an extraordinary jumble of Hebrew, English, German, Greek and Italian.” Here again, the central ritual was a danced one, performed, the Italian ethnographer Vittorio Lanternari reports, “for the purpose of producing a state of ecstasy in the participants.”⁶⁷ Candidates for initiation into the cult assembled around a sacred pole, where,

because of the strain, combined with the heat of the day, the shouting of the worshippers, and the furious pace of the dancers going round and round, the candidates for initiation were hypnotized; their bodies were then seized by others and tossed repeatedly into the air until they became unconscious. As soon as they recovered, they were considered initiated into the cult, and were pushed summarily into the march [against the British].⁶⁸

Anthropologists and other scholars have often tended, in recent decades, to view such rites with impatience, if not disgust. Dancing in circles does not, after all, as was claimed in some cases, make men immune to bullets or cause colonizers to depart in their ships. From a modern European vantage point, this is “irrational” behavior, akin to mental illness.⁶⁹ Thus the anthropologist Lucy Mair saw similarities between the visions of millenarian (and often ecstatic) cults and the “fantasies” and “hysterical phenomena” common to mental patients.⁷⁰ Even the deeply sympathetic Lanternari described the ecstatic rites of colonized people as “collective psychoses” and a “means of evasion.”⁷¹ More recently, the sociologist Bryan Wilson notes condescendingly:

Cargo cults, and other movements among simpler peoples, are frequently attended by manifestations of what observers might call “hysteria” or “frenzy.” Undoubtedly, these responses can be induced in some circumstances, but there is no reason to suppose that they are not usually spontaneous … The psychic benefit from such exercises, we may note parenthetically, is, sociologically speaking, the only sort of salvation that is really to be attained.⁷²

But it is this smug Western vantage point, rather than the rituals of “simpler peoples,” that cries out for psychological interpretation. The danced rituals of rebellious colonized peoples would probably not, after all, have seemed so strange to a medieval European carnival rebel or, for that matter, to one of the sixteenth-century German Anabaptists who danced triumphantly through the streets of Munster until more orthodox Protestants subdued them. What had changed between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries was the Western idea of revolution. Medieval European peasants, like nineteenth-century colonized peoples throughout the world, seem to have imagined revolution as a fairly sudden transformation, coming up from below and leading swiftly to abolition of the hated hierarchy, to a “world turned upside down.” But European revolutionaries of the post-Reformation era faced absolutist monarchs who possessed vast armies and police apparatuses. In this situation, revolution appeared to be a painstaking project, requiring many months or years, and similar to war in its demand for discipline and planning.

The historian Michael Walzer has argued that modern revolution was a task for the kind of ascetic, single-minded, self-denying personality that Calvinism sought to inculcate, and certainly some of the successful revolutionaries of the West would seem to fill the bill. As we have seen, the English revolutionary leader Oliver Cromwell, a Calvinist himself, railed perpetually against the festive inclinations of his troops. The Jacobin leader Robespierre despised disorderly gatherings, including “any group in which there is a tumult”—a hard thing to avoid during the French Revolution, one might think.⁷³ His fellow revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just described the ideal “revolutionary man” in terms that would have been acceptable to any Puritan: “inflexible, but sensible; he is frugal; he is simple … honorable, he is sober, but not mawkish.”⁷⁴ Lenin inveighed against “slovenliness … carelessness, untidiness, unpunctuality” as well as “dissoluteness in sexual life,”⁷⁵ seeing himself as a “manager” and “controller” as well as a leader.⁷⁶ For men like Robespierre and Lenin, the central revolutionary rite was the meeting—experienced in a sitting position, requiring no form of participation other than an occasional speech, and conducted according to strict rules of procedure. Dancing, singing, trances—these could only be distractions from the weighty business at hand.

We might respond in many ways to this Calvinist model of revolution, which has served to reinforce Western disdain for the ecstatic rituals of oppressed and colonized peoples. We could point out that the ascetic and militaristic Western model of revolution—though successfully applied to anticolonial struggles in the mid-twentieth century—carries a considerable risk of dictatorship as the outcome. Fear of disorderly or “irrational” behavior readily masks a fear of the people, and a leader who sees himself as a “controller” is well on his way to becoming a tyrant. Alternatively, we might make a utilitarian argument for the importance of ecstatic ritual within otherwise “Western” revolutions. What is achieved through such rituals, in a purely functional sense, is an intense feeling of solidarity among the participants—at least all accounts suggest as much—and solidarity is the basis of effective political action from below. Even the “fantasies” entertained by participants, or apprehended in trance, surely have an empowering effect. The field hand who achieves unity with a god through a Vodou possession trance, and the market woman who leads a second life as a priestess—these are potentially formidable adversaries.

Furthermore, if ecstatic rites were only a frivolous distraction from “real” politics in the Western sense, how are we to explain the zeal with which white authorities sought to repress them? The only explanation we would be left with is that the white authorities were themselves being “irrational” and that white hysteria was a persistent feature of the colonial effort—for wherever they sprang up, the syncretic religions and mystically motivated movements of native peoples were met with harsh repression. In Africa, colonial authorities crushed any religious movement they saw as heterodox, overly enthusiastic, or simply too “African.” The first leader of an “independent” African-Christian movement—a Congolese woman who took the name of Donna Beatrice—was burned to death by the Belgians in 1706.⁷⁷ As recently as the 1920s, the Belgians sentenced another independent African prophet, Simon Kimbangu, to life imprisonment, and the British even harassed the African version of the Watchtower movement, which featured long nights of drumming, hymn singing, and speaking in tongues.⁷⁸ In the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century, the British governor of Trinidad launched “a kind of inquisition” against Obeah, in which suspected adherents of that religion were burned, hanged, or subjected to amputations of their ears or noses.⁷⁹ Napoleon Bonaparte instigated an effort to eradicate Vodou in Haiti;⁸⁰ Portuguese colonial authorities harassed and suppressed the candomblés.⁸¹

In some cases, pure hysteria—or at least overreaction—does seem to have motivated the repression of native rituals. The Ghost Dance religion, for example, presented no immediate threat to whites; in fact, its moral code included the precepts: “Do no harm to anyone” and “You must not fight!”⁸² But apparently unaware of the cult’s pacifism, U.S. authorities suppressed the cult vigorously and ended up blaming it for the Sioux uprising of 1890, which culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee. After all, Ghost Dancers were subversive enough to imagine the imminent return of all the Indian dead, who would have amounted, by the end of the nineteenth century, to an impressive army.

But can the European repression of ecstatic rites everywhere be ascribed to irrational overreaction, or can we credit the whites with some ability to discern a real threat? In the Caribbean, the colonial authorities’ long-standing hostility to the African-style drum does seem to have been based on a realistic assessment of that instrument’s subversive uses. British authorities in Trinidad banned drums in 1884, with a newspaper expressing the usual dismay over “the state of civilization of people whose members can be set in movement by the repetition of such barbarous sound.”⁸³ But we can infer a more rational and military motive, since the authorities simultaneously banned dancing, processions, and “any assemblage or collection of persons armed with sticks or other weapons of offence and numbering ten or more.”⁸⁴ In Cuba, U.S. occupying forces banned “drums of African origin” in 1902, later expanding the prohibition to include “all Afrocuban ceremonial dances” as “symbols of barbarity and disturbing to the social order.”⁸⁵ Military considerations played a role in the prohibition of drums in mid-eighteenth-century South Carolina, in part because slaves were using them as a means of long-distance communication.

Finally, even supposing that the danced rituals and religions with which people worldwide responded to enslavement and colonization were entirely frivolous, nonthreatening, and politically pointless, who are we—as people operating within the Western tradition of rationality and scholarship—to judge them? If the oppressed gained nothing more from their ecstatic rituals and cults than a “psychic benefit,” to use Wilson’s phrase, we must still concede that—to people who had lost their traditions, their land, and often their freedom—a psychic benefit is no small thing. As the anthropologist I. M. Lewis wrote: “What we find over and over again in a wide range of different cultures and places is the special endowment of mystical power given to the weak. If they do not quite inherit the earth, at least they are provided with means which enable them to offset their otherwise crushing jural disabilities.”⁸⁶

Consider a fairly recent ecstatic religion, the Full Witness Apostolic Church of Zion, started by a Zulu mine worker under South African apartheid in 1956. The church’s central ritual is a circular leaping dance derived from a precolonial initiation ritual: “The whirling circle builds up a unitary momentum, like a dynamo generating the spiritual energy … The ever closer coordination of physical gestures under the driving beat and the physiological effects of the circling motion seem to dissolve the margins between individual participants, who act and respond as one body.”⁸⁷ These dancers might have been better advised, by a left-leaning anthropologist, for example, to join the African National Congress, and possibly some of them did. But if all they found in their religious ritual was a moment of transcendent joy—well, let us give them credit for finding it. To extract pleasure from lives of grinding hardship and oppression is a considerable accomplishment; to achieve ecstasy is a kind of triumph.

Such triumphs become rarer and rarer, though, as we move from the age of conquest to the present. Despite all the efforts to preserve traditional rites—and all the flare-ups of ecstatic and defiant religious movements—the overall story is necessarily one of cultural destruction and gathering gloom. Ancient rituals were suppressed; syncretic religions marginalized and driven underground; religiously inspired revolutionary cults destroyed. To return to the Tahitians with whom we began this chapter: In the late eighteenth century, they had used one of their traditional festivities to make fun of the two Spanish priests who had come to convert them, denouncing the poor Christians as thieves, fools, and (although this insult may have lost some of its potency in translation) “shellfish.”⁸⁸ A few decades later, though, the Tahitians were sufficiently worn down that the dour Protestant missionaries who replaced the priests could boast of having “restrained the natural levity of the natives” and prevailed on them to abandon their danced rituals.⁸⁹

When the Russian navigator Baron Thaddeus Bellingshausen visited the island in 1820, he found that the Tahitians now wore European clothes and that both men and women had shaved their heads since, as the historian Alan Moorehead writes, “that lovely gleaming black hair which once fell to the girls’ waists was apparently regarded by the missionaries as unsanitary.” Tattooing had been discouraged; liquor officially banned; and “where there had once been unashamed free love there now existed Christian guilt.” The missionaries must have been especially proud that “no one danced any more or played Tahitian music. Even the weaving of garlands of flowers was forbidden.”⁹⁰ Defeated, converted, and “reformed,” the Tahitians had little to do but drink.

Such were the tristes tropiques lamented by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the mid-1950s—scene of broken cultures, wrecked economies, and melancholic populations disposed to suicide and alcoholism.⁹¹ In the face of so much destruction, it may seem petty to focus on the obliteration of communal ritual and festivity. But in any assessment of the impact of European imperialism, “techniques of ecstasy”—ways of engendering transcendence and joy from within the indigenous group itself, without any recourse to the white man’s technologies or commodities—must at least be counted among the losses.