IHS podcasts are a new podcast series initiated by the Institute for Historical Studies’ Director, Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. This episode highlights Dr. Virginia Garrard’s most recent book: Faces of God in Latin America: Emerging Forms of Vernacular Christianity (Oxford, 2020). Each episode features Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra and Ashley Garcia, a PhD Candidate in History at UT Austin.

Introduction

What are the “New Faces of God” in Latin America? In what way are these new manifestations of “vernacular” Christianity any different from previous ones? In this podcast historian Virginia Garrard traces the rise of new religious movements in Latin America that differ from previous forms of Christianity in a region with 500 years of deep engagement with Christianity.  

Dr. Garrard identifies various decentralized, bottom-up religious movements that, unlike previous movements, were controlled by local ministries whose ethnicity and backgrounds reflected that of the majority of the population, namely Indigenous and Black people as well as women.  These movements reflected the actual racial and ethnic composition of local societies better than traditional forms of colonial Christian religion, which were usually in the hands of European, Creole elites or American missionaries. In one sense these movements were deeply anticolonial. Yet they were also aggressively politically conservative.

Studies of these new forms of religion in Africa and Asia cast these movements as peculiarly rooted in the “Global South.” Yet one could argue that these movements represented the global triumph of right-wing, libertarian American religious traditions: Bottom up, millenarian, Pentecostal, libertarian, and culturally conservative.

Like previous manifestations of grass-roots, democratic theological experimentation and decentralization in America, these spiritual movements relied on individual interpretations of the Old Testament and the Pentecostal, demonological interpretation of the Act of the Apostles. They sought self-help and material success. They also aimed to cut ties between individuals and traditional forms of communal, theological, or bureaucratic authority.  These vernacular movements are fast growing today. They now represent a quarter of the population of Latin America.

In this podcast we explore the connections between these new movements and globalization and neoliberalism.  We probe how their rise and global spread represent a challenge to prevailing theories of colonialism, modernity, and secularization.

~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guest

Dr. Virginia Garrard is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and past Director of LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. Her most recent monograph is Faces of God in Latin America: Emerging Forms of Vernacular Christianity (Oxford, 2020).  She is the author of Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983 (Oxford University Press, 2010); Terror en la tierra del Espiritu Santo (Guatemala: AVANCSO, 2012); Viviendo en La Nueva Jerusalem (Guatemala: Editorial Piedra Santa, 2009), and Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (University of Texas Press, 1998). She is co-author with Peter Henderson and Bryan McCann of Latin America and the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2018). She co-edited with David Orique and Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens of The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity (Oxford, 2020), served as co-editor with Stephen Dove and Paul Freston on The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Along with Mark Atwood Lawrence and Julio Moreno, she edited Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow: New Histories of Latin America’s Cold War (University of New Mexico Press, 2013). She served as single editor for On Earth as it is in Heaven: Religion and Society in Latin America (Scholarly Resources, 2000) and co-edited with David Stoll, Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America (Temple University Press, 1993). She is currently researching a new book on revolutionary Catholic priests in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s and is co-editing a book of essays on Central America at its Bicentennial, to be published in 2023.

Hosts

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Institute for Historical Studies.

Ashley Garcia is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research includes 19th century political history, American communitarianism, and American political thought. Her dissertation, “An American Socialism: The Associationist Movement and Nineteenth Century Political Culture,” explores America’s most popular utopian socialist program: the Associationist movement of the 19th-century. Ashley has also completed a Portfolio in Museum Studies as her secondary PhD field.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Institute for Historical Studies – Monday, November 8, 2021

Notes from the Director

“The Eyes of Texas” is such a controversial school song that last year the President of UT established a committee to investigate the origins of the song and its evolution over time. The Committee concluded that the song did not have explicit, obvious racist origins. Recently in a series of detailed archival studies, Professor Alberto A. Martinez argued that the committee drew too heavily on the testimony of an utterly unreliable witness who participated in the creation of the song. This panel will convene to discuss whether the Presidential Committee got the history of the origins of the song right. ~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Featuring Historians:

• Dr. H. W. Brands
  Professor; Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History
  The University of Texas at Austin
• Dr. Dwonna Naomi Goldstone
  Associate Professor of History, and
  Director, African American Studies Program
  Texas State University
• Dr. Alberto A. Martínez
  Professor of History, and Director, History and Philosophy of Science
  The University of Texas at Austin

Co-Moderators:

• Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
  Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History; and Director, Institute for Historical Studies,
  The University of Texas at Austin
• Dr. Edmund T. Gordon
  Vice Provost for Diversity, Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost; Executive Director of Commemorative and Contextualization Projects; Associate Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies and John L Warfield Center for African and African American Studies,
  The University of Texas at Austin

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Institute for Historical Studies – Wednesday, October 20, 2021

The Harlem Renaissance shaped the ideas and understandings of race in the United States—but also in Mexico. The debates sparked by the New Negro Movement in the 1920s transformed the way artists, writers, and scientists deployed the concepts of race, blackness, nation, and culture—how ideas of race looked, what they sounded like, what they said. Yet these aesthetic and political debates in Harlem were also informed by Mexican ideas and ideas of Mexico, and, in turn, they shaped what would become the postrevolutionary Mexican state. Through the work of Miguel Covarrubias, this paper explores the patchwork of ideas that informed these debates—from painting, science, and writing to jazz and blues, cultural anthropology, and the visual making of the state. It draws a connection between these two distant borderlands: part of modern Mexico was born in Harlem.

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié is a writer, photographer, and doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar and a Contex Doctoral Fellow. His work explores the interconnections between the histories of photography, science, and anthropology. He traces the tensions between the making of ethnography and the development of new visual methods of representing otherness—photography, painting, sketching, and writing. In 2018, nexos awarded his essay “Testigo (in)voluntario: la muerte de Kevin Carter” with the Carlos Pereyra Essay Prize. Learn more about his work at www.rsmoulinie.com and follow him on Twitter at @rsmoulinie.

Respondents:

Dr. Ruben Flores
Associate Professor of History
University of Rochester

Dr. Adela Pineda Franco
Director, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS), and Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Peniel E. Joseph
Professor of History; Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values; and Founding Director, Center for the Study of Race and Democracy
The University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Mauricio Tenorio
Samuel N. Harper Professor of History, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College
The University of Chicago

Read about the IHS Graduate Research Fellows this Year:
https://notevenpast.org/institute-for-historical-studies-race-and-caste-research-theme-2021-22/

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Institute for Historical Studies – Wednesday, October 20, 2021

A Roundtable Inspired by Sumit Guha’s
Tribe and State in Asia Through Twenty-Five Centuries
(Columbia University Press, 2021)

Notes from the Director

Every literate person today will encounter the word “tribe” in many settings. What does this word mean? When and how did its use begin? Is it a good label for any contemporary social organization? Is it relevant for policymakers to think with? Academics have often critiqued its use, but that has not suppressed its ubiquity. Why? In his book, Tribe and State in Asia Through Twenty-Five Centuries, Professor Guha offers answers to all the above. The book starts at the beginning of the Iron Age and looks at both unwritten cultures dominant in the past and the hypertextual world of today. Its four chapters successively analyze the Asian uses of tribe-like categories, European deployment of the term in the age of imperialism, the environments where it flourishes and those it makes and the diversity of tribes across Asia today.

This workshop seeks to redefine the genre of book review by inviting three other distinguished scholars to “think with Guha’s book on the category of tribes” in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Our distinguished guests Brian Delay, Paul Landau, and Christopher Atwood will engage in a conversation with Sumit Guha on the political, cultural and historiographical work that the category tribes has done in various regions of the world, including the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

Author and discussants

Dr. Sumit Guha holds the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professorship in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Educated at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the University of Cambridge, he has taught at St. Stephen’s College, the Delhi School of Economics, Brown University and Rutgers University. Among his numerous books and co-edited volumes he is the author of History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 (University of Washington Press, 2019).

Featured discussants:

Dr. Christopher P. Atwood
Department Chair and Professor, Mongolian and Chinese Frontier & Ethnic History, University of Pennsylvania

“Responding to Sumit Guha’s Tribe and State in Asia through Twenty-Five Centuries is a bit awkward. Sumit makes extensive use of my works, but in the end does not quite agree with my conclusions. Like other ‘anti-tribals’ in my field of Mongolian studies (David Sneath, Lh. Munkh-Erdene), I see no useful role left for ‘tribe’ or ‘tribal’ in history or social science, while Sumit clearly does. So in the same spirit, let me point out ways in which Sumit is definitely right, and we ‘anti-tribals’ wrong, before I go on to profess myself not quite convinced by his arguments. The most important question Sumit gets right is that the term ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal’ seems here to stay. Although ‘barbarian’ or at least ‘feudalism,’ it hasn’t happened even in our own field. And it hasn’t happened because of certain ambiguities in our argument. The evidence for classic clans, avoidance, and anti-state dissidence is rather stronger among the Turks than it is among the Mongols. Our argument could have been, that Inner Asian tribes exist, just more among the Turks than the Mongols. But for reasons good and bad, we have mostly made arguments that the term ‘tribe’ just is not necessary. Not surprisingly, Turcologists have most dismissed our work, insisting that all nomads are tribal, Turk and Mongol alike. Perhaps we should have accepted half a loaf and just argued, yes Turks have tribes, but Mongols don’t. Instead we have gotten no loaf at all: tribes are still used for both. But in the end, the sticking point for me is that I can’t get away from the relational nature of the designation ‘tribe.’ In Sumit’s survey the most powerful and convincing parts come precisely where he treats tribe as a tool in states’ handling of those in relation to, but not fully incorporated, in themselves. That being the case, then I still have deep reservations over any use of tribe’ outside of such a relational context. As ‘minorities’ only exist in relation to ‘majorities,’ so ‘tribals’ exist only in relation to ‘states.'”

Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Director, Institute for Historical Studies, and Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, The University of Texas at Austin

Behetria and the Iberian political ecology of tribe and state in the 16th-century American borderlands
 
The Iberian conquest of America is ungraspable without the ongoing production of knowledge on borderland insurgencies from Parral Chichimec to New Mexico Pueblos to Chilean Mapuches, with a whole gamut in between. I would like to focus on sociological models of borderland insurgencies in the 16th century Spanish empire that culminated with a treatise on political ecology and sociology of state building, namely, Jose de Acosta’s Procuranda Indorum Salute (1588) an immense learned treatise on “conversion” in three types of places and circumstances: decentralized borderlands, “barbarians” (from Mexico to China), and civilized Counter Reformation European societies. Central to Acosta is the notion of political ecology: one changes the place one changes the people. There is a an evolutionary, teleological dimension to this but also an element that might be overlooked in Sumit’s wonderful study of term and theories used by of lay northern European imperial bureaucracies: it is the religious dimension of many of these “European” ideas. There are uncanny resemblances between all state bureaucracies in relationship with the borderland insurgencies, regardless of whether they are western or non-western, lay or religious.

Dr. Brian DeLay
Associate Professor, and Preston Hotchkis Chair in the History of the United States, University of California, Berkeley

“I see three basic contexts in which the term is deployed in North America vis-a-vis Native People, all of which resonate in interesting ways with Sumit’s material from India. The first is as a (usually contemptuous) category in political comparison. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European and Euro-American commentators in North America generally used nation and tribe interchangeably when referring to Indigenous polities. When commentators wanted to denigrate Indigenous polities relative to western states, however, (as in the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution), “tribe” was invoked. Justice Marshall famously characterized “tribes” as “domestic dependent nations.” The purposely diminished sense of the term becomes more common as the power of the settler state  increases across the 19th century. The second use for ’tribe’ is as a legal term. As Sumit describes for India, tribe is obviously still a consequential legal category in the U.S. today. There are 574 federally-recognized “tribes” and 63 state-recognized “tribes,” and those legal designations carry with them very significant political and economic consequences. Third and finally, tribe is a social-science term for a particular kind of socio-political organization. At its most lazy and expansive, it has been deployed to encompass all or nearly all Indigenous societies in North American history. That static and essentializing use fo the term has been rightly tossed aside in most academic writing. But, like Sumit, I think that the term still has diagnostic value. Specifically, we need a term to describe dynamic manifestations of Indigenous political and economic activity that unfold above the level of the family or band but below the level of trans-national (or pan-tribal) confederacy. If we don’t use “tribe” for that purpose, we’ll need an alternative.”

Dr. Sumit Guha
Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professorship in History, The University of Texas at Austin

“I am grateful for the careful reading and interesting comparisons offered by my colleagues. I am especially delighted that my book has connected with world regions that my limitations did not allow me to cover. My purpose throughout the book has been to demystify categories without necessarily casting them aside. Obviously I am working with a model of states making and dissolving tribes along with tribes breaking and making states. Then one must recognize the tribal basis of faiths and the devotees growing into a tribe and I see this as a recurring process in history, not an evolutionary stage. I hope it is evident that I personally prefer the individualistic civic model of citizenship rather than any of those I have discussed in my book. But citizenship too makes the moral demands of solidarity and sacrifice, as the tribe and the empire do. It is in that context, that I have also offered an implicit social psychology of political forms, especially of the tribe. It obviously rejects the binary offered by flatter versions of economics and sociology. The former starts with the premise of atomized individuals making selfish choices; the latter with structures that deny individuals any choices”

Dr. Paul Landau
Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park

“Sumit Guha offers a fascinating history of what may defensibly be termed tribes in Asia. In Africa south of the Sahara, however, in general, it is harder to conceive of such a history without replaying colonial fantasies. That is because “tribe” was an administrative shorthand (woven into certain kinds of public discourse) to serve for all magnitudes of association — so long as a local apparent human diversity obtained. Guha finds a commonality (or a cloud of uses): kin-ordered, mobile, small (1000 to say 10,000), segmentary, clan-based, but in Africa this this was a survival strategy dating from the era of the slave trade and pertaining to terrain (mountains etc. as per Jim Scott). The idea of ethnicity does not clarify things: Pairing Yoruba with Tiv, Ndebele with Tswana, etc. forgets that each “group” had an historical trajectory that registered at different levels of expression making nonsense of any single category. (I will briefly unpack these ethnic names in my five minutes to demonstrate this concretely and why we perhaps should not in my view write a history of tribes in Africa.) It was not as a side effect, but the purpose of ethnic shorthand/tribe as a late colonial administrative fiction to cover up a patriarchal unconcern about borders of group subjects. And yet ethnic identities and tribal identities (apparently universal but not so) developed in urban spaces especially out of this very history of opacity, which deserves committed attention.”

This discussion is part of the IHS History Faculty New Book Series.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.