Transcript
I want to begin by acknowledging that we are meeting in the traditional enunciated territories of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples and we pay our respects to elders, past, present, and future and to all those who have stewarded the land and water for generations. It has been an immense honor to serve the American Academy of Religion. The exchanges, collaborations, and relationships forged through my participation in the AAR have shaped my formation as a scholar.
One of the most rewarding parts of the work in this past year was the conversations I had with so many of you who shared with me what the AAR has meant for you and what you imagine for its future. These exchanges highlighted for me the unique possibilities that can emerge when such a diverse group of remarkable scholars work together for things we care deeply about beyond our day jobs. And of course, I owe the opportunity to participate in the AAR to many others.
I want to take a moment to recognize the support of the Hispanic Theological Initiative, which made it possible for me and for so many others to become active members of the even as graduate students. Gracias. I am grateful too, to my colleagues and to my dean, David Hampton for their continuing support. And thanks to the many members that lead this organization in program units, standing committees, juries, task forces and more, as well as the members of the board of directors with whom I had the pleasure of working. Thanks to our staff without whom none of this happened, and to our capable and dedicated executive director Alice Hunt.
It's been an honor working with each one of you and it is humbling to speak to you today as part of this ritual of sorts that marks the end of my tenure as president.
I invite you to reflect on the following question: what is the role of the study of religion in times of catastrophe? To post this question is perhaps to presume to know something, not just about catastrophe, but also about time, to imagine that we can define the contours of this moment or even grasp its temporality. I have no such knowledge, but approaching this lecture, this annual ritual of conclusion in times such as these, has led me to ponder the strangeness of time as a force impinging upon our work.
We have been living through a pandemic, the boundaries of which we do not yet know even as the stories of fear, loss, uncertainty, and exhaustion begin to recede from our collective attention. The pandemic revealed too, for many of us, the difficulties of telling time. When did we last meet? Was that a year ago, or three? It is odd to find it so hard to do something as mundane as keeping time even for those of us who are used to telling time by the cities in which the annual meeting is held, like that was in San Diego, I remember.
Our own teaching rhythms have been unsettled by turning to virtual teaching, then back in-person, then virtually for a few weeks, then back. We have quarantined for two weeks, for 10 days, for five. And even if we long to leave the pandemic in the past, what we have learned from it may guide us toward attentiveness as climate change is producing even more profound changes in temporality.
We know the seasons are changing longer summers, and springs in February. We seem to have hundred year storms every five years. There are slow moving food shortages, water toxicity, and species extinctions, as well as swift hurricanes, floods and wildfires.
In January, winter storm Izzy brought freezing temperatures, high winds, snow and ice to the southeast region of the United States. Snow storm Malik brought hurricane level winds and floods to northern Europe. Seven states in Malaysia suffered massive floods. In February, Texas suffered the most significant icing event in its history. In March, a heat wave heated Antarctica reaching up to 70 degrees above normal. India had the hottest month in 122 years. A tropical cyclone killed 50 people in Mozambique. In April, tropical storm Maggie killed more than 120 people in the Philippines. And the list goes on.
We have heard so many of these lists that we may miss the peculiarity of this way of telling time as a procession of catastrophes. Near us and far, they are piling up so fast that it is difficult to hold on to their uniqueness, to honor their impact on specific communities, landscapes and ways of being, to read their marks in religious practices and the people who study them.
Listing them quickly as I just did alerts us to a worldwide pattern, but it also occludes the specificities of place and the communities entangled with them. For those who suffer them directly, catastrophes can create a break in the experience of time. They can rupture the possibility of collective meaning. When people are forced out of the land they held sacred, when they can no longer cultivate the maize or dukkah they need for rituals, when the material conditions that sustained communities are destroyed, the devastation is profound. When the buffaloes were killed, the ceremonies and communal practices of meaning-making were disrupted, which led a Crow Chief, Plenty Coups, to say that after the buffaloes left, nothing else happened. After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, poet Raquel Salas Rivera wrote, "There is no world after the hurricane."
I take these statements seriously as expressions of breaks in the experience of time. Those of us observing the effects of climate change from a relative distance still sense strangeness of time. "This is an unprecedented event." We hear it so often that the meaning of the statement erodes. The main character in Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive describes the experience of disrupted temporality as follows: "Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed and we know it. Somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits, we feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening. Perhaps it is that we sense an absence of future because the present has become too overwhelming. So the future becomes unimaginable." This sense of disrupted temporality then prompts her to assess our ways of knowing: "We haven't understood the exact way we experience time. Our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found new ways of documenting it, we might begin to understand the new way we experience space and time."
Something has changed indeed and our methods for approaching the world, the worlds in which we live and the worlds that we study, have fallen short. Our scholarly concepts and disciplinary structures have been shaped by social political processes that extricate people from their environment, leading us to imagine ourselves as subjects cut off from the specificities of the material contexts in which we live.
Even as I wrote about bodies in Poetics of the Flesh, some of the limitations of my methods eluded me. It took a catastrophe to reveal to me the extent of this disciplinary uprooting. Like many Puerto Rican scholars, I perceived Maria as a rupture in time and it steered for me worries about the future of Puerto Rico, the island that claims me, the future of the Caribbean. Yet this rupture could only be understood in relation to the past as an event in the unceremoniously archived procession of our catastrophes, to use Edouard Glissant's words.
500 years of colonial history in which Puerto Rico has been a laboratory of economic and social experiments have materialized in soil and sea as well as in our flesh. The environmental history of the Caribbean is inseparable from the colonial desires for economic gains and for the power that wealth would grant. As Edward Said observed, to think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them, all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about. And Christianity was implicated in these processes as Luis Rivera-Pagan reminds us.
Who can forget the image of Pope Alexander VI granting the Kings of Castile and Leon and all their descendants, all dominions, cities, camps, places and villages and all rights and jurisdictions and all islands and mainlands found and to be found? Still, taking possession of land is not simply a matter of occupying space. It entailed a new way of understanding and documenting the world as well as a transformation of soil, water, entire ecosystems and human lives.
Colonialism creates zones of vulnerability that make climate change all the more catastrophic. This is all too evident and worth repeating. But reframing our ways of knowing the world requires also moving beyond generalizations. If colonialism extricated nature from culture, Glissant argues, we must now attempt to reestablish those links. To do so, he invited readers to return to the point of entanglement, which I interpret here as returning to those moments in which we lost a sense of belonging to the earth and replaced it with flat ideas of territory and the human.
The point of entanglement I returned to was the 16th century Caribbean, and I'll be sharing some of its stories with you as I invite you to think of other points of entanglement. The Tainos or Arawak, the native peoples of the Caribbean were the first to experience the sudden catastrophe brought about by Spanish conquest of America. They were enslaved to extract gold. When the amounts of gold extracted were deemed insufficient to satisfy the crown's expected remittances, the Arawak themselves became the bounty, shipped to Spain to be sold for profits. They were brutally punished for failing to pay established tributes and executed when they rebelled.
They suffered epidemics from pathogens carried by the newcomers, smallpox, yellow fever and malaria. Some managed to escape to the mountains or to islands not yet colonized, but most died at an astounding speed. The Taino population of Puerto Rico was decimated just a decade after Juan Ponce de Leon set foot on the island in 1508. "Who of those born in future centuries will believe this?" wrote Bartolome de las Casas. "I myself am writing this and saw it and know most about it, can hardly believe that such was possible."
As the Arawak population was decimated, the Spaniards brought African captives to provide enslave labor for gold and agriculture. Cataclysm would now fall on them and their descendants. Slavery in the Caribbean continued into the 1800s. So the catastrophe that seemed so sudden, so unbelievable to Las Casas, lasted for centuries. Enslaved peoples and their descendants established new links to the Caribbean. "They peopled the landscape with gods and spirits, with demons and poppies, with all the rich panoply of human imagination," Sylvia Wynter writes. Europeans also kept coming, as did Chinese and Indian laborers. New empires displaced old ones and the demography of the Caribbean, as well as its culture and its religions were changed irreversibly.
This human catastrophe figured prominently in the historical memory of the Caribbean. But another dimension of this history, the extraordinary environmental changes that colonialism produced, is mostly absent from the stories we tell about ourselves. Our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott expressed the entanglement of this history of human and environmental catastrophe as follows: the rain lost its reason and behaved with no sense at all. What had angered the rain and made the sea foam? Seven seas would talk bewilderingly that man was an endangered species now, a specter just like the Arawak or the egret or parrots screaming in terror when man approached. And that once men were satisfied destroying men, they would move on to nature.
Just imagine the environmental impact of all the things that colonialism brought to the islands. European men with their myth and guns, chickpeas, citrus trees, sugar cane, wheats, rats and viruses, cattle and swine trampling land used to the light touch of birds and iguanas. Imagine all the products necessary to sustain the lives of voracious conquering men. Then the extraction from the islands of gold and pineapple and wood and Indigenous people.
These processes would have lasting effect on the material environment and they would change our ways of understanding the world. The Tainos had practiced multi-crop farming, periodically moving their plots, their conucos, which allowed the soil to replenish. Colonialism destroyed not just the conucos, but also the social material ties between peoples and islands, violently tearing them away from the soil. This uprooting, this destierro, gave way to forms of dispossession and displacement that continue to this day. It also gave way to forms of knowledge that uproot people from the social material environments.
After mining exhausted gold reserves, the colonizers turned their efforts to commercial agriculture, especially sugar cane. Cultivation of sugar cane entailed deforestation on a massive scale, and the displacement of people from land use for sustenance agriculture. Forests were cleared to plant cane, for timber to build processing facilities, for fuel for boiling raw juice. The impact was visible in the islands, but as the scale of production grew, the plantation assemblage extended globally. Growers imported captives from Africa for slave labor, wheat from New Orleans, and codfish from Newfoundland to feed enslaved peoples. They brought cotton for the clothing. Some islands imported timber from Louisiana and from New England where I now live.
This history shaped the Caribbean materially, religiously, culturally. But it is not just a local history. Colonialism, environmental devastation, and genocide reshaped local ecologies around the world, in the Canary Islands and the Banda Islands in the Indian Ocean, in New Amsterdam and new Spain, each in distinct ways that married their own narratives. And as the process moved from one place to another, it wove the fabric of racial capitalism. "Nature as land, conceivable only in terms of property, laid bare of myth, custom, tradition," to cite Wynter again. Their legacies shape our world. I am suggesting that we need to return to such points of entanglement to understand what is happening, what has been happening to our experience of space and time, and to begin transforming our ways of documenting and engaging the world. Tracking the linked paths of ecology, extraction, dispossession, and forced relocation requires methods that can incorporate different temporal and spatial scales, including the long histories of extractivism as well as attending to the communities, even the small communities, that suffered them.
We need to learn from other ways of thinking about and inhabiting time. As Bolivian Aymara scholar Sylvia Rivera Cusisanqui suggests, a linear vision of history occludes the regression and progression, the repetition or overcoming of the past that is at play at each juncture. Old stories reverberate in the present, like when the river of [inaudible 00:28:22] turned into blood or when the forests were devastated for sugar.
Perhaps if we found new ways of documenting it, we might begin to understand our present futures. Histories of colonial and racial devastation teaches that environmental futures are linked to our pasts. We may describe them as ancestral catastrophes, as Elizabeth Povinelli suggests. Indeed, it is hard to avoid a sense of premonition. Or is it memory? When I learned that the technologies that are supposed to give us hope, like the solar panels and batteries that should save us from fossil fuel, require more extraction from native lands, entrepreneurs of green energy following old colonial paths for nickel to New Caldonia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Madagascar. For antimony to the Salmon River Mountains in Idaho. For lithium to El Salar de Uyuni, high in the Andes in Bolivia, a sacred site for the Indigenous Uru people.
Colonialism and racial capitalism always have sacrifice zones. Will we hear the echoes of older footsteps as these entrepreneurs reactivate colonial paths of extraction? The parrots screaming in terror all over again. Time and again, communities that experience the onslaught of colonialism and racial capitalism have warned of the environmental effects of such practices. Many of their voices are lost from the archive. Others are still calling on us. We know in 1642, Miantonomoh, the chief of Narraganset people of New England warned, "We shall all be gone shortly for you know our plains were full of deer and also our woods, and our calfs full of fish and foul. But the English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass and with axes fill the trees. Their cows and horses eat the grass and their hogs spoil our clam beds and we shall all be starved."
In 1846, formerly enslaved Louis Clark alluded to this entanglement of slavery and environmental devastation when he warned that slavery curses the soil as much as it harms people and animals. Similar warnings have been repeated for as long as there has been colonialism, and they still are today. But the colonial divide makes some of the prophetic warnings almost inaudible.
Puerto Rican poet, Anna Portnoy Brimmer calls attention to this persistent silencing by returning to the 19th century philosophical question. If a tree falls in an island where there are no human beings, would there be a sound? And then she listens for the voices of trees, the distinct growl of the flamboyan, the starfruit, the plantain, and then warns to not speak of trees now. When the trees have spoken, it is the deadliest of silences. And as the trees cry out, so does a people. And this is the truth that the poem utters as its own cry, that if a people fall in an island and the world is around to hear it, we make a sound. But only the ocean responds.
Still against all odds, communities continue to recreate links between nature and culture. New versions of old conucos are still being planted. Many communities persist in their efforts to protect land and water, and to reimagine myths, rights and tradition. These voices past and present call us to active listening, and I hope they prompt us all to support works that seek to amplify the voices muffled by our grand discourses. Listening for and retelling stories of ancestral catastrophes is to take responsibilities for the stories we tell and for the stories we quickly forget.
In times of climate change, it is easy to turn to readily available homogenizing visions of the world at the expense of the particularity of places. It is tempting to rush past the long histories of catastrophe to focus on present threats. But we need a more capacious sense of collectivity that can only emerge when we are willing to honor our stories and tell the truth about injustices that have shaped both environmental devastation and responses to it. A world of our many worlds.
This requires, I think, remaining involved in the ongoing process of revising our language, being mindful of how many of the terms we use to describe the world hide hierarchies of power under the veil of universality. Words like America, planet, humanity. We need language and concepts that help us perceive the specificities of places and the communities entangled with them, and to relearn how projects of decolonization, dismantling racism, and environmentalism are tangled like Incan quipus.
What is the role of the study of religion in times of catastrophe when the present becomes overwhelming and the future unimaginable? The program for this meeting shows the many ways in which AAR members bring the tools of our discipline to bear on this pressing question. You have organized sessions and papers and topics such as catastrophe and mourning, human nature and human disasters, Indigenous ecologies, climate change, apocalypse.
You have analyzed economies and ontologies of extraction, cosmologies and rituals of relating to the earth, climate justice and racism, environmentalism, virtual art and science fiction, migration and food sovereignty, trauma and hope. Annual meetings compress in a few days along long corridors a dizzying array of approaches and themes. These discussions strengthen our work and they also concretize the structure of our collective endeavor. By sharing terms, concepts, and modalities of research, we participate in shaping the guild and the study of religion.
Still AAR offers us more. A unique space to grapple with challenges that can only be addressed collectively, such as transforming the very tools of our discipline, the methods we use, the categories that structure our areas, and even the language we share. It offers us an opportunity to experiment with forms of collective engagement. The question for us is what configurations of this collective that is the AAR would allow us to heal the epistemic fractures we have inherited between humans and particular ecologies, between time and place, between the geopolitical and the ecological.
How should we structure the vibrant conversations that take place at AAR meetings to cultivate intellectual diversity that is more like sustainable conucos than a series of monocultural plots? Creating such ecologies of knowledge entails cultivating together different areas of inquiry, traditions of environmentalism, histories of colonialism, analyses of ongoing racial structuring of society, patterns of dispossession and displacement, intentionally opening spaces to learn from the hard-earned wisdom of those who have long lived in a world not built for them, like people with disabilities and migrants. From such a sense of collectivity, we might begin to address big questions. How to understand time when regularity is eroding? How to deepen our sense of place when the scope of the crisis extends so wide? How to be human in times such as these?
We may even begin to imagine other futures. The vision of environmentalism that can emerge from such intentionally structured collective work would be quite different from those promoted by nations, corporations and institutions enchanted by global power, and it is this rich ecological vision that the AAR can offer the broader public. The AAR has taken the first steps in a process of self-reflection in which we have sought to learn about who we are and reassess our goals and needs. Many of you have already participated in this process, and next year each of you will be making concrete decisions about how to structure our work together.
It is my hope that we see this as an opportunity to bring our collective wisdom to bear on this process of imagining new possibilities for collective engagement. If we can cultivate a dynamic collectivity where all of our members can find space to flourish and contribute to our vision, I am confident that we can transform the study of religion to meet the challenges of our times. Thank you.