Richard Werbner (2011) Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana number eleven in the series Anthropology of Christianity edited by Joel Robbins.
Berkeley, California and London, UK, University of California Press, Softcover edition, 269 pages, with maps, 13 photographic plates, detailed index and a free DVD, Holy Hustlers, 53 minutes long, P220. ISBN 978-0-520-26854-8. Available at Books Botswana at the University of Botswana.
Richard Werbner is Emeritus Professor in African Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Holy Hustlers is his latest study focusing on the charismatic Christian reformation in Botswana as exemplified by the Eloyi, an Apostolic faith-healing church in Gaborone. Werbner is famous in Botswana for his Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana (2001) a public anthropology of Kalanga elites. An earlier book on Zimbabwe, Tears of the Dead: the social biography of an African family (1992) also was quite controversial.
Werbner is fluent in Setswana and Kalanga. He loves languages and the hidden meanings that lie in words, the different levels of reality that are revealed as one probes deeper into a culture and a complex situation. He becomes excited at discovering their subtitles and delights in paradoxes. He was in Gaborone in June showing the DVD that accompanies his book and discussing it with the various audiences.
What Werbner has written about and captured in his 53-minute DVD that is also being distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, is transparent, out in the open, and there is nothing secret about it. Yet it is very controversial both in Botswana and elsewhere. He followed various healing sessions over nine months.
He is keenly aware of the ambiguity, the uncertainty of meaning, in what he has written about and captured in the footage. His approach was one of "non-preconception". He was open to learn and trust what he was observing and recording. His is a new view of faith healing in practice.
What has made this combined work more controversial is that the Eloyi has been caught up in conflict, schism, and legal attacks. The conflicts often involve a loss of faith in the process of healing by the prophets. They also can be generational.
The young prophets have come from unusual backgrounds and outsiders may view them as "charlatans", uneducated dropouts, opportunists who are in it for the material advantages, prestige and power, and the way they are perceived by women as attractive. It is this latter that has led to issues of paternity and allegations of fornication with underage girls.
The younger generation has been open to innovation that the older generation has not fully accepted. One such example was the creation of a membership form, including a [photograph, marked by a stamp of the church, and with each member having their own file.
In the past the Eloyi used to sacrifice animals only at night. Now one of the bishops has started sacrifices during the day, an innovation that town dweller, who prefer not to go out at night, have welcomed. But the father "encourages Apostolic to come to him for sacrifice at the village headquarters, rather than to his son in the city.
When it comes to the paperwork and procedures, he conveys they go against his personal, immediate encounter with a suffering other in the presence of the Holy Spirit" (page 103).
The young prophets have also taken to issuing "prescriptions" where they write down a list of required actions to be followed by the supplement. For example, the wife of Werbner's assistant was instructed to: bathe while fir red candles burned around her; to seal all her joints with the image of the moon; to tie her bed with a red cord and also cords of many colours crossed; to be prayed over while swaddled in a red cord and under tapers; bathed with boiled river water; to keep river water in a bottle as a pillow; and to tie her loins with a doubled many-coloured cord. Perhaps the most dramatic change has been in the creation by the young prophets of new types of robes and new caps in new colours and with new symbols.
The son has started to rival the father. Declared an archbishop, he now wants to "free his church not only of his father's authority but of his father's heavenly ranking of charisma" (page 104). Sheds are built as churches.
When one collapses in a gale, it is like a divine revelation, because one of the young prophets a few days before had predicted the wind. A new one is quickly built. "The church contains holiness with its walls". The Apostolics who participate fully in an all night service, must not come and go. There are links between these practices and the older traditions in southern Africa of ritual healing.
Clapping, ringing bells, beating tambourines to cry out to the Almighty, and the loud singing, are all part of the service, the process, the healing. Moved with the Spirit, people will rise and sway, vibrate and begin to dance.
Prayers are hummed, the people are cared for and a process of healing occurs. In religious terms they are, "Transfigured by the spirit". This is made possible by their total involvement in voice, hands and "the very movement of their bodies".
Werbner believes his work also accentuates the "cross-cultural appreciation of empathy. Given the importance of vicarious experience as divine in Christian passion, one might expect a high regard for empathy in the anthropology of Christianity and other Christian studies" (page 114). In talking about his work he make parallels, particularly to the period of the Protestant rebellion in the mid-1600s in England, when groups like the religious Society of Friends (Quakers) mushroomed, who believed that divine inspiration could be communicated directly from a supreme being to an individual without the intermediary of a pastor, preacher or Pope. They trembled at the word of the Lord; yet they then went on to preach, George Fox starting in 1647 about their new beliefs, and were willing to go to prison rather than swear allegiance to the crown, or to take an oath, or to take up arms. He asks, is not what the Eloyi prophets are doing similar what happened during Cromwell's Republic in England?
Werbner says, "When the prophets diagnose, treat and exorcise for their patients, they wage a spiritual war of good and evil and feel their patients' pain in their own bodies. Beauty beckons God, in their view, and they whirl in ecstasy, while dressed in lavish robes, for the glory of God.
But beyond the empathy and compassion, which they express, they hustle and shock. Pushing impatiently, they jostle or even batter their patients emotionally with fear of hidden malice, cunning and entrapment. They impose their own vision of boitsaanape, of occult expertise, of deceptive appearances and dangers in the familiar world of belonging".
He writes, "The unemployed young men of Eloyi gloss Christianity in the light of their very different experience - they impose their charismatic understandings of the human condition according to masculine street smarts" (page 115). One says in the film, "They can be healed by faith ... I dance with grace ... I show compassion ... our crystal ball is our transformer, it calls all the gifts for us". The film includes a sequence of cleansing and healing of a house, with the ultimate revelation, the finding of a snake. The prophets are both holy and hustlers "who swing between extremes". One participant at the seminar noted that the Eloyi should not be judged negatively because, "After all they are healing and not bewitching".
It is impossible in a short, general review, to do full justice to both the book and the DVD. I can only suggest that you get both, read and watch and come to your own conclusions.
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment