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2. A Culture of Popular Catholicism
- University of California Press
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60 Missionary Christianity of all varieties brings distinctive notions of divinity and new monopolies of mediation that demand a radical reorganization of existing religiosity. As they consolidated their mission in nineteenth-century colonial southern India, Jesuits brought new religious symbols, a plethora of divine beings including the saints, and complex notions of worship.1 They also tried to discipline religious boundaries in an unprecedented way. But rigorous prohibitions and punishments could not possibly isolate Tamil Catholics from existing modes of religious thought and feeling. Lived Catholicism would involve imaginaries, dispositions, attitudes, and modes of signification continuous with non-Christian neighbors. Where Church interpretations of sin or suffering, sacramental religion, or the priestly monopoly of divine mediation were inadequate to the range of religious needs, there would be conceptual, semeiotic, or ritual adaptation or innovation. This chapter examines several ways in which Catholic practice was informed by indigenous semiotics and reasoning. Devotional or healing practices, for example, allude to hybridized concepts of divinity and a tendency to shift from a metaphorical to an indexical relationship between sacred ideas/qualities and material things, from symbol to substance, analogy to materiality. These mark a resistance to the separation of the religious and the cultural in Nobili’s treatises so as to Brahmanize Christianity, and a departure from modern-day Catholic “inculturation,” which locates culture in the adaptable signifier rather than the mode of signification. At the same time, innovation and creativity driven by varied urgent social projects of healing, protection, or recognition defy any singular ethnographic representation of Tamil Catholic tradition. 2 A Culture of Popular Catholicism A Culture of Popular Catholicism 61 While a strong Tamil cultural thread interwoven with European Catholic traditions speaks of “continuity” in Robbins’s (2007) terms, Jesuit Catholicism (especially from the nineteenth century) was forcefully disjunctive. Missionaries communicated radical change: new moral codes—in Foucault’s (1990, 1977) terms, new “modes of subjection” and “self-forming activity” and a new “telos” (Robbins 2004a, 216–19)—and the denunciation of non-Christian religion. The challenge is to see how these demands were conceived in indigenous as much as missionary terms—that is, to identify the ways in which Catholic converts both represented and reconciled the tension between their experience as inheritors of a cultural tradition and the demands of global Catholicism. The structure of this chapter is given by two problematics. The first is the historical question of how and with what consequences Jesuit missionaries communicated their version of Catholicism in rural Tamil Nadu. The chapter begins with an account of the French priests in the late nineteenth century and the ideas of Christian religion, moral personhood, and interiority that they sought to impose, and the type of authority they tried to deploy. This involves looking at the “boundary work” through which these missionaries attempted to consolidate the realm of Tamil Catholicism against the pitfalls of surrounding paganism and superstition. The chapter will argue that Jesuit missionary religious discipline not only challenged existing notions of person and agency, but also provoked resistance manifest as popular heterodox cults with their own distinctive synthesis of Christian and Tamil modes of religiosity. These mostly focused on spirit possession—which, I argue, provides a counterpart to the missionary discipline of confession. We will see in particular how a Jesuit discourse on confession and Communion that stressed autonomous moral persons whose eternal future is shaped by the internal struggle with sin (see Mauss 1985) existed alongside a quite different concept of persons, agency, sin, and ways of dealing with misfortune that was enacted in the peripheral discourse of possession-exorcism at certain saint shrines. These involved a south Indian conception of the person-body with fluid boundaries, invaded by social, spiritual, and environmental forces that come to be objectified within the body (Osella and Osella 1996, 1999; Daniel 1984). In order to further understand these cults, the chapter turns to contemporary Catholic cults of possession, where, I will argue, the missionary teachings on pagan religion and on the dangers of human passion are still found in mimetic parallel. The tension between confession and possession will be introduced, then, as one dynamic in the historical production of Tamil Catholicism (cf. Županov 2008). The second problematic concerns how exogenous religious figures—including the saints and the Virgin Mary—introduced by Jesuits and redirecting popular religiosity to Christian rather than pagan objects were organized by an existing structure of representations. Catholic saints and sainthood will be viewed in [3.237.91.98] Project MUSE (2024-03...