The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today (review)

In the post September 11 United States, the terms apocalyptic and millennial are often invoked in the context of terrorist threat from the "outside." Numerous media discussions have employed these terms, already made familiar to Americans as a result of Y2K and other warnings surrounding the turn of the millennium, to explain the attacks on the World Trade Center. Unfortunately, explanation too often goes no further than a facile application of long misunderstood labels. Media characterizations risk a caricatured effect. Apocalyptic and millennial become synonymous with "the enemy," a shadowy figure who comes across as seized by irrational hatred of all that is good.

It is in this context of heightened fear and confusion about apocalyptic belief that James Faubion's new book will necessarily be read. The events and aftermath of September 11 create unique pressure on a work written prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and focused around, though not expressly on, that earlier, equally momentous and confusing event now simply known as Waco. While Faubion's efforts to correct dismissive, knee-jerk responses to millennialism are more than ever warranted, The Shadows and Lights of Waco will strike many as too academic to reach the wide audiences his grasp of the issues deserves. He is aware that his decision to engage substantially with issues of anthropological methodology and philosophical conceptualization makes for dense prose, stating in his introductory remarks that the complexity of his text is "inescapable" because it is a "reflection of the complexity of the topic, the theme, the phenomena I address" (xiii). Although Faubion is not to be faulted for opting to write for a more scholarly and theory-versed audience, and he is certainly not responsible for post-September 11 shifts in attention; in light of the times, the book comes across as something of a missed opportunity to reach a wider audience.

More pertinent to the point of the book's own stipulated aims are questions regarding whether Faubion's complexity duly illuminates his topic for this narrower audience, most likely consisting of poststructuralist anthropologists, Foucauldian analysts, and scholars of millennial thought, and whether the work fulfills the promise of elucidation implied by its subtitle, Millennialism Today. In my judgment—and to further carry forward his title's metaphors of light and shadow—it does so at times in brilliant flashes. At other times, however, lucidity is overshadowed by divertingly esoteric passages that obscure rather than clarify contemporary millennialism in its elastic yet identifiable expression and practice. I do not attribute this tendency to the book's genealogical aims. Drawing on Foucault, genealogy is an intricate telling of frequently ignored or covered-up and contradictory historical details. Much of what Faubion accomplishes is genealogy at its best, as is befitting the editor of volumes II and III of the Essential Works of Foucault series. My criticism is when traditional intellectual history supplants genealogical investigation without acknowledging it. One of several such text-bound examples occurs in a relatively abstruse twenty-page discussion of arguments by Vico, Herder, Kant, and Schleiermacher, variously including typology, national reason, and the messianic movement known as Sabbatianism, that is then oddly summarized with the words "So this is our history" (182). I too think that the apparatuses of dominant truth in modern history have labeled and categorized millennialism as irrational and pathological, but it is too wide a leap of faith to correlate these thinkers with mainstream practices.

The innovative form of the book is partly responsible for its mixed effect. Throughout, Faubion draws on what he identifies as "three modulations of voice." One of these is designated in the text in Henry Adams third person style as "the anthropologist." Another is that of his "principal interlocutor," Amo Paul Bishop Roden, a woman whose words from interviews and her own writings appear throughout the text in italics. The book is dedicated to her, and rightly so, since she is central...