Are you what you believe? Some thoughts on Ornamentalism and religion

Though well aware of the process of “othering” which often characterised imperial actions, imaginings and writings, I have often been struck by the various types of engagement by which Britons sought to make connections with their imperial “others.” I was therefore intrigued to read David Cannadine’s declaration in Ornamentalism that the British empire “was at least as much (perhaps more?) about the replication of sameness and similarities originating from home as it was about the insistence on difference and dissimilarities originating from overseas.” ¹ Cannadine explained that empire was often about the creation of affinities, and during a decade of research on British humanitarianism, I had often lamented the relative absence of scholarship which took connection-building seriously as an imperial project. Cannadine, quite rightly, emphasised the need to recover “the world-view and social presuppositions of those who dominated and ruled the empire, and also of those followers and supporters who went along with it in Britain and overseas.” ² The second part of this statement impressed me even more than the first. Cannadine is talking about the need to take the subject peoples of empire seriously as active agents in the making of their own histories. This approach, standard fare in the area studies movements of the 1960s and 1970s, was eclipsed more recently by a preoccupation (mainly in the western academy) with western power as expressed through hegemonic structures such as colonial discourse. A range of theories described as “postcolonial” often see these structures as all-powerful, rendering the subject of empire helpless to act outside them, and therefore doomed to take them as their ultimate reference point whether for acceptance, resistance or modification. Although historians of empire usually prefer a more nuanced approach to the complex problem of agency, they have become increasingly marginalised in the burgeoning field of “empire studies” where they are vastly outnumbered by literary and social science scholars. This development is extremely exciting, demonstrating the fact that the fundamental importance of imperial history has been ignored for too long outside history and political science departments. The recent involvement of a range of disciplines new to the field can only be a strength in the long run. In the meantime, however, Cannadine has much of value to say about the importance of historical context, and of the challenge posed to any theory that claims to unveil some incontestable truth about the past. For him, as for most historians of empire, imperialism was a complicated series of projects. Imperial racism was undeniable, but so was empire’s preoccupation with status and hierarchy: a preoccupation which many non-European imperial subjects shared. ³

I have been working recently on British missionary ethnography in the south Pacific, and struggling to find the best way of theorising the constant tension between alterity and universalism in missionary writings, or, to put it another way, between “othering” and “brothering.” Finding the blunt instrument of colonial discourse theory unsatisfactory, I had decided to put the tension itself at the centre of attention. It seemed to me that recent postcolonial approaches were badly hampered by their materialism: the reduction of complex historical processes to structures (literary or otherwise). This materialism allowed missionary beliefs to be deconstructed as apologetics for capitalism, colonialism or racism, and although this situation was much preferable to uncritical hagiography, it seemed to me that it did not advance us much beyond the traditional marxian approach to religion as superstructure. In other words, despite its revelations about the way that language constructs reality, colonial discourse theory has actually been very conservative in its treatment of religion. I wondered what would happen if religious belief could be theorised as belief (however embroiled in all sorts of material conditions) and that what was really going on in mission ethnography was in fact a paradox created by belief itself. Mission beliefs required a mutually sustaining and deeply frustrating combination of spiritual alterity (heathen in need of the gospel) and universalism (equality before God). Both were essential parts of mission. To explain the universalism away as a distraction from structures of colonial discourse, as some Pacific scholars have...