Superstition – Idolatry – Fetishism: How Early Reformed Protestantism Saw Africans
The “material turn” in the study of religion attributed the scholarly neglect of materiality to a “Protestant bias” that privileged a focus on texts and meanings. The central point was to transcend this bias, that had mutated into a secular form, by deconstructing the hierachical binary of spirit and matter, in which the former was held to be superior to the latter. This deconstruction had a strong, productive impact on the study of religion, first and foremost because it helped identify the dismissal of religious material forms – as “fetishism” or “idolatry” – as an expression of Eurocentric and Protestant superiority claims vis-à-vis peoples claimed to be located on a lower– or even degenerated- stage in the evolution of religion. The call to re-materialize the concepts and methods governing academic research on religion, of course, also had repercussions for the study of Protestantism. Looked at closely, Protestant traditions appeared to have developed a salient religious material culture (one of the central themes of this conference). What remains distinctive, however, is the condescending stance towards material religious forms among practitioners of other religious traditions, whether these were Catholics or so-called “heathens” in Africa. In this lecture, I will situate the importance of the material turn in relation to the construction of Africans as steeped in “superstition”, “idolatry” and “fetishism” in the period around 1700 and beyond, when Protestant thinkers became increasingly aware of, and contributed to, the rise of knowledge about other religions that went hand in hand with European imperial outreach. I will argue that Africans were viewed through the lens of biblical “idolatry” and anti-Catholic polemics, and the material forms employed by them were targets for iconoclasm. Rejecting the hierarachical spirit-matter binary, I will appreciate the “fetish” as a provocative figure that underscores the inextricable materiality of religion, including Protestant traditions,
Birgit Meyer (PhD, 1995) is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she studies religion from a material and postcolonial angle. She directs the research program Religious Matters in an Entangled World and co-directs the collaborative Legba-Dzoka research project.
