Abstract
Reviewed by John Docker , The University of Sydney, Australia
Christina Petterson presents those of us who wrestle with the intersections of colonialism and religion with a very challenging book: one which is independently minded and theoretically and historiographically sophisticated. The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter centers itself in Greenlandic history yet is comparative in its scope, referring to other, even distant, colonial situations around the world, including indigenous anti-colonial thinking about sovereignty in Australia and Jean and John Comoroff’s anthropological theories concerning missionary practices in South Africa. Petterson is refreshingly unafraid to challenge influential intellectual approaches, especially the postcolonial theory of Edward Said and Homi Bhabhi, though I will have to register some disagreement here.
The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter crafts a powerful argument drawing on Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1977–78. Foucault’s observations on Christian pastoral power provide its theoretical framework, that governmentality working through missionary ideas and practices established Danish colonial practices, totally restructuring Greenlandic society in terms of a sense of self, gender, race, and ethnicity. However, the book introduces a caveat about Foucault’s conceptualization of European religious history. In particular, Foucault’s “predominantly Roman-Catholic focus” (pp. 11, 73) is supplemented by an evocation of the distinctiveness of Danish Lutheran Protestantism, bearing on the kind of colonization perpetrated on the Greenlandic Inuit from early in the 18th century onwards.
Petterson sketches an interesting contrast between Roman-Catholic and Protestant histories in Europe: with the Reformation, the figure of the Virgin Mary was excluded from the divine order, the godhead was conceived as solely masculine, and women were now associated with superstition, papist ritual, and sorcery, leading to accusations of and convictions for witchcraft in the centuries following the Reformation (p. 51). All power, and all rationality, were now invested in the man as the head of the family (pp. 53, 69). His unquestioned authority replaced the Catholic pope as a reference point, just as the Roman-Catholic confessional was replaced by the Protestant catechism. These processes enabled the “Protestant subjectification process” in both Lutheran Denmark and its colonialization of Greenland. Because of the centrality of scripture in Protestant theology and missionary activities, reading and writing were important in the colonial formation of a Greenlandic intelligentsia, the catechists who are featured in the narrative of Petterson’s book (pp. 11, 73).
In the view of The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter, however, understanding “subjectification” in Greenlandic history has been impeded by a “focus on hybridity” (p. 7) in contemporary postcolonial theory. What the book opposes is a postcolonial perspective that celebrates hybridity as an always positive historical force that supposedly destabilizes the fixed racial and ethnic categories and hierarchies of colonialism. By contrast, the Danish missionaries in the 18th century established hybridity as the key vector of an overwhelmingly successful colonization, creating an elite of Greenlanders who were the product of marriages between Danish men and Greenlandic women. These men became the catechists, educated in reading and writing, who assisted the Danish Lutheran missionaries and were promoted as models for Greenlandic society and family life for others to emulate (pp. 7–8).
The book has postcolonial theory in its sights, critiquing it in a number of ways, including its occlusion of class: “One of my main quarrels with postcolonial theory (in particular Edward Said and Homi K Bhabha) is the general failure to address questions of class” (p. 131). Homi Bhabha is singled out for particularly harsh criticism. Petterson builds on the well-known critiques of Bhahba made in the 1990s by Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik (in relation to India), by comparing the colonial subjectivity of the Greenlandic catechists to the “postcolonial subjectivity” of postcolonial critics such as Bhabha. For Petterson, both groups were and are intelligentsias who held and hold a “privileged place within the overall social structure,” privileged by education, income, and living conditions. In the case of the postcolonial critics, their “subjectivity” is firmly tied to the “upper middle class,” of which Bhabha is a “product” (p. 132). For both groups, in historic Greenland and modern India, hybridity expresses their class position, caught between their colonial background and ambivalence towards a colonial power. The book is keen to emphasize this point: “hybridity is conceptualized within relations determined by particular material conditions” (p. 132).
The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter invokes the importance of Marx on class as an alternative to postcolonial theory, referring readers to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (pp. 133–134). I find curious this choice of The Eighteenth Brumaire, and will return to it later when discussing Said.
I admire The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter for its independence and the challenges it throws out to postcolonial theory, not the least its postsecular attention to the religious dimensions of European colonialism. The book’s Introduction observes, for example, the “tendency in the reception of Foucault’s work to bypass pastoral power and its techniques, which holds an extremely pivotal position within Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality” (p. 10). The book amply redresses this neglect.
I do have critical questions to ask. As an overall argument with totalizing ambitions, I think The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter embraces Foucault at his determinist wintry worst, his theory of governmentality, that is, “subjectification” (pp. 10–12). Subjectification is a highly functionalist term; it assumes its own answer that the individual is always subject to power – in the case of Greenland, to Lutheran ideology. My own preference is for the notion of consciousness, or historical consciousness, where the character of consciousness is an open question. There is always the possibility of consciousness being conflicted, contradictory, or fragmented, and therefore, the possibility of dissidence, self-questioning, and transformation. The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter, however, views any kind of dissent through a bleak Foucauldian prism, in which dissent only leads to further consolidation of power. The book discusses a major dissenting movement of the late 18th century, the Habakuk heresy (p. 18), held by the missionaries to be an “unauthorized Greenlandic appropriation of Christianity,” involving a female visionary, Mary Magdalene, who became “the archetype of all Greenlandic charismatic movements and their followers” (p. 21). However, in the book’s argument, the “Habakuk movement facilitated the extension of colonial power through its opposition” (p. 95). Power and subjectification form an unbreakable circle.
The book argues that the catechist elite in Greenland, in being taught writing, then became subject to writing’s function in a colonial society, which in Foucault’s terms is subjectification “as a technology of self” that “dovetails with the disciplining strategies of the colonial administration” (p. 96). Writing, then, can never be open to refractory, multiple, and multivalent readings. The book refers to a study by Penny Van Toorn (2006) concerning the entry of writing and literacy into Indigenous life worlds in Australia, focusing on the subversive use of “writing by Aboriginal agents in the course of colonial history” (p. 107). Petterson, however, does not take up Van Toorn’s challenge in relation to Greenlandic history; instead, she simply notes that “subversive uses of writing” are “not the object of my analysis,” which is to study how the catechists used writing as a kind of power “to construct Greenlandic society” (p. 108).
We might note here that at other times, Foucault was interested in agency, as in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, where he admires the techniques of self-fashioning cultivated by the Stoics.
I have my doubts about the critique of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha and by extension of postcolonial theory as such. Surprisingly, apart from a parenthetic coupling of Said with Bhabha, there is no analysis at all of Said in the book. In the Conclusion, The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter claims far too sweepingly that postcolonial theory “rests on a celebration of the hybrid as the ambivalent subject-position of postcolonial discourse” (p. 184). But if such criticism might be held to apply to Bhabha, it certainly cannot be said of Said, the author of Orientalism. He does not center his writings on the notion of hybridity: think, for example, of his essay pondering the last part of Exodus, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: a Canaanite reading,” or historical investigations such as The Question of Palestine, or his collaborative work with the photographer Jean Mohr After the Last Sky. Over and over he drew attention to his being a Palestinian in exile, as in Out of Place: A Memoir.
The book tells us that Bhabha’s notion of “hybridity is conceptualized within relations determined by particular material conditions,” those “characteristic of the elite or bourgeois postcolonial condition” (p. 132) in India. Here, I perceive a species of historicism that we can only understand ideas in terms of the specific historical situation of their creation, with the further implication that ideas do not travel beyond particular borders, contexts, and class origins. But of course that is what ideas do: for example, the ideas of scripture are not bound to its origin in the ancient Middle East. And is it so easy to specify a particular class position that supposedly directs and encloses an author’s ideas? In opposing Bhabha, The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter turns to Marx, yet Marx’s class position is certainly not easy to locate: a German exile in London, of upper middle class professional background, living in straitened circumstances, supported by Engels the factory owner. The book then muses that if we turn to class relations within Greenlandic history, “the picture becomes slightly more complex than what Marx’s categories allow” (p. 133). It invokes The Eighteenth Brumaire at this point, perhaps the most carnivalesque of all Marx’s texts and very much admired by Edward Said in his The World, the Text, and the Critic.
The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter makes a strong point about how the Danish Protestants deployed hybridity as a strategy in their colonization of Greenland. But this does not mean that the idea of hybridity, and the associated idea of Mestizo, cannot illuminate other historical situations. For example, in his book, The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation, the cultural theorist Ned Curthoys (2013: 54–56) writes of the poet Heinrich Heine, exiled from Germany in France, that his “sympathies” were with the “brilliant, pluralist history of the golden age of Moorish Spain” as a culture of tolerance, a convivencia of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, that challenged European colonialism and its associated Christian hubris and national chauvinisms: “Heine’s Sephardi poetics of memory, his profound sympathy towards Judaism’s succor in Arab lands and the experience of both Moors and Jews at the hands of the Catholic Inquisition, scandalously celebrates the hybridity of Mestizo cultures.” What we could say is that hybridity may sometimes serve, and at other times disturb, power; it remains an open historical question.
A final note: there is an interesting affinity between The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter and Said in terms of method. In our Is History Fiction?, Ann Curthoys and I point out that in the introduction to Orientalism, Said wished to modify Foucault’s impersonal approach to the history of ideas by focusing on the contribution to the making of ideas and discourses by particular intellectual personalities (Ann Curthoys and John Docker, 2015: 10). Such is Christina Petterson’s approach in her very lively book. Indeed the book at times is quite novelistic in its creation of historical characters: Niels Hveyssel, the missionary; Mary Magdalene, the visionary, and, at an angle to the focus on the conforming catechists, the writer, and scribe, Peter Gundel, who suffers from “tuberculosis and gout,” is unable to hunt, instead writes novels and letters, prepares a translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and “died on 8 March 1931 at the age of 36” (pp. 125–126). There is a tension in The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter between such creation of characters, even the refractory Gundel, and the impersonality of its Foucauldian determinism.