Exchange and Extraction in American Religion
by Brandon Bayne
When I arrived in Chapel Hill a decade ago, I was immediately tasked with a grad seminar at UNC titled, “Religion and Cultural Contact in America.” I was not sure if I inherited this course from Tom Tweed or Laurie Maffly-Kipp, but one thing was clear by its catalog description: it fit precisely the sensibility I had developed in graduate school. Issues of cultural contact and exchange had been central to my own research as I sought to unpack encounters between Catholic evangelists and Indigenous communities in colonial New Spain. Analysis of intercultural contact and the creative hybridities that emerged from colonial contact zones had also inspired my early experiences with teaching. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, I selected Tweed’s Retelling US Religious History (along with the introduction from Crossing and Dwelling) as a backbone to the wider tale we set out to cover in that new course and Maffly-Kipp’s essay became a touchstone of our hope to push beyond the US to other Americas. The volume, along with other well-known collections on lived religion and practice, had strongly shaped many of us who entered doctoral studies at the turn of the millennium.
As I dove into my first experience trying to introduce these subjects to a new generation of young scholars, I chose Catherine Albanese’s chapter, “Exchanging Selves, Exchanging Souls: Contact, Combination, and American Religious History” in Retelling US Religious History, as a particular course touchstone, a key starting place for our investigation of places and practices of inter-cultural encounter and religious creativity. To quote from that first 2013 syllabus description,
This course takes as its beginning point Catherine Albanese’s 1997 claim that contact, combination, encounter, and exchange should constitute the central themes of the study of religion in America. Albanese argued that these themes would necessarily turn our attention to Indigenous and Catholic encounters in the colonial period and forefront reciprocal negotiations between dominant white Protestants and “African ports of call, Jewish alliances, and Asian junctures” in later centuries. This seminar charts the development of academic literature in the ensuing two decades as a new generation of historians, ethnographers, and religious studies scholars took up this challenge (whether they knew about this particular essay or not). We will study historical instances of confrontation and comparison in the Americas (porously conceived) and seek theoretical insight into how we might describe the religious practices and productions that emerged out of such moments.
For the next decade, we thought about this work together, a greenhorn assistant prof and a bunch of stellar graduate students trying to assess the impact of this thematic focus and its potential for their own future work. Over this time, students expressed appreciation for both the essay and wider volume, but also showed increasing unease and eventually frustration with the language of “exchange” and “gift-giving” as metaphors for American religion, especially in cases of colonial coercion and extraction.
The first thing to say about Catherine Albanese’s contribution to this volume is that she titled it well. Without the space to summarize the whole chapter, you can still get it right there in the headline. It is about exchange–of identities and religious belonging, to be sure, but also the hybrid productions and new combinations that flowed from moments of intercultural contact in the US. Albanese relied on Marcel Mauss’ 1925 essay “The Gift” in this work, arguing that “gifts, markets, alliances, and constraints were of a piece, part of a continuous social process that maintained the requirements for societal order” (202). What followed — from Isaac Mayer Wise’s awkward train conversations with arrogant Protestants to Algonquian modifications of Puritan practices in John Eliot’s praying towns to 1970s Hare Krishna reconfigurations in response to immigration — Albanese offered brilliant, multivalent illustrations of that theme. Through a wide-ranging tour, she made a compelling case that American religions were “changed religions, new religions” by way of myriad, unpredictable encounters.
For those of us beginning our graduate training in the early 2000s, this essay served as a welcome correction to pervasive tradition-oriented histories as well as a rejection of simplistic interpretive binaries that emphasized conversion or resistance. Albanese deftly moved beyond the field’s persistent focus on origins and essences, and provided a map of new cultural formations, third spaces, transformed religious identities, and innovative practices forged from contact and exchange.
In my own work, I noticed the connection between the essay and other approaches to previously marginalized histories. Albanese voiced similar trends to emerging methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies and Ethnohistory in the late 20th century. In these fields, “crossroads, “messy encounters,” and “contact zones” had become prominent metaphors to describe ways that Indigenous communities navigated colonialism. One brilliant example of this important intervention was the volume edited by Joel Martin (another Retelling author), Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of American Religious Landscape. Martin and the volume’s authors presented a profound change in the study of Indigenous Christianities by centering complicated moments and complex mediaries who challenged received scholarly preoccupations with authenticities and assumptions that traditionalism meant never changing. Scholars like Kenneth Mills, Rachel Wheeler, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Greg Roeber, Lin Fisher, Tracy Leavelle, and Emma Anderson brought this work forward throughout the next decade, offering powerful analysis of agency and adaptation in the long story of Indigenous engagements with Christianity.
These authors filled the weeks in our grad seminar after our initial reading of Albanese. But eventually we would always do an exercise. It began with a series of readings that interrogated the concept of “Syncretism.” Then, we would discuss the potential of its actual denotation and etymology (creating together), but also the long history of its racialized connotations, prevalent assumptions about supposed purities, and the ridiculous notion that some religions were not, in fact, syncretistic. Finally, we would spend a couple hours brainstorming possible alternatives, other metaphors of contact and creativity: fusion, melding, creole, mixed, mestizaje, nepantla, bricolage, hybrid, hybridity, hybridizing, acculturation, inculturation, and my favorite – confrontation/confrontación, a term that implies conflict in English but also comparison in its Spanish cognate (two things placed across from each other). All of these concepts, like syncretism, have pitfalls and presumptions to unpack, and we spent a good chunk of our remaining time returning to that work with each new text.
Over the years, however, students increasingly expressed special contempt for the word “exchange.” Beginning in 2015, I noted how their eyes began to roll deeper into the back of their heads and their exasperated groans grew with each mention of gifting and exchange. Instead, they insisted, we needed more attention to asymmetric power, a robust account of structural violence, and especially an interrogation of empire, settler-colonialism, and the coercive racial structures that not only shaped these encounters but also the academy and our field of American Religion. All of these things circumscribed anything we might call “exchange,” they insisted. In the era of #LandBack and #NoDAPL, “gifting” felt at best insufficient, but often gross as a descriptor of assimilative laws, family separations, and land extractions.
What I missed during my first dozen reads, however, is that Albanese remained attentive to violence and power in subtle ways beyond the questionable reliance on Mauss and his study of “archaic societies.” She consistently noted the presence of coercive structures and constraining powers at every turn in her chapter. Even in her introduction to the theory of the gift, Albanese warned that gifts always “came with strings and prods attached. They extended velvet gloves but masked iron hands beneath. To give a gift meant to coerce with a moral agency that overlay the actual exchange.” It is here that we can continue the conversation about that essay, the wider volume, and their impact. Let us remain attentive to the velvet gloves and iron hands. In so doing, we might foster wider questions about our own settler-colonial frameworks, including their foundational role in our field’s accounts of early colonies and their attempted conversions.
Attention to space, contestation, and the material dispossession of territory from Indigenous communities should shape our evaluation of the surprising and original combinations that proceeded from contact. That is the challenge: remaining attentive to asymmetric power even as we narrate the complex responses and creative productions employed by those navigating these encounters. If we were to suggest a sequel today, we might supplement that powerful original title with an expanded space, a new verb, and a different “C” that could help us situate these tangled encounters and challenge the teleology of the US nation state, something like “Exchanging Selves, Extracting Lands: Colonialism and Combination in Religions of the Americas.”
Brandon Bayne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. His first book, Missions Begin with Blood: Suffering and Salvation in the Borderlands of New Spain (Fordham University Press, 2021) shows how Catholic priests invoked the rhetoric of martyrdom and redemptive sacrifice to justify epidemic disease, colonial dislocation, and the territorial dispossession of Indigenous communities. Missions Begin with Blood won the 2022 Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. His current research focuses on race, religion, memory, and erasure in modern celebrations of colonial missionaries.