Structured as ‘Essential Characteristic

The objects considered by the social sciences are complex in the sense that event intellectually it is impossible to list the characteristics that would exhaustively describe a society, an organization or even a group of moderate size. This mean that we have to select and simplify. Some simplifications are inevitable in so far as they are directly imposed by the subject we are dealing with. Once I am interested in a question relating to a society rather than that society as such (for example, why is it economically stagnant?) a certain number of characteristics can be eliminated as irrelevant to the matter in hand. But is not always easy to determine in advance whether a feature is relevant to a problem or not. Geographical factors may be either unimportant, or conversely they be of crucial significance (as in the case of Colombia in chapter 3).

In reality, the relevance of a characteristic can only be decided a posteriori, once it has proved possible to construct a theory enabling us to explain the stagnation of the society we are examining, if that is the problem we are addressing ourselves to. Such a theory will be more or less complex, depending on the circumstances, and more or less convincing. In any case, it will take the form of a set of propositions in which stagnation will be seen as the result of a certain number of characteristics – A, B, C. . . N – of the society under consideration. In general, there will not be many of them (at least in relation to the theoretical and ideal set of characteristics that would provide an exhaustive description of the society) and they will also be interlinked in a certain way. Since they are few in number and form a more or less coherent whole, it will often be said, as a result of an understandable association of ideas that they make up the structure of the society.

Such a label is, once again, both natural and useful. The notion of structure certainly brings to mind the notion of a ‘set of basic characteristics’. It also contradicts the idea of a random collection. This means that when we talk about a structure in the sense under discussion at the moment, we certainly see, by virtue of the fact that they come together as a whole, its structural elements as interdependent or as helping to produce the effect that is being studied. The danger is, however, that the nation of structure is virtually synonymous with that of essence and might in this context suggest that the ‘essential’ features or the ‘structural’ data incorporated in to the theory describe the ‘underlying reality’ of the society in question and that all else is simply trivial ‘appearance’. The ‘realism’ of interpretations of this kind is, as we shall see, unhelpful and dangerous.

In the rest of this chapter, we shall look at, in turn, the problems raised by the notions of ‘structural laws’ and the ‘structural causes’ of change.

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THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS IN AFRICA

Africa was host eighty translations of Bunyan’s book and so provides a useful site to examine how the book was changed as it traveled into new spiritual communities.

One respone to The Pilgrim’s Progress was conditioned by African appropriations of Protestantism more generally. One tenet of Protestant theology that never proved portable was the idea of original sin. Concepts of social sin certainly existed, but the idea that, whether one liked it or did not, one was sinful never caught on among African  readers, translators, or missionaries. Those aspects of the text that discussed these ideas were generally edited out, a feature that depended on the material practices of mission translation. Translation was generally pursued in teams made up of second-language missionaries and first-language converts. Missionaries were also inveterate experimenters having to try out bits and pieces with their new audiences to see what would work. Between the Africa translators and the pressure of popular taste, the sections of the text expounding ideas of original sin were edited out. Where these could not be removed, the meaning of original sin was changed. The most famous image of Bunyan’s story, namely, the burden on Christian’s back, stood for original sin. In many Africa editions, this meaning was erased, and instead the burden came to stand for colonial rule itself (Hofmeyr 2004: 76-97).

One further theme that African translation highlighted pertained to themes of orality and literacy. In the paraliterate world in which Bunyan’s story unfolds, documents are not everyday objects, and they tend to stand out either as items of great religious significance or as agents of state oppression, like the pass that Christian, a masterless man, must carry. This ambivalence around documents resonated with the experience of many African Christians seeking religious advancement but kept back on the one hand by the colonial state with its network of documentary control and on the other, by the white-controlled structures of the mission churches. In the final scene of Part I of the book, Christian arrives at the gates of heaven but first has to produce his certificate to get in. Ignorance, who is text in the queue, has no certificate and is unceremoniously pitched down into hell. This scene of difficult and select entry into the portals of power proved popular with African Christians and made its way into illustrations, novels, hymns and songs (Hofmeyr 2004: 137-50).

Important is that African Christian used The Pilgrim’s Progress to project their concerns into a broader international arena. By using the internationally recognized story of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which came to acquire African illustrations and hence African characters, African Christians could project themselves into an international area, often seeking to go over the heads of their various oppressors-the colonial state, white settlers or royal chiefly lineages who persecuted commoner converts-to appeal to an international public.

However, what were the limits of the text’s circulation? When did the text cease to be itself? In some cases, the text disappeared as part of a political decision to eschew the white-dominated world of mission and colonial state. In one case, Simon Kimbangu, who broke away from the Baptist in the central Congo region, probably picked up some symbols from the book, in all likelihood from illustrations. One of them shows Christian emerging dripping from the Slough of Despond. In his hand is a Bible that is dry. Kimbangu traditionalized this image of fetching a book from the next world, a process that involved passing through a body of water. Kimbangu “poached” from the text but disavowed the source (Hofmeyr 2004: 28-9).

In other cases, the text disappears not because of difference but because of similarity. Here the story evaporates into African oral traditions that share many similarities with Bunyan’s storytelling techniques that emerge from a paraliterate world, Bunyan himself being a first-generation literate. Both The Pilgrim’s Progress and African oral narrative traditions share folktale motifs such as the use of dramatic dialogue, two characters to a scene, proverb, riddles, formulaic phrasings, and onomastic strategies. Particles of Bunyan’s story could hence be elided into African literary traditions. In these circumstances, texts disintegrate, not through political resistance but rather under systems unaware of, or indifferent to, their supposedly “correct” and “original” meaning (Hofmeyr 2004: 30).

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THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in to part in 1678 and 1684 in the wake of the English revolution. The first part of the book tells the story of the hero Christian making his way from earth to heaven. The second tells of his wife Christiana and family who follow in his footsteps to join him in heaven.

The book very rapidly became an evangelical classic and traveled beyond England, making its way to Protestant Europe and the New World. Its next major migration came courtesy of the nineteenth-century Protestant mission movement. Drawn largely from Low Church evangelicals to whom The Pilgrim’s Progress was a most beloved book, the movement propagated the text in most parts of the globe, resulting in some 200 versions worldwide.

To understand what fuelled this translation activity, we need to grasp the seminal role of Bunyan’s book in the lives of Protestant evangelicals, poring over the illustrations, and acting out scenes to entertain themselves. As adults, they read Bunyan on a daily basis, and encountered the story in choir service, pageants, dramas, tableaux, magic lantern slides, postcards, and posters. One fan even landscaped his garden as a Pilgrim’s Progress theme park. As a book that was woven into the emotional fabric of everyday life and was featured in conversion narratives, The Pilgrim’s Progress was seen as a user-friendly Bible that summarized the core verities of the Protestant message.

Once these evangelicals became missionaries, they hastened to translate the text. Back home, Nonconformist mission supporters assiduously publicized these translations not only as a way of rising the profile of overseas mission, but to add value to their most beloved writer, who was still regarded as vulgar and theologically suspect by the Anglican establishment. At fundraising meetings, magic lantern slides showed illustrations form foreign editions. Mission periodicals reported on translations and how they were received. In one instance, a mission exhibition showed a live tableau of a missionary translating The Pilgrim’s Progress. Cumulatively, these reports created the idea that the text had miraculous powers of circulation and acted like a mini Bible in converting those it encountered (Hofmeyr 2004: 56-57).

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CAN RELIGIOUS TEXTS BE TRANSLATED

These transformations from part of a much longer history of translation within Christianity that has spurred extensive controversy. Can sacred texts be translated? Can a divine language be translated into a human one? Does translation assist or impede the spread of religious?

This debate has produced a continuum of positions stretching from an insistence that the divine cannot be translated to an equally enthusiastic assertion that it can. The first position is associated with Islam wherein Arabic, the language in which an angel dictated the Koran, is deemed to be the most superior version in which to encounter the sacred text. Translations are not disallowed but are seen as lesser than the Arabic. The position of the Catholic Church (until 1962), which held that the Bible was best read in Latin, represents a not dissimilar position.

By contrast, Protestants, particularly those of an evangelical stripe, have been ardent translators (Sanneh 1991). These evangelical versions of translation generally go hand in hand with the idea of translation as revelation. In this view, translation becomes possible as God will ensure that his meaning infuses the new version. A second Protestant view is more modest and holds that translation is a human activity prone to error and dependent on human decisions and interpretations (Engelke 2007: 22-3).

Questions of translation enrich the methodological field of religious textual inquiry. One focus is obviously on the source and the target text to see what orders of understanding the linguistic and the stylistic choices of the translation do or do not enable. Outside the text, we need to ask how translation is actually done and what ideas about translation the participants hold. Finally as translation studies indicate, we need to consider broader political questions to ask how ideas of equivalence or non-equivalence come into being. Whether texts are seen as faithful renditions of one another depends not only on the quality of the translation but on a broader political willingness to believe in the commensurability of people, ideas, and cultures (Liu 1999).

To see how these issue worked in practice, we turn to the translation of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a key of evangelical Protestantism often considered a second Bible by Nonconformists and widely translated by missionaries drawn from their ranks.

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TRANSLATION

The idea that “the Bible” existed in the early Protestant mission empire is something of a misnomer. Biblical translation was time consuming. Getting agreement on how to translate key terms such as baptism, spirit, and resurrection was arduous. Most mission societies worked through the Bible Society, which generally demanded that all Protestant mission in one language area collaborate on the translation. Diversity of denominational opinion further delayed the process. In some cases, it took half a century before both testaments were translated and published as one volume. “The Bible” could hence exist as a handful of separate booklets that were indistinguishable from other pamphlets (Hofmeyr 2004: 77-9).

Complicating this picture was the way in which the Bible (or parts of it) was changed as it entered new spiritual traditions. In the case of Africa, with some 1,000 languages and as many ethnic groups, the Bible came to be reinterpreted in diverse ways. This “reformation” was possible since Christianity in Africa was spread by Africans. Missionaries were few and far between and were generally culturally remote from the people they proselytized. The work of brokering the gospel fell to the African foot soldiers of Christianity, the catechists, evangelists, and Bible women who knew how best to present new ideas to their audiences.

African Christianity produced distinctive theologies. These included an Africa Christology (Christ as intermediary rather than son of God), a stress on healing, and emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In other cases, African Christians “re-biblicized” the Bible, playing up Old Testament themes of prophecy and polygamy that the missionaries sought to downplay (Hastings 1994).

Orality and literacy provided another site for both re- and (in some instances) de-biblicization. Christian sacred texts pivot on a metaphorical conjunction of the oral and the written. God’s oral voice is mediated in print (or manuscript): “The ritual of reading recapitulates the primal experience of speaking and hearing the word of God” (Stock 1990: 149). These themes assumed an added edge when introduced into sub-Saharan societies that were oral or paraliterate. Here ideas of divine orality and literacy were fused in novel ways. In some case, literacy was believed to come directly from God (rather than via the tainted agency of the missionaries) and was conferred miraculously on believers by angels in dreams and visions (Hofmeyr 2006). In a very different instance, the Friday Masowe Church in Zimbabwe refuses to use the Bible because they receive the Word “live and direct” as they say form the Holy Spirit (Engelke 2007).

Isabel Hofmeyr

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TRANSNATIONAL TEXTUAL CIRCULATION

Isabel Hofmeyr

The protestant evangelical mission movement can usefully be considered as a pioneer of transnational print mass media. Driven by urgent evangelical imperatives, Protestant mission organizations were responsible for pumping out billions of printed texts to all corners of the globe. In the words of one of its historians, the movement was “the greatest single medium of mass communication in the nineteenth century” (Bradley 1976: 41).

Seen theologically, this activity is not surprising. Evangelicals held that Christ’s “great commission” to spread the gospel formed the core of Christianity. There was an urgent imperative to disseminate Christian ideas to as many people as possible.

Unsurprisingly, one prevalent theme in mission media was that of conspicuous circulation. Mission exhibitions invariably included displays of religius material that had been translated into foreign languages. This translation dramatized the fact that these texts had circulated far and wide. Likewise figures such as the colporteur or Bible woman enacted mission texts in motion. Transport was a trope in mission narratives with ships forming a common thread in mission publicity. Most large mission societies owned sea-going vessels to ferry their personnel about. Such ships provided publicity opportunities in terms of funding drives, stories, pictures, hymns, and poems. The ship became a metaphor of the word itself, sailing out to all corners of the globe.

In the early years of the Protestant mission movement, this belief in conspicuous circulation expressed itself in the widespread notion that the Bible, unaided by human hands, would magically circulate, converting all those it encountered. The early propaganda of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBC), founded in 1804, portrayed Bible rather like mini missionaries (Canton 1904: 317). In these parables, text are invested with extraordinary powers of possession and enchantment.

This theory of enchanted reading is particularly clear in relation to a key evangelical genre, the tract. Handbooks on tract distribution and reading portrayed these “noiseless messengers” (USCL 1948: title) as mesmerizing objects. In one account, a man is given a tract that he tears up in a rage and throws down on the carpet, expecting that the servant will sweep it away. The next day, the torn scraps remain. The man summons the servant. She explains the she saw the word eternal on one of the pieces of paper and felt afraid to sweep it away. The man sticks the pieces of torn paper together, reads the tract and is converted (Watts 1934: 8).

On the face of it, this view of textuality may appear unremarkable. Across all religions, sacred texts are assumed to have magical properties: they fall from heaven, they are acquired in dreams, they are dictated by angels. This example would constitute an evangelical Protestant instance of this phenomenon, driven as such ventures were by urgency and fervor.

However, this miraculous circulation also has to be read in terms of technological development on which it depended and at times stimulated. As Lesley Howsam’s history of the BFBS demonstrates, the modernization of the bookbinding industry was precipitated by the BFBS-created demand for Bibles (1991). The BFBS were ever on the lookout for new forms of technology that could provide sturdily bound Bible in the numbers required. By the early nineteenth century, bookbinding was still organized as a small craft industry. Before the 1820s, books were not bound as a matter of course and instead, it was common practice to buy unbound sheets and have theme bound to the customer’s specifications (Howsam 1991: 123).

The book as we know it today, namely as a modern commodity, identically produced in edition bindings, did not fully exist. The organization that helped to bring this practice into being was the BFBS, which required large numbers of books whose bindings could withstand the distances they had to travel. Under the pressure of BFBS production schedules, bookbinding was forcibly shifted from a pre-modern craft to a modern mass-production industry.

A consideration of religius texts in the Protestan mission domain, then, leads us into the heart of modernity itself. One part of this relationship hinges on the ways in which the production and management of Protestant texts acted as a force for modernist innovation. David Nord’s work on the American Bible Society demonstrates how the exigencies of distributing texts across vast distances brought into being modern management practices such as detailed record keeping and statistics (2007: 37-66).

A second aspect of Protestant textual production and modernity is less direct and pertains to the oft-noted way in which modernity, an apparently austere and secular process, in fact feeds off ideas of magic and enchantment. By its own account, modernity is meant to be a universal force of rationality, secularism, and disenchantment. However, as much recent work indicates, this universal rationality is something of an optical illusion. On the one hand, this mirage depends on the trick of passing off a particular European historical experience as universal (Chakrabarty 2000). On the other, modern institutions and their audiences conspire to imbue modernity with magical abilities as a way of making these new institutions intelligible (Murdock 1997). The widely studied phenomena of viewers believing that televisual media are haunted forms part of this process (Sconce 2000). Televisual media portray people who are not there. Rather than mastering the boring mechanical detail of this phenomenon, popular cultural beliefs gloss this process in terms of ghosts and spirits.

The mass production and circulation of Bible captures these processes of enchantment admirably. This development depended on a combination of magical evangelical belief and cutting-edge technology through which identical commodities poured out of bookbinding factories. BFBS publicity insisted this circulation was divinely inspired and at times sought to suppress its mechanical aspects, in one case removing the phrase “printed by machinery” from a BFBS edition (Howsam 1991: 95). More speculatively, we might also ask how Protestant ideas of magical circulation create an environment in which the idea of transnational circulation itself can start to make sense.

Yet, what of the reception of these circulating texts? What did readers in various parts of the world make of Protestant Bibles? To address this issue, we turn to themes of translation.

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