Introduction: The Power of Religious Identities in the Americas

analyses, to express some of Vodou's dynamic force. Still, she encounters thorny questions of authenticity, authority, and representation. Does the act of staging in a global context a tradition that is firmly connected with ancestors, kinship relations, and locality end up commodifying what it This content downloaded from 157.55.39.136 on Thu, 19 May 2016 04:30:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Vasquez, Williams / RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES IN THE AMERICAS 19 seeks to rememorialize and preserve? Conversely, how can a dance troupe like Wilcken's Makandal avoid reifying a living, contemporaneous tradition as just a museum piece? Is the act of performing Vodou theater (unproblematically) empowering? For whom? "Can the subaltern speak?" as the postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak (1985) pointedly asked. And, in the global dynamics of deand reterritorialization, who is the subaltern? And what does it mean for Haitians to restage Vodou in diaspora? The foregoing discussion shows how the field of religion and politics in Latin America has expanded since the early days of institutional analyses of church-state relations. Just as the field benefited from a dialogue with the literature on democratization, civil society, and social movements, we are now witnessing a new wave of frameworks, questions, and methodologies in the conversation with cultural and ethnic studies, postcolonialism, and theories of globalization. This conversation provokes at least two exercises in "border-crossing." First, research on religion in the Americas is increasingly becoming cross-disciplinary, bringing together not only the social sciences and humanities but also the performing and expressive arts. It is no longer sufficient for political science and sociology to enter into dialogue with anthropology, religious studies, and theology. To understand the complex interplay of religion, culture, and society, it is also necessary to bring in approaches as diverse as geography, literature (in particular the testimonio genre), theater, dance, ethnomusicology, and studies of media and popular/ material culture. Second, current research is transgressing the traditional container of the nation-state and the cold war cartographies of area studies, exploring the links among various overlapping scales of analyses that range from the personal and local to the national, continental, transcontinental, and global. The task here is to continue to be attentive to specificities of local, national, and regional histories and power relations while embedding them in transnational and global dynamics. The articles in this issue represent a first attempt at working out the implications of these border crossings. From our perspective, however, old questions remain. In particular, the issue of power, both in terms of domination and resistance, is just as relevant today as it was during the heyday of the Catholic Church's preferential option for the poor, liberation theology, and Christian base communities. For one thing, traditional corporate actors still matter. The state, though buffeted by global processes and local challenges from below, actively works to implement structural adjustment policies while it seeks to regulate the impact of transnational migration either by militarizing its borders, as in the case of the United States, or by setting up institutional arrangements to collect remittances from or grant dual citizenship to los hermanos en el extranjero, as many Latin American governments have done. The Catholic Church, as a This content downloaded from 157.55.39.136 on Thu, 19 May 2016 04:30:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 20 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES corporate actor, reacts to the state at various levels, from papal condemnations of the excesses of capitalism and its "culture of death" to the apostolates set up by the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops to minister to immigrants and defend their rights (John Paul II, 1999). It is undeniable, however, that the ways in which power is applied and countered have changed drastically. Castells (1996; 1997) argues that the current salience of locality and identity is due to the emergence of what he calls a "network society," a society produced by the intersection of decentered, flexible, and open-ended networks exchanging goods, capital, ideas, images, and people. According to him, in the face of intense social dislocation and fragmentation that challenge old ways of organizing space and time, there is a "widespread surge of powerful expressions of collective identity that challenge globalization and cosmopolitanism on behalf of cultural singularity and people's control over their lives and environment" (1997: 2). This is because "when the world becomes too large to be controlled, social actors aim at shrinking it back to their size and reach. When networks dissolve time and space, people anchor themselves in places, and recall their historic memory" (66). Attempts to cut the world down to size, which prominently include religion, build "defensive identities" and "reactive movements" "generated by actors that are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination, thus building trenches of resistance and survival on the basis of principles different from, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of society" (8). The key problem is how to translate local resistance or what cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1989) would call "militant particularism" into social change. How can purely defensive identities become "project identities" whereby "social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by doing so, seek the transformation of overall social structure" (8)? Castells is not sanguine about the potential of religion to generate project identities from the seeds of defensive identities. Working primarily with fundamentalism, he hypothesizes that, in comparison with environmentalist and feminist movements, religion may be too sectarian, too wedded to apocalyptic and millennarian utopias that wish to return to mythical pasts, to be the source of "embryos of a new society" in the now. The essays that follow are cautiously optimistic about the emancipatory potential of religion and suggest that it is still too early to confirm Castells's hypothesis. In the Americas, religion is far more complex and polyvocal than he imagines. What is the power of religious identities generated in the hemispheric crucible of pluralism, transnational migration, global media, diaspora, and hybridity? We are only beginning to answer this question. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.136 on Thu, 19 May 2016 04:30:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Vasquez, Williams / RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES IN THE AMERICAS 21