![]() In Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, though, it isn’t the simplest thing to figure out how to form a new couple and undergo the process of mating. It records, more commonly, an unstable process of subjective-becoming and semiotic recoding that takes place between troubled poles of de-nativization and re-nativization, belief and rejection, birth and rebirth, as an “encounter” with events and forces circulating through discourse and signs crossing from the colonial regime/ ecumene down to our own postcolonial regime/ secular ecumene of multiplicity and neo-liberal suspicion.A key component in building a strong, forward-looking lineage is having plenty of new offsprings to continue into the next generation. As Sam Cooke affirmed, in the aftermath of Dylan, “A Change Gonna Come.” Yet a ‘conversion experience’ is by no means a fixed or unidirectional process of self-formation expressing a will to fixed belief. A haunting version of such life-change and caritas is New England Puritanism offspring Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s opening of Free Home for Incurable Cancer on the Lower East Side, after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1891, and her founding of a Dominican order as Mother Mary Alphonsa. “He a new creature: old things are passed away behold, all things are become new” reverberates the staggering present-tense claim for conversion, down through centuries of repetition, for the incoming-power of the inaugurating/ reborn subject (“new creature”) of early Christian modernity. Conversion means a turning with and as some force of newness: it affirms, plugs into, and enacts energies of becoming, eruptive ideas, recomposition, and a creativity (or beatitude) latent or damaged in the self. In conversion, broadly speaking of it as a transfigurative poetics, one encounters a life-force of amplified being like the New Haven ship coming into harbor for Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia or his meeting the “praying families” of New England, or Dylan’s seeking out the folk-mentorship of Woody Guthrie reborn in a New Jersey sickbed, or Allen Ginsberg meeting Kerouac and Snyder on the Beat roads of San Francisco and writing Howl. In so doing, he goes a long way toward helping us understand the nature of violence generally, its complicated connections with religion, and how society in the future might avoid being blindsided by the worst aspects of human nature. Rather, he presents the evidence revealing which kinds of religious ideas and practices contribute to certain kinds of violence and why. Taking a scrupulously objective approach, Eller neither accuses nor exonerates religion in regard to violence. ![]() ![]() In the final chapter, “Religion and Nonviolence,” Eller examines nonviolent and low-conflict societies and considers various methods of managing conflict. He devotes separate chapters to: ■sacrifice (both animal and human) ■self-mortification (including self-injury, asceticism, and martyrdom) ■religious persecution (from anti-Semitic pogroms to witchhunts) ■ethno-religious conflict (including such hotspots as Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, and the former Yugoslavia) ■religious wars (from the ancient Hebrews’ wars and the Christian Crusades to Islamic jihad and Hindu righteous wars) ■and religious homicide and abuse (spousal abuse, genital mutilation, and “dowry death,” among other manifestations). Eller presents a wealth of case material, demonstrating the many manifestations of religious violence-not just war and terrorism, which are the focus of so many discussions of religiously motivated violence-but also more prevalent forms. But as anthropologist Jack David Eller shows in this illuminating, in-depth study, violence in connection with religion is a very broad-based phenomenon encompassing all cultures and including a wide variety of activities and complex motives. The phrase “religious violence” often brings to mind dramatic events: the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, riots in India between Muslims and Hindus, or, farther back in history, the Crusades and the Thirty Years War.
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