Senior Research Seminar with Dr Victor Cova (University of Cambridge)

Dr Victor Cova (University of Cambridge)Woke Religion, the Cult of Humanity, and Durkheim in Amazonia

In Woke Racism: A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, James McWhorter writes that "an anthropologist would not recognise a difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism." Thus convoked, the anthropologist of Evangelical Christianity and of activism must rise to the occasion. Karen Fields, a historian of millenial Christianity in Central Africa and critic of contemporary revivals of racism, pointed out a possible response when she argued that Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religion was to be read as fundamentally concerned with racism. Racism, for Durkheim, would be a barbaric revival of totemism in an age demanding instead a scientific cult of society, pointing us back to Auguste Comte's scientific Cult of Humanity. Although largely forgotten today, Comte's ideas animated progressive politics, and singularly antiracist activism, across the world during the second half of the twentieth century. At the heart of his mature thought, however, was the necessity to reconcile, in the positive religion, fetishism and the positive sciences crowned by sociology. The category "fetishism" was later analytically decomposed into totemism and animism, which have surfaced again recently during the ontological turn. It brings us back to contemporary Amazonia where Shuar individuals criticise what they see was the missionaries' (and perhaps the anthropologist's) racism while reinventing racial categories, and settlers draw on Amazonian myth to describe the alien origins of "copper-skinned" and "white-skinned" people. This double-detour, through the thicket of anthropology's deep history and into contemporary Amazonia, hopes to shed critical light onto contemporary activist projects of scientifcally-informed moral reform exemplified by some strands of antiracism.