Remembering and forgetting: Land and commemoration in the aftermath of the American Revolution

In this paper I consider stories about the American Revolution, the dispossession of the Haudenosaunee and the related move to Canada collected in the late nineteenth century by American historian Lyman Draper from both Six Nations and American settler communities. I suggest that Six Nations stories of suffering in the flight to Canada were a way of commemorating promises and making claims about mutual obligations. In the meantime, settler narratives tended to lay a different type of claim to the land through a re-enactment of battles by which it had been won. Story and ritual were ways both of re-kindling relationships (or imagined relationships) that had undergirded treaty promises, even as some stories also speak to the forgetting of Haudenosaunee presence on land that was claimed both for the American nation but also by families.

Spinoza on the Sakoku Edicts

Spinoza’s Tractatus-Theologico Politicus (TTP), published 350 years ago in 2020, offered a theory of historical religions’ dependence on the power of the imagination, body-techniques, and material culture. A rereading of the TTP from an anthropological lens can assist in exploring these features of his political philosophy. In this presentation, I analyze Spinoza’s ideas about superstition, religious diversity, and the role of the state, by unpacking his brief reference to the Dutch East Indian Company’s (VOC) dealings with Japan’s Tokugawa regime. In the seventeenth century, after the so-called Sakoku Edicts of the 1630s, the Dutch were granted exclusive trading access on the small island of Deshima. However, trade was accepted only on the condition that the VOC made no efforts to convert Japanese to Christianity. Furthermore, despite protests from Protestant authorities in Utrecht and Amsterdam, Christian practices and symbols were strictly forbidden, and sailors to Japan warned of the consequences of breaking this promise. To maintain diplomatic and trading relations, the VOC brought gifts such as large brass chandeliers that resonated, back in Europe, with Protestant-Catholic enmities, but acquired new theological-political meanings in Japan. Spinoza cites the Tokugawa regime’s strict management of foreign religious influence approvingly, as a case study for demonstrating the secondary status of rituals versus the inwardness of his proposed universal religion. Yet, the TTP simultaneously advises the effective state regulation of religious diversity by managing religious minorities’ material presence. By historically contextualizing Spinoza’s treatise, his comment on the Sakoku Edicts and his introduction of a “national religion,” or religio patriae, can be better understood. Explicitly rejecting the ideal of a separation between church and state, Spinoza’s TTP suggested the state to harness as well as to curb the power of the imagination and its material, religious manifestations.