Protest and profanation: Agrarian revolt and the little tradition, Part II

Conclusion

Perhaps one reason why political scientists and historians generally overlook the moral and political ideas of the little tradition is that both, unlike the anthropologist, tend to concentrate on the written record-the product, par excellence, of the great tradition. The little tradition achieves historical visibility only at those moments when it becomes mobilized into dissident movements which pose a direct threat to ruling elites. It is for this reason that I have had to rely so heavily on evidence from millenial revolts in constructing my argument. Yet it seems to me that there is a “shadow history” which remains to be written for almost every mass movement in the Third World.

Consider, for example, the case of nationalism. There is evidence that the meaning of independence at the base of many nationalistic movements diverged markedly from its meaning to the intelligentsia who nominally led them. David Marr concludes that in Vietnam “salvation from the foreigner was taken by the peasantry to include salvation from hunger, tenancy, and taxes” (emphasis added).¹ For the Filipino peasantry, Sturtevant claims that “... independence took on miraculous connotations.” “Some barrio dwellers began to look forward to the anticipated condition as a panacea for everything from hook worms to hacenderos.”² It is only when the nationalist legions elude the control of their erstwhile leaders that this shadow history and its participants move into the spotlight. Much the same may be said about communist and socialist movements which are apt to look radically different from the village than from the national headquarters.³ If it is worth writing religious history and sociology with the beliefs and values of its mass adherents in mind, then it is worth writing the history and sociology of political movements in the same spirit. The enterprise is important not only because it uncovers the experienced history (what French historians would call mentalité populaire) of most actors but also because it is likely to reveal the whole substratum of ideas and values which represent a human potential that is only rarely tapped.

In this analysis of the little tradition and popular religion in Europe and Southeast Asia, my point has been to demonstrate that, among the peasantry in most complex agrarian societies, one can find a pattern of profanations-symbolic reversals of the existing social order. The idiom in which they are expressed is, almost universally, religious. Much as the official religious doctrine is selected, reworked, and profaned in little tradition cults, so is the existing political order symbolically negated in popular millenial traditions.

For the most part, as we have stressed, these symbolic reversals are an undertone, a counterpoint, to dominant religious and political ideas. When outside forces or natural disasters appear to overwhelm the peasantry and play havoc with the normal categories of experience, however, this alternative world may chart a new course of action and open up new possibilities. This alternative symbolic world is constructed, we must not forget, largely in reaction to what might be described as the historic process of modernization-the creation of a bureaucratic state, the penetration of a market economy, the replacement of custom by law-a process experienced by much of the world's peasantry. It is out of the turmoil and pain of this transformation that the need for a redemptive community grows. How else are we to comprehend a religious symbolism of liberation that displays so many similarities across time, space, culture, and religion?

If this examination of peasant religion and politics has revealed anything, it is surely that there is no such thing as a perfect ideological hegemony which socializes subordinate classes to accept either their fate or the values which ordain that fate. In fact, it would appear that the growth of oppression dialectically produces its own negation in the symbolic and religious life of the oppressed. At the very least this negation generates a new resistance to socialization and moral instruction from above. At most, it represents the normative basis for rebellion and revolution.⁴ As Lucien Goldmann has pointed out, “human action ... can no longer be defined by its actual reality without reference to the potential reality which it seeks to bring into being.”⁵ We can do no better in closing than to quote Marx on religion, including a passage that is, alas, usually taken out of context: Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.⁶ If the production of values is a political weapon in the class struggle, then the religious profanations of popular religion are no less a weapon than the doctrines of the high church.