Pamela E. Klassen
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226552569
- eISBN:
- 9780226552873
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226552873.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, American and Canadian Cultural Anthropology
Following the journey of an Anglican missionary across Indigenous land, this book examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—lucidly reveal ...
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Following the journey of an Anglican missionary across Indigenous land, this book examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—lucidly reveal the spiritual politics of colonial settlement. A city builder who bargained away Indigenous land to make way for the railroad, Archbishop Frederick Du Vernet (1860-1924) knew that he lived on the territory of Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and Haida nations who had never ceded their land to the onrush of Canadian settlers. He condemned the devastating effects on Indigenous families of the residential schools run by his church while still serving that church in part through attending to settlers through “White Work.” At the same time, Du Vernet came to a “late style” embrace of psychic research—with a special focus on telepathy—as the path to understand the soul and to bring about social and political harmony. Testifying to the power of what he called radio mind, with evidence from the apostle Paul and the philosopher Henri Bergson, Du Vernet found a way to explain the world that he, his church, and his country made. Through Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment, we see how agents of colonialism built metaphysical traditions on land they claimed to have conquered. Expanding approaches to religion and media studies to ask how sovereignty is made through stories, this book shows how the spiritual invention of colonial nations takes place at the same time that Indigenous peoples—including Indigenous Christians—resist colonial dispossession through stories and spirits of their own.Less
Following the journey of an Anglican missionary across Indigenous land, this book examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—lucidly reveal the spiritual politics of colonial settlement. A city builder who bargained away Indigenous land to make way for the railroad, Archbishop Frederick Du Vernet (1860-1924) knew that he lived on the territory of Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and Haida nations who had never ceded their land to the onrush of Canadian settlers. He condemned the devastating effects on Indigenous families of the residential schools run by his church while still serving that church in part through attending to settlers through “White Work.” At the same time, Du Vernet came to a “late style” embrace of psychic research—with a special focus on telepathy—as the path to understand the soul and to bring about social and political harmony. Testifying to the power of what he called radio mind, with evidence from the apostle Paul and the philosopher Henri Bergson, Du Vernet found a way to explain the world that he, his church, and his country made. Through Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment, we see how agents of colonialism built metaphysical traditions on land they claimed to have conquered. Expanding approaches to religion and media studies to ask how sovereignty is made through stories, this book shows how the spiritual invention of colonial nations takes place at the same time that Indigenous peoples—including Indigenous Christians—resist colonial dispossession through stories and spirits of their own.
Pamela E. Klassen
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226552569
- eISBN:
- 9780226552873
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226552873.003.0007
- Subject:
- Anthropology, American and Canadian Cultural Anthropology
This chapter focuses on how radio waves served as the central medium for Frederick Du Vernet’s late style spiritual politics. Combining the innovations of radio technology with what psychology was ...
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This chapter focuses on how radio waves served as the central medium for Frederick Du Vernet’s late style spiritual politics. Combining the innovations of radio technology with what psychology was newly revealing about the complexity of human consciousness, Du Vernet saw radio mind as opening up a new spiritual frequency for all. Based in part on the copious marginalia he left in his library of books focused on psychology, theology, and psychic research, including books by William James and Henri Bergson, the chapter tells the story of how he came to be convinced by the powers of telepathy as he grappled with debilitating illness. In a contrapuntal reading, the chapter parallels his “telepathic testimonies,” published in church and secular newspapers, with his letters to church and government officials in which he criticized the evils of residential schools for Indigenous children. Quoting the voices of Indigenous parents in his appeals to his Anglican colleagues in Toronto, Du Vernet highlighted the devastation wrought on parents and children when they were torn apart through the residential schooling system. At the same time that he wrote about the power of thoughts to travel across distance, he insisted on the importance of families in proximity.Less
This chapter focuses on how radio waves served as the central medium for Frederick Du Vernet’s late style spiritual politics. Combining the innovations of radio technology with what psychology was newly revealing about the complexity of human consciousness, Du Vernet saw radio mind as opening up a new spiritual frequency for all. Based in part on the copious marginalia he left in his library of books focused on psychology, theology, and psychic research, including books by William James and Henri Bergson, the chapter tells the story of how he came to be convinced by the powers of telepathy as he grappled with debilitating illness. In a contrapuntal reading, the chapter parallels his “telepathic testimonies,” published in church and secular newspapers, with his letters to church and government officials in which he criticized the evils of residential schools for Indigenous children. Quoting the voices of Indigenous parents in his appeals to his Anglican colleagues in Toronto, Du Vernet highlighted the devastation wrought on parents and children when they were torn apart through the residential schooling system. At the same time that he wrote about the power of thoughts to travel across distance, he insisted on the importance of families in proximity.
Alison Findlay
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719062032
- eISBN:
- 9781781700150
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719062032.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
This chapter outlines the sexual and spiritual politics in the 1634 case and shows how it came to be adapted for the London stage after some of the victims were brought to London for questioning. The ...
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This chapter outlines the sexual and spiritual politics in the 1634 case and shows how it came to be adapted for the London stage after some of the victims were brought to London for questioning. The stories told against them were invented, but they were effective because they expressed common attitudes and drew on still-current memories of the events of 1612, fictions that were again circulated in the 1634 play. They were refashioned around themes such as disruptive women, transgressive sexual energy, and social inversion. Religious politics formed the background to the 1612 trials, but a generation later things had moved on. Not popery but Puritanism and the ritualistic high Anglicanism of the 1630s were the targets of its even-handed satire; and whilst the witches were still the object of real fears and fascinations, they were beginning to become figures of fun.Less
This chapter outlines the sexual and spiritual politics in the 1634 case and shows how it came to be adapted for the London stage after some of the victims were brought to London for questioning. The stories told against them were invented, but they were effective because they expressed common attitudes and drew on still-current memories of the events of 1612, fictions that were again circulated in the 1634 play. They were refashioned around themes such as disruptive women, transgressive sexual energy, and social inversion. Religious politics formed the background to the 1612 trials, but a generation later things had moved on. Not popery but Puritanism and the ritualistic high Anglicanism of the 1630s were the targets of its even-handed satire; and whilst the witches were still the object of real fears and fascinations, they were beginning to become figures of fun.
Lila Corwin Berman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226247830
- eISBN:
- 9780226247977
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226247977.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
American Jews’ enduring commitment to urbanism played a central role in their postwar moves from cities to suburbs. The contradiction in this statement is obvious: why would American Jews move to the ...
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American Jews’ enduring commitment to urbanism played a central role in their postwar moves from cities to suburbs. The contradiction in this statement is obvious: why would American Jews move to the suburbs if they cared so passionately about cities? Taking its cue from historians and social critics who have long looked toward Detroit to understand twentieth-century urban transformations, Metropolitan Jews tells the story of how Jews left the city by retaining a deep and often troubling sense of their fundamental urbanism that they carried with them well into the suburbs. It brings to light the unexamined yet deeply consequential vantage point of predominantly liberal and middle-class American Jews, whose metropolitan journeys challenge reigning explanations of white flight, urban disinvestment, and the rise of suburban conservatism in postwar American history. Between World II and the era of urban crises in the 1960s and 1970s, American Jews fashioned a new kind of urbanism, a metropolitan urbanism, evidenced in their political, cultural, spiritual, and economic lives. With close attention to Jewish neighborhood space and activism, housing policy and economics, urban real estate markets, tensions and alliances between Jews and blacks in the city, shifting terms of public urban power, and Jewish spiritual life and architecture, Metropolitan Jews transforms how we understand the postwar American city and the crucial role that Jews played in shaping it.Less
American Jews’ enduring commitment to urbanism played a central role in their postwar moves from cities to suburbs. The contradiction in this statement is obvious: why would American Jews move to the suburbs if they cared so passionately about cities? Taking its cue from historians and social critics who have long looked toward Detroit to understand twentieth-century urban transformations, Metropolitan Jews tells the story of how Jews left the city by retaining a deep and often troubling sense of their fundamental urbanism that they carried with them well into the suburbs. It brings to light the unexamined yet deeply consequential vantage point of predominantly liberal and middle-class American Jews, whose metropolitan journeys challenge reigning explanations of white flight, urban disinvestment, and the rise of suburban conservatism in postwar American history. Between World II and the era of urban crises in the 1960s and 1970s, American Jews fashioned a new kind of urbanism, a metropolitan urbanism, evidenced in their political, cultural, spiritual, and economic lives. With close attention to Jewish neighborhood space and activism, housing policy and economics, urban real estate markets, tensions and alliances between Jews and blacks in the city, shifting terms of public urban power, and Jewish spiritual life and architecture, Metropolitan Jews transforms how we understand the postwar American city and the crucial role that Jews played in shaping it.
