Guardians of Idolatry by Viviana Díaz Balsera

The accounts of Capuchin-Franciscan missionaries in seventeenth-century Kongo provide food for thought in understanding how conversion was not a simple question of adaptation or retention, but also one involving repetitions, relations, and emergences. This paper seeks both to further elaborate Scott's critique and the limitations of the adaptationist/retentionist debate as it considers phenomena like religious conversion and transformation, seizing upon concepts like repetition, relation, and emergence for analytic substance. more The anthropologist David Scott has identified the intractability and limitations of adaptationist and retentionist frameworks. The anthropologist David Scott has identified the intractability and limitations of adaptationist. As both of these studies insist, shorthand categories that judge and pretend to describe material religious practice - as idolatry does - twist and turn in ways that are never far from questions of recognition, othering, and power.

In engaging these works in the here-andnow, I could not help but recall the rhetorical arguments made by the Islamic State-the ones that hinge largely on the category of idolatry (shirk), finding in it a thing at once mobile and capacious enough to catalyze an alternative vision of sovereignty and a critique of what are purportedly understood and felt as imperial incursions. The return is a timely one, since the imbrication of race, religion, and colonization points not only to historical concerns in need of further elaboration, but also to present and pressing global, political, and economic entanglements. more Two recent studies of the medieval and early modern Spanish world by professors Mina García Soormally and Viviana Díaz Balsera return us to what Inga Clendinnen called the ‘“concealed and mysterious dialects” of European and native interaction’ or to what Kenneth Mills has referred to as the propensity of idolatry and Christianity to meet as well as to compete. Two recent studies of the medieval and early modern Spanish world by professors Mina García Soorm.

Guardians of Idolatry by Viviana Díaz Balsera