Thin Description

John L. Jackson Jr.

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674727342
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often dismissed as a fringe cult for their beliefs that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites and that veganism leads to immortality. But John L. Jackson questions what "fringe" means in a world where cultural practices of every stripe circulate freely on the Internet. In this poignant and sophisticated examination of the limits of ethnography, the reader is invited into the visionary, sometimes vexing world of the AHIJ. Jackson challenges what Clifford Geertz called the "thick description" of anthropological research through a multidisciplinary investigation of how the AHIJ use media and technology to define their public image in the twenty-first century.Moving far beyond the "modest witness" of nineteenth-century scientific discourse or the "thick descriptions" of twentieth-century anthropology, Jackson insists that Geertzian thickness is an impossibility, especially in a world where the anthropologist's subject is a self-aware subject—one who crafts his own autoethnography while critically consuming the ethnographer's offerings. Thin Description takes as its topic a group situated along the fault lines of several diasporas—African, American, Jewish—and provides an anthropological account of how race, religion, and ethnographic representation must be understood anew in the twenty-first century lest we reenact old mistakes in the study of black humanity.

Notes

ONE. PASSOVER

1. One of my undergraduate courses, “Spiritual Communication,” specifically focuses on the ways in which various societies differently conceptualize and operationalize an assumed human capacity to speak to sentient beings other than human ones, such as angels, gods, demons, fairies, saints, and the dead. Although particulars differ from culture to culture, sanctioned and socially shared assumption about humanity’s ability to contact such entities (for example, through prayer) is almost universal. On another (somewhat related) point, the idea of glossalia, or “speaking in tongues,” as other anthropologists have pointed out, is an evocative metaphor for the ways in which all ethnographic stories unfold: by invoking varied voices in an effort to move the narrative along. This book attempts to play with some of those suggestive symmetries.

2. Thin Description is an extended meditation on this posited and policed difference: Jew versus Israelite. For one explicit articulation of that distinction (by a priest with ties to the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem), see Cohane Michael Ben Levi, Israelites and Jews: The Significant Difference (Levitical Communication, 1997). For a very differently framed parsing of the “ancient Israelites” versus “Jews” distinction (found in the discourse of Israeli archaeologists), see Nadia Abu-El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Many people have written about such nomenclatural and categorical debates within Jewry. Some of them get invoked later on in this book (linked to other aspects of their arguments). For now, let me just add that anthropologist Netta Van Vliet has recently penned a provocative dissertation about the self-differential “Israeli-Jew” subject that pivots on tensions between and among religion, culture, nation, race, sexuality, and gender in ways that articulate powerfully with the Israelite versus Jew discussion as theorized by (and through) the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem.

3. The quotation marks (around “nuclear research facility”) are usually placed there by the folks who remark on this point. What they want to argue is that “research” is a euphemism for “bomb-making,” which the Israeli government hasn’t officially confirmed or denied.

4. Many anthropologists have written about how centrifugal tendencies (that could potentially pull societies apart) are mocked, managed, performed, and controlled during public rituals that help to bind communities together, rituals that involve unleashing the necessary safety valve of sanctioned and ephemeral “liminality,” making unacceptable or unintelligible identities and actions permissible for a particular stretch of time as a way of shoring up social categories of authority and hierarchical value within a given group. For work from one foundational anthropological voice in these discussions, see Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1969), and Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974).

5. For discussions about diasporic homecomings, see Fran Markowitz and Anders H Stefansson, eds, Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 183–198, including a specific examination of the AHIJ group. And for a valuable overview of African American “encounters” with Judaism/Hebrewism, see Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch, eds., Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially the chapter by Ethan Michaeli, which speaks to some of the ways in which saints conceptualize their “exodus” from Chicago. Also, for an overview of the community’s structure and sensibility, see Martina Konighofer, The New Ship of Zion: Dynamic Diaspora Dimensions of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2008). Also, for a synthetic overview of global black Judaisms (and historical debates about their very possibility), see Tudor Parfitt, Black Jews in Africa and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). And for a rendition of the AHIJ’s story that casts a critical eye most pointedly on its gendered political and spiritual investments, see Emily Raboteau, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012), 48–58.

6. For an unpacking of this notion of a “black midrash,” see Walter Isaac, “Locating Afro-American Judaism: A Critique of White Normativity,” in A Companion to African American Studies, eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 512–542. In his dissertation research, Isaac, a student of philosopher Lewis Gordon, head of Temple University’s Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, critiques the ontological presuppositions that ground what he calls “the Jews Studies project.” He is also someone who grew up in an African American family whose members self-identified as Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews. On a separate issue, let me just note that I will use Hebrew Bible/Christian Scriptures, Old Testament/New Testament, and Torah interchangeably throughout this book, mostly because the AHIJ (and other Hebrew Israelites) use all of these terms—and all of these scriptures. Some Black Jewish groups (and a few Hebrew Israelite camps) eschew the New Testament, but they are a relative minority within this diverse community.

7. These short descriptions (in quotations marks) of NWP come from several pamphlets and other literature produced by the AHIJ community for the express purpose of explaining their beliefs and practices to interested outsiders.

8. Other anthropologists have also studied the AHIJ community, and some of them have attended NWP ceremonies. Their work will come up throughout this book. Some of the anthropologists whose offerings have been particularly useful are Fran Markowitz, who has not written a book on the subject but has penned a series of important articles, including “Blood, Soul, Race, and Suffering: Full-Bodied Ethnography and Expressions of Jewish Belonging,” Anthropology and Humanism 31(1): 41–56; “Creating Coalitions and Causing Conflicts: Confronting Race and Gender Through Partnered Ethnography,” Ethnos 67(2): 201–222; and, with Sara Helman and Dafna Shir-Vertesh, “Soul Citizenship: The Black Hebrews and the State of Israel,” American Anthropologist 105(2): 302–312. Works specifically on the AHIJ include Morris Lounds Jr., Israel’s Black Hebrews: Black Americans in Search of Identity (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 1983) as well as Merrill Singer’s articles (several of which come up later in this book) and his 1979 dissertation, “Saints of the Kingdom: Group Emergence, Individual Affiliation, and Social Change among the Black Hebrews of Israel” (PhD diss, University of Utah).

9. For instance, Zev Chavet, “Obama’s Rabbi,” New York Times, April 2, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/magazine/05rabbi-t.html?pagewanted=all.

10. The blue cords are worn on saints’ garments per God’s command to Moses in Numbers 15; 38–41: “Speak unto the Children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue; And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD, and do them; and that ye see not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring: That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God. I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the LORD your God.” The “ribband of blue” worn by saints serves a mnemonic function similar to the one performed by tefillin for Jews, though the AHIJ read tefillin as the literalization of a biblical metaphor from Deuteronomy 6:8: “And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.” According to the AHIJ, this is meant as a command to make sure that one’s deeds (“sign upon thine hand”) and thoughts (“frontlets between thine eyes”) are guided by the teachings of God. (This is also a fairly standard rabbinic interpretation.) I am using the King James Version of the Bible, which is the version that most saints in the Kingdom use. The Kingdom also sees Ezekiel’s prophesy concerning “law in our inward parts” to mean that the fringes and cords no longer need to be seen by saints themselves. It is more of a way to identify oneself to outsiders.

11. Priscilla Wald, “American Studies and the Politics of Life,” American Quarterly, 64(2), 190.

12. The idea that such confusion is purposefully sown is a function of the belief that many people do not want the AHIJ’s truths circulating far and wide—that certain people have a vested interested in keeping humans in the dark about Yah’s divine mandates.

13. The Dead Sea gets its name from the lack of fish and other life that inhabit its waters. They have a difficult time thriving because of the extremely high salt levels in the water, which is why it is also sometimes called the Salt Sea. Of course, it is probably lost on no one that the AHIJ engage in a kind of counter-semantics that is similar to practices found in many other communities, most obviously (to those working with the African Diaspora) the Rastafari who think quite seriously about the literal meaning of morphemes as they rewrite the English language in their Dread Talk (also called a “livalect”). Some of their most famous lexical interventions: “understand” is replaced with “overstand” (or “innerstand”), “I” is substituted for “me” as either the subject or the object of a sentence, and “downpression” is used as a more accurate-sounding proxy for “oppression.”

14. Of course, other spiritual and religious communities, including Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, and many others, champion mind and body connections. And one cannot begin to talk about religions that focus on mind/body links without thinking about Asian religions. This book will try to demonstrate a bit of what makes the AHIJ’s theorized links between minds and bodies different from some of these other groups.

15. The story of the African Hebrew Israelites proffers many interesting links to canonized versions of Jewish history. And I’ll underthematize most of them. Even still, every once in a while, I’ll mark particularly interesting parallels, sometimes in endnotes and sometimes in the main text. For example, this playful recasting of newness and oldness could be interestingly linked to Theodor Herzl’s notion of altneuland, the “old new land,” the title of one of his Zionist utopian novels. Other readers will find many more points of convergence that are not as explicitly marked, some of which I’m probably not even aware of.

16. Anthony Wallace, “Re...