Examples of colonialists or outsiders using supernatural manipulation?

January 30, 2015 8:11 AM

Does anyone know any examples of colonial governments or outsiders making up stuff about the supernatural to convince traditional peoples to follow some law or give them some resource or do something else that it's in the self-interest of the outsiders?

For example, I thought I had read something about Canadian or European merchants telling the Copper Inuit that they had to save skin from every caribou kill and sell it to the merchants, and if they didn't, they would supposedly lose all the caribou. That specific example turned out not to be true, but would anyone happen to know of any examples in that vein?

Thanks!

posted by mrmanvir to Society & Culture (8 answers total)

Best answer: Would Christopher Columbus' use of the 1504 lunar eclipse against the natives of Jamaica count?
posted by Anne Neville at 8:14 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: In the 19th Century, the French sent conjurer Robert-Houdin to Algeria to quell an uprising by presenting his magic tricks as real.
posted by yankeefog at 8:18 AM on January 30, 2015

Best answer: Historians argue whether Cortes either claimed he was a god, played along with the idea, or if it's all just a made-up story.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:25 AM on January 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

Cabeza de Vaca apparently did this pretty extensively. In Bernard DeVoto's "The Course of Empire" he claims that de Vaca's slave Estevanico took on the role of a demigod to impress local tribes in to helping them on their journey back to Spanish settlements after they were shipwrecked on the Gulf coast.
posted by saladin at 8:43 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The powers that be are surely still at it:

in the 70's the British Army stoked fears about Satanism:

“It was quite clear that the church, both the Roman Catholic church and the Protestant church, even for the paramilitaries, held a fair degree of influence,” Wallace said. “So we were looking for something that would be regarded with abhorrence really by the two communities, and at the same time would be something that paramilitaries couldn’t justify, and also would be in many ways seen as a reason why some of the outrages were taking place.

“That sort of degree of activity was lowering the value of human life. And so eventually it came to the point where we looked at witchcraft … Ireland was very superstitious and all we had to do was bring it up to date.”

Wallace said the manufactured hysteria was also useful in keeping younger children in at night and away from buildings that the military and police might have used for undercover surveillance.

posted by twistedonion at 8:48 AM on January 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Presumably your question seeks examples of supernatural manipulation above and beyond standard preaching of the Christian gospel, but in reality, the imposition of the religious beliefs of colonial overlords on native populations was used in exactly this way. Certainly some of the preachers and officials believed that this was necessary in order to save the souls of the natives, but the overriding purpose was to pacify and "civilize" the natives "in the self-interest of the outsiders." And it is still going on it some places.
posted by beagle at 8:50 AM on January 30, 2015 [6 favorites]

Mod note: Couple comments removed. Specific examples with links is going to be a lot more useful here than vague references or side-chatter about religion.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:13 AM on January 30, 2015

Best answer: Cabeza de Vaca apparently did this pretty extensively. In Bernard DeVoto's "The Course of Empire" he claims that de Vaca's slave Estevanico ...

I read one translation of Cabeza de Vaca's North American narrative only a few months ago, and these examples are worth clarifying, because they answer the question in maybe some unexpected ways.

Just as an aside, Estevanico was a slave on the same expedition, but he wasn't Cabeza de Vaca's slave. I don't recollect the episode that DeVoto likely had in mind being about Estevanico in particular, but maybe. My notes on this are super duper informal--sorry!--so I'd trust a lot of other sources over them. Anyway, here are some excerpts from my notes that are related/relevant:

One of the most important lessons Cabeza de Vaca himself learns from the Capoques is how to be seen as a healer among them. They actively want him and other members of the expedition to be curers and, like, blow air on them or something, and they withhold food from Cabeza de Vaca when he declines to do it. So Cabeza de Vaca develops a schtick as a healer. He does things he's seen the Capoques do: passing a pebble over someone's stomach was one sort of cure; bleeding them and then sucking on and finally cauterizing the wound was another. But he also introduces novel practices, e.g. to say a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria, then pray and make the sign of the cross. The locals supposedly think this is great, and Cabeza de Vaca claims they're totally grateful.

And later ...

So the quatro amigos head off together toward the interior of Texas ... From here on out, everywhere they go, they will offer their services as healers, and there are a ton of folks around who need them [...] Anyway, while he's still in Texas, just a few interesting things happen. For one thing, Cabeza de Vaca 'heals' a man who appears to be dead, and that guy later wakes up and survives, and that is *big news*.

And that brings us to the fun part ...

OK, so as the four remaining expedition members hike through the Hill Country and into the southwest, he meets more and more people. There's a town with 50 huts. Then a town with 100 huts. Cabeza de Vaca describes encountering so many villages he literally loses count. There are locals traveling with them the whole way, and apparently word of Cabeza de Vaca's coming gets ahead of them, because they'll arrive to big groups of people waiting for them, yelling and slapping their thighs and rattling gourds with pebbles inside. They're super excited about this healer coming who can maybe raise the dead. They carry the expedition members into huts, people sing and dance, and then Cabeza de Vaca and company will get up in the morning to heal and bless everyone and move on.

But a funny thing happens each time they arrive in a new village. It's reminiscent of the hospitality custom Cabeza de Vaca encountered on [maybe] Galveston Island where, like, a visitor would come by, and the hosts would just give pretty much all their stuff to them. Well, apparently that's common out here to the west too, and as the number of people accompanying Cabeza de Vaca along the way gets larger and larger, it turns into kind of a big deal. In most cases, the host villages have heard he's coming with a bunch of people, so they'll hide their really important stuff and let the crowd of guests come in and take what they like out of their less valuable belongings.

Unfortunately for one host village, though, Cabeza de Vaca's entourage eventually amounts to like *three or four thousand people* (he says). Cabeza de Vaca complains about the size, because he has to go around breathing on everyone's food to bless it, which takes forever. And this one town isn't prepared for their arrival at all, so all these guests come in and basically ransack the place and get all their best stuff. The hosts are, like, crying and crying, but the folks in the caravan more or less say, "Hey, it's cool--these dudes are the Children of the Sun! And you can join us and plunder the next town!" So the folks from that village basically *have* to join the procession to the next village to recoup their losses to some degree. Maybe that's how the group got so big in the first place.

Bear in mind, Cabeza de Vaca is writing this to his king and has every reason to exaggerate the heck out of his ability to get along well with Native American groups. Among other things, he'll go on to say how he helped keep convert a bunch of folks to Christianity, not coincidentally protecting them from a bunch of slavers by doing so, all in accord with royal and papal edicts that Las Casas lobbied so hard for. But it's all pretty suspicious, among other reasons because Cabeza de Vaca seems very interested in a nice royal appointment somewhere. He says he turns down an offer to be de Soto's second-in-command, and what he gets is the governorship of the area around Buenos Aires.

Still, it's an interesting story.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 2:54 PM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]