This essay focuses upon a single object, a shipwrecked anchor that was washed ashore on the eastern Cape coast of southern Africa. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, European travellers, missionaries, and magistrates cited this anchor as evidence of religion among indigenous people in the region. By the end of the century, however, this same anchor was being used by metropolitan theorists as a classic piece of evidence for the origin of religion. By recounting the strange story of this anchor, I hope to recover a history (or prehistory) of the study of religion in three phases-frontier, imperial and apartheid-that have defined the practice of comparative religion from a southern African perspective.
1996 Academic Press Limited To develop as an academic discipline, the study of religion requires a sense of its own history. As Walter Capps observed, the academic study of religion 'cannot pretend to find its way until it can relate to its past in narrative form'. 1 The narratives of standard histories trace the study of religion back to Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenthcentury social Darwinism. As 'internal' histories of an academic discipline, however, these narratives ignore aspects of the history of the study of religion that are of greatest historical interest. In raising what the authors perceive as enduring theoretical issues of category formation and interpretation, explanation and analysis, conventional accounts, I would argue, do not do justice to the entanglement of the study of religion in a violent history of European conquest and colonization. They fail to examine the intimate relation between category formation in the study of religion and European colonial domination of 'exotic' or 'primitive' societies. In addition to providing raw religious materials that were transformed into intellectual manufactured goods at metropolitan centres of theory production, colonized peripheries were on the front lines of the very production of the modern categories, 'religion' and 'religions'. Accordingly, if the history of the academic study of religion is to be rewritten, it must be a narrative of historically situated practices that is sensitive to their practical implications in the world. To recover the full extent of these implications, the history of the study of religion will have to be recast, not from the European centre, but from the colonized periphery. 2 Towards that end, I am in the midst of writing a local history of comparative religion that is situated in southern Africa. A first volume, focusing on what I call 'frontier comparative religion', documents the transition from the denial to the discovery of indigenous religions. Among the findings of that book, I mention only two: first, I have been able to show that the discovery of a local religion depended upon colonial conquest and containment. Once an African community was placed under the colonial administration of a magisterial system, a location system, or a reserve system, it was discovered to have an indigenous religious system. Second, I have analysed the comparative procedures of morphology and genealogy that were employed by travellers and missionaries, settlers and colonial officials, as well as by African comparativists, to trace southern Africans back to the ancient Near East. As unlikely as it may sound, comparative religion in southern Africa during the nineteenth century arrived at the conclusion that the Xhosa were Arabs, the Zulu were Jews, and the Sotho-Tswana were ancient Egyptians. 3