大西洋视野中的北美黑奴宗教：一种文化混合体

[摘要]本文以“神圣物—沟通物—世俗物”的神圣化结构为研究框架，首先分析西非传统宗教中神圣物的多重性特征以及沟通物的多元性和持续性特征，接着在大西洋范围内对黑白文化接触过程中的社会经济压力、宗教共同基础以及宗教团体的作用分别进行梳理，最后得出了这样的结论，即白人基督教教义的枝条被顺利地嫁接到西非传统宗教基本结构的树干之上，从而在北美大陆的土壤上长成了一棵文化混合性的参天大树。
[关键词]北美黑奴新教；“神圣物—沟通物—世俗物”结构；混合体。
Slave Religion in Colonial North America from an Atlantic Perspective:
A Cultural Syncretism
[abstract]Inspired by Mircea Eliade’s differentiation between “the sacred” and “the profane”, this article advances a religious analytic frame of “the sacred—the heavenly ladders—the profane”, which respectively refer to the other world, this world and the linking bridges between the two worlds. By using this analytic frame, this article first explores the multiple characters of the sacred entities and the plural and continuous characters of the heavenly ladders in the main Western African religions. After criticizing the academic debates around Robin Horton’s theory of the “two-tiered arrangement of the unobservable”, this article then analyzes in turn the social and economic pressures connected with the so-called “macrocosm” over the black slaves in North America, the common ground between Western African religions and Western Christianity, and the functions of the white missionaries in North America. Having viewed the academic debates centering on the continuity of African traditions made by Melville J. Herskovits and E. Franklin Frazier, this article lastly draws a conclusion that the branches of Western Christianity had been successfully grafted onto the trunk of the basic religious structure of Western Africa, and that a towering tree of cultural syncretism was thus growing up on the land of the North American continent in the colonial period.
2006年8月南开大学“从国际视野重新审视美国历史”国际学术研讨会论文