PARA/ INQUIRY Postmodern Religion and Culture Victor E ... - IMIC

connection with the Columbian Exposition, was determined to further encourage academicstudies of the world’s religions and unite those religions under Christianity:To unite all Religion against all irreligion; to make the Golden Rule the basis of this union; topresent to the world … the substantial unity of many religions in the good deeds of theReligious Life; to provide for a World Parliament of Religions, in which their common aims andgrounds of unity may be set forth, and the marvelous Religious progress of the NineteenthCentury be reviewed. 14It is the construction of unity, via the ancient past and Otherness, in relation to the modernideal or proper city, which gives rise to many humanistic questions today, much in the sameway, for example, as it did in Chicago in 1893 – the ultimate manufactured city, the White City.In this sense, the Chicago Exposition serves as an illustration of the emergence of theparasacred.Chroniclers of the Chicago Exposition note their fascination with the human achievementsof the Western world. Behind the neoclassical façades of plaster, cement, and jute fiber wereelectric stoves, electric lights, telephones, and what were to become the everyday appliancesof the twentieth century. Not only did the Columbian Exposition celebrate technologicalachievements, but it demonstrated something of the extent, the promise, of the Westerntechnological mode of existence and the dominance of a Western mode of subjectivity. Theneoclassical architecture brought the Exposition-goers back in “time” to the secrets andorigins of Western civilization. The past and present, as it was intended, came together in onemoment of transmitting the sacred from the ancient past to the present.37At the same time as the Exposition’s neoclassical faux structures of plaster and woodhoused the achievements of the Western world, there were other enclosures there with otherhumans who were not entirely participatory in or celebratory of this civilizing power. Theexhibits on the Exposition’s Midway Plaisance featured ethnological studies of the non-Western world, the conquered, which were supervised by Harvard anthropologist FredricWard Putnam. F.W. Putnam, in attempting to bring together two worlds, hired as theorganizer Sol Bloom who, unlike his contemporaries, wrote: “I came to realize that a tall,skinny chap from Arabia with the talent for swallowing swords expressed a culture which tome was on a higher plane than the one demonstrated by a group of earnest Swiss peasantswho passed their day making cheese and milk chocolate.” 15 Ward’s assistant Harlan IngersollSmith was less generous, and perhaps more attuned with the thinking of his time, when hestated that the ethnological exhibits “from the first to the last … will be arranged to teach alesson; to show the advancement of evolution of man.” 16The White City, or the “whited sepulchre” as Frederick Douglass and Ida Barnett Wellsnamed it in their essay “The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’sColumbian Exposition,” 17 symbolized the center of humanity; and the neoclassicalarchitecture, recalling the Golden Age of Greece, created the sense of a celestial city –a sacred place in which all humanity, even those thought to be not yet suitably evolved, couldpartake of the essence of being human. The sacrality of the Exposition’s Grand Basin andthe Midway held in tension a peculiar and unsteady dialectic. The Grand Basin’s sacralitywas dependent upon the “unholy” Midway. What this sacrality, with its totalizing discourses,attempted to suppress was actually the para/sacrality of the Midway – that whichexists around and outside of the sacred. In an effort to include the achievements of African-