Yang Visiting Scholar Jennifer Scheper-Hughes, MDiv ’96, on ‘Proximate History’

Jennifer Scheper-Hughes, MDiv ’96, one of the two Yang Visiting Scholars in World Christianity, is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on the lived history of Latin American Christianity with special consideration for the religious lives of Mexican and Mexican American Catholics. Her book, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (New York University Press, 2021), was named one of the top five academic books on religion for 2021 by Publishers Weekly.  

Her current research project concerns the collective labor of religious ritual in Mexico and Central America, centering especially the sacramental leadership of laywomen. At Harvard Divinity School (HDS), Hughes taught a course, “Lived History of the Church in Latin America: Global Perspectives and Dimensions.”

We recently sat down with her to discuss her scholarship, her experience at HDS, and advice to future Yang Scholars.

For me, the Yang Visiting Scholars program was an invitation to open myself to new ideas and possibilities. It’s been wonderful to fully immerse myself in the life of the School. I'm a resident at the CSWR, and I’m steeping in the conversations and making myself available to experience the wealth of discussions and the diversity of work that takes place here. HDS has really welcomed me into all of that.

I also participate in the North American Religions Colloquium and various research talks at the CSWR. David Hempton, who directs the Yang Visiting Scholars program, organized a two-day Radcliffe workshop with Gina Zurlo about the future of the study of World Christianity and how Harvard can help facilitate and contribute to that future, which was generative and interesting. I think that the Yang program really speaks to Christian diversity globally. That's what we get when we think about World Christianity: there's a tremendous diversity of belief and practice, and it’s wonderful to bring that into the life of students here at Harvard Divinity School.

This year I have completed an edited volume and two book chapters. Most importantly, while at HDS I have been “seeding” a new book and trusting that this year at HDS is preparing me for what’s next.

I am trained in the interdisciplinary study of religion. I think of myself as a historian of religion, and I work on Latin American Catholicism. The lived religion part of it is looking at how communities that were subject to Spanish imperial rule navigated and negotiated this new religion. I work with sixteenth-century materials, sources, and historical documents. I was also raised in the ethnographic field; my mom was an anthropologist. 

I often think about the contemporary moment and how contemporary communities understand their past—what they remember and know about the origins of their religious practice and belief. I move between the sixteenth century and the present in my work. As I discussed recently in the Hackett Lecture at the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), I think about this relationship in terms of “proximate history.” 

It is “proximate” because it's premised on relationships and collaborations in the present with living communities, then thinking about how to draw these connections, investigating their understandings as a hermeneutic when reading the historical archive. I take seriously these communities’ questions about the past, the stories they want to tell, the histories they want to preserve—all of this is the collaborative part of my historical work.

Working with living communities in Mexico, mostly rural and Indigenous, or Indigenous descended, I learned that they often understand that Catholicism is the inheritance of their Indigenous ancestors, not of Spanish missionaries. It's their ancestral tradition, given to them by their ancestors, not imposed on them by the Spanish. This hermeneutic and emphasis informed both of my books: Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2010) and The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (New York University Press, 2021). 

In the first book, I wanted to tell the history of a 500-year-old crucifix. I had questions about the role of crucifixion imagery in Mexico, and the idea of the pain and suffering of Christ. Then I went to the small pueblo community where this image had been for almost 500 years, and I realized that for them it is less a memory of a suffering god and more a relationship with a living, animate image. After realizing this, I told the history of this image of a living object—as a vital material object in the lives of this community, past and present. My approach reflected and took seriously the community's own understanding of this object.

In my most recent book, which developed out of the first, I wanted to see how the catastrophic epidemics of the sixteenth century—perhaps the most severe being the epidemic of 1576—influenced religious life in the region. I had a sense in the abstract, but not in the textured, lived way. And in that moment, when Indigenous people were dying from these epidemics, they were also coming to understand themselves as Catholic. By the time of this epidemic, people weren't thinking of themselves as converts; it had been 50 years or so since the Spanish colonizers arrived. They had already understood that this was part of who they were for a while, but on their own terms. I think of this as a work of “salvaging” the religious tradition. And the story of the missionary, Spanish missionaries, evangelizers, is often sort of marginal from the perspective of these communities. 

Finally, I’m currently interested in the sacramental leadership of laywomen in Mexico and Central America. When I studied here at HDS, I studied with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Harvey Cox and later with Rosemary Ruether at the Graduate Theological Union—Elisabeth and Rosemary were two leaders in the feminist Catholic theological movement. I’ve always written about women in my work, but now I am looking to write about them more centrally. My appointment as a Yang Visiting Scholar allowed me to travel to El Salvador for the first time this past fall, to a community where laywomen are the leaders of Catholic ritual life. I’m currently collaborating with that community and thinking about its history and the origins of their Catholic practice.

There are several different sources that inspired my interest in this area. I was raised Roman Catholic, very much in the Vatican II tradition. I sometimes refer to myself as a Catholic love child of the 1960's. I grew up in Berkeley, and my early experience of Catholicism was positive, open, free thinking. 

Another major source is my mom's research and the places it took our family growing up. We lived for a while in a Catholic village in the Dingle Peninsula in Southwestern Ireland. As a young child, I regularly attended a three-hour long Gaelic mass. Her research also brought us to a “favela,” a slum, in Northeast Brazil, where I spent a lot of time growing up. Later, I was highly influenced by the liberation theological movement there.

I had an important experience in Brazil as a college student. I was living in the community and auditing classes at the Federal University of Recife. I was involved with a seminary, a Catholic seminary in Recife that pedagogically emphasized liberation theology. When I was there, the Vatican was suppressing liberation theology and dismantling some of the infrastructure related to it. The conservative archbishop, in concert with the Vatican, closed the seminary while I was there. 

There were several hundred students and people who were taking classes, doing lay education and literacy programs, and I joined them when they gathered at the seminary in protest. There was something about being outside that locked seminary that made me understand something, I think, about the tensions in the church and institutional tensions between the magisterium, the hierarchy of the church, and this lived popular, powerful expression of marginalized and disenfranchised communities. 

That's also how I ended up at Harvard Divinity School as a graduate student. I thought, well, they shut the seminary down. Where am I going to go? Because I thought that I might enroll to study at the seminary. When I was at HDS, I studied with Harvey Cox, who, at the time, had just written a book about the silencing of the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff.

Immerse yourself in the HDS community and the conversations as much as possible, while also making sure you have time for your own work. This is a very special opportunity for scholars who typically must balance their focus on their own work with the responsibilities associated with teaching full course loads. Take advantage of the time the program affords to write, think, collaborate, and grow as a scholar. 

Banner photo: Jennifer Scheper-Hughes, MDiv '96. Photo by Marisol Andrade Muñoz