Laura S Grillo | Georgetown University (original) (raw)

ANTHOLOGY CHAPTERS by Laura S Grillo

IN PRESS & FORTHCOMING -DO NOT QUOTE UNTIL PUBLICATION "Queen" Nanny (c. 1686-c. 1755) was a leg... more IN PRESS & FORTHCOMING -DO NOT QUOTE UNTIL PUBLICATION

"Queen" Nanny (c. 1686-c. 1755) was a legendary leader of the Jamaican Windward Maroons, a community of formerly enslaved Africans who escaped to the hills. Under the leadership of this elder, they successfully repelled repeated attempts by British colonizers to recapture and subdue them, eventually obtaining a peace treaty granting them land rights in perpetuity.

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Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions, 2024

Divination is a ritual mode for communicating with the divine. But divination is not just one amo... more Divination is a ritual mode for communicating with the divine. But divination is not just one among many rituals practiced in the religions of Africa and the diaspora. Divination is the very pivot on which all other practices-initiation, healing and the protective arts, libation, sacrifice, and even possession trance-hinge. It is an essential warrant that commissions or sanctions these other rites. It establishes their orienting spiritual vision. It links the individual to the human and spiritual community and reveals the inextricable place of the person in a dynamic and spirit-filled cosmos. It is through divination that we can best understand how these various other practices operate as a complex and coherent religious system, as philosophically sophisticated as it is pragmatic. There are multiple forms of divination and a variety of systems for accessing oracular knowledge among the diverse traditions in the Caribbean. This is no less true of divination in the source traditions of Africa. Divinatory techniques vary tremendously, from the interpretation of omens to water gazing or geomancy, but a common form relies on reading the configurations that result from the random cast of a set of objects, such as shells or bones. The diviner is a ritual specialist who has mastered the technique to obtain and decipher the messages transmitted from the spiritual realm through these phenomena in the physical world. But divination is far more than "fortune telling. " Its primary object is to enable the client to navigate life's problems by offering concrete

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Anthropology and Humanism, 2020

The very nature of fieldwork constructs the conditions for "exceptional experience." Learning to ... more The very nature of fieldwork constructs the conditions for "exceptional experience." Learning to inhabit an unfamiliar world and operate outside one's normal frame of reference makes one vulnerable. The "participant observer" is inevitably changed. This may be especially true when the effort to bridge perspectives involves experimentation of a kind that not only engages the researcher in intense and intimate inquiry but also entangles her as an inextricable part of it. My investigation of the cryptic practice of divination in West Africa was such an entanglement. My memoir, Ask for the Road, is about my fieldwork on divination in Côte d'Ivoire-an investigation that, through the seers' uncannily accurate readings, quickly turned into an exploration of my haunting past in that country. The diviners' readings forced me to revisit the demise of my former marriage to an Ivoirian man and its continued hold on me. "The Boiling Cauldron," a chapter from the memoir, is about a meeting with one of those diviners and a disturbing encounter that helped me decide to take leave of the past once and for all, and claim a new direction. [Africa, divination, memoir, witchcraft] No one had ever mentioned his leprosy, and I was unprepared. When we first met, his eyes fixed intently on mine, and I felt him waiting and daring me to look at the corroded stumps of his hands and feet. I'd always had a horror of deformity. Once, many years before, Simon and I were standing in the field of corrugated dried mud that served as makeshift station waiting for our bush taxi to leave, when a leprous beggar had approached me from behind and tapped my shoulder. I turned to the shock of a gaping hole where his nose should have been, and lips gnawed and dripping like wax. I caught my body's sinking weight against the door of the old Peugeot. Simon chased him away and tried to make light of it. "I would have offered him a cigarette, but what could he have done with it?" he snickered. "Get it?" he urged, but I was still dizzy and weak. This time, though, I stepped toward the diviner and extended my hand. He reached out the shaft of his arm. When I took it his expression softened. He turned and led us out of the sun into his cool consulting room. Diarra Souleymane was what the Moslems called him, but he was better known by his Senoufo name, Dé Tchéclezo. He was a sand caster. As I followed

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Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Mande studies, 2017

"Mothers at the round-about: recollecting identity on moral grounds" - a presentation delivered i... more "Mothers at the round-about: recollecting identity on moral grounds" - a presentation delivered in Grand-Bassam, Côte d'Ivoire. Based on the book, An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa (Duke UP, 2018).

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In The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, ed. William Schweiker, Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2005. 438-447., 2005

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In Religion Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Dynamics in African and the New African Diasporic Religions., 2012

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in Religion: Super Religion. Ed. Jeffrey J. Kripal. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Religi... more in Religion: Super Religion. Ed. Jeffrey J. Kripal. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Religion series. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Press. 2017.

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The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions, 2012

In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions, Ed. Elias Kifon Bongmba. Oxford, England: ... more In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions, Ed. Elias Kifon Bongmba. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2012: 112-126.

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in Ifa Divination, Knowledge, Power, and Performance. Eds. Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland Abiodun. ... more in Ifa Divination, Knowledge, Power, and Performance. Eds. Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland Abiodun. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2016

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ARTICLES by Laura S Grillo

Anthropology and Humanism, 2020

Extract from memoir, "Ask for the Road" (forthcoming).

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History of Religions, 1997

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Journal of Africana Religions

Abstract:This response by the author of An Intimate Rebuke relays how the book's subject, fem... more Abstract:This response by the author of An Intimate Rebuke relays how the book's subject, female genital power (FGP) and the principle of "matrifocal morality," emerged from fieldwork. Taking up key questions by four commentators, it emphasizes the need to make Africa the source and subject of novel critique.

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Journal of Religion in Africa, Jan 1, 2022

Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrat... more Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrated a founding epistemic violence. The matrix of Black Reason, Blackness, and The Black worked systematically to justify colonialism and undermine African subjectivity. By maintaining its grip over the psyche, the postcolonial commandement effortlessly and indefinitely sustained subjugation. This is its ‘little secret’. Mbembe suggests that liberation may be possible by appealing to an archive from the ‘underside’ of African history to retrieve a self that is not constituted by toxic colonial projections. Drawing on my work An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa, I argue that the traditional appeal by postmenopausal women to their ‘bottom power’ is just such a living matrix – a ‘matri-archive’. Performing this ritual in the context of public protest, the ‘Mothers’ deploy their own ‘little secret’ with the capacity to break the hold of the postcolony...

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2019

Book Review

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Religion in Public: Faith and Action Series (blog, University of Leeds), 2020

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Global-e, 2019

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Contending Modernities (blog of University of Notre Dame), 2020

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Journal of Africana Religions, 2019

The author of "An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa" (D... more The author of "An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa" (Duke UP, 2018), responds to 5 scholars' assessments of the study, first presented at the American Academy of Religions, and published by the Journal of Africana Religions.

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IN PRESS & FORTHCOMING -DO NOT QUOTE UNTIL PUBLICATION "Queen" Nanny (c. 1686-c. 1755) was a leg... more IN PRESS & FORTHCOMING -DO NOT QUOTE UNTIL PUBLICATION

"Queen" Nanny (c. 1686-c. 1755) was a legendary leader of the Jamaican Windward Maroons, a community of formerly enslaved Africans who escaped to the hills. Under the leadership of this elder, they successfully repelled repeated attempts by British colonizers to recapture and subdue them, eventually obtaining a peace treaty granting them land rights in perpetuity.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions, 2024

Divination is a ritual mode for communicating with the divine. But divination is not just one amo... more Divination is a ritual mode for communicating with the divine. But divination is not just one among many rituals practiced in the religions of Africa and the diaspora. Divination is the very pivot on which all other practices-initiation, healing and the protective arts, libation, sacrifice, and even possession trance-hinge. It is an essential warrant that commissions or sanctions these other rites. It establishes their orienting spiritual vision. It links the individual to the human and spiritual community and reveals the inextricable place of the person in a dynamic and spirit-filled cosmos. It is through divination that we can best understand how these various other practices operate as a complex and coherent religious system, as philosophically sophisticated as it is pragmatic. There are multiple forms of divination and a variety of systems for accessing oracular knowledge among the diverse traditions in the Caribbean. This is no less true of divination in the source traditions of Africa. Divinatory techniques vary tremendously, from the interpretation of omens to water gazing or geomancy, but a common form relies on reading the configurations that result from the random cast of a set of objects, such as shells or bones. The diviner is a ritual specialist who has mastered the technique to obtain and decipher the messages transmitted from the spiritual realm through these phenomena in the physical world. But divination is far more than "fortune telling. " Its primary object is to enable the client to navigate life's problems by offering concrete

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Anthropology and Humanism, 2020

The very nature of fieldwork constructs the conditions for "exceptional experience." Learning to ... more The very nature of fieldwork constructs the conditions for "exceptional experience." Learning to inhabit an unfamiliar world and operate outside one's normal frame of reference makes one vulnerable. The "participant observer" is inevitably changed. This may be especially true when the effort to bridge perspectives involves experimentation of a kind that not only engages the researcher in intense and intimate inquiry but also entangles her as an inextricable part of it. My investigation of the cryptic practice of divination in West Africa was such an entanglement. My memoir, Ask for the Road, is about my fieldwork on divination in Côte d'Ivoire-an investigation that, through the seers' uncannily accurate readings, quickly turned into an exploration of my haunting past in that country. The diviners' readings forced me to revisit the demise of my former marriage to an Ivoirian man and its continued hold on me. "The Boiling Cauldron," a chapter from the memoir, is about a meeting with one of those diviners and a disturbing encounter that helped me decide to take leave of the past once and for all, and claim a new direction. [Africa, divination, memoir, witchcraft] No one had ever mentioned his leprosy, and I was unprepared. When we first met, his eyes fixed intently on mine, and I felt him waiting and daring me to look at the corroded stumps of his hands and feet. I'd always had a horror of deformity. Once, many years before, Simon and I were standing in the field of corrugated dried mud that served as makeshift station waiting for our bush taxi to leave, when a leprous beggar had approached me from behind and tapped my shoulder. I turned to the shock of a gaping hole where his nose should have been, and lips gnawed and dripping like wax. I caught my body's sinking weight against the door of the old Peugeot. Simon chased him away and tried to make light of it. "I would have offered him a cigarette, but what could he have done with it?" he snickered. "Get it?" he urged, but I was still dizzy and weak. This time, though, I stepped toward the diviner and extended my hand. He reached out the shaft of his arm. When I took it his expression softened. He turned and led us out of the sun into his cool consulting room. Diarra Souleymane was what the Moslems called him, but he was better known by his Senoufo name, Dé Tchéclezo. He was a sand caster. As I followed

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Mande studies, 2017

"Mothers at the round-about: recollecting identity on moral grounds" - a presentation delivered i... more "Mothers at the round-about: recollecting identity on moral grounds" - a presentation delivered in Grand-Bassam, Côte d'Ivoire. Based on the book, An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa (Duke UP, 2018).

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In The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, ed. William Schweiker, Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2005. 438-447., 2005

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In Religion Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Dynamics in African and the New African Diasporic Religions., 2012

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in Religion: Super Religion. Ed. Jeffrey J. Kripal. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Religi... more in Religion: Super Religion. Ed. Jeffrey J. Kripal. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Religion series. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Press. 2017.

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The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions, 2012

In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions, Ed. Elias Kifon Bongmba. Oxford, England: ... more In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions, Ed. Elias Kifon Bongmba. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2012: 112-126.

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in Ifa Divination, Knowledge, Power, and Performance. Eds. Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland Abiodun. ... more in Ifa Divination, Knowledge, Power, and Performance. Eds. Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland Abiodun. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2016

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Anthropology and Humanism, 2020

Extract from memoir, "Ask for the Road" (forthcoming).

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History of Religions, 1997

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Journal of Africana Religions

Abstract:This response by the author of An Intimate Rebuke relays how the book's subject, fem... more Abstract:This response by the author of An Intimate Rebuke relays how the book's subject, female genital power (FGP) and the principle of "matrifocal morality," emerged from fieldwork. Taking up key questions by four commentators, it emphasizes the need to make Africa the source and subject of novel critique.

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Journal of Religion in Africa, Jan 1, 2022

Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrat... more Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrated a founding epistemic violence. The matrix of Black Reason, Blackness, and The Black worked systematically to justify colonialism and undermine African subjectivity. By maintaining its grip over the psyche, the postcolonial commandement effortlessly and indefinitely sustained subjugation. This is its ‘little secret’. Mbembe suggests that liberation may be possible by appealing to an archive from the ‘underside’ of African history to retrieve a self that is not constituted by toxic colonial projections. Drawing on my work An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa, I argue that the traditional appeal by postmenopausal women to their ‘bottom power’ is just such a living matrix – a ‘matri-archive’. Performing this ritual in the context of public protest, the ‘Mothers’ deploy their own ‘little secret’ with the capacity to break the hold of the postcolony...

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2019

Book Review

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Religion in Public: Faith and Action Series (blog, University of Leeds), 2020

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Global-e, 2019

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Contending Modernities (blog of University of Notre Dame), 2020

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Journal of Africana Religions, 2019

The author of "An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa" (D... more The author of "An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa" (Duke UP, 2018), responds to 5 scholars' assessments of the study, first presented at the American Academy of Religions, and published by the Journal of Africana Religions.

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Along an African Border: Angolan Refugees and their Divination Baskets. By Sonia Silva. Philadelp... more Along an African Border: Angolan Refugees and their Divination Baskets. By Sonia Silva. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 188, 37 illustrations.

Review article in History of Religions 52/3 (2013):414-417.

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Ivoirian women vehemently protest the violence and calamity of civil war by deploying an embodied... more Ivoirian women vehemently protest the violence and calamity of civil war by deploying an embodied rhetoric of ritual, appealing to the traditional religious concept of " Female Genital Power. " I propose that their imagistic resistance to the postcolonial state represents a catachresis, with a few interesting twists. Most salient is that what women reinscribe onto the political scene is not as a feature of the imperial culture but the concept-metaphors of indigenous religion, and especially the image of Woman as the source of moral and spiritual power from which proceeds all political, religious, and juridical authority. Whereas the logo-centrism of the academy, and postcolonial theory in particular, leads to aporia, ritual remands scholars into the situation of the actual world, where women are actively engaged in self-representation that both defies projected depictions of them and rejects their absence from state conceptions of power.

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A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ARVIND SHARMA'S A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion is a thou... more A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ARVIND SHARMA'S A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion is a thought experiment fully deserving of our serious consideration. The title of the book alone provokes one to ask what the primal perspective could bring to the discipline. If the philosophy of religion were to take the so-called primal religions into account, how would its terms, concepts, and conclusions be forced to change? Would it make this largely Christian enterprise more relevant to a religiously heterogeneous world? Could the infusion of insights from primal religions shed light on the limits of the rationalist preoccupations of the Enlightenment and help the discipline to better conceive an approach that could account for religious pluralism without assessing some as true and others as mis-taken? These are the pressing questions that could move the discipline of

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Cultural Anthropology, 2012

In the series Hot Spot Forum: Côte d'Ivoire Is Cooling Down? Reflections a Year after the Battle ... more In the series Hot Spot Forum: Côte d'Ivoire Is Cooling Down? Reflections a Year after the Battle for Abidjan

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Jacob Olupona's City of 201 Gods critically engages the question of interpretation and understand... more Jacob Olupona's City of 201 Gods critically engages the question of interpretation and understanding in the analysis of specific African lifeworlds (re)defined by religious culture. Olupona's interpretation invites further interpretation of how emergent symbolic forms in a context of plural religious practices provoke both consensus and dis-sensus with respect to secularist practices.

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Queen" Nanny (c. 1686-c. 1755) was a legendary leader of the Jamaican Windward Maroons, a communi... more Queen" Nanny (c. 1686-c. 1755) was a legendary leader of the Jamaican Windward Maroons, a community of formerly enslaved Africans who escaped to the hills. Under the leadership of this elder, they successfully repelled repeated attempts by British colonizers to recapture and subdue them, eventually obtaining a peace treaty granting them land rights in perpetuity.

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Ritual has pride of place in the oral religions of Africa. It is the primary medium through which... more Ritual has pride of place in the oral religions of Africa. It is the primary medium through which religious thought is expressed and transmitted. Before launching into a discussion of any particular rituals, however, there are two common but mistaken presumptions about the nature of African religions that must be addressed.

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Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 21, 2024

Divination is a ritual mode for communicating with the divine. But divination is not just one amo... more Divination is a ritual mode for communicating with the divine. But divination is not just one among many rituals practiced in the religions of Africa and the diaspora. Divination is the very pivot on which all other practices-initiation, healing and the protective arts, libation, sacrifice, and even possession trance-hinge. It is an essential warrant that commissions or sanctions these other rites. It establishes their orienting spiritual vision. It links the individual to the human and spiritual community and reveals the inextricable place of the person in a dynamic and spirit-filled cosmos. It is through divination that we can best understand how these various other practices operate as a complex and coherent religious system, as philosophically sophisticated as it is pragmatic. There are multiple forms of divination and a variety of systems for accessing oracular knowledge among the diverse traditions in the Caribbean. This is no less true of divination in the source traditions of Africa. Divinatory techniques vary tremendously, from the interpretation of omens to water gazing or geomancy, but a common form relies on reading the configurations that result from the random cast of a set of objects, such as shells or bones. The diviner is a ritual specialist who has mastered the technique to obtain and decipher the messages transmitted from the spiritual realm through these phenomena in the physical world. But divination is far more than "fortune telling. " Its primary object is to enable the client to navigate life's problems by offering concrete

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Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics, Jun 20, 2022

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Journal of Religion in Africa, Dec 27, 2021

Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrat... more Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrated a founding epistemic violence. The matrix of Black Reason, Blackness, and The Black worked systematically to justify colonialism and undermine African subjectivity. By maintaining its grip over the psyche, the postcolonial commandement effortlessly and indefinitely sustained subjugation. This is its ‘little secret’. Mbembe suggests that liberation may be possible by appealing to an archive from the ‘underside’ of African history to retrieve a self that is not constituted by toxic colonial projections. Drawing on my work An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa, I argue that the traditional appeal by postmenopausal women to their ‘bottom power’ is just such a living matrix – a ‘matri-archive’. Performing this ritual in the context of public protest, the ‘Mothers’ deploy their own ‘little secret’ with the capacity to break the hold of the postcolony’s spell.

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Journal of Religious Ethics, 1992

... part of it. This paper will show Dogon divination to be an ethical duty arising from the resp... more ... part of it. This paper will show Dogon divination to be an ethical duty arising from the responsibility the Dogon people under-stand themselves to bear for the proper functioning and flourishing of the cosmos. The myth of Ogo ...

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Journal of Africana Religions, 2019

Abstract:This response by the author of An Intimate Rebuke relays how the book's subject, fem... more Abstract:This response by the author of An Intimate Rebuke relays how the book's subject, female genital power (FGP) and the principle of "matrifocal morality," emerged from fieldwork. Taking up key questions by four commentators, it emphasizes the need to make Africa the source and subject of novel critique.

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Numen, May 1, 1994

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This chapter presents original field research on divination and sacrifice in Cote d’Ivoire. It ai... more This chapter presents original field research on divination and sacrifice in Cote d’Ivoire. It aims at more than a portrait of the phenomena in the complex postmodern situation and discusses these practices to be vital resources for Africans struggling to contend with the vicissitudes of life in the urban situation. The chapter argues that the ongoing practice of divination is influencing the emergent shape of social reality and is itself constitutive of modernity. It describes that the prominence of divination on the contemporary scene is a moral response to the very real structural inequalities generated by globalization. Together, divination and sacrifice foster a sense of community based on "Africanity," one that transcends the perilous appeal to citizenship but does not fall back on the divisive conceptions of ethnicity. Keywords: Africanity; Cote d’Ivoire; divination; globalization

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Religion Compass, Nov 25, 2009

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Duke University Press eBooks, 2018

In this response I challenge the neglect of postcolonial theory in Laura Grillo’s An Intimate Reb... more In this response I challenge the neglect of postcolonial theory in Laura Grillo’s An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in Côte d’Ivoire and argue instead for its inclusion as a resource for immanent critique. I argue that Grillo’s text enhances and enriches the way we may think about time and politics in the postcolonial moment, but that it may in turn also be revitalised and strengthened by speaking with and to postcolonial thought, adding it to the lexicon and strategies of displacement Grillo identifies in practices of female genital power and the matri-archive they reference.

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History of Religions, May 1, 2013

ing symbolic theories, McCorkle asks, “How are scientist able to discern between subjective inter... more ing symbolic theories, McCorkle asks, “How are scientist able to discern between subjective interpretations, which construe meaning? . . .What interpretations should scientists categorize as valid and which ones . . . should they leave out as invalid?” (75). Who are these scientists, and what are their criteria for validity? How are these criteria arrived at, and how are they applied? In sum, the work as a whole falls naturally into two only tangentially related segments and might better have been presented as two journal articles. McCorkle’s material on Buddhist death rituals is uneven in quality and does not seem to contribute to the stated argument of the book. It should be read cautiously, with close attention to his use of sources and in conjunction with recent scholarship on Buddhist mortuary practices. Nevertheless McCorkle’s work on human responses to corpses represents a valuable effort, particularly given the increased attention being paid to death studies in academic research. He engages with a complex issue—how we as individuals react to the physical presence of death—and makes some useful first steps in studying it; but his work raises at least as many questions as it answers. For a general reader, there may be more detailed statistical analysis than can easily be assimilated; but this part of the book provides an insight into the workings of the cognitive science of religion and challenges us to engage with its methods and findings.

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Anthropology and humanism, May 28, 2020

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The Journal of Religion, Apr 1, 1991

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Oct 27, 2011

ARVIND SHARMA’S A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion is a thought experiment fully ... more ARVIND SHARMA’S A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion is a thought experiment fully deserving of our serious consideration. The title of the book alone provokes one to ask what the primal perspective could bring to the discipline. If the philosophy of religion were to take the so-called primal religions into account, how would its terms, concepts, and conclusions be forced to change? Would it make this largely Christian enterprise more relevant to a religiously heterogeneous world? Could the infusion of insights from primal religions shed light on the limits of the rationalist preoccupations of the Enlightenment and help the discipline to better conceive an approach that could account for religious pluralism without assessing some as true and others as

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Routledge eBooks, Mar 28, 2019

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Nova Religio, Feb 1, 2013

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Jul 8, 2019

Book Review

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Journal of Africana Religions, 2014

Olupona’s “indigenous hermeneutic” offers a privileged guided journey into the dense ritual space... more Olupona’s “indigenous hermeneutic” offers a privileged guided journey into the dense ritual space of a vital city. I underscore a subtle leitmotif—gender and female agency—running throughout this interpretive account to show women’s power to be both a sustaining force and source of ironic reversals in the fate of Ilé-Ifẹ̀

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Blackwell Publishing Ltd eBooks, Nov 20, 2007

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Translation of Introduction of "An Intimate Rebuke" (2018) by A.M. Bouttieux, 2018

Le pouvoir génital féminin : un rite prototypique d'une importante aire géographique L’Egbiki, n'... more Le pouvoir génital féminin : un rite prototypique d'une importante aire géographique
L’Egbiki, n'est pas seulement une pratique ésotérique originale associée à ce village éloigné ou à la population ABIDJI qui célèbre le Dipri. Pendant cinq siècles au moins, et dans toute l'Afrique occidentale, les femmes ont activement recouru à la ritualisation d'un concept religieux fondamental, à savoir que la gent féminine possède une puissance spirituelle innée et incarne l'autorité morale. Ce pouvoir réside dans les organes génitaux. En temps de désastre social, les aïeules se dévêtent et dansent de manière obscène. En brandissant des branches et de vieux pilons, elles frappent leur sexe et leurs seins pour contrecarrer les forces du mal. Ces gestes paradigmatiques qui expriment à la fois une malédiction et une admonestation collective constituent le recours au « pouvoir génital féminin»
Ce pouvoir n'est pas la capacité reproductrice des femmes ni ne fait allusion à la maternité quand bien même ces fonctions sont importantes dans les sociétés traditionnelles africaines. « Les Mères », ménopausées, appartiennent plutôt à un genre ambigu car elles ont dépassé le stade de la reproduction sexuelle. À l'instar des êtres primordiaux, le pouvoir qu'elles détiennent réside dans le fait qu’elles sont bisexuées. En tant qu’incarnations vivantes des ancêtres, les Mères sont à la fois les gardiennes de l'ordre moral et les vecteurs d’une énergie essentielle, primordiale et influente dont le siège est le ventre et la vulve. En s'adressant à leur sexe comme à un autel de chair, elles utilisent rituellement leur potentiel génital pour susciter les sorts les plus dangereux dans une forme de « combat spirituel » contre les forces maléfiques qui menacent la communauté....

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