Race and Materiality in African Religious Contexts.pdf (original) (raw)

Embodiment and Relationality in Religions of Africa and Its Diasporas

Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas

Melodically rocking Sufi bodies remember God on a former plantation in South Carolina, reconnecting with ancestors and an imagined homeland. Dancers in Martinique use the sound of the bèlè drum to achieve emotional transcendence and resist alienation caused by centuries of French assimilation. Devotees of Mama Tchamba in Togo use shuffling steps, dress, and ritual to placate the spirits of formerly enslaved people from the North whom their own ancestors bought and sold. All of these examples foreground one thing: the role of the body specifically in the shaping, transmitting, and remaking of African and African diasporic religions and religious communities. Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas is an edited volume that critically examines the role of the body as a source of religiously motivated social action for people of African descent across the geographic regions of the African continent, the Ca rib bean and Latin Amer i ca, the American South, and Eu rope. From a variety of religious contexts-from Pentecostalism in Ghana and Brazil to Ifá divination in Trinidad to Islam in South Carolina, Nigeria, and London-the contributors investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and negotiation of par tic ular social relationships and collective identities. A series of case studies explore how embodied practices-such as possession and spirit-induced trembling, wrestling in pursuit of deliverance, ritual dance, and gestures and postures of piety-can inform notions of sexual citizenship, challenge secular definitions of the nation, or promote transatlantic connections as well as local and ethnic Introduction: Embodiment and Relationality in Religions of Africa and Its Diasporas yolanda covington-ward and jeanette s. jouili

Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas

The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifá practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healing, and sexua...

African religions: Images and I-glasses

Religion, 1990

Every guest editor would like to claim that her/his special issue of a journal is of the `landmark' variety. While there have been some excellent articles on Africa in Religion, 1 the present issue-the first devoted solely to African religions-marks both a decision by the editorial board to publish more thematic issues, and a more general revival of interest in African religions. This interest is manifested by a concern to give African religions greater prominence in world religions textbooks, and to see such religions represented in wider academic enterprises and publishing projects. It is also evidenced by the (re)creation of a consultation on `Religion in Africa' at the American Academy of Religion. Four of the essays in this edition of Religion were originally presented at a panel of `Images of African Religions' which took place at the AAR annual meeting in Anaheim, California in November 1989. These contributions, as well as the ongoing agenda of the consultation, reflect a concern not just to see Africa included in terms of subject matter and hence stimulate research and influence comparative analyses, but also to disseminate the wider theoretical challenges offered by discourse about African religions. One such example would be the challenge to text-centred perspectives in the study of religion. The essays by Lewis, Murphy, Shaw and Baum are concerned with unmasking and unwrapping the academic and cultural images or constructs that we have all lived with in our textbooks, mass media and scholarly publications. All four explore the historical development of these images. This self-reflexivity or critical examination of the various `I-glasses' which produce the diverse images of African religions must be seen in the context of broader scholarly discussions (in fields such as literary criticism, anthropology, art history, linguistics and philosophy) on the invention of tradition, the construction of cultural categories and the ideological foundations of academic discourse in general. 2 The power base of knowledge is especially important in the African context with its experience of colonial and missionary activity. Not long ago, Robin Horton delivered an incisive critique of those who viewed African religions through Judaeo-Christian spectacles' or the `Devout Opposition', as he called them. 3 More recently, post-modernist thinkers have demonstrated the hegemonic under

Subjectivity: Offerings from African Diasporic Religious Ethnography

Fieldwork in Religion, 2022

This article focuses on subjectivity in the ethnography of religion by considering the multiplicity of subjectivity and their relationalities, drawing from the author’s ethnographic encounter with the orisha Oshun in Trinidad. This reflection on the implications of taking seriously the spectral or spirit, in their many forms and aspects, as active agents involves the expansion of subjectivity and the relational aspects of inter-subjectivity from the singular to the multiple. Written from a pur- posefully provocative compound subject position of “I/we”, this article asks that ethnographers of religion grapple with the offerings of ontologies outside the Western “normative” intellectual tradition. I/we offer that this shift will impact our engagements with the people and communi- ties that we work with, expanding our capacity to share multiple worlds and our ability to engage numerous theorizations.

‘Don’t make it a doctrine’: Material religion, transcendence, critique

2016

Once a matter of beliefs, symbols, values and worldviews, religion has progressively appeared in recent anthropological works as material religion, a highly concrete phenomenon based on affects, senses, substances, places, artifacts, and technologies. But what happened to transcendence, the dimension of religious worldmaking that remains beyond – hidden, untouched, unseen, unheard or unfulfilled? Is it necessarily the 'other' of material religion, a residual category that carries no ethnographic value? Retaining an emic concern with authority and a reflexive awareness about processes of boundary-making, in this article I approach material religion as a field of problematization inhabited by anthropologists and religious subjects alike. I examine some of the protocols whereby Pentecostal Christians in Ghana engage critically with the problem of materi-ality in their own religion, and argue that this operation lends ethnographic access to the role of transcendence in material religion's everyday.

Towards a critique of indigenous African religion

HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 2011

In this article, it is argued that a postcolonial critique of the colonial study of religion should not preclude a critique of indigenous African religion itself. The latter may be developed from a human rights perspective and a critique of exclusionary views of indigeneity. The argument is illustrated by means of specific case studies.

The Need to Re-Conceptualize African ‘Traditional’ Religion

African Research Review, 2013

Reality is a universal philosophical problem that people try to explain its underlying principle from their subjective perception. Religion is one of those ways to explain this unknown principle with spiritual connotation. In this connection, Africa as an entity looks at reality in a different perspective, which in this work we term African Religion. But as this work observes, a misconception about African Religion gave birth to a contraption called "African Traditional Religion". On this note, this work sets forth to re

‘Deconstructing Dogma’: Transgressive religious iconography in South African art

de arte, 2014

In this article I present a brief theoretical overview of the history of religious imagery and iconoclasm as a background for the works that are displayed in the exhibition 'Deconstructing Dogma', held at the University of Johannesburg's Art Gallery from 6-28 May 2014. I explain the strength of feeling ascribed to images that are considered sacred, with the result that they comprise a perfect vehicle for parodic quotation in post-modern terms, leading to a disruption of complacent viewing. The long history of values, idealistic role models and didactic instruction inherent in Christian imagery is thus exposed in such a way as to encourage questioning of how those values may still be informing contemporary social behaviour. A close iconographic analysis of selected examples from the 'Deconstructing Dogma' exhibition illustrates the way the chosen artists respond to a broad range of contemporary social ills in South Africa, using art-historic Christian imagery directly or alluding to characters and stories from the Bible. Whatever form the work takes, whether direct parody of specific works or parodic reference to types, this self-reflexive mode of art-making engages both the past and the present in what is often a critical response to both. This article thus presents a rationale for the transgressive quotation and parody of Christian imagery in post-apartheid South African art that responds timeously to current social injustice.

Responding to new Imageries in African indigenous Spiritualties

Religious: Jurnal Studi Agama-Agama dan Lintas Budaya Journal of Religious and Cross-Cultural Studies, 2022

As a result of rash and incorrect assumptions, African spiritualities have been adulterated, bastardized, and multiplied. Academic studies in African spiritualities "were mostly conducted by Europeans and Americans who were extremely biased and primarily focused their scholarship on comparing African religion with Christianity and Islam. I will approach the new images of African spiritualities from two perspectives: the conflict between religion and spirituality, and the demonization of African spiritualities. The goal of this study is to present a new picture of African spirituality from two perspectives: the tension between religion and spirituality, and the demonization of African spirituality. The study's findings indicate that there is a complicated phenomenon that disfigures African spirituality. In both indigenous spirituality in Africa, and in spirituality created by Africans in the diaspora, the problem of portraying demonic African styles and perspectives in expressing mundane and non-mundane realities seems accepted. There are three aspects in analyzing this: historical-racial, media-social, and ideological. These aspects cross over on the point of African religion versus spirituality.