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- Convenors:
-
Marieke van Winden (conference organiser)
(African Studies Centre Leiden)
Rijk van Dijk (African Studies Centre Leiden)
Thomas G. Kirsch (University of Konstanz)
Senzokuhle Doreen Setume (University of Botswana)
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- Stream:
- E: Transdisciplinary debates
- Start time:
- 5 February, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
- Session slots:
- 2
Long Abstract:
All over the African continent, ways of knowing are playing an important role in people’s everyday lives, which are not mediated by formal education or science. These religious ways of knowing are rarely acknowledged in development efforts and university curricula, and yet are important for understanding how people in Africa make sense of developments in the wider world. Given the diversified and pluralist nature of religion in Africa, practitioners are faced with competing claims to truth and a multitude of different knowledge practices that range from the experience-near heuristics of the spiritualist variety to sophisticated religious knowledge transfers. At stake in this context, therefore, are not only the specific contents of authoritative religious knowledge but also the much more basic question of how this knowledge can be gained in the first place. The panel examines religious knowing in Africa and concentrates on the limitations of understanding these ways of knowing. Conceptualizing religious practitioners to be ‘knowledge seekers’, it asks what specific aspects of reality are assumed to be ‘unknown’ or even ‘unknowable’ by them. It explores the strategies employed to link religion with the development of knowledge and, in other empirical instances, to accommodate to the fact that certain things can or should not be known.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Damilola Agbalajobi (Obafemi Awolowo University)
Paper long abstract:
Towards the end of 2019, Prof. B.I.C. Ijomah Centre for Policy Studies and Research, University of Nigeria, (UNN) organized a two-day conference on witchcraft on its campus. The conference call took the religious public imaginary by surprise. The Christian community of the South-East of Nigeria started a massive campaign and condemned the hosting of such a conference. A number of other religious stakeholders rallied support for the clergy's condemnation of the conference through various fora including the social media. The opposition was so stiff that the authorities of the University initially made moves to cancel the conference. The University, however, made some concessions by changing the topic of the conference and also the ideology of the conference to allay public fears and satisfy the religious community. The ideology of the conference was later modified to that of demystifying witchcraft or the powers of witches. The claims of the current study are that i) the church is by this singular act taking over the control of knowledge production, dissemination and consumption from the ivory tower ii) the church-ivory tower clash is a subjective and political clash of supremacy of different spirituals and iii) the contemporary ivory tower's handlers are scientific brain and religious mind scholars actively participating in the return of the ivory tower to the era of inquisition. This paper, therefore, aims to examine the hidden gender war exemplified in the clash over knowledge production and dissemination represented in feminine spiritual energies called witchcraft within the framework of power relations in higher education. Using agency and group theories to analyze ethnographic and quantitative data gathered from the 2019 witchcraft conference at the University of Nigeria (UNN), it should be convenient to conclude that given the preponderance of scientific brain and religious mind scholars who are the current handlers of higher education in the country, the politics of nationalization of foreign spirituality over African native spirituality is on the ascendancy and the ivory tower is fast disappearing as a habitat of scientific enquiry in which the morphology of the science of all spiritual energies happening in different religious traditions can be subjected to intellectual scrutiny. More than this, it is observed that the scientific brain and religious mind scholar handler of the ivory tower manifests no inherent contradictory tension in himself and as an extension of the church is an educated patriarch.
Rune Larsen (KU Leuven, Faculty of Social Sciences)
Paper long abstract:
Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Windhoek, Namibia I will in this paper analyse my experiences of going to creation with "the Mountain Iyahs". This is a group of primarily coloured break-away Rastafarians from Namibia's Khomas region. In search of a spiritual sanctuary the Mountain Iyahs had found a channel of inner communication with the Divine by means of bush-meditation combined with consultations of different teacher-plants. They do this through syncretic and individualized spiritual practices that draw inspiration from spiritual and religious sources from across the globe. I explore how these experiences speak of the spiritual-existential journeys of the Iyahs (and myself); how global flows of images and information influence these younger Namibians' spiritual ontologies; and how the Iyahs' spiritual politics enable a rethinking of both spiritual and scientific epistemological boundaries. I hereby counter public and political narratives in Namibia that depicts the country's younger population as idle and (politically) disengaged. I do this by showing how the Iyahs' Saturday retreats to the bush brings forth a critical engagement on social and existential issues that haunts life in contemporary Windhoek. Likewise, the spiritual and recreational use of psychoactive substances such as the Iyahs' teacher-plants comes with great stigma globally. In light of this stigma I address the spiritual significance and socially productive forces of such use. I argue that the Mountian Iyahs' consultations with teacher-plants is an anti-ideological and barrier-breaking mediation between the positively disclosed world and its otherwise invisible and hidden spiritual realms. This mediation facilitates their inclusive spiritual practices. These practices are characterized by an ingenious combination of critical religious suspicion and radical openness towards a multiplicity of sources of spiritual knowledge and divine possibilities.
Senzokuhle Doreen Setume (University of Botswana)
Paper long abstract:
While the need for decolonising counselling in Africa has been an academic subject for some time now, counselling in the context of death as so far not been addressed. Counselling -theories, -methods, and -models that are used for training and providing counselling services in Africa often originate from Europe and America, this poses challenges of relevance and appropriateness and effectiveness in an African context. In Africa particular attention must be drawn to what can be called "special deaths"; these include deaths of (one of) twins/twin, traditional doctor people with albinism etc. Special deaths often involve special rituals and convictions. Providing effective counselling in such cases demands specific knowledge and understanding of associated rituals, imaginaries and their meaning, and the question is how are grief-counselling services in Botswana currently dealing with these special deaths? Developing a qualitative-auto-ethnographic study on this level of knowledge in counselling-practices this study aims to explore the death rituals relating to the passing away of one of twins, and to examine the cultural knowledge of psycho-social support systems available to surviving twins in North East Botswana. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with twin less twins, parents of twin less twins, local counsellors (social workers and pastors) and traditional ritual specialists. The study found out that many twin-less twins have not sought professional counselling; this is because counsellors do not engage with (local) knowledge and understanding of the twin rituals and their implications in grief counselling; these include a number of cultural practices convictions such as no mourning no burial rituals a surviving twin's death is immanent) and no contact with corpse of the deceased twin, exchange of clothes between the living and dead twin; 'burial' of the live-twin. Yet, these practices are strongly maintained by the local community and the bereaved. As such the data reveal an important contestation between the Euro-centric orientation of the available grief-counselling practices and the local cultural practices of dealing with special deaths. The paper will argue that, while there is a mis-match between available grief-counselling services, and while these counselling practices display a counter-cultural orientation, these counselling services also seem to resist an idea of decolonisation. The paper will seek to provide an answer to the question as to why such counselling especially in the situation of special deaths demonstrates a profound resilience against the inclusion of understandings of the local cultural meanings and practices that revolve around these situations.
Rijk van Dijk (African Studies Centre Leiden)
Paper long abstract:
This paper starts off from the observation that while the mobility of people is often related to the development and aspiration of upward social mobility, this exploration often lacks the inclusion of a perspective on the mobility of institutions. Most studies in Africa that explore different forms of mobility tend to highlight the mobility of individuals, their networks and circulation of knowledge and imaginaries in view of how they may, or may not, come together in reaching a better position in life and a higher status on the social ladder. This paper aims to draw attention to the geographical and social mobility of institutions, and how these may interrelate. This perspective is of particular relevance to the religious domain in Africa where institutions such as transnational churches, demonstrate a knowing-how of institutional mobility in moving across geographical borders, but where the question as to how they have been able in the process to climb the social ladder has received much less attention. Furthermore, this question as to how such religious institutions produce, foster and imagine upward social movement can also be fruitfully raised in relation to some cultural institutions, such as marriage, that have great significance for the combined processes of geographical and social mobility. This paper explores how in the Botswana context transnational Pentecostal churches not only have developed a know-how on how to place themselves higher on the social ladder of status, respect and successfulness in this society, but also perceive of the institution of marriage as an institution that should be 'uplifted'. It thus becomes a target of developing an aspirational know-how of how this upliftment can and should be reached. In so doing, this paper focuses on how the Pentecostals in Botswana develop understandings of institutional social mobility in multifaceted ways.
Thomas G. Kirsch (University of Konstanz)
Paper long abstract:
My paper takes its clue from the common understanding of Christians worldwide that God’s will is unchanging and independent from the vagaries of life on earth, also implying that God is self-identical in eternity. At the same time, it is widely conceded that, for humans, God’s identity remains categorically unknowable in its entirety. Examining the case of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in present-day Zambia, I show that pneumatic Christians trust in the fact that aspects of God’s identity reveal themselves in the form of earthly manifestations of the Holy Spirit. They therefore expect each appearance of this spiritual entity to reveal new insights into God’s will and plans. Yet, this also means that the Holy Spirit is expected to always make a difference – to differ from what humans already know about it but, importantly, also from previous instances of it manifesting itself. Consequently, spirit manifestations are only then attributed to the Holy Spirit if they do not merely replicate previous spiritual manifestations but differ from them, if only slightly. In this way, the pneumatic quest for knowing God’s identity resembles what philosopher Jacques Derrida noted about handwritten signatures: They are only then deemed to be a marker of personal identity if each instance of them deviates gradually from preceding instances while at the same time retaining a certain degree of family resemblance with them. Taking inspiration from the latter insight (without otherwise subscribing to deconstruction theory), my paper probes into the analytical purview of it for the study of pneumatic Christianity in Africa (and beyond).
Agustina Alvarez (Independent researcher)
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on sacred forests in the North Pare Mountains, Tanzania, and questions the relationship between local Pare worldviews and discourses of Christianity and Islam which drives their conservation. In spite of not being gazetted by the State, studies show that sacred forests in North Pare have a wider variety of endemic flora and fauna and are better preserved than national forests reserves. Although they are small in size, sacred forests are thus important globally, but as in many parts of the world, the introduction of alternative faiths and formal education based on Western scientifical truths, among other things, has weakened their precolonial significance. Inevitably, such 'modernity discourses' have diluted the concept of interconnectedness of all beings and the interrelations between the visible and non-visible worlds, upon which the eco-centered African holistic vision of creation existed. However, the findings of my research, collected by means of an ethnographic fieldwork in the Kilimanjaro area, show that Pare customs and traditions have not completely vanished and are still the main reason for - and primary task of - sacred forests conservation. While the modern conservation agenda often builds its policies on the assumption of a traditional/modern dichotomy, the article analyzes to which extent Pare customs and traditions have mixed with and incorporated new philosophical categories and (Western) scientific concepts to give new meaning and relevance to sacred forests and their preservation. These reflections are not only necessary to stop reproducing the boundaries of the colonial world, but also to complement recent conservation efforts in a new perspective.
Anna Madeleine Ayeh (University of Bayreuth)
Paper long abstract:
During their whole life, Muslim women in Benin engage in seeking knowledge about Islam, drawing on a multitude of sources that at times reinforce, at times contradict each other. How to know what is the right knowledge emerges a question that is posing itself on a day-to-day basis and manifests in seemingly mundane interactions and situations. Carefully analyzing these moments, this paper looks at religious knowing as relational as well as situatively and contextually contingent. This perspective shows women as seekers, keepers and multiplicators of religious knowledge, constantly claiming religious knowledge that is being accepted, challenged, or rejected, thereby creating a dynamic scape of religious discourse that is too easily ignored in a script-centered understanding of Islamic knowledge.
Sulaiman Adewale Alagunfon (Freie Universitaet Berlin)
Paper long abstract:
To know Arabic or to engage in pursuing Arabic knowledge is presumably equivalent to knowing or pursuing not only the knowledge of Islam but also the totality of Islam as a religion in the Yoruba society of Nigeria. In the view of many, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Arabic is just the same thing as Islam. This culturally oriented motivation for the study of Arabic has overtime determined the ways people learn and try to know more about Islam in the society and has also been one of deciding factors of inclusion and exclusion among the populace. For Islamic purposes, Arabic can be regarded as one of the vibrant languages being massively learned outside the realm of the so-called formal education. It has developed a very strong and viable system of its own over the ages and continues to be taught at different levels and domains such as traditional Ile Keu (school), madrasa-based system and governmental institutions. This paper explores those ways through which Arabic, via its Islamic background in the Yorubaland, south western Nigeria can, and continue to, be known. Despite various formal and informal levels and institutions where Arabic is being learnt, only three ways of knowing, this paper argue, are extant viz; ta'allum, (learning), ta'līm, (lit. teaching) and Ta'līf (authoring). These ways, which seems to be normal, transcends the border of their respective common meanings and purposes in the Yoruba-Nigerian socio-religious context. How the three work out and how they are being appropriated for socio-religious purposes in the contemporary Yorubaland are thus also engaged in this paper.