Paper short abstract:

I discuss the role of religion in regimenting and representing social time in Tanzania, as clergy simultaneously attempt to maintain spiritual heritage, and discourage specific traditional practices. I examine these as efforts to shape the future of Christianity and of individual Christians.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the role of religious practice in regimenting and representing social time. A majority of Tanzania's Chagga people are Christian, and Chagga spiritual heritage remains important to many. A central element of pre-Christian Chagga religion was veneration of ancestors and perpetuation of their memory, along with producing offspring to perpetuate one's own memory, thus achieving a kind of immortality. I suggest that this is one way of acting on one's future.

In practice, however, this is a sticky issue for Chagga clergy, who want to maintain their identity and heritage as Chagga people, at the same time as it is their duty to discourage some practices of ancestor veneration, including animal sacrifice and divination. This duty is impressed upon them doctrinally, as they believe it indicates a weak faith, and by global discourses of modernisation which label certain practices superstitious or backwards. In this paper, I discuss efforts by Chagga clergy to negotiate this tense relationshiop with traditional religious practices. Some focus on theological efforts to create alternatives for Christians to comemmorate ancestors and orient themselves toward a future of salvation (for example, re-contextualisation of Eucharistic traditions); others adopt the language of social justice, positioning sacrifice and divination as vehicles of impoverishment. I examine these efforts as attempts to shape the future of both Chagga Christians and Christianity - attempts which both seek to constrain the temporal orientations and actions of church members, and are themselves constrained by different understandings of orthodoxy and modernity.