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- Convenors:
-
Henni Alava
(University of Jyväskylä)
Alessandro Gusman (University of Turin)
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- Stream:
- Religion
- Location:
- Chrystal McMillan, Seminar Room 4
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 12 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel extends understanding of the nexus between religion and citizenship in contemporary Africa by exploring how "religious citizenship" is formed through everyday practices and outside of explicitly political or religious arenas.
Long Abstract:
This panel extends understanding of the nexus between religion and citizenship in contemporary Africa by exploring how "religious citizenship" is formed through everyday practices and outside of explicitly political or religious arenas.
A focus on citizenship highlights the double role of religion as both an engine of social change, and a carrier of continuity. While schools and political parties affiliated with religious groups have historically nurtured ideas and practices of citizenship that continue to structure public debate, religion has also been a central source of disruption. In the 21st Century, new movements in Christianity and Islam have introduced radical lexicons of 'moral citizenship' (Bompani and Valois 2017), and contributed to transforming the ways in which networks of kinship, business, and politics are organised.
But where does religion wield its influence on ideas of citizenship, and how? We suggest looking not only to formal arenas of civic education (churches, mosques, schools or political rallies), but to 'less obvious' spaces and processes: the ways in which ideas and practices of the morally good citizen are constructed in the everyday (Lambek 2010), to disruptions that alter habituated citizenship practices (Dewey 1916), or to how religion contributes to the tactics people employ to engage with the powers that structure their lives (de Certeau 2011). Such views open possibilities for analysis emerging from diverse empirical settings. While most of the published research on these themes has focused on Islam and Christianity, we encourage researchers working on any religious tradition to share their empirically-grounded insights.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses contestations of religious citizenship in South Africa in the judicial realm. It offers an ethnographic account of the investigations in 2017/18 of a governmental commission into practices of Pentecostal churches deemed harmful for believers' health, and financial fraud.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses contestations of religious citizenship in South Africa in the judicial realm. Over the post-apartheid period, religious activism promoting the right to religious freedom has become increasingly vocal and institutionalized. This activism emerged as a response to the gradual expansion of liberal rights, in particular around gender and sexuality since 1994. At the same time, there have been repeated media scandals centering the presumably criminal practices of some religious groups, in particular Pentecostal churches and a growing sense that religious groups used the legal idiom of religious freedom to cover obscure activities.
This paper follows on such allegations by exploring how they are discussed among Pentecostals in the South African city of Cape Town and among the members of a governmental commission (the so-called Commission on the Right of Cultural, Linguistic and Religious Communities) that was tasked to explore and adjudicate them in 2017. In particular, the commission assessed charges against several Pentecostal churches of engaging in practices that were deemed harmful for believers' health, and financial fraud. The paper provides an ethnographic account of these investigations and uses them as a prism to explore the paradoxes, aporia and limits of religious citizenship in a liberal postcolonial polity.
Paper short abstract:
This study critically examines the crossing of boundaries between practitioners of Islam and Christianity in terms of health seeking practises in a mission hospital in a multi-religious neighbourhood in Madina, Accra.
Paper long abstract:
Ghana practices a plural medical system comprising of biomedical (allopathic), traditional (indigenous) and faith-based healing. Studies over the years have focused attention on Islamic healing, faith-based healing (mainly on Pentecostal and Charismatic healing practices) as individual medical categories. However, a study that critically examines the crossing of boundaries between practitioners of Islam and Christianity in terms of health seeking practises is empirically lacking. In this study, I examine how the Pentecost Hospital has thrived in Madina (a predominantly Muslim community) and how Muslims negotiate their access to the services of the hospital which has most of its staff as Christians. The aim of the hospital is to provide healthcare for the people within its immediate location and surrounding communities. And the mission of the hospital is to provide affordable and quality healthcare to all persons, especially the poor and marginalised. The hospital, among other services, provide obstetrics and gynaecology, and maternal and child welfare clinics. Against this background, I also examine how Islamic parents are entangled in their orientation on how to cater for their wards by 'Christian mothers' without recourse to religious identity. Underlying this negotiations by Muslims in this Christian mission hospital is the principal of DARURA (Islamic principal of necessity).
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how religious citizenship is understood by the Harari of Harar, Ethiopia. It questions how Islam consolidates what it means to be Harari and underpins the Harari's claim upon the city during a time rife with ethnic upheaval and inter-Islamic tensions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how the Harari deploy their Muslim identities and Islamic heritage to assert a religiously-driven citizenship of the city of Harar, Ethiopia and how these narratives weave between and enlighten broader local discourses on ethnicity and rights to the city and national discourses on ethnicity and Islam within Ethiopia. For the Harari, to be truly ethnically Harari one must also be Muslim. Further, both of these elements of identity are predicated by a heritage stemming from the physical city of Harar. While the Oromo are now the ethnic majority within the city, Harar was previously almost exclusively Harari, and despite their minority status in the region, was designated as the Harari's regional state under Ethiopia's 1990s system of ethnic federalism. Within the city, most Hararis practice a form of Sufist Islam. However, during my fieldwork in 2017-2018, religious schisms between the 'Wahhabi' seeped into ongoing ethnic tensions between a group of Oromo, the Qeerroo, and the Harari population of the city. This paper thus draws upon that ethnographic material to explore how and why these tensions interlock and how the Harari use their Sufist-based Islamic practice to further ground their rights to the city of Harar while the Qeerroo, simultaneously claiming the city and surrounding region for the Oromo, use burgeoning Wahhabi movements and discourses to discredit the religious praxis of the Harari and thereby claim moral authority over them, further underpinning their own claims to Harar.
Paper short abstract:
Morality in Zanzibar is intertwined with religious values and particularly women perform and negotiate moral values. The everyday practice of moral citizenship is performed through social relationships and appearance, through which Muslim women claim their superiority compared to regional others.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I focus on how gendered moral citizenship in urban Zanzibar is negotiated. Economic and political tensions between Zanzibari and mainland Tanzanians are shaped through feelings of inequality. Zanzibari claim they are disadvantaged and the political union made Zanzibar one of the poorest regions of Tanzania. Further, through the confrontation with tourists and people from Western parts of the world through mass media, Zanzibari realize inequality takes place in their disadvantage on a global level. They deal with this through emphasis on moral superiority. Muslim women extend this to a form of moral citizenship in which they perceive Zanzibar as a place where religion is practiced in better ways than the neighboring areas with more religious diversity.
Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Zanzibar, I argue women practice moral citizenship in everyday life through embodied and disembodied performance. The female body is part of moral negotiations on individual level, within her family and beyond. Through embodiment women emphasis their moral practices and reflect on that of others. Different styles of dress and specific ways of communication are part of embodied moral practices. In urban Zanzibar women negotiate moral citizenship through everyday practice and behavior, which urges for a gendered interpretation of morality.