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- Convenors:
-
Benjamin Soares
(University of Florida)
Eva Spies (University of Bayreuth)
Rüdiger Seesemann (University of Bayreuth)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH118
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites contributions that highlight the diversity of religious expressions, imaginations, and locations in Africa and demonstrate how religious practices, concepts, and uses of space help to constitute each other through their mutual imbrication and relationality.
Long Abstract:
This panel revolves around the multiple and changing religious practices, concepts, and spaces in Africa and its diaspora. Our analytical focus is on the relational character of religious expressions, imaginations, and locations, whether identified as "African Traditional Religions", Christian, Islamic, Hindu or other contemporary religious movements. Our starting point is the assumption that religious traditions constitute and are constituted through the relations between them as well as through the relations among their diverse forms. Such relations can occupy the entire range from adaptation, appropriation, exchange, competition, conflict, rejection, etc. Urban contexts are particularly suited to illustrating how actors of diverse religious traditions share public spaces and are linked with similar social groups, thereby offering insights into the ways religious practices, concepts, and spaces interrelate and influence each other. In rural contexts, plural religious instantiations often constitute part of everyday life (e.g., in multi-religious uses of certain ritual places or the multiple sources of religious knowledge, as with many healers), which feeds back into the entanglements of urban religion.
We are particularly interested in contributions that highlight the diversity of religious practices, concepts, and spaces while demonstrating how such practices, concepts, and uses of spaces constitute each other through their relationality. We also invite studies of specific themes, social formations, practices, texts, or objects with an analytical perspective on their relations to other activities, texts, objects, (religious) traditions, etc. Given the conference's thematic focus, we especially solicit proposals that address modes of religious relationality in rural-urban encounters or in urban contexts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Muslims in Nigeria have related and responded to the activities of Christians through vacation camps for spiritual development of Muslims in Nigeria.
Paper long abstract:
Beyond the conflicts that usually occur in their encounter, Muslims have responded to the activities of Christians in Nigeria with religious vacation programmes notably Islamic Vacation Camp (IVC) and Islamic Training Programme (ITP). Following their co-religionist's holiday camps for Christians in Secondary schools, the vacation programme was initially organized by the Muslim Students Society of Nigeria (MSSN) for young Muslims in such schools to learn about Islam and encourage interaction among them. They were organized during Easter and Christmas holidays to dissociate young Muslims from the activities of their Christian communities during these periods. Today, other Muslim organizations such as the Muslim Congress (TMC) are organizing vacation programmes in various urban and rural communities during these periods. For many Muslims, going to the camps is a spiritual pilgrimage, hajj, and migration, hijrah, away from 'sins' which are believed to be caused by complex urban culture and Christian festivals in these periods. They also provide opportunities to develop spirituality and skills needed to cope with these challenges. This paper argues that vacation camps could be considered as both spaces and practice which emerge from the fluidity of relationship between Muslims and Christians in modern Nigerian. Focusing on the MSSN and TMC in southwest Nigeria, this paper explores the development of these vacation camps and how they emerged as spaces where spirituality is mediated and performed. It will further show the pattern of interaction between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria and how this relation has shaped each other's practices.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the role of Pentecostal churches in enabling rural-urban connections through kinship and family networks. By embracing and recasting the importance of practices such as fostering kin, they contribute to shaping processes of religious change in contexts of religious plurality
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the role of Pentecostal churches in shaping rural-urban connections through kinship networks and family relationships in contemporary Benin. The study of Pentecostalism in Africa, predominantly in urban contexts, has been associated with processes of migration, urbanization and the emergence of new middle classes in the continent. Pentecostal rhetoric of rupture with 'tradition' has often been interpreted as fostering social disentanglements, particularly from kinship networks, thus enabling the realisation of people's aspirations to modernity. However, ethnographic evidence from a semi-rural town in the south-east of Benin suggests that Pentecostal churches play a key role in maintaining kinship relations along the rural-urban divide. In this paper, I argue that Pentecostal churches operate as 'nodes of connection' between rural and urban worlds. They do so by reframing practices such as fostering, and hosting relatives' children during school holidays, through a moral framework where generosity and hospitality become signs of being a 'good' Christian. The effect is twofold. First, it maintains relationships among non-Pentecostals and their Pentecostal kin. In a plural religious context, such as this, these practices become opportunities for the evangelisation of unconverted kin. Second, they offer opportunities for courting among Pentecostal youth, thus enabling the development of future relationships of affinity between members of the church. The paper suggests that it is important to pay attention to domestic processes and the intricate ways in which rural-urban entanglements are mediated through religious practices
Paper short abstract:
Within the realm of healing in Zanzibar Town, embodiment of the “other” religion is ambiguous. While it constitutes the affliction it can also provide the means to counter it. This paper analyzes how concepts of “dini” and “religion” are employed to navigate healing in an interreligious setting.
Paper long abstract:
Do Christians take Islamic medicine? - Yes, of course. You see, when you have a Muslim spirit, even if you are a Christians, you need to take Islamic medicine as that is the medicine to which Muslim spirits react.
And when Muslims have Christian spirits, like in the Kibuki? - Ah, the Kibuki is something else…
Indeed, the Kibuki does not fit into the narrative that spirit possession constitutes an undesirable affliction requiring treatment. Lived relationships with Buki spirits (Christian spirits from Madagascar) do not identify the embodiment of an "other" as the problem, but rather as solution: spirit possession renders further afflictions manageable. With Kibuki interreligiosity is embodied to counter afflictions.
From my interlocutor's perspective, however, spirit possession as such is a problematic condition that in inacceptable. According to him, such a close bodily encounter with any "other", let alone a Christian spirit, enables one's body to enact forbidden practices - such as heavily drinking Brandy - for which one will be held accountable on judgement day. Interreligiosity is questionable enough, this embodied interreligiosity is unthinkable.
Yet, my interlocutor regarded Christians' ingestion of the Qur'an an appropriate measure to be taken in light of possible possession with Muslim spirits. The embodiment of a religiously "other" spirit (the affliction) is best targeted with the embodiment of the "other's" scripture.
Via analytically distinguishing the concept of "dini" (Swahili, see also Arabic dīn) from "religion" in Zanzibar Town, this ethnographically grounded paper explores how embodied interreligious relations need to be healed and constitute healing.
Paper short abstract:
Looking at the Sabbath service of the Nazareth Baptist Church, performed at an open-air temple in the center of Durban, this paper explores this practice’s relationality with regard to its urban setting, diverse religious traditions, and the wider social context of (post-)apartheid South Africa.
Paper long abstract:
Every Saturday, a congregation of the Nazareth Baptist Church gathers at one of their temples, called Khayelihle, the good home, located in a park in central Durban. Across a four-lane road lies Warwick Junction, the city's largest informal market and transportation hub, a public space where South Africa's (super-)diversity is encountered on a daily basis. The area is also religiously diverse, with a major Christian bookshop located across the road, a Nigerian Pentecostal Church in a warehouse around the corner, and the tomb of Durban's most famous Sufi saint just beyond Warwick and the railroad tracks.
The Nazareth Baptist Church is one of South Africa's oldest and largest African Initiated Churches, and Khayelihle Temple is its oldest in Durban, though it moved location many times. At present, the temple is not even marked by the customary circle of white stones. The sacred location manifests only when the congregation enchants space, when it sings the Sabbath hymns and praises Jehovah because "he made us reign over the homesteads of our enemies."
Kneeling in a public park, the members of the NBC, wearing Zulu traditional garb underneath the white church gown, take a stand as they sing at the statues of Louis Botha, first president of the Union of South Africa, and Dinuzulu, last of the Zulu kings. This paper explores how NBC practices relate rural referents to an urban setting, mix pre-colonial and Christian lines of tradition, and challenge (post-)apartheid spatial signification and order.
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims at analyzing the interplay between urban everyday life and religious boundary work and in the Indian Ocean port city of Mahajanga, Northwest Madagascar.
Paper long abstract:
The paper aims at analyzing the interplay between urban everyday life and religious boundary work and in the Indian Ocean port city of Mahajanga, Northwest Madagascar. It follows the main question of how cities' historical, cultural, and spatial conditions shaped religious plurality and the interaction of religious communities and how these communities themselves affected social urban life. Inspired by the recent debate in the anthropology of Islam on morality, piety and everyday life (Debevec, 2008; Fadil & Fernando, 2015; Jouili, 2015; Schielke, 2015), I take the complexities and inherent ambiguities of everyday lives as starting point to scrutinize the (un)making of religious boundaries within an urban milieu that is characterized by a high degree of religious diversity (including spirit possession, ancestor veneration, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, as well as varying expressions of the "magical"). My aim is to reach beyond interpretations of religion that focus exclusively on the ritual character and attempts to find the intersections as well as divisions of religious and (urban) "ordinary ethics" (Lambek, 2010) while investigating how social actors, discourses and power relations work toward the construction of difference and diversity or even unity based on consensus, tolerance and concord. As such, the presentation touches on a number of complex socio-political questions concerning the nature of religious freedom, the limits of toleration and about the role of religions in urban (secular) societies (Barnes, 2005; Das, 2014). My argument is mainly based on fieldwork among educated middle class milieus in Mahajanga, conducted between 2012 to 2015.