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Full Description
This book is a richly detailed comparative analysis of endogenous, Muslim, and Christian religious thought and practice in sub-Saharan Africa.
Organized thematically, the book presents a conceptual and analytical framework for the study of religious traditions as complex and constantly evolving social phenomena. The most salient theme in the book is how different religious traditions defined and provided for the personal and communal wellbeing of their adherents. Other major themes explore how religious traditions have influenced one another, how religious practitioners conceptualized and interacted with spiritual entities, how religious knowledge and expertise were acquired and transmitted, how rituals were organized and structured in order to achieve their aims, and how rituals affected those who performed them. Additional topics analysed include the personalization of relationships with spiritual entities, the gendering of religious thought and practice, how personal transformative rituals were conceptualized and enacted with reference to stages of the life cycle, such as birth, marriage and death, and how suffering was seen as integral to the process of personal transformation.
Overall, the book engages with issues that continue to animate the study of religious thought and practice in Africa and African studies more generally.
Contents
Introduction
Part I. Religious concepts and concepts about 'religion'
1 Conceptualizing the 'religious'
2 'Translating' religious concepts
Part II. Diversity within religious traditions
3 Diversity of religious thought: a West African example
4 Diversity of religious practice: an East African example
Part III. Religious participation
5 Interacting with spiritual entities and spiritual forces
6 The dynamics of ritual performance
7 Ritual as transformance
Part IV. Religious quests for wellbeing
8 'Probable' histories of an ancestral religious tradition: kubándwa mediumship in lacustrine eastern Africa
9 Initiatory healing associations
10 Religious healing in southern Africa
11 Muslim quests for wellbeing in West Africa
Part V. Knowing and not knowing
12 Epistemologies
Bibliography
Filmography
Index
