This work examines the emergence of the concepts of religion and religions on 19th-century colonial frontiers. It analyzes the ways in which European settlers, and indigenous Africans, engaged in the comparison of alternative religious ways of life as one dimension of intercultural activity.
This book investigates the role of religion in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Southern Africa. Building on a diverse range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches, the book reflects on how religion, politics and health have interfaced in Southern African contexts, when faced with the sudden public health emergency caused by the pandemic. Religious actors have played a key role on the frontline throughout the pandemic, sometimes posing roadblocks to public health messaging, but more often deploying their resources to help provide effective and timely responses. Drawing on case studies from African indigenous knowledge systems, Islam, Rastafari and various forms of Christianity, this book provides important reflections on the role of religion in crisis response. This book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of African Studies, Health, Politics and Religious Studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This collection of essays is brought together in the honour of Gerhardus Cornelis (Pippin) Oosthuizen on his eighty third birthday. Pippin has been one of the most significant religion researchers and prolific Humanities publishers South Africa has ever produced. Among his friends and colleagues are some of the most important scholars of religion in South Africa and elsewhere. With his critical acumen and insightful understanding of the ebb and flow of the South African socio-political landscape of the last fifty-odd years, he has been a distinguished leader in research and has been honoured with Honorary doctorates from South Africa’s leading universities. This collection constitutes a small token of appreciation for his more than fifty years in academia and his academic leadership.
The aim of this book is to provide a way to do justice to an African language of faith. In systematic theology, anthropology and philosophy of religion, similar debates about how to interpret an African language of faith are ongoing. Trying to avoid the othering discourses of past generations, scholars are careful to take seriously what people in Africa say without portraying peoples beliefs as weird or backward. Yet, in their desperate attempts to avoid othering, these theologians, anthropologists and philosophers often painfully misconstrue the language of faith in Africa. Understanding the language of faith in Southern Africa is not an easy task. How should we take seriously the form of language that often seems so strange and different? I argue that, after African inculturation theology and black liberation theology, a better way to make sense of being a Christian in Southern Africa is to pay close attention to peoples language of faith. The way in which people speak of the spirit world or powers in Africa appears strange to outsiders, and the sense of community and the holistic worldview differentiates the African way of life from its Euro-American counterparts. When proper attention is paid to the use of concepts like spirit world, power, community and holism, language of faith in Southern Africa is neither as strange as it may seem, nor as romantic. By investigating these distinguishing concepts that colour language of faith in Southern Africa, this book contributes to future projects of both fellow theologians who try to construct a contemporary African theology and those who are interested in theology in Africa given the well-known southward shift of the centre of gravity of Christianity.
In a changing South Africa, recovering the meaning and power of African tradition is a matter of crucial importance. This work participates in that recovery by providing a comprehensive guide to research on the indigenous religious heritage of this dynamic country. Detailed reviews of over 600 books, articles, and theses are offered along with introductory essays and detailed annotations that define the field of study. This work plus two forthcoming volumes, Christianity in South Africa: An Annotated Bibliography and Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism in South Africa: An Annotated Bibliography will become the standard reference work on South African religions. Scholars and students in Religious Studies, Social Anthropology, History, and African Studies will find this set particularly useful. This work organizes and annotates all the relevant literature on Khoisan, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho-Tswana, Swazi, Tsonga, and Venda traditions. The annotations are concise yet detailed essays written in an engaging and accessible style and supported by an exhaustive index, which comprise a full and complex profile of African traditional religion in South Africa.
Wild Religion is a wild ride through recent South African history from the advent of democracy in 1994 to the euphoria of the football World Cup in 2010. In the context of South Africa’s political journey and religious diversity, David Chidester explores African indigenous religious heritage with a difference. As the spiritual dimension of an African Renaissance, indigenous religion has been recovered in South Africa as a national resource. Wild Religion analyzes indigenous rituals of purification on Robben Island, rituals of healing and reconciliation at the new national shrine, Freedom Park, and rituals of animal sacrifice at the World Cup. Not always in the national interest, indigenous religion also appears in the wild religious creativity of prison gangs, the global spirituality of neo-shamans, the ceremonial display of Zulu virgins, the ancient Egyptian theosophy in South Africa’s Parliament, and the new traditionalism of South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma. Arguing that the sacred is produced through the religious work of intensive interpretation, formal ritualization, and intense contestation, Chidester develops innovative insights for understanding the meaning and power of religion in a changing society. For anyone interested in religion, Wild Religion uncovers surprising dynamics of sacred space, violence, fundamentalism, heritage, media, sex, sovereignty, and the political economy of the sacred.
The historiography of African religions and religions in Africa presents a remarkable shift from the study of 'Africa as Object' to 'Africa as Subject', thus translating the subject from obscurity into the global community of the academic study of religion. This book presents a unique multidisciplinary exploration of African traditions in the study of religion in Africa and the new African diaspora. The book is structured under three main sections - Emerging trends in the teaching of African Religions; Indigenous Thought and Spirituality; and Christianity, Hinduism and Islam. Contributors drawn from diverse African and global contexts situate current scholarly traditions of the study of African religions within the purview of academic encounter and exchanges with non-African scholars and non-African contexts. African scholars enrich the study of religions from their respective academic and methodological orientations. Jacob Kehinde Olupona stands out as a pioneer in the socio-scientific interpretation of African indigenous religion and religions in Africa. This book is to his honour and marks his immense contribution to an emerging field of study and research.
An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.
Almost three-quarters of South Africans in the late-1990s call themselves Christians. From colonial times, when missionaries embroiled themselves in frontier conflicts, until recently, when both defenders and opponents of apartheid draw heavily upon Christian doctrine and ritual, Christian impulses have shaped South Africa.