I have been observing and analyzing religious trends in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa for several decades, with a particular focus on new religious movements, variously termed “minority religious groups,” “sects,” or “unconventional religious groups.” My years of living in southern Nigerian cities afforded me valuable insights into the workings of complex religious landscapes. As democratization, neoliberalism, media deregulation, and global religious activism increasingly change the stakes of coexistence between religious groups, and between such groups and the state, the management of Africa’s increasingly competitive religious public spheres has become a more compelling area of investigation.
Posts Tagged ‘indigenous religions’
January 7th, 2013
Traditional, African, religious, freedom?
posted by Rosalind I. J. Hackett
July 17th, 2012
Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa
posted by The EditorsIn his new publication, Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa, David Chidester explores South African indigenous religious heritage and the meaning and power of this religion in a changing South African society.
February 7th, 2012
Secularism, lexical ordering, and resistance to dialogue
posted by Jeremy Webber
Akeel Bilgrami’s paper is very rich; I cannot speak to all its arguments. I focus on his principal concern: his desire to amend Charles Taylor’s definition of secularism so that the rights to free exercise of religion and evenhanded treatment are qualified by “the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve (ideals, often, though not always, enshrined in stated fundamental rights and other constitutional commitments).” When religions are inconsistent with these ideals, “there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first.” These ideals can, apparently, be anything, as long as they “do not get articulated in terms that mention religion or the opposition to religion.” What is important is that they exist and that they come first.
January 27th, 2011
Rhetoric and authority
posted by Jonathan VanAntwerpenAt Notes from the Social Field, Ernesto Castañeda reflects on President Obama’s rhetorical performance in the aftermath of the shootings in Tucson.
January 20th, 2011
Native American civil religion?
posted by Richard AmesburyLee Gilmore reflects on the opening blessing at Obama’s Tucson speech last week by Carlos Gonzales, who identified himself as a Yaqui and fifth-generation Mexican-American.
September 23rd, 2010
The future of China’s past: An interview with Mayfair Yang
posted by Nathan Schneider
Anthropologist Mayfair Yang teaches in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has done pioneering work discovering, describing, and reflecting on the fate of traditional culture in post-revolutionary China through numerous articles and edited volumes, two documentary films, and her book Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: the Art of Social Relationships in China. Throughout, she brings the insights of post-colonial theory and gender studies to bear on the living remnants of ancient ways of life. She is currently writing a new book, Re-Enchanting Modernity: Sovereignty, Ritual Economy, and Indigenous Civil Order in Coastal China.
May 12th, 2010
Politics of misrecognition
posted by Jimmy Casas Klausen
What would secularity look like if we approached it through the perhaps vague rubric of “indigenous ‘religions’”? . . . Will we ever know? Most considerations of secularity, secularism, and secularization take the Abrahamic religions and, in the South Asian context, Buddhism and Hinduism as their objects, and much discussion in the wake of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age has continued this trend. Whether implicitly or explicitly, secularity is usually understood as a “civilizational” condition, and Taylor seems to confirm this by relying on Karl Jaspers’s notion of an “axial age” to mark a major civilizational transformation in thought that took place in China, India, and the Mediterranean world in the last centuries BCE. Hence, one variety of secularism, or one consequence of the varieties of secularism, might be that the practices and “myths” of indigenous religions will constantly defy availability to knowledge. Taking cues from some of the essays collected in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, I want to use this category of indigenous religions to think through the absences in and limitations of Taylor’s book—specifically, its misrecognition of indigenous religions.
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