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Ancestors, Power And History In Madagascar

198,75€ + 10% CARD

 The peoples of Madagascar are renowned for the prominence they give to the dead. In this edited volume, regional specialists reassess the significance of ancestors for changing relations of power, emerging identities, and local historical consciousness. Case-studies include The Royal Bath of 1817 (Pier Larson), Succession in an Urbanized Sakalava Kingdom (Lesley Sharp), The Antankaraia Ritual Cycle (Michael Lambek, Andrew Walsh), Nineteenth-Century Norwegian Missionary Culture (Karina Hestad Skeie), Sacrifice on the East Coast (Jennifer Cole), Violence among the Zafimaniry (Maurice Bloch), and Circumcision and Colonialism in the South (Karen Middleton). Three further chapters present original research on slavery, memory, and cultural politics in the Highlands (Sandra Evers, David Graeber, Francoise Raison-Jourde). Diversity and complexity make this volume a valuable addition to the literature on ritual and religion.
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Mission To Educate - A History Of The Educational Work Of The Scottish Presbyterian Mission In East Nigeria, 1846-1960

by William H. Taylor

198,75€ + 10% CARD

 By using primary sources, this case study seeks to shed new light on the nature and extent of European (in this case Scottish) educational pioneering work in Africa (in this case, eastern Nigeria). It examines the essential differences between (a) the pre-colonial period, (b) the colonial period, and (c) the pre-independence period. It argues that non-formal community and political education were continuously as central to the Christian (here, Presbyterian) missionaries' work as was the formal schooling of the young - females as well as males. While the curricula reflected the missionaries' religious objectives, and later the colonial government's, the evidence demonstrates an on-going commitment to the personal and social development of pupils and their parents, and their society. The Presbyterians encouraged the emergence of an independent Nigerian church and, in their schools, a pride in being Nigerian.
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Origins Of The New Churches Movement In Southern Ethiopia, 1927-1944

by Brian L. Fargher

198,75€ + 10% CARD

 This study describes the beginnings of a movement which has created another face for Ethiopian Christianity. The expatriate missionary-evangelists, who in 1927 were encouraged by Emperor Haile Selassie to work in southern Ethiopia, intentionally by-passed the Orthodox model and made a fresh start. Three of the many facets of the movement comprise the body of the book. There is the religious backdrop of Orthodox Christianity and the expatriates' fundamentalist traditions; then the praxis and polity of their work; finally the post-Occupation outcome which confirmed their choices. Since its beginning in 1932 the New Churches Movement has impacted every part of Ethiopian society: religious, political and socio-economic. It demonstrates that a fresh start can be complementary rather than competitive. The movement's success encourages missionary-evangelists to continue making new beginnings.
ENGLISH

Asante Catholicism - Religious And Cultural Reproduction Among The Akan Of Ghana

by Pashington Obeng

198,75€ + 10% CARD

 Asante Catholicism focuses on the interaction between post-conciliar Roman Catholicism and Asante religion of Ghana, with its implications for self-definition and cultural renewal. It begins by exploring Asante cultural history, and depicting how their religo-political institutions were affected during contact with European traders, missionaries, and colonial authorities. It further highlights the mutual shaping between Catholicism and the indigenous Asante worldview. The fusion between Christianity and Asante ways creates conflict, innovation, and modification as the Church reinterprets Christian values and figures along Asante notions. For example, Jesus Christ is reconfigured as kurotwiamansa (leopard). Sections on the interface between Catholic beliefs and Asante socio-political institutions are particularly important for missiologists. Finally, the book discusses religious vocabulary, spirituality, theology, and the role of community during social and religious change.
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Ingessana - The Religious Institutions Of A People Of The Sudan-Ethiopia Borderland

by Marian Charles Jedrej

198,75€ + 10% CARD

 Ingessana presents the results of field research carried out in the Ingessana Hills area of Sudan, between the White and the Blue Niles, among a people who maintain a proud tradition of cultural independence. The book examines the religious institutions of the Ingessana people, attempting to understand how their history and development has been affected by interaction with powerful neighbours, such as the Islamic Sudanese, Nilotics and Ethiopian groups. The Ingessana have always sought to define this engagement in their own terms and in such a way as to preserve their distinctive identity. The analysis shows how the Ingessana have created a unique religious tradition as part of a wider culture of resistance.
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Bemba-Speaking Women Of Zambia In A Century Of Religious Change (1892-1992)

by Hugo F. Hinfelaar

~~197,43€~~ 177,69€ 10% OFF

 Bemba-Speaking Women of Zambia traces the often painful religious changes that have occurred among the Bemba-speaking women of Zambia since the last decade of the 19th century. It argues that the religious tenets of the traditional domestic cult had already been undermined by the centralising tendencies of the merchant princes before the arrival of the missionaries who based their church structures on the concept of the Bemba hierarchy. The body of the book describes with great authority the creative redress of the women as channelled through independent Christian movements and through the mission churches themselves. These chapters are especially important as it is shown in the last part of the book that these genuine reactions of the women could well offer material for genuine inculturation.
ENGLISH

Bembaland Church - Religious And Social Change In South Central Africa 1891-1964

by Brian Garvey

198,75€ + 10% CARD

 Roman Catholic missionaries entered the territory of Bemba-speakers in Central Africa in 1891. Seventy years later the Church in Bembaland was about to enter a new phase as an independent religious community within a newly established African nation. This book traces the stages of church growth from its pioneering introduction to a traditional agricultural polity, through periods of disturbing economic and social change, to the later challenges from autochthonous Christian foundations originating in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions.
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Migration And Christian Identity In Congo (Drc)

by Emma Wild-Wood

213,33€ + 10% CARD

 Christianity and migration have greatly influenced society and culture of sub-Saharan Africa, yet their mutual impact is rarely studied. Through oral history research in north eastern Congo (DRC), this book studies the migration of Anglicans and the subsequent reconfiguring of their Christian identity. It engages with issues of religious contextualisation, revivalism and the rise of Pentecostalism. It examines shifting ethnic, national, gender and generational expressions, the influence of tradition, contemporanity, local needs and international networks to reveal mobile group identities developing through migration. Borrowing the metaphor of 'home' from those interviewed, the book suggests in what ways religious affiliation aids a process of belonging. The result is an original exploration of important themes in an often neglected region of Africa.
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Catholic Pentecostalism And The Paradoxes Of Africanization - Processes Of Localization In A Catholic Charismatic Movement In Cameroon

by Ludovic Lado

222,60€ + 10% CARD

 The anthropological literature on religious innovation and resistance in African Christianity tended to focus almost exclusively on what have come to be known as African Independent Churches. Very few anthropological studies have looked at similar processes within mission churches. Through an ethnographic study of localizing processes in a Charismatic movement in Cameroon and Paris, the book critically explores the dialectics between 'Pentecostalization' and 'Africanization' within contemporary African Catholicism. It appears that both processes pursue, although for different purposes, the missionary policy of dismantling local cultures and religions: practices and discourses of Africanization dissect them in search of 'authentic' African values; Charismatic ritual on the other hand features the dramatization of the defeat of local deities and spirits by Christianity.
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Aids And Religious Practice In Africa

302,10€ + 10% CARD

 This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display people's resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.
ENGLISH

African And European Readers Of The Bible In Dialogue - In Quest Of A Shared Meaning

by Gerald West e Hans De (J.H) Wit

233,20€ + 10% CARD

 Far too long, the relationship between European and African biblical scholarship has been a non-relationship. Divergent insights into how biblical texts should be interpreted and made fruitful for the current context, cultural differences, colonial past and post-colonial future, radically different social situations - this all made companionship and real interaction difficult. This rich and multilayered volume (result of a Stellenbosch conference 2006) attempts to disclose new modes of dialogue between readers of the Bible from those two worlds. More than twenty theologians from Africa and Europe reflect together on how readers from radically different contexts - professional and ordinary alike -, may become allies in an ethically accountable way of relating the biblical text to their current (global) situations and how a process of mutual learning may be established. This book provides important insights in intercultural hermeneutics, the relationship between classical historico-literary approaches and new forms of interpretation. It also gives examples of new forms of how to read the Bible in the secularised European context and the HIV/Aids stricken Africa. Particularly enriching is that every contribution is followed by a personal letter of response of another contributor to the book, giving impulses for further dialogue and debate. The book is useful for all biblical scholars and students, in particular for those interested in how to do contextual exegesis in a manner that also takes into account the context of the other.
ENGLISH

Church And Settler In Colonial Zimbabwe - A Study In The History Of The Anglican Diocese Of Mashonaland/Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1925

by Pamela Welch

213,33€ + 10% CARD

 This book examines the history of the Anglican Diocese of Mashonaland/Southern Rhodesia (virtually co-extensive with modern Zimbabwe) in the period 1890-1925, when its institutions took shape and its religious character was formed. While work among indigenous communities is outlined, the primary subject is the church's work with white settlers. A fresh general narrative is provided and an examination of clergy recruitment and finance relates events in Mashonaland to developments in global Anglicanism. Among the questions addressed are those of religion and empire, church and state and the complexities of relationship between the Church of England and her overseas extensions, particularly those covering areas of white settlement. Local developments in religious practice are also explored: most striking of these was the settler apprehension of the vast landscapes of South-Central Africa as a locus of the sacred and their custom of veld burial.
ENGLISH

Africas Of The Americas - Beyond The Search For Origins In The Study Of Afro-Atlantic Religions

223,93€ + 10% CARD

 The anthropology and history of African American religious formations has long been dominated by approaches aiming to recover and authenticate the historical transatlantic continuities linking such traditions to identifiable African source cultures. While not denying such continuities, the contributors to this volume seek to transcend this research agenda by bracketing "Africa" and "African pasts" as objective givens, and asking instead what role notions of "Africanity" and "pastfulness" play in the social and ritual lives of historical and contemporary practitioners of Afro-Atlantic religious formations. The volume's goal is to open up contextually salient claims to "African origins" to empirical scrutiny, and so contribute to a broadening of the terms of debate in Afro-Atlantic studies.
ENGLISH

Christian Churches In Dahomey-Benin - A Study Of Their Socio-Political Role

by Patrick Claffey

210,68€ + 10% CARD

 This book, divided into two broad sections, examines the state in the Republic of Benin and the socio-political role of the Christian churches. The first looks at the remarkable pre-colonial kingdom of Danxome and its place in the imagining of the modern contrat social beninois. The second section looks at both the historical role of the mainline churches and the more recent development of a Christianisme beninois. The study concludes that the churches are above all a commentary upon the society in which they find themselves. Rather than an overt challenge to the state, they articulate social distress and the desire for a different future. In times of stress they may prove to be the only viable institutional buttress as well as the arbiter. This study seeks to make a contribution to the understanding of the public role of Christian churches in Africa.
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Gender, Social Change And Spiritual Power - Charismatic Christianity In Ghana

by Jane E. Soothill

210,68€ + 10% CARD

 Charismatic Christianity is the most recent and fastest growing expression of Pentecostal religion in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Ghana's capital, Accra, the charismatic churches dominate the religious scene. This book focuses on the gender discourses of Ghana's new churches, and considers charismatic perspectives on womanhood, manhood, marriage and family life. Offering a fresh perspective on the organisational structures of the charismatic churches, this study looks at the leadership roles of female pastors and pastors' wives, and draws attention to the links between female leaders and spiritual power. By highlighting the importance of spiritual power in interpreting gendered social change, the book sheds new light on the socio-cultural role of Ghana's new churches.
ENGLISH

Producing African Futures - Ritual And Reproduction In A Neoliberal Age

197,43€ + 10% CARD

 The cumulative implications for Africans of the neoliberal processes (market speculation, shifts in sites of production, new modes of consumption, redefinition of the relation between states and their citizenry) cannot be reduced to single parameters. Three themes are central: the neoliberal production of personhood, the crises of youth and the moral panic in which so many of the wider reforms are registered in experience. With contributions on marriage payments, Muslim saints, popular theatre, homosexuality, ritual haunts, domestic reproduction, masculine fantasy, poetic justice, spirit possession and corruption.
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Overtly Muslim, Covertly Boni - Competing Calls Of Religious Allegiance On The Kenyan Coast

by Mark R.J. Faulkner

197,43€ + 10% CARD

 This volume explores the way of life of the Boni community, a hunter-gatherer people that straddle the Kenya/Somali border in East Africa. The Boni converted to Islam some fifty years ago and the reasons for this, both internal and external to the community, are identified. The book argues that former indigenous religious activity, far from having died out, is now being renegotiated so as to reflect an evolving Boni self-identity in a multi-ethnic setting as well as allowing the fermentation of resistance in the face of attempts at cultural hegemony advanced by outside forces. Employing a phenomenological approach and a methodology based on participant observation, this volume identifies three contrasting spheres of religious activity - the bush, the village centre, and individual homesteads.
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African Indigenous Religions And Disease Causation - From Spiritual Beings To Living Humans

by David Westerlund

197,43€ + 10% CARD

 This comparative and historical study focuses on religious aspects of disease etiologies among five, systematically selected, African peoples: the San, Maasai, Sukuma, Kongo and Yoruba. Unlike the homogenizing tendencies of many earlier comparative works by scholars of religion, this book highlights the differences between and the plurality within the religions and cultures of the selected peoples, as well as processes of change. The work covers a period of about 100 years, from the late 19th to the late 20th century, and much of the material used comes from European mission archives. To different degrees among the peoples studied, there has been a gradual shift from an emphasis on spiritual beings such as God and ancestors to living humans like 'witches' as agents of disease. In a theoretically eclective analysis, possible reasons for this shift are discussed.
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African Charismatics - Current Developments Within Independent Indigenous Pentecostalism In Ghana

by Johnson Asamoah-Gyadu

197,43€ + 10% CARD

 This volume examines Pentecostal/charismatic renewal in an African context. Ghanaian Pentecostalism in its modern charismatic form has become the most visible expression of renewal within indigenous Christianity. The book first articulates the contribution of the older African initiated churches (AICs) to local Christianity arguing that, in spite of a present decline, the AICs have left an enduring theological imprint on indigenous Christian expression. Furthermore, it accounts for the rise of the new independent churches, the charismatic ministries. These have been proliferating across the West Africa sub-region since the late 1970s. In addition to this, the book explores how the emphases of the new Ghanaian charismatics-internationalism, transformation, prosperity, healing and deliverance-provide useful insights into the nature of modern African Pentecostal spirituality.
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Circle Thinking - African Women Theologians In Dialogue With The West

by Carrie Pemberton

197,43€ + 10% CARD

 This volume traces the origins of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, a group of African women theologians established in the 1980s. It is a movement which has been dedicated to research, publication and support of African women. The book traces a struggle against excluding and alienating practices from Western missionary tradition and African cultural transpositions in contemporary Church and society. The theology of advocacy which has emerged encourages African women to develop theologies of empowerment from their histories and struggles, and addresses the multiple crises which the continent faces. The problems of culture, ethics and post-colonialism are explored in the issues surrounding ubiquitous violence against women on the continent and the continuation of clitoridectomy as an enduring strategy for making gender and clan for some African peoples.
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Dreaming, Religion And Society In Africa

198,75€ + 10% CARD

 The contributors to this investigation of dreaming in a diversity of African cultures and settings have each approached the matter with a respect for an indigenous discourse which does not necessarily subscribe to Western evaluations of the objective and subjective. The matter of dreaming is not so much a psychological constant as ultimately sociological and historical.Dream discourse as a strategy deploys contingencies in the elaboration of social relationships and the defence, restoration and promotion of identities. Dreaming is therefore prominent in such critical settings as sickness and healing, artistic inspiration and craftwork, election to religious office, conversion to Islam or Christianity.
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Hail Orisha! - A Phenomenology Of A West African Religion In The Mid-Nineteenth Century

by Peter Mckenzie

250,43€ + 10% CARD

 Orisha worshippers who were not subjected to forced migration to the Americas in the nineteenth century remained their own masters, inhabiting cities, towns and farm villages in their West African kingdoms. This study uses documentation from Yoruba writings and from the written record of European missionaries to describe the various facets of their religious life. Arranged in the form of a phenomenology, the work deals with such matters as the veneration of the environment; carved images of the divine; the orisha celebrated in festival, worship and sacrifice; systems of divination; female and male religious specialists; and the protean divinities themselves.The comprehensive use of archival material will ensure the abiding value of this historical picture of the orisha, useful for comparisons with the present day.
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Christianity And African Culture - Conservative German Protestant Missionaries In Tanzania, 1900-1940

by Klaus Fiedler

198,75€ + 10% CARD

 The common charge laid against missionaries that they are destroyers of African culture is shown to be untrue of the missionaries treated in this book, who worked with considerable success to integrate Christianity and African culture. The author examines the endeavours of the missionaries from the perspective of the local Christians, who were not themselves interested in Africanization as such. One can thus find some missionaries defending - against the elected African Church leadership - the right of the Chagga Christians to circumcise their daughters, and Nyakyusa Christians refusing to use African tunes because the missionaries - influenced by National Socialism - professed both love for African culture and White superiority. This informative book, based on local and archival research at Daressalam University, is eminently readable. It features the first historical study of Bruno Gutmann, and provides case study material for teaching.
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Christian Churches And The Democratisation Of Africa

198,75€ + 10% CARD

 This volume focuses on the role Christian churches have played in Africa's democratisation movements since the late 1980s. In some cases churchmen have presided over national conferences; in many, Christians comprise arguably the most significant segment of civil society. In some countries pastoral letters have challenged dictators; in others, churches have provided an essential support for the status quo. The book comprises both theoretical analyses and case studies. The theoretical discussions include the history of Church-State relations; theology and democracy; Pentecostalism and democracy; the problems of consolidating democracy. The 13 case studies sketch the historical context, and then critically examine developments up till late 1993. The book will prove particularly useful to students of Third World Christianity, African historians and political scientists, and all interested in the socio-political role of Christianity.
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