Shrines In Africa

Explores how African shrines, in their diverse forms, are more than just points of worship - they are powerful symbols of ethnic solidarity, group cohesion, and knowledge about the landscape. This book shows how African shrines help to define ethnic boundaries, and symbolically articulate a society's connection with the land it occupies.

In the African context, shrines are cultural signposts that help one understand and read the ethnic, territorial, and social lay of the land. The contributions gathered here by Allan Charles Dawson demonstrate how African shrines help to define ethnic boundaries, shape group identity, and symbolically articulate a society's connection with the land it occupies. Shrines are physical manifestations of a group's claim to a particular piece of land and are thus markers of identity--they represent, both figuratively and literally, a community's 'roots' in the land it works and lives on. The shrine is representative of a connection with the land at the cosmological and supernatural level and, in terms of a community's or ethnic group's claim to cultivable territory, serves as a reminder to outsiders of ownership. Shrines in Africa explores how African shrines, in all their variable and diverse forms, are more than just spiritual vessels or points of worship--they are powerful symbols of ethnic solidarity, group cohesion, and knowledge about the landscape. Moreover, in ways subtle and nuanced, shrines represent ideas about legitimacy and authenticity in the context of the post-colonial African state.

This book offers an ethnography of the beliefs and practices of Vodu, as they relate to daily life in an ethnic Ewe fishing community on the coast of southern Togo.

This book offers an ethnography of the beliefs and practices of Vodu, as they relate to daily life in an ethnic Ewe fishing community on the coast of southern Togo.

In this groundbreaking work, Robert Baum seeks to reconstruct the religious and social history of the Diola communities in southern Senegal during the precolonial era, when the Atlantic slave trade was at its height. Baum shows that Diola community leaders used a complex of religious shrines and priesthoods to regulate and contain the influence of the slave trade. He demonstrates how this close involvement with the traders significantly changed Diola religious life.

This book presents a pioneering work on the ethnopsychology of African healing spaces and its strategic influence in the contemporary constructs and negotiations of African sacred geography. Since African Christianity towers now-as the "new global face" of World Christianity-and the defining face of the "Next Christendom", there is the urgent need to engage the active conversations of African Christianity in direct relationship to the larger therapeutic background of African healing shrines

This book presents a pioneering work on the ethnopsychology of African healing spaces and its strategic influence in the contemporary constructs and negotiations of African sacred geography. Since African Christianity towers now-as the "new global face" of World Christianity-and the defining face of the "Next Christendom", there is the urgent need to engage the active conversations of African Christianity in direct relationship to the larger therapeutic background of African healing shrines.

The coastal belts and hinterlands of East Africa and South Asia have historically shared a number of cultural traits, commodities and cosmologies circulated on the wings of the monsoon winds. The forced and voluntary migrations of Asians and Africans across the Indian Ocean littoral over several centuries have reverberated in the memories, literatures, travelogues and religious, architectural, and socio-political imaginations of both the regions. And, they continue to do so in various forms and platforms. This book explores nuances of various narratives on these long-term transcultural exchanges with a special focus on India. It explores the ways in which Africa and Africans have been narrated in South Asian history and culture in order to unravel the nuanced layers of reflexive, rhetorical, stereotypical, populist, racialist, racist and casteist frameworks that informed diverse narratives in vernacular texts, songs, films and newspaper reports. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary approaches of narratology, Afro-Asian studies, and Indian Ocean studies, the contributors enunciate how the African lives in South Asia have been selectively remembered or systematically forgotten. Through multi-sited ethnographies, multilingual archival researches and interdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter provides theoretical engagements on the basis of empirical research in such regions as Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Hyderabad and Mumbai as well as in Sri Lanka. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.