Mixed Messages: Using the Bible and Qur'ān in Swahili Tracts /
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The present volume sets Swahili religious tracts available in Kenya and Tanzania in their context. The book starts with an overview of tracts in Swahili from the 19th century to the present day, an examination of Swahili as a religious language, and an introduction to Swahili versions of the Bible and Qurʾān. Chesworth then introduces the range of tracts currently available, examining eight in detail. In particular he considers how they present scripture in order to promote their own faith, Islam or Christianity, whilst denigrating the 'other'. Finally, the volume discusses the impact from modern media on these tracts.
:
The present volume sets Swahili religious tracts found in Kenya and Tanzania in their context. It examines how they present scripture in order to promote Islam or Christianity whilst denigrating the 'other'. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004519664
9789004519039
Mixed Messages: Using the Bible and Qur'ān in Swahili Tracts /
:
The present volume sets Swahili religious tracts available in Kenya and Tanzania in their context. The book starts with an overview of tracts in Swahili from the 19th century to the present day, an examination of Swahili as a religious language, and an introduction to Swahili versions of the Bible and Qurʾān. Chesworth then introduces the range of tracts currently available, examining eight in detail. In particular he considers how they present scripture in order to promote their own faith, Islam or Christianity, whilst denigrating the 'other'. Finally, the volume discusses the impact from modern media on these tracts.
:
The present volume sets Swahili religious tracts found in Kenya and Tanzania in their context. It examines how they present scripture in order to promote Islam or Christianity whilst denigrating the 'other'. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004519664
9789004519039
Christianity and the African Imagination : Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings /
:
During the twentieth-century, Christendom shifted its centre of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere, Africa becoming the most significant area of church growth. This volume explores Christianity's advance across the continent, and its capturing of the African imagination. From the medieval Catholic Kingdom of Kongo to a transnational Pentecostal movement in post-colonial Zimbabwe, the chapters explore how African agents - priests and prophets, martyrs and missionaries, evangelists and catechists - have seized Christianity and made it theirs. Emphasizing popular religion, the book shows how the Christian ideas and texts, practices and symbols, which have been adapted by Africans, help them accept existential passions and empower them through faith to deal with material concerns for health and wealth, and to overcome evil.
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1 online resource :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004245112
9789004116689
First-Century Christians in Twenty-First Century Africa : Between Law and Grace in Gabon and Madagascar /
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Millions of African Christians who consider themselves genealogical descendants of one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel-in other words, Jewish by ethnicity, but Christian in terms of faith-are increasingly choosing a religious affiliation that honors both of these identities. Their choice: Messianic Judaism. Messianic adherents emulate the Christians of the first century, observing the Jewish commandments while also affirming the salvational grace of Yeshua (Jesus). As the first comparative ethnography of such "fulfilled Jews" on the African continent, this book presents case studies that will enrich our understanding of one of global Christianity's most overlooked iterations.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004507708
9789004507692
Jesus for Zanzibar : narratives of Pentecostal (non-)belonging, Islam, and nation /
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In Jesus for Zanzibar: Narratives of Pentecostal (Non-)Belonging, Islam, and Nation Hans Olsson offers an ethnographic account of the lived experience and socio-political significance of newly arriving Pentecostal Christians in the Muslim majority setting of Zanzibar. This work analyzes how a disputed political partnership between Zanzibar and Mainland Tanzania intersects with the construction of religious identities. Undertaken at a time of political tensions, the case study of Zanzibar's largest Pentecostal church, the City Christian Center, outlines religious belonging as relationally filtered in-between experiences of social insecurity, altered minority / majority positions, and spiritual powers. Hans Olsson shows that Pentecostal Christianity, as a signifier of (un)wanted social change, exemplifies contested processes of becoming in Zanzibar that capitalizes on, and creates meaning out of, religious difference and ambient political tensions.
:
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004410367
Professional women in South African Pentecostal Charismatic churches /
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This book gives a unique insight into the changing shape of contemporary religion examining the new role that Pentecostal Charismatic Christianity plays in the lives of young, professional, black women who are enjoying career success and becoming part of South Africa's new middle class. Amongst these women an interesting relationship has emerged between work and religion as they feel that the social networks and self confidence they gain from their religious communities are as important as their spiritual experiences. But not all the women who join these churches remain, and this book explores why some women leave the churches in which they had previously felt they gained so much.
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Revision of author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Warwick, 2006 under title: Women of valour : professional women in South African Pentecostal churches. :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [275]-295) and index. :
9789004193642 :
0169-9814 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Locating Politics in Ethiopia's Irreecha Ritual /
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In Locating Politics in Ethiopia's Irreecha Ritual Serawit Bekele Debele gives an account of politics and political processes in contemporary Ethiopia as manifested in the annual ritual performance. Mobilizing various sources such as archives, oral accounts, conversations, videos, newspapers, and personal observations, Debele critically analyses political processes and how they are experienced, made sense of and articulated across generational, educational, religious, gender and ethnic differences as well as political persuasions. Moreover, she engages Irreecha in relation to the hugely contested meaning making processes attached to the Thanksgiving ritual which has now become an integral part of Oromo national identity.
:
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-205) and index. :
9789004410145
Christian churches in Dahomey-Benin : a study of their socio-political role /
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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 Danxomέ and its place in the imagining of the modern contrat social béninois . The second section looks at both the historical role of the mainline churches and the more recent development of a Christianisme béninois . 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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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [307]-324) and index. :
9789047419778 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Bourdieu in Africa : exploring the dynamics of religious fields /
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Bourdieu in Africa: Exploring the Dynamics of Religious Fields offers a view of religions as social games played by interested actors. Analyzing practices as strategic moves, this critical approach conceptualizes the religious field as relations of exchange and competition between experts and laity, and explores how the actors' habitus, including religious beliefs, serve to misrecognize and thus legitimize relations of power within the religious sphere and beyond. The authors discuss the volatile religious fields of Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and South Africa, with their variably configured tensions between African traditions, Christianity and Islam, but also consider the interrelations of religion with other social fields, with politics, economy, education and law.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004307568 :
0169-9814 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Baha'i faith in Africa : establishing a new religious movement, 1952-1962 /
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In 1952, there were probably fewer than 200 Baha'is in all of Africa. Today the Baha'i community claims one million followers on the continent. Yet, the Baha'i presence in Africa has been all but ignored in academic studies up to now. This is the first monograph that addresses the establishment of this New Religious Movement in Africa. Discovering an African presence at the genesis of the religon in Iran, this study seeks to explain why the movement found an appeal in colonial Africa during the 1950s and early 1960. It also explores how the Baha'i faith was influenced and Africanized by its new converts. Finally, the book seeks to make sense of the diverse and contradictory American, Iranian, British, and African elements that established a new religion in Africa.
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1 online resource (xii, 279 pages) : illustrations, maps, portraits. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004226005 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Gender, social change and spiritual power : charismatic Christianity in Ghana /
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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.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [231]-248) and index. :
9789047419396 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
AIDS and religious practice in Africa /
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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.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047442691 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Reclaiming the women of Britain's first mission to West Africa : three lives lost and found /
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Reclaiming the Women of Britain's First Mission to Africa is the compelling story of three long-forgotten women, two white and one black, who lived, worked and died on the Church Missionary Society's first overseas mission at the dawn of the nineteenth century. It was a time of momentous historical events: the birth of Britain's missionary movement, the creation of its first African colony as a home for freed slaves, and abolition of the slave trade. Casting its long shadow over much of the women's story was the protracted war with Napoleon. Taking as its starting point a cache of fifty letters from the three women, the book counters the prevailing narrative that early missionary endeavour was a uniquely European and male affair, and reveals the presence of a surprising number of women, among them several with very forceful personalities. Those who are interested in women's life history, black history, the history of the slave trade and British evangelism will find this book immensely enjoyable.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789004387447 :
0169-9814 ;
The Khōjā of Tanzania : discontinuities of a postcolonial religious identity /
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The Khōjā of Tanzania, Discontinuities of a Postcolonial Religious Identity attempts to reconstruct the development of Khōjā religious identity from their arrival to the Swahili coast in the late 18th century until the turn of the 21st century. This multidisciplinary study incorporates Gujarati, Kacchī, Swahili, and Arabic sources to examine the formation of an Afro-Asian Islamic identity (jamatī) from their initial Indic caste identity (jñāti) towards an emergent Near Eastern imaged Islamic nation (ummatī) through four disciplinary approaches: historiography, politics, linguistics, and ethnology. Over the past two centuries, rapid transitions and discontinuities have produced the profound tensions which have resulted from the willful amnesia of their pre-Islamic Indic civilizational past for an ideological and politicized 'Islamic' present. This study aims to document, theorize, and engage this theological transformation of modern Khōjā religious identities as expressed through dimensions of power, language, space, and the body.
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1 online resource (xvii, 226 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004292888 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Africas of the Americas : beyond the search for origins in the study of Afro-Atlantic religions /
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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.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047432708 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Isaiah Shembe's hymns and the sacred dance in Ibandla LamaNazaretha /
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In Isaiah Shembe's Hymns and the Sacred Dance in Ibandla lamaNazaretha , Nkosinathi Sithole explores the hymns of Prophet Isaiah Shembe and the sacred dance in Ibandla LamaNazaretha, and offers an emic perspective on the Church which has attracted scholars from different disciplines. Isaiah Shembe's Hymns and the Sacred Dance in Ibandla lamaNazaretha posits that in the hymns, Shembe found a powerful medium through which he could voice his concerns as an African in colonial times, while praising and worshipping God. Sithole also refutes claims by some scholars that the sacred dance was a response to colonialism and oppression, showing that in fact the sacred dance in Ibandla lamaNazaretha is considered to be a form of worship and is thought to exist on earth and in heaven.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004320628 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Hindu gods in West Africa : Ghanaian devotees of Shiva and Krishna.
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In Hindu Gods in West Africa , Wuaku offers an account of the histories, beliefs and practices of the Hindu Monastery of Africa and the Radha Govinda Temple, two Hindu Temples in Ghana. Using historical material and data from his field work in southern Ghana, Wuaku shows how these two Hindu Temples build their traditions on popular Ghanaian religious notions about the powerful magicality of India's Hindu gods. He explores how Ghanaian soldiers who served in the colonial armies in India, Sri Lanka, and Burma during World War II, Bollywood films, and local magicians, have contributed to the production and the spreading of these cultural ideas. He argues that while Ghanaian worshippers appropriated and deployed the alien Hindu religious world through their own cultural ideas,as they engage Hindu beliefs and rituals in negotiating challenges their own worldviews would change considerably.
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1 online resource (346 pages) :
9789004255715 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Ritual imagination : a study of tromba possession among the Betsimisaraka in eastern Madagascar /
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Ritual Imagination is a study of spirit possession and ritual dynamics. Based on fieldwork in eastern Madagascar, Hilde Nielssen shows how tromba possession works as a flexible and fluid force, whose ritual imaginary playfully draws together elements from radically different cultural and social domains, thereby constituting human realities and creating ways of relating to changing and disjunctive circumstances. Tromba's strength lies in its fluid capacities to relate to ongoing social change by altering its own practices, while at the same time continuing to heal person and cosmos. The book critically addresses the still dominant perspective in anthropology, where rituals are understood as representations of culture and society. Using tromba as a pivotal case in the critique of ritual as representation, this book offers a fresh perspective on ritual and spirit possession.
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1 online resource (xi, 326 pages) : color illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004223875 :
0169-9814 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
An ethnography of a Vodu shrine in southern Togo : of spirit, slave, and sea /
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In this book, Eric Montgomery and Christian Vannier provide an ethnographically informed text on the cultural meanings and practices surrounding the gods and metaphysics of Vodu, as they relate to daily life in an ethnic Ewe fishing community on the coast of southern Togo. The authors approach this spirit possession and medicinal order through "shrine ethnography," understanding shrines as parts of sacred landscapes that are ecological, economic, political, and social. Giving voice to practitioners and situating shrines and Vodu itself into the history and political economy of the region make this text pertinent to the social changes and global relevance of Millennial Africa.
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1 online resource (ix, 306 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004341258 :
0169-9814 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Pentecostalism, globalisation, and Islam in northern Cameroon : megachurches in the making? /
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Pentecostalism is among the fastest growing social movements in the 21th century. This volume discusses global aspects of Pentecostal churches in northern Cameroon, by describing how the local congregations interact with civil society, traditional religion, and Islam. Extensive fieldwork and descriptions of the complex historical context within which the churches emerge, makes the author draw attention to Pentecostal leaders as social entrepreneurs inspired both by local traditions and by a global flow of images and ideas. This indicates that Pentecostalism can be interpreted both as a social and as a religious movement which manages to encounter mainline churches and Islam with flexibility and spiritual authority.
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1 online resource (x, 260 pages) :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004244979 :
0169-9814 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.