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- Convenors:
-
Felicitas Becker
(Gent University)
Joel Cabrita (University of Cambridge)
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- Location:
- C5.01
- Start time:
- 27 June, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Religion and media in twentieth-century Africa: changing forms of literacy and orality, changing publics and subjectivities; the making and contestation of sacred texts and religious performance.
Long Abstract:
This panel proposal is inspired by recent scholarship that examines the intersection between forms of communication and the growth of new religious constituencies. It seeks to further pursue these insights in the context of twentieth century Africa. We are particularly interested in how media practices enabled, shaped, and limited forms of claims-making by relatively marginal individuals and groups in religious contexts. The media focus covers both 'old' (including handwriting and print technologies) and 'new' (including the internet) forms. We expect to focus on papers that explore media history and practice with reference to religious contexts or content, but will consider studies where the religious aspect of media use is one among several. Relevant themes include, but are not be limited to:
• The creation of publics - religious and otherwise - in interaction with various forms of old and new media
• Making and contesting sacred texts
• Literacy as a 'bundle of traits' with varying social and religious implications
• An attention to genre, and narrative conventions
• Text and healing - the materiality of media
• The uses of 'secondary' literacy in post-colonial Africa
• Media and performance - especially the performance of violence
• Official/authorised (rather than subversive) media performances and the establishment of religious orthodoxies
• Orality and 'authenticity', eg invoking nativism
• Preaching and the public sphere
• Women in the media; women's media practices
• Institutional and financial contexts shaping media practices
• Media use and new/emergent subjectivities, including religious disciplines of the self
Accepted papers:
Session 1David Gordon (Bowdoin College)
Paper short abstract:
Argues that the function of oral and written knowledge and practices were contingent on historical contexts. Explores writing and orality in the late colonial period by considering relationship between an indigenous Zambian church and secular agencies during the 1950s
Paper long abstract:
In colonial Africa written texts were disseminated as signs and agents of European power. By the middle of the twentieth century across northern Zambia various texts produced authority: vernacular bibles, biographies of missionaries, guides to moral living, colonial identity documents, and political party cards. This paper considers rise of the Alice Lenshina' s church (a.k.a. the Lumpa Church) in the 1950s as an engagement with these textual realms of power. The church employed various forms of writing, including passports to heaven, narratives, and "commandments," which were written by missionary-educated church members. These texts were sacred documents that underpinned the church's moral teachings, served to support its bureaucracy, and legitimized the church with respect to European missionaries, the colonial government, and the African nationalist movement. These textual practices also engaged with oral ones, however. While external signs of authority were achieved through such texts, internal authority often rested on performance. Spiritual inspiration in particular derived from hymns sung by mostly young women. These songs were revealed to Lenshina by God, disseminated through village-based choirs, and remembered by choir masters. This paper considers how gendered tensions within the church and between the church and secular authorities (including the colonial state, chiefs, and political parties) were related to these textual and oral practices. By pointing to such political factors, the paper challenges sociological and teleological versions of the nature of oral and written knowledge and practices. The paper is based on fieldwork among surviving members of Lenshina's Church and archival documentation.
Gerard van de Bruinhorst (Afrika-Studiecentrum)
Paper short abstract:
this paper explores the shifting role of islamic swahili newspapers in tanzania from media of religious instruction to mobilizing agencies re-interpreting current events in a historical framework
Paper long abstract:
In 1965 the editor of one of the first Islamic Swahili newspapers wrote to its readers: 'this newspaper is a sheikh who will visit you every month'. In line with this view the paper published religious articles on faith as well as speeches from Muslim leaders. News and reflection on political events only played a minor role. When the political climate changed in the early 1990s a different kind of newspaper emerged and these weeklies focused much more on politics than on religious instruction. This change of focus can be illustrated by a passionate plea published by the al-Huda editor in 2012. He urged mosques to turn into educational centres supporting the national Islamic movement (harakati) by teaching the public in a similar way as newspapers and other media already did.
Borrowing from social constructivistic theories of social movements I look into these shifting newspaperparadigms with special emphasis on an-Nuur, the Islamic Propagation Centre's (IPC) newspaper distributed since 1991. In more than thousand copies an-Nuur created a shared definition of the deplorable state of Muslims in Tanzania. Whereas the IPC demands for changes are cloaked in recent human rights idiom, the justification is often interpreted as rooted in historical comparisons. Demonstrations are often scheduled on important historical dates in the Islamic calendar. I argue that this historical framing can only be understood if we take into account the important role played by the IPC in the development of an Islamic school curriculum in which history is of paramount importance
Siri Lamoureaux (University of Siegen)
Paper short abstract:
Technologies of speaking and writing enable new social roles for Moro Christian women. Through language socialization and literacy events associated with a Moro ethnic movement women perform a conservative Christian role while, informally, they craft a more progressive Christian subjectivity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the link between new technologies of speaking and writing and the spread of Christianity in the Arab-Islamic state of Sudan. For the marginalized Moro people, Christian conversion is linked with an ethnic-indigenous project that arguably owes its success to a Moro literacy campaign that produced more than 30 books, the New and Old Testaments and now uses a variety of media (newspaper, cassettes, Facebook, Youtube) for its cause. Most adult Moro, especially women with no formal education, can nonetheless read and write Moro. This paper focuses on how women achieve a new social role as moral and spiritual leaders through the literacy program. Mastery of the new written "language" (Biblical Moro) indexes this new Christian subjectivity and is achieved through a process of language socialization (Schieffelin 1986) through texts and 'technologies of speaking' (Blommaert 2007) which potentially influence the way Moro think about themselves. In addition to reading and writing, they acquire the formulaic and ritualized genres of praying and preaching and other practices (hymn-writing, record-keeping etc.) which involve certain linguistic skills (entextualization, indexing Biblical Moro, prosody etc.) and culminate in the performance of faith through written, verbal and embodied techniques which I examine as literacy events. I will also examine how the literacy campaign which enabled this is run by Church leaders who construct a discourse of ethnic "purity" and in so doing maintain "traditional" Moro patriarchal norms. Women are complicit in promoting these conservative values in their preachings, but craft a more progressive subjectivity in informal practices.
Adepate Mustapha-Koiki (University of Lagos)
Paper short abstract:
Exploring the use of social media and networking among Islamic youth organisations in tertiary institutions in Nigeria to harness their thoughts.
Paper long abstract:
With computer technology information can now be assessed in one's palm and right on one's bed! Hence, the internet has become "the new normal". The Pew Foundation asserted that, Since the internet supplements the traditional surveillance function of the mass media, when there is any news event, interested parties post blogs for others to read. Bloggers posted first-hand accounts of the 2005 terrorist bombings in London. In the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom, bloggers provided details about life in Baghdad. With Blogs, interested parties are encouraged to chime in their opinions. Against this background, this paper examined the extent which Islamic youth organizations like the Muslim Students' Society of Nigeria, MSSN, in tertiary institutions use the social media to harness their thoughts on Islamic issues and how much of networking do its members engage in to disseminate Islamic messages.