Paper short abstract:

Based on interviews with church members in South Sudan and Uganda, this paper explores how Christians perceive the terms 'Pentecostal' and 'Evangelical' and establish relationships between denominations.

Paper long abstract:

Since the late 1980s, scholars studying Christianity in Africa have discussed the Pentecostal or Charismatic movement. Some studies refer to the 'born again', who have had a conversion experience in their Christian beliefs. At the same time, many scholars have found it difficult to distinguish between the Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Evangelical movements.

However, relatively few studies address the self-identification of African Christians for these denominations and the relationships between denominations or church-related organizations, and knowledge of these issues is useful for understanding the broader situation.

In this study, therefore, I intend to examine this issue through interviews with church members. I focus primarily on church members in South Sudan, but also address the situation in Uganda.

As a result of the interviews, I found the following: 1) church members in South Sudan and Uganda made clear distinctions between the Pentecostal, Evangelical, and Charismatic movements; 2) almost all churches have relationships with churches, organizations, and denominations in Africa and the world, and these relationships exert an influence on the activities of the churches; and 3) the term 'born again' is used not only in Evangelical churches but also in mainline churches. In fact, it is used in nearly all Protestant churches, though this is not the case in Catholic churches.

These findings illustrate how Christian churches in South Sudan conduct activities across denominations or organizations, maintaining distinct identities under the broad umbrella of people termed 'born again'. Moreover, Catholic activities are separate from Protestant ones, although their activities are similar.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Mozambique, this paper explores how religions have come to be perceived as bounded, and yet how despite that boundedness individuals engage multiple traditions. Those engagements are best described in terms of mobility, specifically border-crossing or polyontological mobility.

Paper long abstract:

In northern Mozambique, Islam, Roman Catholicism, and (more recently) Pentecostalism have taken turns attracting local Makhuwa-speaking converts. Yet in none of these cases was that which came to be termed "the religion of the ancestors" displaced. It was preserved and brought into interaction with the world religions. The precise nature of that interaction is the topic of this paper. I attend particularly to the multiple religious practices of self-identified Makhuwa Christians. In broad strokes, one might see the phenomenon of Christians consulting with diviners, imbibing traditional medicines, and making offerings to ancestors as evidence for the fusion of religious worlds. But the broad strokes miss what is evident up close: that ancestors are rarely brought into the churches and that Christian saints never appear at ancestral shrines. Among the Makhuwa, rather than fusion, one sees an acceptance of disparate zones, though not without a willingness to tack back and forth between them. Makhuwa religiosity is less a matter of hybridity than of what anthropologist Janet McIntosh calls "polyontologism." Building on McIntosh, this paper argues for the idea of border-crossing (or polyontological) mobility, a kind of mobility predicated on rupture, but rupture understood paradoxically as reversible and repeatable.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Zanzibar, I ask how a continuously stabilized notion of "dini" as singular, separated from a potential plurality of "religion", speaks back to the conceptual conditions of "intra-action" with which I have approached an ever-changing topology of "religion multiple".

Paper long abstract:

Asking about the interreligious dialogue during ethnographic fieldwork in Zanzibar, I was lectured that the required plurality of religions does not work for "dini" (Swahili, often translated as "religion") which is singular, and which is Islam. With the analytical language of Karen Barad (2007, now glossed as major work of "new materialism"), I pondered on this conversation and described dini and religion in a relation of "intra-action": from within their entanglement, the differentiation of dini and religion matters eliciting new possibilities for entanglements. Because dini and religion are made to translate into each other, their differences become pronounced. The conversation departed from my question about the interreligious dialogue, employed the common translation of religion as dini to then distinguish dini from religion, and finally to comment on Christians' take on "dini" which in that instance was infused with a notion of religion, linking back to the interreligious dialogue. This has allowed me to address the ambiguities of dini/religion's entangled differentiations, disrupting connections, and bounded fluidities in the context of global power dynamics. In this contribution I probe to go deeper: I ask how a continuously stabilized notion of "dini" as singular, separated from a potential plurality of "religion", speaks back to the conceptual conditions of "intra-activity" as I have employed it for addressing an ever-changing topology of "religion multiple" in Zanzibar. To what extent does the analytical engagement with relationalities and multiplicities preclude dini's singularity? What does dini's intra-actively established singularity teach?

Paper short abstract:

This contribution will outline the heterogenous ways Islam is practiced within the Somali communities in Kenya. It will ask how it is possible to establish an academic language, that acknowledges difference without falling into the trap of fixation, but also without portraying everything as fluid.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution will outline the heterogenous ways Islam is practiced within the Somali communities in Kenya. While Somalis are in Kenya often presented as practicing a rather strict Islam, I argue that beyond that public image there are many religious practices by Somali Muslims not fitting into this image. Starting from a conflict in the Muslim community in Nakuru, I will sketch out very different ways of practicing Islam among Somalis in Kenya - from what is referred to as Salafi/Wahhabi interpretations of Islam, to being active in the Tablighi Jamaat, to 'Sufi' practices and healing ceremonies, but also to Islam as just an important aspect of life for many and an almost neglectable one for some. These practices are not only part of changing local and global entangelements, but they are also used in power struggles within urban Kenyan Muslim communities, which were heavily influenced by the migration of Somalis (from Kenya as well as from Somalia) to the cities since the beginning of the 1990s. In these arenas of competition specific interpretations of Islam serve as justifications for drawing boundaries between 'us' and 'them'. In a second step I will examine different emic and etic taxonomies along which the field of Islam is described, taxonomies which feed into ideas of clearly distinguishable practices within Islam. As these taxonomies are used in the emic and etic discourses alike, it is difficult to find and establish an academic language which acknowledges difference without falling into the trap of fixation.

Paper short abstract:

Describing how Muslims in Asante conceive and frame "African Traditional Religion," I discuss how their conceptualizations, translations, and comparisons not only pose a challenge to pre-established Western concepts but prompt one to rethink them.

Paper long abstract:

As an ethnographic contribution to the critical reflection of scientific concepts to study the dynamics of religious diversity and encounters in contemporary Africa, my paper discusses what one can gain from considering the takes of those involved in these dynamics as actual theory. In a religiously diverse country like Ghana, where Christianity, Islam, and "African Traditional Religion" co-exist in the same settings, actors from these traditions constantly encounter, interact, and relate to one another. In these open and, at times, conflictual processes, they commonly conceive their respective others on their own terms. In this paper, I describe and discuss how Muslims in Asante frame "ATR." In their discourses, "ATR" is commonly referred to as "bōkā" - a Hausa term referring to specific dealings with spiritual entities. As neither Muslims nor "ATR" practitioners consider bōkā as religion, there is no conceptual equality between both traditions on that level. However, Muslims also employ Islamic vocabularies and narratives, speaking of jinn or shirk, when referring to "ATR." Conversely, they use "ATR" concepts and narratives in their Islamic discourses as well. Thereby, "ATR" has its reverberations in these too - either as critique or affirmation of certain imaginaries and practices. Thus, Muslims' conceiving and framing of "ATR" in Asante is simultaneously a process of differentiations and translations that are made in one-for-one exchanges and not by a universal middle term. I discuss how such (local) conceptualizations, translations, and comparisons not only pose a challenge to pre-established Western terms and concepts but prompt one to rethink them.

Paper short abstract:

In many parts of West Africa today, everyday religious practices involve the use of sounds which create tensions and sometimes violent conflict between religious practitioners. This study examines the mediation of religious sounds and coexistence in diversifying societies.

Paper long abstract:

Over the years the study of religion and media has received much interest among scholars. Practices of mediation and the use of various kinds of new and old media in Pentecostalism, African Traditional religion and Islam has been well documented. So far, these researches have concentrated mainly on specific religious groups. By contrast, the repercussions of the production and use of media in co-existing religious groups on the level of multi-religious neighborhoods has not been critically examined. Based on my PhD research on Madina Zongo in Accra , this study examines the soundscapes of diversity that entangle Christians, Muslims and to a lesser degree ATR practitioners and demonstrate how these practitioners respond to or appropriate these diverse religious sounds in their everyday encounters. Engaging Brian Larkin's "Techniques of Inattention" and some selected works on the so-called "noise" discourse, I will offer methodological and theoretical reflections on the framing of sounds and mediation of religion in the everyday encounters of religious practitioners, especially between Muslims and Christians in diversifying societies.

Paper short abstract:

By means of a case study of Chrislam, a series of religious movements that originated in south-western Nigeria in the 1970s and that combine Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices, this paper opens up a new avenue to study religious plurality.

Paper long abstract:

Christian-Muslim relations in Africa are largely approached in terms of either religious conflict or interfaith dialogue. These two approaches suffer from the same limitation: they take religious boundaries for granted. In an effort to open up the binary logic of an exclusive 'either/or' that permeates the study of religion and replace it by an inclusive 'both/and' paradigm (Lambek 2008), this paper presents a case study of Chrislam: a series of religious movements that originated in south-western Nigeria in the 1970s, which combine Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices. I begin with the history of two of the most popular Chrislam movements in Lagos. The underlying idea is that to be a Christian or Muslim alone is not enough to guarantee success in this world and the hereafter; therefore, Chrislamists participate in Christian as well as Muslim rituals, appropriating the perceived powers of both. Appropriation involves a process of translation, whereby elements from one religious context are interpreted into another. This raises the question: what is acceptable religious plurality? To illustrate the limits of religious plurality, I conclude with the case of a banned Chrislam movement. What we see here is that the secular Nigerian state decides on what is legitimate religious fusion and what is prohibited. In this spirit, the Chrislam movements demonstrate not only that the common bifurcation between Christianity and Islam that still largely dominates scholarship on religion in Africa is highly problematic, but also challenge the conventional religious-secular divide.