You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This rich ethnographic study explores the life and work of successful marabout women in Dakar. It is set against the background of their private family lives, of developments in Senegalese society, and of global changes. While including female experts in spirit possession and plant-based healing, it also gives a rare insight in the work of women who offer Islamic knowledge such as Arabic astrology, numerology, divination and prayer sessions. With the analysis of marabout women's work this study sheds light on the ways in which women's authority in esoteric knowledge is negotiated, legitimated, and publicly recognised in Dakar. The study focuses especially upon marabout women's strategies to gain their clients' trust. Reference to rural areas is a significant element in this process. This study thus contributes to an understanding of the gendered way in which trust and scepticism are related to marabouts' work and of the role of a connection between Dakar and the rural areas therein.
How to understand the simultaneity of parental love and care with inaction when a child is ill? This question inspired author Lianne Holten to conduct the ethnographic study presented in this book. Holten worked and lived in the isolated village of Farabako (Mali) to help establish a maternity clinic. She clearly describes the tension between Western biomedical thinking and local ideas on health. Holten explains how biomedical assumptions make the mothers' actions appear incomprehensible, but she also shows the logic within the local context. This study contributes to the understanding of the importance of local moralities in health and will be useful for public health initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa. (Series: Mande Worlds - Vol. 6)
A wide-ranging overview of how magic has been defined, understood and practiced over the millennia introduces it in today's world as a real force that helps people overcome misfortune, poverty and illness.
This handbook generates new insights that enrich our understanding of the history of Islam in Africa and the diverse experiences and expressions of the faith on the continent. The chapters in the volume cover key themes that reflect the preoccupations and realities of many African Muslims. They provide readers access to a comprehensive treatment of the past and current traditions of Muslims in Africa, offering insights on different forms of Islamization that have taken place in several regions, local responses to Islamization, Islam in colonial and post-colonial Africa, and the varied forms of Jihād movements that have occurred on the continent. The handbook provides updated knowledge on various social, cultural, linguistic, political, artistic, educational, and intellectual aspects of the encounter between Islam and African societies reflected in the lived experiences of African Muslims and the corpus of African Islamic texts.
Includes Proceedings of the Executive council and List of members, also section "Review of books".
This book takes food parcels as a vehicle for exploring relationships, intimacy, care, consumption, exchange, and other fundamental anthropological concerns, examining them in relation to wider transnational spaces. As the contributors to this volume argue, food and its related practices offer a window through which to examine the reconciliation of people’s localised intimate experiences with globalising forces. Their analyses contribute to an embodied and sensorial approach to social change by examining migrants and their families’ experiences of global connectedness through familiar objects and narratives. By bringing in in-depth ethnographic insights from different social and economic contexts, this book widens the understanding of the lived experiences of mobility and goes beyond the divide between origin and destination countries, therefore contributing to new ways of thinking about migration and transnationalism that take into consideration the materiality of global connections and the way such connections are embodied and experienced at the local level.
l’encontre de l’opposition stéréotypée entre soufisme et salafisme, les contributions rassemblées dans cet ouvrage montrent la convergence entre certains ordres soufis et les mouvements salafistes dans leur enrôlement des subalternes, femmes, jeunes et « castés », au Sahel musulman. Une telle évolution ne peut se comprendre que dans la longue durée et en connectant les espaces. L’espace sahélien est marqué depuis le XIe siècle par une forte prépondérance de l’islam reposant sur un triptyque partagé avec l’ensemble du Maghreb voisin : malikisme, acharisme et soufisme confrérique. Après les révolutions musulmanes plutôt égalitaires du XVIIIe siècle, ces confrér...
African women’s history is a vast topic that embraces a wide variety of societies in over 50 countries with different geographies, social customs, religions, and historical situations. Africa is a predominantly agricultural continent, and a major factor in African agriculture is the central role of women as farmers. It is estimated that between 65 and 80 percent of African women are engaged in cultivating food for their families, and in the past that percentage was likely even higher. Thus, one common thread across much of the continent is women’s daily work in their family plot. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa contains a chronology, an introdu...
Writing boards and blackboards are emblematic of two radically different styles of education in Islam. The essays in this lively volume address various aspects of the expanding and evolving range of educational choices available to Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa. Contributors from the United States, Europe, and Africa evaluate classical Islamic education in Africa from colonial times to the present, including changes in pedagogical methods—from sitting to standing, from individual to collective learning, from recitation to analysis. Also discussed are the differences between British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese education in Africa and between mission schools and Qur'anic schools; changes to the classical Islamic curriculum; the changing intent of Islamic education; the modernization of pedagogical styles and tools; hybrid forms of religious and secular education; the inclusion of women in Qur'anic schools; and the changing notion of what it means to be an educated person in Africa. A new view of the role of Islamic education, especially its politics and controversies in today's age of terrorism, emerges from this broadly comparative volume.
Since around 2000, a growing number of women in Dakar, Senegal have come to act openly as spiritual leaders for both men and women. As urban youth turn to the Fay?a Tij?niyya Sufi Islamic movement in search of direction and community, these women provide guidance in practicing Islam and cultivating mystical knowledge of God. While women Islamic leaders may appear radical in a context where women have rarely exercised Islamic authority, they have provoked surprisingly little controversy. Wrapping Authority tells these women's stories and explores how they have developed ways of leading that feel natural to themselves and those around them. Addressing the dominant perceptions of Islam as a con...