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This is a fresh account of African Catholicism among the Asante of Ghana, combining ethnographic detail, secondary sources, and personal reflection. It clarifies how Asante Catholics extend and transform their indigenous ideas and practices, thereby reshaping Christianity.
Religion and Politics in a Global Society: Comparative Perspectives from the Portuguese-Speaking World, edited by Paul Christopher Manuel, Alynna Lyon, and Clyde Wilcox, explores the legacy of the Portuguese colonial experience, with careful consideration of the lasting impression that this experience has had on the cultural, religious, and political dynamics in the former colonies. Applying the insights derived from three theoretical schools (religious society, political institutions, and cultural toolkit), this volume brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines, offering in-depth case studies on Angola, Brazil, East Timor, Goa, Mozambique, and Portugal—societies connected by a shared colonial past and common cultural and sociolinguistic characteristics. Each chapter examines questions on how faith and culture interrelate, and how the various national experiences might resonate with one another. This volume provides a deeper understanding of the Lusophone global society, as well as the larger field of religion and politics.
This book presents selected addresses presented before the Personalist Discussion Group meetings held in conjunction with the annual meetings of The American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. It includes the central ideas of American Personalistic Idealism developed during the twentieth century, its major criticisms, and recent developments by philosophers who are either Personalistic Idealists or sympathetic to the position.
In March 2017, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa-Akufu announced his intention to build a national cathedral to the people of Ghana. The announcement elicited watertight counter arguments that morphed into two a priori re-litigated assumptions: First, Ghana is a secular country and second, religion and state formation are incompatible. Informed by a frustrating paradox of an overwhelming religious presence and concurrent pervasive corruption in the country, public conversation reached a cul-de-sac of “conviction without compromising.” In The Political Economy of Heaven and Earth in Ghana, Charles Prempeh deploys the national cathedral as an entry point to provide both interdiscipl...
This book seeks to widen perspectives on entrepreneurship by drawing attention to the diverse and partly new forms of entrepreneurial practice in Africa since the 1990s. Contrary to widespread assertions, figures of success have been regularly observed in Africa since pre-colonial times. The contributions account for these historical continuities in entrepreneurship, and identify the specifically new political and economic context within which individuals currently probe and invent novel forms of enterprise. Based on ethnographically contextualized life stories and case studies of female and male entrepreneurs, the volume offers a vivid and multi-perspectival account of their strategies, visions and ventures in domains as varied as religious proselytism, politics, tourism, media, music, prostitution, funeral organization, and education. African cultural entrepreneurs have a significant economic impact, attract the attention of large groups of people, serve as role models for many youths, and contribute to the formation of new popular cultures.
Shaping Membership, Defining Nation explores and interprets the social politics, religion, and history of Africans (Habshis/Siddis) in Karnataka of South India. Focusing on the continuous dialog between African Indian historical formations and contemporary power structures, Pashington Obeng clearly explains the process of constructing socio-political and religious mores to respond to India's religious, socio-economic, and caste systems. The study begins by contextualizing the history of Africans inIndia before moving onto a sociological study. Pashington Obeng examines the formal and non-formal religious customs that stress African Indian agency in appropriating and shaping new forms of Indianness as well as African Diasporic realities. The book concludes with an important analysis of African Indian folksongs and dances.Shaping Membership, Defining Nation is a ground-breaking study of interest to scholars of African History and contemporary Indian society.
This book investigates how women's power and caste cleavages often continue to transcend and crosscut the boundaries of caste/tribe, gender, age, class and religion in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh It examines the gendered divisions of labor in rural communities and how countervailing forces have restricted women's status and roles in South Asia.
This bibliography lists the most important works published in anthropology in 1995. Renowned for its international coverage and rigorous selection procedures, IBSS provides researchers and librarians with the most comprehensive and scholarly bibliographic service available in the social sciences. IBSS is compiled by the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics, one of the world's leading social science institutions. Published annually, IBSS is available in four subject areas: anthropology, economics, political science and sociology.
This book examines the relationship between Catholic missionaries and the colonial administration in southeastern Belgian Congo. It challenges the perception that the Church and the state worked seamlessly together. Instead, using the territory of Kongolo as a case study, the book reconfigures their relationship as one of competitive co-dependency. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, the book argues that both institutions retained distinct agendas that, while coinciding during certain periods, clashed on many occasions. The study begins by outlining the pre-colonial history of southeastern Congo. The second chapter examines how the Church began its encounters with the pe...
Chinese practices related to ancestors have long been the subject of conflicting interpretations. These practices are rooted in the lived experience of practitioners, and therefore need to be considered as embodied expressions of the quest for existential meaning. For practitioners, the achievement of existential meaning requires the inclusion, implication, and mediation of the ancestors. When gestures in ancestor rites are analyzed from this perspective it is possible to appreciate their essence as constitutive of “ancestor religion.” This book uses an inquisitive method that investigates the discrepancies between foreign and local explanations, and proposes another hermeneutic framework for ancestor related praxes.