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Religion and politics : taking African epistemologies seriously
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Afrika-Studiecentrum |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | Religious modes of thinking about the world are widespread in Africa, and have a pervasive influence on politics in the broadest sense. We have published elsewhere a theoretical model as to how the relationship between politics and religion may be understood, with potential benefits for observers not just of Africa, but also of other parts of the world where new combinations of religion and politics are emerging. Application of this theoretical model requires researchers to rethink some familiar categories of social science. I N T R O D U C T I O N Nine years ago, this journal published an article (Ellis & ter Haar 1998) in which we argued that politics in Africa cannot be fully understood without reference to religious ideas that are widely shared in societies south of the Sahara. Subsequently, we developed this hypothesis into a book, Worlds of Power (Ellis & ter Haar 2004), that presents a theoretical model for analysing the relationship between religion and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, showing at length how this can aid understanding of a wide range of social and political phenomena. We embarked on this exercise simply because we found the existing models for understanding the relationship between religion and politics to be unsatisfactory. All the models in common academic use are based on the assumption of a structural distinction between the visible or material world and the invisible world, whereas such a rigid distinction does not reflect ideas about the nature of reality that are * Stephen Ellis is a Senior Researcher. Gerrie ter Haar is Professor of Religion, and Development. J. of Modern African Studies, 45, 3 (2007), pp. 385–401. f 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0022278X07002674 Printed in the United Kingdom prevalent in Africa. The development of a new theoretical model intended to explain the relationship between religion and politics in Africa reflects more than a striving for scholarly precision. It promises to be of much wider usefulness at a time when religious movements are occupying public space in so many ways and in so many places : neo-pentecostal, charismatic and Islamist movements, but also neo-traditional movements like Kenya’s mungiki (Wamue 2001), or difficult-to-categorise phenomena such as the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda (Van Acker 2004). The purpose of the present article is to revisit our theory regarding religion and politics, nine years after its first formulation, in the light of various reviews and critiques that it has encountered. Our theory proceeds from the proposition that the religious ideas held by so many Africans – hundreds of millions of people – need to be taken seriously, and should be considered in their own terms in the first instance (Ellis & Ter Haar 2004: esp. 16–21). Yet it is striking how many reviewers and other readers choose to describe such ideas as manifestations of ‘ superstition’ or ‘ the occult ’. This is significant because, as Harold Turner (1976: 13) noted in regard to African-initiated churches, ‘our approach to any range of phenomena is both revealed and influenced by the names we bestow upon it ’. In fact, this observation may aptly be applied to religious phenomena in general. In Africa, the latter are grounded in distinctive modes of acquiring knowledge about the world, characterised by a holistic approach in which the sacred and the secular can be said to constitute one organic reality (Ilesanmi 1995: 54). Philosophers routinely make distinctions between different kinds of knowledge. African modes of thought, we suggest, are neither more nor less than epistemologies that include ways of acquiring knowledge not normally considered within the scope of social science. We suggest that such epistemologies have validity, meaning that not only do all people have a right to think about the world in whatever way they choose, but that modes of perception unfamiliar to Western observers may – in theory, at least – be of universal application. If this is so, it means that African ideas about religion and its relation to politics are important not only for understanding Africa, but may have the potential to inform our understanding of religion and politics more generally, in a world that is presently characterised by new alignments of these two fundamental elements. This is a capital point, which distinguishes our approach to the study of religion and politics from the many studies that, however excellent they may be, are based on the supposition of a separation of the religious and secular realms. Such studies almost invariably translate religious data (assumed to be a second order of truth at best) into sociological terms (assumed to correspond to reality). We argue for a 386 S T E PH EN E L L I S AND GERR I E T ER HAAR |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/12900/ASC-071342346-185-01.pdf?sequence=2 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
