African Spirituality
an approach from intercultural philosophy
1. Introduction[i]
There is currently a hype in the production of encyclopedias on
Africa, and in this context Valentin Mudimbe approached me a few
years ago whether I would be willing to write the entry on ‘African
spirituality’ for an encyclopaedia of Africa and the African
diaspora which he was editing. Never having used the word ‘spirituality’
in any of my own writings on African religion so far, and bargaining
for time, I asked him what I was to understand by it: time-honoured
expressions of historical African religion such as prayers at the
village shrine; the wider conceptual context of such expression,
including African views of causality, sorcery, witchraft, medicine,
the order of the visible and invisible world, and such concepts
as the person, ancestors, gods, spirits, nature, agency, guilt,
responsibility, taboo, evil, not to forget the ordering of time
and space in terms of religious meaning; the expressions of world
religions in Africa, especially Islam and Christianity; the accommodations
between these various domains. Mudimbe’s answer was: all of
the above, and whatever else you wish to bring to the topic. Though
unduly flattered by his request, I never came round to writing the
entry: I could not overcome the fear of exposing myself as ignorant
of the essence of African religion.
Very recently, I brought together in one website[ii] a considerable
number of my papers on African religion as written over the years,
also in preparation for a book largely to consist of the same material.
This has made me reflect on the very topic Mudimbe invited me in
vain to write on.
The readily available material from the website contains only
some fifteen of the myriad writings on African spirituality which
are in existence, and in that respect there is no special reason
to take these specific writings as our point of departure. Yet I
will do so, for the following reason: as far as these writings are
concerned, I have first-hand knowledge of the specific empirical
and existential conditions under which the statements they contain
came into being, and of the personal evolution of the author who
made these statements. Implicitly this means that I appeal to introspection
as one of my sources of knowledge. While a time-honoured tool in
the history of philosophy (think e.g. of Socrates’ daimôn
and Descartes ‘cogito ergo sum’), we are only too well
aware of the dangers of introspection.[iii] The public representation
of self in what may be alleged to be pure introspection inevitably
contains elements of performativity, selection, structuring, and
is likely to be imbued with elements of transference reflecting
the introspecting author’s subconscious conflicts and desires.
Incidentally the same criticism applies, in varying degrees which
have hardly been investigated, to all other philosophical and social
scientific statements. Be this as it may, I rely on introspection
only implicitly in the present argument: mainly I will acknowledge
my personal recollection of the specific social processes of my
own gaining knowledge, or ignorance, of African spirituality.
The present argument may ultimately, in more final form, serve
towards the introduction of my book in the making, and this is another
incentive to write it. The extensive references to my own published
work merely serve to cover as many as possible of the articles to
be included in the prospective book.
What I wish to do is pose a number of obvious and straight-forward
questions, and attempt to give very provisional answers to them,
in order to initiate our further discussion on these points:
• Is there a specifically African spirituality?
• Can we know African spirituality?
• What specific themes may be discerned in African spirituality?
• To what extent is African spirituality a process of boundary
production and boundary crossing at the same time?
• Within these boundaries, what is being produced: group
sociability, the individual self, or both?
• How can we negotiate the tension between local practice
and global description of African spirituality?
2. Is there a specifically African spirituality?
It is almost impossible to separate this question from the next
one, concerning the epistemology of African spirituality. However,
we have to start somewhere, and it may be best to start where the
controversies and the politics of intercultural knowledge production
are most in evidence. The existence of a massive body of writing
specifically on African religion, and the institutionalisation of
this field in terms of academic journals, professorial chairs, scholarly
institutions, at least one world-wide scholarly association, has
helped to make the existence of specifically African spirituality
(or religion, I will not engage in terminological debate here) into
at least a globally recognised social fact. But to recognise the
nature of social facts as being socially produced at the same time
raises the question of irreality, virtuality, performativity, existence
by appearance only. If we argue that ethnicity is socially produced,
we argue at the same time for the deconstruction of ethnic identity
claims as inescapable, historically determined, absolute, unequivocal.[iv]
Something similar has been argued for culture.[v] Is it now the
turn for African spirituality to undergo the same treatment?
African spirituality features prominently in the increasingly
vocal expressions by intellectuals, political and ethnic leaders,
and opinion-makers who identify as African or who can claim recent[vi]
African descent. Of late such discussions have concentrated around
the Afrocentrist movement[vii] for which I personally have great
sympathy.
Here a dilemma arises.
One could either stress[viii]
(1) the fact that the concept of ‘Africa’ is a fairly
recent geopolitical construct and therefore is unlikely to correspond
to any ontological reality informing, and mediated through, spiritual
expressions some of which (like royal cults, ancestral cults, cults
of the land) can be demonstrated[ix] to have existed for centuries
if not millennia on the soil of the African continent. By taking
this view one may have long-term historical reality on one’s
side, but at the same time one gives the impression of seeking to
rob those who identify with ‘Africa’ from their most
cherished possession, their most central identity.
Or, alternatively, one may
(2) affirm that there is something uniquely African, not just in
sheer terms of geographical location or provenance but also in substance,
thus playing into the cards of the Afrocentrists and similar consciousness-raising
forms of intellectual mobilisation. But then one must be prepared
to run the risk of oversimplification, seeing one ‘African
spirituality’ where in fact there are myriad different African
spiritual expressions, some as far apart as:
(a) the cult of royal ancestors in West Africa under the Akan cultural
orientation, and
(b) the ecstatic veneration of the Holy Spirit in Pentecostal Southern
African churches;
or
(c) the veneration of land spirits in the somewhat thin Islamic
trapping of local saints in North Africa, and
(d) the ecstatic cults of affliction associated with misfortune,
a unique personal spiritual quest, and the circulation of persons
and commodities across vast distances of space, as in the South
Central and Southern African ngoma complex;
or
(e) the meticulous cultivation of female domesticity and sexuality
in South Central African girl’s initiation cults, and
(f) the annual cult of the descent of the Cassara demiurge, revenger
and cleanser of witchcraft, in westernmost West Africa.
These examples, all within the range of my own African religious
research in over three decades, may be multiplied ad libidum.
If many colleagues clamour to subsume these varieties of spiritual
expression under a common label, as ‘African’, it is
not so much because these expressions are situated in the African
continental land mass, or manifestly pertain to a recognisable shared
tradition, but largely because all of them may be cited to represent
forms of local identity and symbolic production on the part of people
whose image of dignity, whose image of spiritual and intellectual
capability and autonomy, has been eroded in recent centuries of
a North Atlantic mercantile, colonial and post colonial hegemonic
assault.
‘African’ in my opinion primarily invokes, not a common
origin not shared with ‘non-African’ or ‘non-Africans’,
nor a common structure, form or content, but the communality residing
in the determination to confront and overcome such hegemonic subordination.
It is especially important to realise that ‘African’,
when applied to elements of cultural production, usually denotes
items which are neither originally African, nor exclusively, confined
to the African continent. Elsewhere I have extensively argued how
many cultural traits which today are considered the central characteristics
and achievements of African cultures, have demonstrably a non-African
origin, and a global distribution pattern which extends far beyond
Africa.[x] This is not in the least a disqualification of Africa,
for exactly the same argument, and even more so, may be made for
so-called European characteristics and achievements, including Christianity
and modern science. It is only a reminder that broad continental
categories are part of geopolitics, of ideology and identity construction,
and not of detached analytic thought. There is a famous passage
in Linton’s Study of man[xi] in which he describes the morning
ritual of the average modern inhabitant of the North Atlantic: from
the slippers he puts on his feet to the God to whom he prays, the
cultural items involved in that process have a heterogeneous and
global provenance, most hailing from outside Europe.
The cultural and intellectual achievements commonly claimed as
exclusive to the European continent, are a concoction of transcultural
intercontinental borrowings such as one may only expect in a small
peninsula attached to the Asian land mass and due north of the African
land mass, thrice the size of Europe. What makes things European
to be European, and things African to be African, for that matter,
is the transformative localisation after diffusion.[xii] Transformative
localisation gave rise to unmistakably, uniquely and genially Greek
myths, philosophy, mathematics, politics, although virtually all
the ingredients of these domains of Greek achievement had been borrowed
from Phoenicia, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Thracia, and the Danube
lands. And a similar argument could be made for many splendid kingdoms
and cultures of Africa.[xiii]
If we accept that ‘African’ today is primarily a political
category reflecting the desire to assert self-identity and dignity
in the face of subjugation and humiliation under North Atlantic
hegemony, then ‘African spirituality’ can no longer
be defined, naively, as a particular way in which the inhabitants
of the African continent go about their time-honoured religion,
today, and in presumed continuity, to a greater or lesser extent,
with the religious patterns such as these existed before European
colonial conquest. We know that ‘African’ is a meaningless
category except in contrast with the ‘non-African’ implied
in the term, and implicated in a particular political history of
hegemony vis-à-vis what is so-called ‘African’.
As befits the place of origin of mankind, the African continent
has the greatest variety of somatic, cultural and religious forms
in the world. We cannot define Africans by reference to that variety.
What makes Africans Africans is not that they tend to have heavily
pigmented skins and woolly curly hair covering their heads (this
does not apply to all people residing in the African continent,
and moreover it does apply to many people outside the African continent,
including many not of recent African descent, such as the original
inhabitants of Southern India, Melanesia, New Guinea and Australia),
but that they have shared in the experience of recent intercontinental
political, military and economic history. In asking the question
as to the nature of African spirituality, we are no longer primarily
interested in the ways in which ‘Africans’, of all people,
use the concepts of spirit, and the actions of prayer, sacrifice,
ritual, to endow their world with meaning, order, and intent, as
if things African constitute their entire world. African spirituality
can only be a political category, which seeks to define a local
spirituality (better probably: a locality of the spirit) in the
face of the threats, lures and inroads of global processes beyond
the local.
‘African spirituality’ then is a scenario of tension
between local and outside, utilising spiritual means (the production,
social enactment, and ritual transformation, of symbols by a group
which constitutes itself in that very process) in order to try and
resolve that tension. In the last analysis, African spirituality
is not a fixed collection of such spiritual means (‘spiritual
technologies’) which might be labelled specifically ‘African’
if that epithet is to denote geographical provenance. The means
are extremely varied, as we have seen. And in many cases these means
are imported intercontinentally from outside Africa. These cases
probably include spirit possession,[xiv] and certainly such world
religions as Islam and Christianity, -- these three forms of African
spirituality together already sum up by far the major religious
expressions on the African continent today.
The latter does not mean that these three forms of African spirituality
are inherently un-African and alien to the longue durée of
African cultural history. Spirit possession is increasingly agreed
to constitute a transformation, in recent millennia, of the religion
of Palaeolithic hunters whose religious expression has been world-wide
mediated (often in shamanistic forms iconographically marked by
deer[xv] and circle-dot motives,[xvi] which passed through Mesopotamia
and the eastern Mediterranean basin in the second millennium BCE)
in the particular form it took in the Northern half of Eurasia by
the onset of the Neolithic. It is likely that this North and Central
Eurasian spiritual expression was considerably indebted to the emergence
of art, symbolic thought, and language by somatically modern man
in Africa from 200,000 BP (and especially 100,000 BP) onwards.[xvii]
Yet it is my impression that African cults of possession and mediumship
derive primarily from a common Old World stock emanating from North
and Central Eurasia, and not so much from the direct intra-African
descendent forms of the Later Palaeolithic. More recently, both
Islam and Christianity emerged in a Semitic-speaking cultural environment
which was not only geographically close to Africa, but towards whose
genesis African influences have been highly important: Mesopotamian
influences on ancient Judaism have been stressed by scholarship
from the late nineteenth century,[xviii] but it is only in recent
decades that the great influence of ancient Egypt on that seminal
world religion is widely admitted and studied in detail;[xix] by
the same token, it is increasingly clear that the cradle of the
Semitic languages is to be sought in Northeast Africa (where even
today the wider linguistic super-family of Afroasiatic has its greatest
typological variety), and that many of the basic orientations of
the Semitic civilisations of Western Asia may have parallels if
not origins in the African continent.
To try and define the conditions under which the process of the
creation of locality in the face of a confusing and identity-destroying
outside world takes place, is the main challenge of cultural globalisation
studies today.[xx] Also in some of my own writings, typically including
those not emphatically appearing under the heading of African religious
studies, this process has been explored.[xxi] Invariably, the process
hinges on the creation of a sense of community which involves the
installation, both conceptually (in shared language) and actionally
(through control of the flow of people and commodities) of boundaries
defining ‘us’ (a ‘we’ into which the acting
and reasoning ‘I’ inserts herself) as against ‘them’.
Without such boundaries, no spirituality, yet, as we shall see,
the very working of spirituality is to both affirm and transgress
these boundaries at the same time -- so that ultimately, African
spirituality is about both the affirmation of a South identity based
on a particular historical experience, and the dissolution of that
identity into an even wider, global world.
3. Epistemology: Can we know African spirituality?
The above positioning of African spirituality has deliberately
deprived the concept from most of its entrenchedly parochial and
mystical implications. If the creation of community through symbols
is a social process aiming at selective and situational inclusion
and exclusion through conceptual and actional means, and if the
process is not limited to a specific selection of cultural materials
supposed to constitute, intrinsically, ‘African spirituality’,
then the vast majority of people identifying as ‘Africans’
would at most times be excluded from the creation of community undertaken
by other ‘Africans’ in a specific context of space,
time and organisation.
For instance, a number of spiritual complexes, including one revolving
on the veneration of dead kings, another on girl’s initiation
and the spirit of menstruation and maturation named Kanga, another
on commoner villagers’ ancestral spirits, yet another on spirits
of the wild as venerated in cults of affliction and in the guilds
of hunters and healers, together make up the spiritual life world
of the contemporary Nkoya ethnic group.[xxii] This statement needs
to be qualified in view of the fact that many who today identify
as Nkoya, including the groups dominant ethnic brokers and elite,
have undergone considerable Christian influence and would primarily
identify as Christians of various denominations, primarily the Evangelic
Church of Zambia, Roman Catholicism, and recent varieties of Pentecostalism.
Moreover, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Islamic Swahili
long-distance traders penetrated into the land of Nkoya and left
some small cultural traces there. All these complexes define insiders
and outsiders in their own right, to such an extent that most Nkoya
tpople today could be said to be outsiders to most of what in some
collective dream of Nkoya-ness would be summed up as the basic constituent
features of the Nkoya spiritual world! All Nkoya men are in principle
excluded from participation in and knowledge of the world of female
initiation; women and all male non-initiate hunters are excluded
from the hunters’ guild’s cults except from the most
public performances of its dances and songs, and so on. Over the
pastdecade, my research on identity, culture and globalisation in
Zambia has concentrated on the annual Kazanga festival,[xxiii] the
main rural outcome of a process of ethnicisation by elite urban-based
Nkoya in the 1980s. The main feature of this festival is that elements
from all these spiritual domains (with exception of Christianity,
which however contributes the festival’s opening prayer and
the canons of decency governing dancers’ clothing and bodily
movements) are pressed into service in the two-day’s repertoire
of the festival. The effect is that thus all people attending the
festival, whose globally-derived format (including a formal programme
of events, the participation of more than one royal chiefs seated
together, the re-enactment of girl’s initiation dances by
young women who have already been initiated, the use of loudspeakers,
the opening prayer and national anthem, the careful orchestration
of dancing movements by dancers who are uniformly dressed, and who
receive payment for their activities, etc. etc.) is entirely non-local,
are forged into a performative, vicarious insidership, by partaking
of a recycled form of spirituality devoid of its localising exclusivity.
Here boundaries are crossed and dissolved, and the most amazing
thing is that -- as I argued at greater length elsewhere -- the
Nkoya people involved do not seem to notice the difference between
the original spiritual dynamics, and its transformation and routinisation
in the Kazanga context. Or rather, if they notice the difference
they appreciate the modern, virtualised form even more than the
original village forms. However, one might also argue that it is
only by sleight-of-hand that the illusion of a more extensive insidership
is created here whereas in fact the essence of the virtualisation
involved is that all people involved, also the original insiders,
are turned into outsiders, banned from the domain where the original
spiritual scenario could be seen to be effective.
When such transformations of inside participation and outside
contemplation and exclusion exist, already within one cultural an
linguistic community with a small window on the wider, ultimately
global world, we should be very careful with claims as to the sharing
or not sharing of the spirituality involved. Central to my argument
is that African spirituality consists in a political scenario, and
that in that context the minutiae of contents of a specific cultural
repertoire, and a specific biologically or socially underpinned
birth-right, are largely or even totally irrelevant.
This may be a difficult position to accept for cultural essentialists
including many Afrocentrists. Yet it is a position which I have
extensively elaborated and which subsumes my entire intellectual
career.[xxiv] It is the position in which I claim to be a Dutchman,
a professor of intercultural philosophy, a Southern African sangoma,
and an adoptive member of a Nkoya royal family, all at the same
time.
In the light of the constructed nature of any domain surrounded
by the boundaries that spirituality both creates and transgresses,
any spiritual domain, African or otherwise, is by definition porous
and penetrable -- in fact, it invites being entered, but at a cost
defined by the spiritual boundaries surrounding it.
That cost is both interactional and conceptual. An exploration
of this cost amounts to defining the place and structure of anthropological
field-work as a technique of intercultural knowledge production;
it is here that the introspection mentioned in my introduction comes
in. Without engaging with the insiders along the locally defined
lines of etiquette, implied meanings, shared local secrets, it is
impossible to attain and to claim insidership. Without engaging
with the linguistic and conceptual bases of such communality as
the insiders create by means of their spirituality, it is impossible
to achieve insidership in their midst. Such insidership is a social
process also in this sense that it cannot just be claimed by the
person aspiring it; quite to the contrary, it has to be extended,
recognised and affirmed by those who are already insiders, and who
as such are the rightful owners of the spiritual domain in question.
These are complex processes indeed. Not only the original outsider
such as the anthropologist seeking to enter from a background which
was initially far removed from that of the earlier insiders, but
also these insiders themselves in their process of affirming themselves
as insiders, have to struggle with massive problems of acquisition
of cognitive knowledge, language skills, details of organisational,
mythical, theological and ritual nature. Their credentials as insiders
are socially and perceptively mediated, and as such contain a considerable
element of performativity, which in principle stands in tension
vis-à-vis actual spiritual knowledge and attitudes, for in
the public production and perception of the latter a non-per formative
existential authenticity tends to be taken for granted. Also the
initial outsider seeking to become insider must perform in order
to affirm her eligibility as insider, and this adds a layer of potential
insincerity to all claims of intimate spiritual knowledge of secluded
local domains.
Yet, despite all these qualifications, I can only affirm that,
yes, the very many distinct domains of locality created by African
spiritualities are as knowable to the initial outsider as they are
to the earlier insiders. The difference is one of degree and not
of kind. Paramount is the political scenario of insertion, not the
immutable facts of an allegedly fixed cultural repertoire or birth-right;
least of all a congenital predisposition to acquire and appreciate
a specific, reified cultural repertoire — as racists, including
racist variants of Afrocentrism, would affirm.
Meanwhile knowing is not the same as revealing, and an entirely
new problematic arises when one considers the problem of how much
or how little the outsider having become insider in a specific domain
of African spirituality, is capable of revealing the knowledge she
has gained, to the outside world, globally, and in principle in
a globally understood international language. Here at least three
problems loom large:
• Can everything, especially everything spiritual, be expressed
in language? The answer is inevitably: no, of course not.[xxv]
• Can everything, especially everything spiritual, be transferred
from the specific domain of one language to that of another language?
Here the answer is: yes, to a considerable extent, but not totally,
cf. Quine’s principle of the indeterminacy of translation).[xxvi]
• Can one mediate inside knowledge to outsiders without betraying
the trust of fellow-insiders? Here the answer is: that depends on
the extent to which one allows the process of reporting to be governed
by the agency of these fellow-insiders -- if that extent is minimal
one’s reporting is downright betrayal and intellectual raiding
in the worst tradition of hegemonic anthropology; but it is not
impossible to mobilise the earlier insiders’ agency, for many
insiders today welcome global mediation of their identity, and therefore
may help to define the forms in which they wish to see their own
spiritual insidership mediated.[xxvii]
4. Themes in African spirituality
I have claimed that in principle African spirituality is a political
scenario devoid of specific cultural contents. In actual fact however
the range of variation in the cultural material that has gone into
the myriad specific constructions of African spirituality, although
wide, is not entirely unlimited.
Let me give an example. In 1981, when guided by a hospitable new
roadside acquaintance into a West African village in Guinea Bissau
for the first time in my life, I could blindly point out the village
shrine and improvise meaningfully on its social and spiritual significance,
merely on the basis of having extensively participated in village
shrine ritual in South Central Africa, at a distance of 5,000 km
across the continent, and having written comparative accounts of
shrines in South Central and Northern Africa.[xxviii] The same applies
to spirit possession, to whose South Central African forms I could
relate on the basis of my earlier research into similar phenomena
in North Africa.[xxix] The forms of kinship ritual and royal ritual
in West and Southern Africa are amazingly reminiscent of each other,
and I am gradually beginning to understand the historical reasons
for this, especially the diffusion (taken for granted in the first
half of the twentieth century, and ridiculed in the second half)
of royal themes from Ancient Egypt.[xxx] The same similarity exists
in the field of divination methods, albeit that here the underlying
common source is not Ancient Egypt but late first-millennium CE
Middle-Eastern Islam having undergone the distant influence of Chinese
I Ching which goes back to the second millennium BCE.[xxxi] But
as the latter forms of oracular ritual already indicate, there is
no compelling reason to limit our comparisons to the African continent,
and in fact there are continuities and similarities extending all
across Africa extending all over the Old World and occasionally
even into the New World.[xxxii] It would be easy to spell out these
themes and communalities more fully, but for our present intercultural-philosophical
argument they are not essential; what is more, they would only detract
us.
5. African spirituality as boundary production and boundary crossing
at the same time — in other words as intercultural philosophy
Adopting a formal perspective that takes the greatest possible
(or should I say: an impossibly great) distance from cultural specificities,
I have suggested that African spirituality is a political scenario
of community generation through spiritual means. In other words,
African spirituality is a machine to generate boundaries.[xxxiii]
However, a boundary which is entirely sealed is no longer negotiable
and amounts to the end of the world. The very nature of a boundary
in the human domain is that it is negotiable, albeit only under
certain conditions, and at a certain cost. I have attempted to spell
out some of these conditions and costs.
The argument, if found not to be totally devoid of sense, has
implications for intercultural philosophy beyond the mere analytical
study of African spirituality. For also intercultural philosophy
itself could be very well defined in the very same terms I have
now employed for African spirituality. While forging a specialist
inside language amongst ourselves as intercultural philosophers,
we intend the boundary which we thus erect around ourselves to be
porous, and to be capable of being transgressed by those we seek
to understand, and by whom we seek to be understood. Both within,
and across, that boundaries there will be limitations to the extent
to which we can know, understand, represent and mediate; but the
possibilities are well above zero.
There is an unmistakable kinship between my approach to African
spirituality as a content-unspecific boundary strategy towards community,
and Derrida’s approach to différance as a strategy
to both affirm and postpone the affirmation of difference; little
wonder that the above argument was written shortly after I attempted
to critically reflect on Derrida’s 1996 argument on religion.[xxxiv]
Besides my reluctance to spell out, at this point, whatever would
appear to be the specific contents of African spirituality after
all, another set of questions continue to bother me, leaving me
rather dissatisfied with the above argument while upholding its
general thrust, which would ultimately point to a definition of
religion beyond ontology, beyond metaphysics, as mainly a (necessarily
contentless) vector of sociability.
6. The politics of sociability versus the construction of the
individual self in African spirituality
The following dilemma arises at this point. Such boundary creation
and boundary crossing as goes on in the context of African spirituality,
does not only create situational and contextual communities to which
one may or may not be co-opted -- it also articulates an I who by
having the experiences engendered by these various spiritual technologies,
involves herself or himself in these domains of community, and in
the very process constitutes itself. Therefore my emphasis, in the
above argument, on the implied political dimension of African spirituality,
is demonstrably one-sided. It is not the ad hoc community created
within spirituality-based boundaries, but the I who is the locus
of these experiences, because it is only the individual who possesses
the corporeality indispensable as the seat of experience at the
interface between self and outside world. As Henk Oosterling aptly
pointed out,[xxxv] spirituality necessarily amounts to an embodied
project. African spirituality then is not only a social technology
but also a technology of individuality, of self. Is this reason
to distinguish between, let us say, social spirituality (the technology
of community) and religious spirituality (the technology of self)?
Is such a distinction at all possible? Or is spirituality best understood
as the nexus between self and community, as the technology which
(in the classic Durkheimian sense)[xxxvi] renders the social possible
despite the centrifugal fragmentation of the myriad individual conscious
bodies out of which humanity consists.
7. Spirituality between local practice and global ethnographic/
intercultural-philosophical description
A second and related point addresses my own positioning within
the above dilemma. I came to intercultural philosophy in the late
1990s out of dissatisfaction with the objectifying stance of cultural
anthropology; before reaching that point, this dissatisfaction had
brought me to suspend professional anthropological distance: I joined
(1990-1991) the ranks of those whom I was supposed to merely study,
and became a Southern African diviner-priest (sangoma), in ways
described in several of my papers.[xxxvii] The present argument
goes a long way towards explaining how I can be a sangoma, a North
Atlantic professor of philosophy, and a senior Africanist social
researcher, at the same time: if the essence of African spirituality
(and any other spirituality) is contentless, then the affirmation
of belief is secondary to the action of participation.[xxxviii]
The problem of actually believing in the central tenets of the sangoma
world-view (ancestral intervention, reincarnation, sorcery, mediumship)
then scarcely arises, and largely amounts to a sham problem.
But not quite. For at the existential level one can only practice
sangomahood, and bestow its spiritual and therapeutic benefits onto
others as clients and adepts, if and when these beliefs take on
a considerable measure of validity, not to say absolute validity,
at least within the specific ritual situation within which these
practices are engaged in. The community which this form of African
spirituality (and other forms of African and non-African spirituality)
generates, clearly extends beyond the level of sociability, and
has distinct implications for experience and cognition. It is a
political stance[xxxix] to insist on the validity of these sangoma
beliefs and to engage in the practices they stipulate, and thus
not to submit one-sidedly to the sociability pressures exerted by
another reference group (North Atlantic academic) and the belief
system (in terms of a secular, rational, scientific world-view)
they uphold; yet the latter belief system is worthy of the same
kind of respect and the same kind of politically motivated sociability,
as the sangoma one.
The dilemma is unmistakable, and amounts to an aporia. I solve
it in practice, day after day, by negotiating the dilemma situationally
and being, serially in subsequent situations I engage in within
the same day, both a sangoma and a philosopher/ Africanist. But
as yet I do not manage to argue the satisfactory nature of this
solution in discursive language. And I suspect that this is largely
because the kind of practical negotiations that produce a sense
of solution and that alleviate the tension around which the dilemma
revolves, defy the consistency, boundedness and linearity of discursive
conceptual thought, -- in other words, the dilemma itself seems
a rather artificial by-product of rational theoretical verbalising
on intercultural and spiritual matters. As I argued elsewhere,[xl]
discursive language is probably the worst, instead of the most appropriate,
vehicle for the expression and negotiation of interculturality.
And this renders all academic writing on African spirituality of
limited validity and relevance. But why confine ourselves to writing
and reading, if the real thing is available at our very doorstep?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[i] An earlier version of this paper was read at the June 2000 meeting
of the Research Group on Spirituality, an initiative of the Dutch-Flemish
Association for Intercultural Philosophy NVVIF, held at the Philosophical
Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam. I am indebted to the participants
for their constructive remarks, and particularly to Henk Oosterling,
Cornée Jacobs, and Frank Uyanne.
[ii] http://come.to/african_religion .
[iii] Dalmiya, V., 1993, ‘Introspection’, in: Dancy,
J., & E. Sosa, eds., A companion to epistemology, Oxford/ Cambridge
(Mass.): Blackwell’s, first published 1992; Shoemaker, S.,
1986, ‘Introspection and the Self’, Midwest Studies
in Philosophy, 9.
[iv] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, Kazanga: Etniciteit in Afrika
tussen staat en traditie, inaugural lecture, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit;
shortened French version: ‘Kazanga: Ethnicité en Afrique
entre Etat et tradition’, in: Binsbergen, W.M.J. van, &
Schilder, K., ed., Perspectives on ethnicity in Africa, special
issue, Afrika Focus, Gent, 1993, 1: 9-40; English version with postscript:
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, ‘The Kazanga festival: Ethnicity
as cultural mediation and transformation in central western Zambia’,
African Studies, 53, 2, 1994, pp 92-125; van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1999, ‘Culturen bestaan niet’: Het onderzoek van interculturaliteit
als een openbreken van vanzelfsprekendheden, inaugural lecture,
chair of intercultural philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam,
Rotterdam: Rotterdamse Filosofische Studies; English version in:
van Binsbergen, Intercultural encounters, o.c.; shortened English
version also in http://come.to/vanbinsbergen .
[v] van Binsbergen, Culturen bestaan niet, o.c. Davidson even made
a similar claim for languages, which is relevant in this context
since language is among the main indicators of cultural and ethnic
identity: Davidson, D., 1986, ‘A coherence theory of truth
and knowledge’, in: LePore, E., ed., Perspectives on the philosophy
of Donald Davidson, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 307-19.
[vi] ‘Recent’ is here taken to mean: ‘having
ancestors who lived in the African continent during historical times,
and specifically during the second millennium of the common era’.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the entire human species emerged
in the African continent a few million years ago. There is moreover
increasing consensus among palaeoanthropologists, based on massive
and ever accumulating evidence, that modern humans (Homo sapiens
sapiens) emerged in the African continent between 200,000 and 100,000
years ago, and from there brought language, symbolic thought, representational
art, the use of paint etc. to the other continents. Cf. Roebroeks,
W., 1995, ‘ ‘’Policing the boundary’’?
Continuity of discussions in 19th and 20th century palaeoanthropology’,
in: Corbey, R. & B. Theunissen, eds., Ape, man, apeman: Changing
views since 1600, Department of Prehistory, Leiden University. Leiden,
pp. 173-179, p. 175. Gamble, C., 1993, Timewalkers: The prehistory
of global colonisation, Bath: Allan Sutton.
[vii] On Afrocentrism, cf. the most influential and vocal statement:
Asante, M.K., 1990, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and knowledge, Trenton,
N.J.: Africa World Press; and the (largely critical) secondary literature
with extensive bibliographies: Berlinerblau, J., 1999, Heresy in
the university: The Black Athena controversy and the responsibilities
of American intellectuals, New Brunswick etc.: Rutgers University
Press; Howe, Stephen, 1999, Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined
homes, London/New York: Verso, first published 1998; Fauvelle-Aymar,
F.-X., Chrétien, J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H., 2000, eds.,
Afrocentrismes: L’histoire des Africains entre Égypte
et Amérique, Paris: Karthala; and the discussion on Afrocentrism
in Politique africaine, November 2000 (in the press), to which I
contributed a critique of Howe, while I am also a contributor to
Fauvelle, Afrocentrismes, c.s., and the author of a forthcoming
review of Berlinerblau in the Journal of African History.
[viii] As I, for one, did in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ‘Rethinking
Africa’s contribution to global cultural history: Lessons
from a comparative historical analysis of mankala board-games and
geomantic divination’, in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed.,
Black Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp: Dutch Archaeological and
Historical Society, special issue, Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch
Archaeological and Historical Society, vols 28-29, 1996-97, pp.
221-254 -- currently being reprinted as Black Athena Alive, Hamburg/Muenster:
LIT Verlag, 2000.
[ix] Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., Religious change in Zambia: Exploratory
studies, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International
[x] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., ‘Islam as a constitutive factor
in so-called African traditional religion and culture: The evidence
from geomantic divination, mankala boardgames, ecstatic religion,
and musical instruments’, paper for the conference on ‘Transformation
processes and Islam in Africa’, African Studies Centre and
Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden, 15
October, 1999, forthcoming in: Breedveld, A., van Santen, J., &
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., eds., Dynamics and Islam in Africa; van
Binsbergen, ‘Rethinking Africa’s contribution’,
o.c.
[xi] Linton, R., 1936, The study of man, New York: Appleton-Century.
[xii] On this key concept for contemporary ‘modified’
(to adopt Martin Bernal’s term) diffusionist approaches, cf.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ‘Black Athena Ten Years After:
Towards a constructive re-assessment’, in: van Binsbergen,
Black Athena: Ten Years After, o.c., pp. 11-64, esp. p. 35f, and
passim thoughout this entire volume.
[xiii] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., in preparation, Global Bee Flight:
Sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, and the World — Beyond
the Black Athena thesis.
[xiv] Eliade, M., 1968, Le chamanisme: Et les techniques archaïques
de l’extase, Paris: Payot; 1st ed 1951; Lommel, A., 1967,
Shamanism, New York: McGraw-Hill; Lewis-Williams, J.D., 1992, ‘Ethnographic
evidence relating to ‘‘trance’’ and ‘‘shamans’’
among northern and southern Bushman’, South African Archaeological
Bulletin, 47: 56-60; Halifax, J., 1980, Shamanic voices: The shaman
as seer, poet and healer, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; Bourgignon,
E, 1968, World distribution and patterns of possession states, in:
Prince, R., ed., Trance and possession states, Toronto: [publisher
] , pp. 3-34; Winkelman, M., 1986, ‘Trance states: a theoretical
model and cross-cultural analysis’, Ethos, 14: 174-203; Goodman,
F., 1990, Where the spirits ride the wind: trance journeys and other
ecstatic experience, Bloomington, Indiana U.P, 1990; Ginzburg, C.,
1992, Ecstasies: Deciphering the witches’ sabbath, tr. R.
Rosenthal, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; repr. of the first Engl.
edition, 1991, Pantheon Books, tr. of Storia notturna, Torino: Einaudi,
1989; Campbell, J., 1990, The flight of the wild gander, HarperPerennial;
van Binsbergen, ‘Islam as a constitutive factor’, o.c.
[xv] Rostovtsev, M.I., 1929, The animal style in south Russia and
China, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Bunker, E.C., Chatwin,
C.B., & Farkas, A.R., 1970, ‘Animal style’, in:
Art from east to west, New York; Cammann, Schuyler v. R., 1958,
‘The animal style art of Eurasia’, Journal of Asian
Studies, 17:323-39.
[xvi] Segy, L., 1953, ‘Circle-dot sign on African ivory carvings’,
Zaïre, 7, 1: 35-54.
[xvii] Anati, E., 1999, La religion des origines, Paris: Bayard;
French tr. of La religione delle origini, n.p.: Edizione delle origini,
1995; Anati, E., 1986, ‘The Rock Art of Tanzania and the East
African Sequence’, BCSP [ Bolletino des Centro Camuno di Studi
Preistorici ] , 23: 15-68, fig. 5-51; Wendt, W.E., 1976, ‘
‘’Art mobilier’’ from Apollo 11 Cave, South
West Africa: Africa’s oldest dated works of art’, South
African Archaeological Bulletin, 31: 5-11; Gamble, Timewalkers,
o.c., with very complete bibliography.
[xviii] E.g. Rogers, R.W., 1912, Cuneiform parallels to the Old
Testament, London etc.: Frowde, Oxford University Press; Pinches,
T.G., 1893, ‘Yâ and Yâwa in Assyro-Babylonian
inscriptions’, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology,
15: 13-15 (of course totally obsolete now, but that is not the point).
More recent standard works on this topic include: Heidel, A., 1963,
The Gilgamesh epic and Old Testament parallels, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, third edition, second edition 1949; Pritchard,
J.B., 1950, ed., Ancient Near Eastern texts relating to the Old
Testament, Princeton: Princeton University Press (many times reprinted);
Kitchen, K.A., 1966, Ancient Orient and the Old Testament, London:
Tyndale Press; Craigie, P., 1983, Ugarit and the Old Testament,
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
[xix] Redford, D.B., 1992, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in ancient
times, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Williams, R.J., 1971,
‘Egypt and Israel’, in: Harris, J.R., ed., The legacy
of Egypt, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 257-290; Assmann, J.,
1996, ‘The Mosaic distinction: Israel, Egypt and the invention
of paganism’, Representations, 56; and especially the comprehensive
project undertaken by M. Görg, editor of the series Fontes
atque pontes, reihe Ägypten und Altes Testament (Wiesbaden),
e.g.: Görg, M., 1977, Komparatistische Untersuchungen an ägyptischer
und israelitischer Literatur, Wiesbaden; Görg, M., 1997, Israel
und Ägypten, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
[xx] Appadurai, A., 1995, ‘The production of locality’,
in: R. Fardon, ed., Counterworks: Managing the diversity of knowledge,
ASA decennial conference series ‘The uses of knowledge: Global
and local relations, London: Routledge, pp. 204-225; Meyer, B.,
& Geschiere, P., 1998, eds., Globalization and identity: Dialectics
of flow and closure, Oxford: Blackwell; Fardon, R., van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., & van Dijk, R., 1999, eds., Modernity on a shoestring:
Dimensions of globalization, consumption and development in Africa
and beyond, Leiden/London: EIDOS; de Jong, F., ‘Modern secrets:
The production of locality in Casamance, Senegal’, Ph.D, University
of Amsterdam, forthcoming (2001).
[xxi] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991, ‘De chaos getemd? Samenwonen
en zingeving in modern Afrika’, in: H.J.M. Claessen red.,
De chaos getemd?, Leiden: Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen, Rijksuniversiteit
Leiden, 1991, pp. 31-47; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, Virtuality
as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic
transformation of contemporary Africa, The Hague: WOTRO [ Netherlands
Foundation for Tropical Research, a division of the Netherlands
Research Foundation NWO ] , Working papers on Globalisation and
the construction of communal identity, 3, also available in: http://come.to/vanbinsbergen
; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1998, ‘Globalization and virtuality:
Analytical problems posed by the contemporary transformation of
African societies’, in: Meyer, B., & Geschiere, P., eds.,
Globalization and identity: Dialectics of flow and closure, Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 273-303; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., ‘Witchcraft
in modern Africa as virtualised boundary conditions of the kinship
order’, in press in: G. Bond, & Ciekawy, E., eds., Witchcraft
dialogues: New epistemological and anthropological approaches to
African witchcraft, my contribution available on: http://come.to/african_religion
; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000, ‘Sensus communis or sensus
particularis? A social-science comment’, in: Kimmerle, H.,
& Oosterling, H., 2000, eds., Sensus communis in multi- and
intercultural perspective: On the possibility of common judgments
in arts and politics, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
pp. 113-128, also available on http://come.to/vanbinsbergen ; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, ‘Dynamiek van cultuur: Enige dilemma's
van hedendaags Afrika in een context van globalisering’, Antropologische
Verkenningen, 13, 2, 17-33, English version: van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1995, ‘Popular culture in Africa: dynamics of African cultural
and ethnic identity in a context of globalization’, in: van
der Klei, J.D.M., ed., Popular culture: Africa, Asia and Europe:
beyond historical legacy and political innocence, Proceedings Summer-school
1994, Utrecht: CERES, pp. 7-40.
[xxii] van Binsbergen, Religious change, o.c.; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history in central western
Zambia, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., & Geschiere, P.L., 1985, ‘Marxist theory and anthropological
practice: The application of French Marxist anthropology in fieldwork’,
in : van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & Geschiere, P.L., ed., Old modes
of production and capitalist encroachment: Anthropological explorations
in Africa, Londen/ Boston: Kegan Paul International, pp. 235-289;
a shorter version specifically on religion included in: http://come.to/african_religion
.
[xxiii] van Binsbergen, Kazanga, Dutch, English and French version,
oo.c. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, ‘Nkoya royal chiefs and
the Kazanga Cultural Association in western central Zambia today:
Resilience, decline, or folklorisation?’, in: E.A.B. van Rouveroy
van Nieuwaal & R. van Dijk, eds., African chieftaincy in a new
socio-political landscape, Hamburg/ Münster: LIT-Verlag, pp.
97-133. French version in press. Further discussions of the Kazanga
festival in my Virtuality, o.c., ‘Popular culture in Africa’,
o.c., and ‘Sensus communis or sensus particularis?’,
o.c.
[xxiv] van Binsbergen, ‘Culturen bestaan niet’, o.c..
[xxv] Quine, W.V.O., 1960, Word and object, Cambridge: MIT Press.
[xxvi] Hookway, C., 1993, ‘Indeterminacy of translation’,
in: Dancy, J., & Sosa, E., eds., A companion to epistemology,
Oxford/ Cambridge (Mass.): Blackwell’s, first published 1992;
Wright, C., 1999, ‘The indeterminacy of translation’,
in: Hale, B., & Wright, C., 1999, eds., A companion to the philosophy
of language, Oxford: Blackwell, first published 1997, pp. 397-426;
Quine, W.V.O., 1970, ‘On the reasons for the indeterminacy
of translation’, Journal of Philosophy, 67: 178-183; Quine,
Words, o.c.
[xxvii] Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1984, ‘Can anthropology
become the theory of peripheral class struggle? Reflexions on the
work of P.P.Rey’, in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & G.S.C.M.
Hesseling, G .S.C.M., eds, Aspecten van staat en maatschappij in
Afrika: Recent Dutch and Belgian Research on the African state,
Leiden: African Studies Centre, pp. 163-80; earlier German version
in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1984, ‘Kann die Ethnologie zur
Theorie des Klassenkampfes in der Peripherie werden?’, Österreichische
Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 9, 4: 138-48. An extensive attempt
to create intercultural intersubjectivity in the rendering of ethnographic
knowledge is described in: van Binsbergen, Tears, o.c.
[xxviii] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1976, ‘Shrines, cults and
society in North and Central Africa: A comparative analysis’,
paper read at the Association of Social Anthropologists of Great
Britain and the Commonwealth (ASA) Annual Conference on Regional
Cults and Oracles, Manchester, 35 pp; soon available at http://come.to/african_religion
; Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1979, ‘Explorations in the sociology
and history of territorial cults in Zambia’, in: Schoffeleers,
J.M., ed, 1979, Guardians of the land, Gwelo: Mambo Press, pp. 47-88;
revised edition in: van Binsbergen, Religious change, o.c., chapter
3, pp. 100-134,
[xxix] van Binsbergen, Religious change, o.c.; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1985, ‘The cult of saints in North-Western Tunisia:
an analysis of contemporary pilgrimage structures’, in: E.A.
Gellner, ed., Islamic dilemmas: reformers, nationalists and industrialization:
The Southern shore of the Mediterranean, Berlin, New York, Amsterdam:
Mouton, pp. 199-239; Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1980 ‘Popular
and formal Islam, and supralocal relations: the highlands of north-western
Tunisia, 1800-1970’, Middle Eastern Studies, 16: 71-91; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., forthcoming, Religion and social organisation
in north-western Tunisia, Volume I: Kinship, spatiality, and segmentation,
Volume II: Cults of the land, and Islam; van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1988, Een buik openen, Haarlem: In de Knipscheer.
[xxx] van Binsbergen, Global Bee Flight, o.c., with extensive discussion
of the literature.
[xxxi] van Binsbergen, ‘Rethinking’, o.c.; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1994, ‘Divinatie met vier tabletten: Medische technologie
in Zuidelijk Afrika’, in: Sjaak van der Geest, Paul ten Have,
Gerhard Nijhoff en Piet Verbeek-Heida, eds., De macht der dingen:
Medische technologie in cultureel perspectief, Amsterdam: Spinhuis,
pp. 61-110; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, ‘Time, space and
history in African divination and board-games’, in: Tiemersma,
D., & Oosterling, H.A.F., eds., Time and temporality in intercultural
perspective: Studies presented to Heinz Kimmerle, Amsterdam: Rodopi,
pp. 105-125; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1995, ‘Four-tablet divination
as trans-regional medical technology in Southern Africa’,
Journal of Religion in Africa, 25, 2: 114-140; van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1996, ‘Transregional and historical connections of four-tablet
divination in Southern Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa,
26, 1: 2-29; van Binsbergen, ‘Islam as a constitutive factor’,
o.c.; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, ‘The astrological origin
of Islamic geomancy’, paper read at ‘The SSIPS [ Society
for the Study of Islamic Philosophy and Science ] / SAGP [ Society
of Ancient Greek Philosophy ] 1996, 15th Annual Conference: ‘‘Global
and Multicultural Dimensions of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy
and Social Thought: Africana, Christian, Greek, Islamic, Jewish,
Indigenous and Asian Traditions, Binghamton University’’,
Department of Philosophy/ Center for Medieval and Renaissance studies
(CEMERS).
[xxxii] The latter applies e.g. to cat’s cradles (games consisting
of the manual manipulation of a tied string), certain board-games,
and the form of the Southern African divination tablets, which have
amazingly close parallels among the North American indigenous population;
cf. Culin, S., 1975, Games of the North American Indians, New York:
Dover; fascimile reprint of the original 1907 edition, which was
the Accompanying Paper of the Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, 1902-1903,
by W.H. Holmes, Chief.
[xxxiii] Partly on the basis of earlier work by Jaspers and Bataille
among others, in the final quarter of the twentieth century the
nature and production of boundaries attracted a considerable amount
of research in philosophy and the social sciences. For philosophy,
cf., for instance, Burg, I. van de, & Meyers, D., ed., 1987,
Bataille: Kunst, geweld en erotiek als grenservaring, Amsterdam:
SUA; Cornell, D., 1992, The philosophy of the limit, New York: Routledge;
Le passage des frontières: Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida,
Paris: Galilée, 1993; Kimmerle, H., 1983, ‘Dialektik
der Grenze und Grenze der Dialektik’, in: Dialektik heute:
Rotterdammer Arbeitspapiere, Bochum: Germinal, pp. 127-141; Kimmerle,
H., 1985, ‘Schein im Vor-Schein der Kunst: Grenzüberschreitungen
zur Identität und zur Nicht-Identität’, Tijdschrift
voor Filosofie, 47: 473-492; Procée, H., 1991, Over de grenzen
van culturen: Voorbij universalisme en relativisme, Meppel: Boom;
Oosterling, H., 1996, Door schijn bewogen: Naar een hyperkritiek
van de xenofobe rede, Kampen: Kok Agora, pp. 138ff and passim. And
for the social sciences: Barth, F., 1969, ed., Ethnic groups and
boundaries: The social organization of culture differences, Boston:
Little, Brown & Co; Devisch, R., 1981, ‘La mort et la
dialectique des limites dans une société d’Afrique
centrale’, in: Olivetti, M., ed., Filosofia e religione di
fronte alle morte, Archivio di Filosofia, 1-3: 503-527; Devisch,
R., 1986, ‘Marge, marginalisation et liminalité: Le
sorcier et le devin dans la culture Yaka au Zaïre’, Anthropologie
et Sociétés, 10, 2: 117-37; Anthias, E., & Yuval-Davis,
N., 1992, Racialised boundaries, London: Routledge; Turner, V.W.,
1969, The ritual process, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Schlee,
G., & Werner, K., 1996, Inklusion und Exklusion: Die Dynamik
von Grenzziehungen im Spannungsfeld von Markt, Staat und Ethnizität,
Koln: Rudiger Koppe Verlag. In a follow-up to the Research Group
on Spirituality, the NVVIF proposes to investigate the nature of
cultural boundaries in the context of the multicultural society,
taking as point of departure the common observation that such boundaries
are often produced, in public and performative situations, to be
deliberately and emphatically non-pourous.
[xxxiv] Presumably the argument would win from being combined with
my argument on Derrida’s 1996 approach to religion; this will
be attempted in a later version. Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., ‘Derrida
on religion: glimpses of interculturality’, paper read at
the April 2000 meeting of the Research Group on Spirituality, Dutch-Flemish
Association for Intercultural Philosophy, now available on the website
of the NVVIF: http://come.to/interculturality .
[xxxv] At the session where this paper was first presented.
[xxxvi] Durkheim, E., 1912, Les formes élémentaires
de la vie religieuse, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Durkheim
departs from what he considers the fundamental condition for religion:
the distinction between sacred and profane, which may take all sorts
of forms in concrete settings of time and place, but whose fundamental
and universal (!) feature is that it is absolute. As such the distinction
between sacred and profane is not only the basis for all rational
thought, but particularly for a cosmological partitioning of the
world in terms of sacred and profane. Sacred aspects of the world
(given aspects of the natural world such as animal species (religiously
turned into totems), but also man-made aspects: events, human acts,
concepts, myths) are not sacred by some aspect of their intrinsic
nature, but there sacredness is superimposed by collective human
representations; the selection of things sacred is entirely arbitrary
and therefore can vary from society to society and from historical
period to historical period — what is involved is merely the
application, with endless variation, of the distinction between
sacred and profane. The sacred is nothing in itself, but a mere
symbol -- but of what? The sacred is subject to a negative cult
of avoidance, taboo, but also to a positive cult of veneration.
It is essential that this cult is a collective thing, in which the
group constitutes itself as a congregation, a church -- Durkheim
uses this world (‘église’) in the original etymological
sense (ekklesia, i.e. ‘people’s assembly’) and
without Christian implications: his own background was Jewish, and
his argument is largely underpinned by ethnographic reference to
the religion of Australian Aborigines, who at the time had undergone
virtually no exposure to Christianity. Durkheim then makes his genial
step of identifying the social, the group, as the referent which
is ultimately venerated in religion. Here Durkheim is also indebted
to Comte’s idea of a ‘religion de l’humanité’
as a requirement for the utopian age when a ‘positivist’,
rational science will have eclipsed all the religious and philosophical
chimera of earlier phases in the development of human society. It
is the group which, through its transformation into a religious
symbol -- a transformation of which the adherents themselves are
largely or completely unaware -- , inspires the believer and the
practitioner of ritual with such absolute respect that their ritual
becomes an ‘effervescence’, a heated melting together
into social solidarity by which the group constitutes itself and
perpetuates itself, and in which the individual (prone to profanity,
anti-social egotism, sorcery) can transcend his own limitations,
can give up his individuality, and become part of the group, for
which the individual is even prepared to sacrifice not only ritual
prestations, but also himself. Without religion no society, but
it is society itself which is the central object of religious veneration;
and from this spring all human thought, all logical and rational
distinctions, concepts of space and time, causation etc.
[xxxvii] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991, ‘Becoming a sangoma:
Religious anthropological field-work in Francistown, Botswana’,
Journal of Religion in Africa, 21, 4: 309-344; van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1998, ‘Sangoma in Nederland: Over integriteit in interculturele
bemiddeling’, in: Elias, M., & Reis, R., eds., Getuigen
ondanks zichzelf: Voor Jan-Matthijs Schoffeleers bij zijn zeventigste
verjaardag, Maastricht: Shaker, pp. 1-29; both papers available
in English versions on: http://come.to/vanbinsbergen , and in preparation
in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., Intercultural encounters: Towards an
empirical philosophy.
[xxxviii] A point elaborated in: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1981,
‘Theoretical and experiential dimensions in the study of the
ancestral cult among the Zambian Nkoya’, paper read at the
symposium on Plurality in Religion, International Union of Anthropological
and Ethnological Sciences Intercongress, Amsterdam, 22-25 April,
1981, 22 pp; available in: http://www.geocities.com/africanreligion/ancest.htm
.
[xxxix] van Binsbergen, ‘Becoming’, o.c.; ‘Sangoma
in Nederland’, o.c.
[xl] van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, ‘Enige filosofische aspecten
van culturele globalisering: Met bijzondere verwijzing naar Malls
interculturele hermeneutiek’, in: Baars, J., & Starmans,
E., eds, Het eigene en het andere: Filosofie en globalisering: Acta
van de 21 Nederlands-Vlaamse Filosofiedag, Delft: Eburon, pp. 37-52;
English version available on: http://come.to/vanbinsbergen , and
in preparation in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., Intercultural encounters:
Towards an empirical philosophy.
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