Africa&#039;s Social and Religious Quest

Randee Ijatuyi-Morphé

doi:10.5771/9780761862680

Summary

This well-crafted book probes the key dimensions of Africa’s existential predicament. It constitutes an intellectual response to a gnawing “African situation”—the starting point for grasping Africa’s social and religious quest. Beyond split explanations of external versus internal factors (e.g., colonization/slavery vs. leadership/cultural values), this study accounts more comprehensively for emergent issues shaping this situation. The situation reflects a gamut of problems in traditional African religion and material culture, which hitherto defines African communality, polities, and destinies vis-à-vis the cosmos and nature. Thus, African religion and communities, each with its own attendant values, do not operate by critical engagement with larger issues of society and civilization, especially those shaped by the advent of (post-) modernity. Rather, they operate via adaptation. The communal drive for natural and social harmony inevitably produces a preservationist view of culture (“leaving things as they are”). This study takes an integrative approach to religion, society, and civilization; eschews dichotomies; and broadly defines and re-signifies life and wholeness as a true end of Africans’ quest today.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2014
ISBN-Print: 978-0-7618-6267-3
ISBN-Online: 978-0-7618-6268-0
Publisher: Hamilton Books, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 627
Product type: Book Titles

1. CONTENTS No access
2. Religion, Anthropology, and the Bible in Africa (RABA) No access
3. List of Figures No access
4. Foreword No access
5. Preface No access
6. Acknowledgments No access
1. 1. 1. On Identifying and Signifying a Quest No access
1. 1. 2. Personal and Communal Stake No access
  2. 3. The Ancestoral Source No access
  3. 4. Social Ferment and Human Machinations No access
  4. 5. Mythology, Magic and Ritual No access
  5. 6. Excursus: Witchcraft Discourse and Interpretation No access
2. 1. 7. Popular (or, Folk) Religion No access
  2. 8. Customs and Ceremonies No access
  3. 9. Prayer and Providence No access
  4. 10. African Pentecostalism and the Miraculous No access
  5. 11. Religion and Social Control No access
1. 1. 12. Communality and the Person No access
  2. 13. Cultural and Moral Traditions No access
  3. 14. Patrimonialism and Procreationism No access
  4. 15. Nature and Environmental Forces No access
  5. 16. Human Dignity/Equality and the Person No access
2. 1. 17. Colonization and Slavery No access
  2. 18. Women, Culture and Liberation No access
  3. 19. Poverty, Wealth and Development No access
  4. 20. Money, Market and Prosperity No access
  5. 21. Social and Cultural (Or, the Genesis) Mandate No access
1. 1. 22. African Weltanschauung (Worldview) and Morality No access
  2. 23. The Good Life in (African) Religious Tradition No access
  3. 24. African Cultural Values and Submergence of Virtue No access
  4. 25. Religion, Culture and African Social Ethics No access
  5. 26. Social History, Progress and Moral Modern Society No access
1. 1. 27. God and the World No access
  2. 28. Humankind and History No access
  3. 29. Salvation and Selfhood No access
1. 1. 30. The End of a Quest: Critical Reflections No access
Select Bibliography No access Pages 589 - 602
Index No access Pages 603 - 626
About the Author No access Pages 627 - 627