AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY
an approach from intercultural philosophy
Wim van Binsbergen
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AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY an approach from intercultural philosophy Wim van Binsbergen |
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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?
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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?
[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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