ECAS 2013

In most primitive societies including Africa, religion was the superstructure upon which other structures were built. It was the superstructure upon which morality was built and rested. Speaking in opposition to Marxian thought religion, rather than the economy, was the superstructure in traditional societies. Every structure in most traditional societies - political, economic, social and, I dare say, cultural - was dependent on and informed by religion. Marriage, pregnancy, childbearing, upbringing/training of children, respect, character, building and sustaining relationships, creating/protecting the norms of the community etc are all sacred/religious obligations in traditional societies.

There is a growing moral decay not only in African societies but the world over. The problem has resulted in retarded/retarding moral development, which is evident in our society today, arises from our contemporary over-secularization of values and issues in our present human world. We need to begin to find ways to unwind the very winding ways of over-secularization through which we have arrived at this very unsatisfactory destination of moral decay and collapse with its painful consequences of lack of care and value for human life.

The sanctity of human life has been thrown to the winds in nearly all parts of the world. The more we secularize our lives, the more insecure our lives become. We have a duty to bring to a halt this overwhelming trend called secularization.

For many African cultures, knowledge in religion, art and medicine are interwoven. The past use of derogatory terms for African Religion has frozen the path to knowledge development in art and medicine. The Dagara word, bεtibr, etymologically represents what scholars have come to define as African (Dagara) Art. Bεr-tibr consists of two terms; the verb bεr (to leave aside, reserved) and tibr an object used to constitute a shrine. Indeed, any object that is permanently dedicated as a shrine object qualifies to be called a bεr-tibr. Dagara people, especially those who have been initiated and trained in different knowledge areas do collect stones and rocks from different environmental and sacred locations such as the hilly regions and the valley locations. These items, in addition to those made by specialists (potters, weavers, sculptors, carvers, etc.) become sacred art objects and tools (bɛr-tibɛ) used to constitute religious and medicinal shrines and cultic institutions. Many of these shrines and institutions were dismantled and the items destroyed between 1930 and 1960 when the majority of the Dagara people became Catholics. My presentation is a report on two sets of Dagara sacred art objects (bɛr-tibɛ), about 52 objects, collected from two family shrines as part of my research into Dagara art, religion and medicine. The focus of the presentation is on the story of survival of these items as endangered archives that are also still loaded with sacred knowledge and meaning within the interwoven fields of religion, art and medicine.

This work sets out to articulate the different challenges, contradictions and dilemmas implied by what it means to be modern in the African instance and to apply this to interrogate modern religious experiences in Africa. The Africa implied is black Africa or what is also known as sub-Saharan Africa and by modernity I mean the worldview that has come about through forms of knowledge that arise from and are agreeable to human nature and has harboured a universal potential for freedom, for humanism, and ultimately, for progress. The paper will defend the claim that modernity in Africa is in a dilemma and will attempt to resolve this dilemma through apposition that will amount to an African theory of modernity. It will apply the position so advanced to interrogate the fundamental assumptions underlying beliefs, ideas or values that define modern religions in Africa. How should the African be modern and religious and what role should be assigned to religion in contemporary Africa, assuming that it is the case that religion is a basic demand of contemporary African life and why? How can this be done without the reversal of the African mind to the overbearing influence of dogmatism and anachronistic thinking that discourages the critical turn which leads to new forms of life that can properly reconfigure the African world? These are the questions that the paper will attempt to answer.

In recent years Kampala, Uganda has experienced mounting tension between religious and secular agendas. This is exemplified with the growth of Pentecostal Charismatic discourse promoting 'moral' agendas in the fight against HIV/AIDS and sexual freedom, with competing secular discourses—emanating both exogenously and endogenously—encouraging biomedical approaches to HIV/AIDS and the extension of human rights to sexual minorities. The recent rise of Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches in Uganda throughout the past decade has led to an abundance of religious discourse within the public sphere. Consequently, Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCC) are influential political actors, influencing state policy over public health and sexuality. In recent years public health initiatives combating HIV/AIDS have become reframed, and now emphasise abstinence and monogamy approaches over condom use in the fight against HIV. Additionally, numerous PCCs offer religious healing as a viable cure those HIV-positive. In 2009 legislation was brought before congress to further criminalise homosexuality. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill finds tremendous support within many Pentecostal Churches, while the origin of the legislation is often directly linked to the Pentecostal-Charismatic community by numerous Western media sources and church parishioners. Following the legislation several Western governments have threatened to withdraw aid if the legislation is passed—as a result President Museveni has publicly denounced the bill—while international public health sources have attributed the recent statistical rise of HIV/AIDS in Uganda to the negation of condoms in overall prevention strategies. This paper aims to examine the conflict between competing secular and religious discourse influencing public policy

Untonomics points to the total theistic nature of african philosophy.African Philosophy of religion necessarily does not follow Platonic and Aristotelian logical debates on God,rather it seeks to unravel the mysteries behind an already existing God including the role of this God in human existence,since african metaphysics strongly believes that the spiritual controls the physical.This untonomic view of the theistic nature of african philosophy seriously conflicts with socionomy,especially the socionomic argument that african religious mentality hinders the development of human intelligence. the point being that highly religious societies often suffer mental and intellectual stagnation due to high level religious mentality that hinders scientific reasoning,industrial development and technological advancement.

Today, about 40 000 Somalis live in Sweden. This paper, based on anthropological fieldwork in the city of Gothenburg, inquires into the role of religion among Somali-Swedes when experiencing illness and suffering. When ill, many Somalis turn to both biomedicine ("Western medicine") and Islam. Faith in Islam and its Holy book, the Qur'an, gives not only religious guidance but also a profound meaning to ill-health in a way that biomedicine cannot. The paper shows how the biomedical view of illness, with its individualized perspective and mind-body distinction, is challenged by a religious and more holistic view of illness and suffering. By presenting a number of cases, it is shown how illness is sometimes manifested as spirit (jinn) possession, the evil eye, sorcery and curses, and related to existential issues and to the social world of the sufferer. To deal with these afflictions, people may use Qur'an recitations and other techniques involving the Qur'an, herbal oils, rituals of exorcism, and they may travel to powerful healers (sheikhs) in Somalia or neighbouring countries.

In spite of the interest that the recent status of Portugal as an immigration country arises, some important issues dealing with immigrant´s states of suffering and death, have hardly been dealt with. For immigrants themselves, this is a reality that often conditions the relation with the home country. Death is thus here looked upon as a process, which involves specific emotional states and triggers the use of rituals in order to cope with the unavoidable distress, acquiring more complicated aspects when away from home.

This paper will deal with the multiple levels that death touches upon, from the symbolic to the more practical ones. Death is one realm in which a transnational approach is mandatory; it entails an intense circulation of material goods and wealth, but also of highly symbolic significant universes which circulate along with the goods and the people: the corpse, but also the spirits and the relations with the other world that people brought along into the diaspora situation. This paper aims at deconstructing prejudiced notions of what happens with the immigrants´ dead bodies, including symbolic representations as well as practical issues, such as legal processes involved to send the bodies home, using as case studies the immigrants from Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in contemporary Portugal. Based on ethnographic data, it will deal with the work done by immigrants´associations, and other intervenient in the process-- hospitals, funerary agencies, diplomatic and border authorities and religious institutions.