Panel 116: Religious Engagements in the Public Sphere. A Critique of the Secular/Religious Divide

At the last ECAS conference several scholars took up the challenge to respond to Ranger’s critique of the category of the ‘occult’ in writing about religion in Africa. In many ways the ensuing discussion centred on the delineation of the religious field in Africa. In our panel we’d like to pursue this conceptual problem from a slightly different angle, by focussing on the secular-religious divide. Rather than presupposing an opposition between a secular West with a clearly bounded religious sphere, and a religious Africa where thanks to a peculiar African worldview religion permeates every aspect of life, we propose to take a look at different religious traditions in relation to historically shifting configurations of public spheres in Africa.

We welcome papers reflecting on the interrelated transformations that have shaped the role of religions in public life in Africa over the last 100 years. By means of ethnographic and historic examples and theoretical reflection we’d like to pursue the questions how “the public sphere” is perceived and constructed in different places at different moments in history and what role religion plays within these constructions. Papers from different disciplinary backgrounds are invited to deal with questions like: Who refers to what kind of public/private separation to (de-)legitimize the public role of religious beliefs and practices? How do religious groups and practices help to draw or take up these lines of demarcation? And how do publics and politics handle the sometimes incompatible visions of society, religion and (national or local) culture developed by either Christians, Muslims, so-called traditionalists or other believers? Who has the power to define the terms of these cultural negotiations and social struggles?