Evil in Africa

Description

William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.

Introduction: African Notions of Evil: The Chimera of Justice
Walter E.A. van Beek and William C. Olsen
Part I. Evil and the State/War
1. Political Evil: Witchcraft from the Perspective of the Bewitched
Sónia Silva
2. Untying Wrongs in Northern Uganda
Susan Reynolds Whyte, Lotte Meinert, Julaina Obika
3. The Evil of Insecurity in South Sudan: Violence and Impunity in Africa's Newest State
Jok Madut Jok
4. Genocide, Evil and Human Agency: The Concept of Evil in Rwandan Explanations of the 1994 Genocide
Jennie E. Burnet
5. Politics and Cosmographic Anxiety: Kongo and Dagbon Compared
Wyatt MacGaffey
Part II. Evil and Religion
6. Ambivalence and the Work of the Negative Among the Yaka
René Devisch
7. Azé and the Incommensurable
Léocadie Ekoué with Judy Rosenthal
8. Evil and the Art of Revenge in the Mandara Mountains
Walter E.A. van Beek
9. Distinctions in the Imagination of Harm in Contemporary Mijikenda Thought: The Existential Challenge of Majini
Diane Ciekawy
10. Haunted by Absent Others: Movements of Evil in a Nigerian City
Ulrika Trovalla
11. Attributions of Evil among Haalpulaaren, Senegal
Roy Dilley
12. Reflections regarding Good and Evil: The Complexity of Words in Zanzibar
Kjersti Larsen
13. Constructing Moral Personhood: The Moral Test in Tuareg Sociability as a Commentary on Honor and Dishonor
Susan J. Rasmussen
14. The Gender of Evil: Maasai Experiences and Expressions
Dorothy L. Hodgson
Part III. Evil and Modernity
15. Neo-Cannibalism, Military Bio-Politics, and the Problem of Human Evil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
16. Theft and Evil in Asante
William C. Olsen
17. Sorcery after Socialism: Liberalization and Anti Witchcraft Practices in Southern Tanzania
Maia Green
18. Transatlantic Pentecostal Demons in Maputo
Linda van de Kamp
19. The Meaning of "Apartheid" and the Epistemology of Evil
Adam Ashforth

List of Contributors and Affiliations
Index

Sujets

• Violence in Society
• African Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Anthropology
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 30 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253017505
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

EVIL IN
AFRICA
EVIL IN
AFRICA
ENCOUNTERS WITH THE EVERDAY
EDITED BY
WILLIAM C. OLSEN
WALTER E. A. VAN BEEK
FOREWORD BY
DAVID PARKIN
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Evil in Africa : encounters with the everyday / edited by William C. Olsen and Walter E. A. van Beek ; foreword by David Parkin. pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01743-7 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01747-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01750-5 (ebook) 1. Good and evil. 2. Good and evil-Social aspects-Africa. I. Olsen, William C. II. Beek, W. E. A. van.
BJ 1406. E 96 2015
170.96-dc23
2015017065
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
CONTENTS
Foreword David Parkin
Acknowledgments
Introduction: African Notions of Evil: The Chimera of Justice Walter E. A. van Beek and William C. Olsen
PART I. EVIL AND THE STATE/WAR
1 Political Evil: Witchcraft from the Perspective of the Bewitched S nia Silva
2 Untying Wrongs in Northern Uganda Susan Reynolds Whyte, Lotte Meinert, Julaina Obika
3 The Evil of Insecurity in South Sudan: Violence and Impunity in Africa s Newest State Jok Madut Jok
4 Genocide, Evil, and Human Agency: The Concept of Evil in Rwandan Explanations of the 1994 Genocide Jennie E. Burnet
5 Politics and Cosmographic Anxiety: Kongo and Dagbon Compared Wyatt MacGaffey
PART II. EVIL AND RELIGION
6 Ambivalence and the Work of the Negative among the Yaka Ren Devisch
7 Aze and the Incommensurable L ocadie Ekou with Judy Rosenthal
8 Evil and the Art of Revenge in the Mandara Mountains Walter E. A. van Beek
9 Distinctions in the Imagination of Harm in Contemporary Mijikenda Thought: The Existential Challenge of Majini Diane Ciekawy
10 Haunted by Absent Others: Movements of Evil in a Nigerian City Ulrika Trovalla
11 Attributions of Evil among Haalpulaaren, Senegal Roy Dilley
12 Reflections regarding Good and Evil: The Complexity of Words in Zanzibar Kjersti Larsen
13 Constructing Moral Personhood: The Moral Test in Tuareg Sociability as a Commentary on Honor and Dishonor Susan J. Rasmussen
14 The Gender of Evil: Maasai Experiences and Expressions Dorothy L. Hodgson
PART III. EVIL AND MODERNITY
15 Neocannibalism, Military Biopolitics, and the Problem of Human Evil Nancy Scheper-Hughes
16 Theft and Evil in Asante William C. Olsen
17 Sorcery after Socialism: Liberalization and Antiwitchcraft Practices in Southern Tanzania Maia Green
18 Transatlantic Pentecostal Demons in Maputo Linda van de Kamp
19 The Meaning of Apartheid and the Epistemology of Evil Adam Ashforth
List of Contributors and Affiliations
Index
FOREWORD
DAVID PARKIN
The comparative study of moral systems is fundamental to anthropological thinking. This collection of nineteen chapters and the editors introduction present rich ethnographic cases from sub-Saharan Africa on a topic bearing on the definition of morality that has been at the forefront of anthropological findings drawn from research in the continent. Yet, as the editors point out, anthropologists have been hesitant to use a concept of evil to refer to acts and beliefs indigenously regarded as moral inversions or perversions of humanity. The term, evil , is indeed an ethnographic imposition drawn from the English and cognate languages and therefore part of so-called Western thinking and moral theology. Yet, notwithstanding this lexical ethnocentricity, people everywhere do treat with horror, utter contempt, or fury those acts, statements, and occurrences (whether human, derived from nature or even of spiritual provenance) that they see as extreme violations of standard expectations of what it is to be human. The particular cultural expressions of such violations vary considerably: regarded as evil in one society or group but sometimes necessary and even beneficial in another. Not that such cultural relativity is unbounded. The flourishing of human life and perpetuity is surely everywhere respected and cultivated, even at the cost of sacrificing individuals and parts of life itself in defense of that principle against violation. It is this possibility of common human understanding of and response to the violations we may call evil, however they are specifically identified and dealt with, that marks it out as a domain of general and critical enquiry. The book admirably balances a consideration of both general and ethnographically specific questions.
The introduction suggests that, despite its enormous sociocultural diversity and historically inextricable global involvement, perhaps even more so in late modernity, sub-Saharan Africa appears to have broadly distinctive ways of conceptualizing evil. The editors point to what they call the practicality of African religion that defines moral contours and is different from the other worldliness of the major Asian religions. Aside from but also intertwined with Islam and Christianity, it is religion less of subservience to a High God but more of negotiation with spirit, ancestor, and perverted human agency, in which moral precepts are accordingly inherently relativized. Islam and Christianity invoke a High God and seek to impose moral absolutes and dissolve the moral ambiguities and ambivalences that arise from the negotiation with evil and its agents. But the world religions have not dissolved the fear of and anger toward, for example, alleged witches, nor the rationality of witchcraft as the most logically acceptable explanation of the otherwise inexplicable suffering that many innocent people endure, sometimes preceded by the blaming of spirits, ancestral and otherwise. As Evans-Pritchard argued long ago ( Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), it makes sense and fills the gap that neither modern science nor other epistemologies have plugged: why me/us and how can I/we reverse the harm and confront its agents? Indeed, if we can point to a strong negotiating tendency in much of Africa, often couched in ritual, as underlying the solution to problems deemed as arising from evil, is this not in fact preferable to absolutist pronouncements of right and wrong and of the inevitable resort to force to settle argument? That said, absolutist moral conflict occurs in Africa, as elsewhere in the world, as nonnegotiable ideologies, beliefs, and prejudices crowd out the possibility of settlement and result in violence. There is the example of antiwitchcraft movements and the killing of witches to eliminate perceived evil, sometimes in the name of a world religion that otherwise condemns such violence. This process of vengeful retribution is, in some form or other, a global phenomenon, whether or not we call it the elimination of witchcraft. But the deprivations and extortionate exploitations of Africa surely make it especially vulnerable to poverty, thwarted aspirations, internecine conflicts, and immense suffering. Reversing such evils inevitably often occurs as retaliation against alleged agents who are commonly themselves victims as much as anyone else. There is also the wider context. Perpetrators of violence in the Hutu-Tutsi conflicts face international tribunals, but not so those powerful world leaders who carry out wars and killings in defiance of international condemnation. Is this not a wider, encompassing evil?
As much of the material in this timely volume shows, the problem of evil in sub-Saharan Africa is, ultimately, an expression of powerlessness and of attempts to remedy deprivation through means which themselves may become excessive and regarded as another level of evil. This retaliatory cycle is not exclusive to Africa, which, however, for a long time has had, and has additionally been given, a distinctive vocabulary and set of concepts to identify it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for a continent-wide book on evil in Africa was born in the aftermath of the volume Religion in Africa. Experience and Expression (1994), which van Beek coedited. During the 2006 African Studies Association meeting, the two editors of the present collection decided to pursue the topic of evil in Africa as a sequel to the earlier volume. We appreciate the direction, point-of-view, and guidance offered by David Parkin in this endeavor. Van Beek gratefully acknowledges the preparatory grant from the Dutch Science Foundation ( NWO 2004), The naturalness of evil: towards an evolutionary approach of notions of evil , which helped sharpen the focus on constructions of evil as an integral part of human existence. His field studies among the Kapsiki/Higi in Cameroon/Nigeria and the Dogon in Mali have been financed from many sources, including three grants from WOTRO (Scientific Study of the Tropics, now Science for Global Development). Two SANPAD (South African-Netherlands Program for Alternative D