Exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.
Scholarship monitors the intrusion of theology into the discipline, while allowing colonialist assumptions to go unchecked and unthought.
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The anthropological discourse about religion was from the outset deeply implicated in the discourse of race and in projects of global expansion and socio-political control.
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A decolonial theory of religion would involve reconsidering the Trans-Atlantic process of imperial designing as the primary site for analyzing modern religion.
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Decolonial thought unmasks the histories of violence that undergird Europe’s self-appointed status as the sole producer and purveyor of knowledge.
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By looking at mobility beyond Eurocentric accounts of modernity, Faith in Flux aims to disrupt the top-down projects of self-conscious modernizers who favor the singular and stable over the multiple and mobile.
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This book will be useful not only to students of African religions, but also to anthropologists, historians of religion, psychologists interested in conversion, and development specialists interested in the ways that indigenous knowledge systems insert themselves into new situations and make them more understandable and controllable.
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Asked to reflect on how Premawardhana’s book resonates with my own, I wondered how my study of female genital power (FGP) in the indigenous traditions of West Africa could possibly relate to a work on Pentecostalism in northern Mozambique.
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Would field thinking complement Premawardhana’s principled commitment to phenomenology? The dilemma is, of course, at least as old as the division between phenomenological and structural approaches to the study of social life
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Premawardhana’s sensitivity to the cultural integrity of the Makhuwa is matched by his knowledge of the literature by whose lights he admirably refracts their lives. He has chewed over the bones of contention in the literature, and is at his most penetrating when juxtaposing the presuppositions of contending anthropological and theoretical traditions.
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The Makhuwa are mobile not because they seek to evade the constraints of tradition, but precisely the opposite, because they are working within them.
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