|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
These days, development inspires scant trust in the West. For
critics who condemn centralized efforts to plan African societies
as latter day imperialism, such plans too closely reflect their
roots in colonial rule and neoliberal economics. But proponents of
this pessimistic view often ignore how significant this concept has
become for Africans themselves. In "Bewitching Development," James
Howard Smith presents a close ethnographic account of how people in
the Taita Hills of Kenya have appropriated and made sense of
development thought and practice, focusing on the complex ways that
development connects with changing understandings of
witchcraft.
Similar to magic, development's promise of a better world elicits
both hope and suspicion from Wataita. Smith shows that the
unforeseen changes wrought by development--greater wealth for some,
dashed hopes for many more--foster moral debates that Taita people
express in occult terms. By carefully chronicling the beliefs and
actions of this diverse community--from frustrated youths to
nostalgic seniors, duplicitous preachers to thought-provoking witch
doctors--"Bewitching" "Development" vividly depicts the social life
of formerly foreign ideas and practices in postcolonial Africa.
In colonial Africa, Christianity has often supported, sustained,
and legitimated a violent process of governance. More recently,
however, following decades of violence and oppression, churches and
religious organizations have mobilized African publics against
corrupt and abusive regimes and facilitated new forms of
reconciliation and cooperation. It is the purpose of Displacing the
State: Religion and Conflict in Neoliberal Africa to illustrate the
nature of religion's ambivalent power in Africa while suggesting
new directions in the study of religion, conflict, and peace
studies, with a specific focus on sub-Saharan Africa. As the
editors make clear, most of the literature on conflict and
peacebuilding in Africa has been concerned with dramatic conflicts
such as genocide and war. In these studies, "conflict"usually means
a violent clash between parties with opposing interests, while
"peace" implies reconciliation and cooperation between these
parties, usually with a view to achieving a social order predicated
on the idea of the sovereign national state whose hegemony is
viewed as normative. The contributors argue that this perspective
is inadequate for understanding the nature, depth, and persistence
of conflict in Africa. In contrast, the chapters in this volume
adopt an ethnographic approach, often focusing on mundane
manifestations of both conflict and peace, and in so doing draw
attention to the ambiguities and ambivalences of conflict and peace
in everyday life. The volume therefore focuses our attention on the
extent to which everyday conflict contributes to subsequently
larger and more highly visible clashes. Displacing the State makes
two important contributions to the study of religion, conflict, and
peacebuilding. First, it shows how peace is conceptualized and
negotiated in daily life, often in ways that are counterintuitive
and anything but peaceful. Second, the volume uses African case
studies to confront assumptions about the nature of the
relationships among religion, conflict, and peace.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|