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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | The Suffering Body: Passion and Ritual Allegory in Christian Encounters |
| Author: | Werbner, Richard |
| Year: | 1997 |
| Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
| Volume: | 23 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Period: | June |
| Pages: | 311-324 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Southern Africa |
| Subjects: | Christianity African Independent Churches African religions colonialism Religion and Witchcraft History and Exploration |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637624 |
| Abstract: | Of all the paradigms challenged, during the 1980s and early 1990s, in research on ritual practice and religious change in southern Africa, few have been more resilient than the modernist paradigm. Its basis remains the dubious, though much disputed and often collapsed, conceptual opposition of the Christian as Modern and the Traditional as Tribal/Primitive. If now something of a paradigm lost, the modernist paradigm is one that is yet to be lost completely. Research arguing with and against it remains at the cutting edge of southern African studies. In a critique of the modernist paradigm, this article raises key questions about ritual as Christian allegory and bodily practice in history. In colonial and postcolonial ritual, around which moments of the Christian drama of self-sacrifice, cosmic martyrdom, redemption and resurrection have African Christians physically embodied their personal and collective identities, their felt individuality or their intimate sense of self? How has Christian passion met moral sensibility in colonial and postcolonial encounters? The account addresses the changing moral economy within which religious argument, whether verbal or mimetic, whether about syncretism or anti-syncretism, is carried forward. A major concern is fundamental, long-term change and the importance for the adherents themselves of ritual and church forms perceived as being universal and global. Notes, ref., sum. |
