African Studies: Religion

Abstract

The study of African religion extends beyond the bounds of ‘religion’ to include healing, withcraft, art, cosmology, and much else, and is both plural and multidisciplinary. Among religious professionals, it began with the works of missionaries and led onto comparative religion and the work of African theologians. A secular tradition was dominated by studies in social anthropology, divided between the British school. The years around 1960 saw a crop of fine, if often rather static, monographs on traditional religion. Yet with the onset of African nationalism, interest shifted towards seeing African religion as a changing, historical object, with studies on the prophetist or syncretic movements, and theories of long-term religious change. The study of Islam had its own distinct course, being more text-based and of greater historical depth; but from the 1960s it converged more with the analysis of Africa's other religions. By the 1990s, religion in Africa became in two ways more integrated. First, the sheer saliency of religion in Africa made it more central to political and social analysis; and second, the relevance of historical studies (particularly of missions) to current realities was fully recognised. As a result, the much-used distinction between tradition and modernity started to lose its analytical relevance for the study of African religion.