Abstract
In African spirituality, ancestor engagement with the community is always mediated through material objects. This article argues that materiality gives meaning and validity to the ancestral system. Ancestral objects are an embodiment of the ancestors or ancestral meaning-making, which links the visible community to the world of the spirits. However, ancestral objects also draw meaning and validation from those who inherit them, such as kings or titleholders who together with them connect the community to the spiritual source of well-being and vice versa. The article argues that such interplay is based on the material, religious and ritual conception of ancestral objects with their inheritors and the well-being of the community they represent. However, most studies on African religious art objects have focussed essentially on the symbolism behind ancestral objects and their motifs rather than on the interplay between ancestral objects and meaning-making in relation to community’s well-being. This article sets out to examine this relation and other performative aspects associated with ancestral objects in the Cameroon Grassfields. It argues that Grassfields religious traditions are materially oriented in the way they shape human meaning-making and interpretation of reality, and represent ancestors as manifested reality and living-dead agents who are part of collective communal action.
Highlights
The role of ancestors in the lives of their living relatives has been the basis of numerous scholarly studies on African spirituality and culture (Jindra 2005; Koloss 2000; Kopytoff 1997; Mbiti 1969; Nürnberger 2007; Setiloane 1976)
In his seminal work on ‘Ancestors as Elders in Africa’, Kopytoff (1997:412) argues that African spirituality is experienced through a continuous relationship between the living-alive relatives and their ancestors who ‘are vested with mystical powers and authority’
Most Africans are aware that their ancestors ‘retain a functional role in the life of their living kinsmen; African kin groups are often described as communities of both the living and the dead’ (Kopytoff 1997:412)
Summary
The role of ancestors in the lives of their living relatives has been the basis of numerous scholarly studies on African spirituality and culture (Jindra 2005; Koloss 2000; Kopytoff 1997; Mbiti 1969; Nürnberger 2007; Setiloane 1976). The use of the drinking horn in pouring libation while sitting on the ancestral stool or throne is believed to unionise the fon or titleholder and the objects and activate communication with the ancestors, which has a strong bearing on the prosperity and well-being of the living family members. It can be argued that it is celebrations and sacrifices or symbols represented on the objects that are crucial for ancestral benevolence or punishment, and the transfer of the power of the deceased into the title cup and small stone - the legitimacy of the user of the cup while sitting on the ancestral stool All these aspects are embodied means of communication with the ancestors. They remain an embodiment of unwritten moral systems, which have found new meaning within the changed African religious, social, relational and moral landscape
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