Review: Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes, edited by Hansjörg Dilger, Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, and Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

Abstract

Within the field of religious studies, the phenomenology of religion has been shunned at times in favor of more quantitative and social scientific approaches. Preferring to interrogate the claims of religious proponents rather than defining qualities of inner states and feelings, these scientifically-oriented methods suppose the latter are simply unobtainable or unobservable and therefore evade objective description. But this technique has proved incomplete. There is nothing to dispute necessarily about these approaches, it’s just that there could be more to meet the eye.Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes provides just this, namely ethnographic research combining rich description with visual representations, i.e., occasional photographs. Furthermore, this volume acknowledges that there are limitations to the phenomenology of religion and that it “lacks analysis of the ways in which religion is implied in the production of sociospatial relations” (32). As a collection, it seeks to overcome this limitation by providing detailed ethnographic accounts of contemporary African urban life, which to me signals the book’s greatest strength. But adding to this, it brings together the “literature on affect, emotion, and sentiment that has flourished in the social sciences and cultural studies in recent years” (2). The essays engage numerous analytical minds with the understanding that “there is no consensus in the theoretical literature on how to define and distinguish these concepts” (4).Affective Trajectories provides an array of religious activities to scrutinize. The Introduction describes its approach as one that “envisages the intertwining of religion, affect, and emotion in African cityscapes…and the ways in which religious symbols and rites structure—and are reworked through—embodied affective relations with urban materialities and power relations” (1). The essays focus upon Africans adapting to the city and its often-cruel vagaries, and how religions aid in channeling affective expressions of all sorts, notably “urban insecurities” (30). Most of the chapters describe African Christianity, with an emphasis on Pentecostalism, and only a single chapter covers Islam. As a standalone, the collection is a source of religious data in and of itself worthy of incorporating into a broader knowledge of religion in urban Africa.The chapters consist of original ethnographic research carried out across much of the Sub-Saharan continent—although east Africa has a light footprint among the essays—and with one African diasporic community in Europe. The cities covered include Johannesburg, Harare, Abuja, Kinshasa, Gaborone, Kampala, and Cape Town. One chapter examines diasporic communities of Nigerian and Congolese pastors in Johannesburg, and then includes some of these same pastors in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao. Several essays focus upon regions or nations and cities within them.Especially valuable is the inclusion of numerous black and white photographs in seven of the eleven chapters. There are a total of ten photos, ranging from a street cleansing at a murder site in Johannesburg, to gatherings of Masowe Apostles dressed in white assembling at the outskirts of Harare demonstrating “how they associate God with the image of people who go out to pray in the wilderness” (68). Other photographs show where “African Christians either eke out their living by growing food crops or successfully turn the same margins of cityscapes into liminal places for reaching out to God in prayer for the poor and sick” (53), or depict street and cemetery cleaning in Kinshasa. This latter provides an example of the belief that “changing the living conditions of our ancestors, we can also change the living conditions of our living brothers and sisters” (138). Members of the Église Messianique Mondiale are given an opportunity to reconcile with their African past rather than make a break from it, as Pentecostalism so often requires. The syncretistic new religious movement from Japan called Sekai Kyûseikyô, and locally known as EMM, gives Africans “pride in the practice of ‘ancestor worship’, which, although of Japanese inspiration, provides a powerful means to re-/produce ‘African’ heritage in a seemingly modern form” (141).This combination of descriptive depth and vivid illustration through the effective use of photographs provides a vital dimension in communicating ethnographic material. The collection would have been even better had additional photos been included. But this is not a shortcoming here, rather the expression of a hope to see more of this in future publications. In an age of images, suitably illustrated ethnography is a useful aid for readers. My guess is, by way of production costs, the inclusion of black and white photos cannot be formidable, yet they are an affective way (yes, I mean affective way) to share the experience of field work. Affective Trajectories gets high marks in this regard.