Some Current Trends in the Study of Ritual in Africa

Abstract

To provide myself with a crude measure of the degree of scholarly interest now being shown in African ritual, I recently made a count of the publications in that area listed in the bibliographies of current publications in fifteen of the last eighteen numbers of the journal Africa-in the period from April, 1960 to July, 1964. These consisted of books and articles whose titles frankly proclaimed their concern with religion, magic, ritual, cosmology, divination and kindred topics. In these fifteen numbers, 253 publications of this sort were mentioned. To give you some idea of the proportion of these publications to other kinds, there was for the same period, a total of 2,428 titles cited in the section of the Africa bibliography, Ethnography and Sociology, from which the ritual count was made. For what these figures are worth this means that Africa over the past four and a half years has listed approximately 68 publications on ritual topics per year out of a total of 648 ethnographic and sociological books and articles in the African field. In other words, (excluding publications classified by Africa under the separate heads of Linguistics, Education and Missions, Government, Economic Development, and Welfare and Miscellaneous, and confining ourselves to the traditional anthropological and archaeological fields,) we find that more than 10 per cent of the publications appearing in its bibliography since 1960 have been devoted to the description and analysis of ritual. The Africa bibliography is by no means a comprehensive one -I could name at least a dozen articles on ritual that have appeared in journals published in African territories that have not as yet been listed in Africa. These figures indicate that quite a healthy level of interest and productivity exists in the area of ritual studies. I might mention here that many other publications not ostensibly or principally concerned with religious topics pay considerable attention to them nevertheless. Many of the articles mentioned are purely descriptive in character, often amounting to no more than notes, on, say, divinatory