The book featured in this roundtable—Laura Grillo's An Intimate Rebuke—presents an incredibly rich study of indigenous religion, ritual, and gender in West Africa, specifically Côte d'Ivoire. The phenomenon the book focuses on is a fascinating one: rituals of “female genital power” (FGP). Grillo coins this term in order to refer to ritual practices in which postmenopausal women—or “the Mothers,” as she calls them—strip their bodies naked, using their breasts and genitalia to curse and cast out the forces of evil. These rituals, in Grillo's reading, are a performance of moral authority and constitute religious and political responses to abuses of power. The ritual can be performed in secret, as spiritual warfare against witchcraft, but also in public, as a form of social and political protest. The latter happened, for instance, during Côte d'Ivoire's civil wars from 2002 to 2007 and 2010 to 2011, where FGP was used to protest violent assaults on the civilian population—especially women, who were sexually harassed on a large scale—perpetrated both by the rebel forces and by the state. Grillo provides an in-depth historical background to these recent public performances of FGP and offers a brilliant ethnographic account of the cultural and religious symbolic meanings behind the practice. The book foregrounds the remarkable continuity of this ritual practice across centuries while highlighting the timeliness of FGP as a form of political protest in contemporary history.An Intimate Rebuke argues that the moral power embodied and enacted through the women's ritual nakedness and the invocation of their sex forms the foundation of West African civilization. In conversation with scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Ifi Amadiume, Grillo maintains that this civilization is not so much characterized by a structure of matriarchy as by the principle of “matrifocal morality.” This principle constitutes a value system in which female elders are held in esteem as bearers of supreme moral authority and spiritual power.The book is based on fieldwork and research spanning three decades—Grillo became fascinated by the phenomenon she first encountered when living in Côte d'Ivoire more than thirty years ago. The pages of this book reflect her sustained engagement with the subject, her in-depth analysis of the wealth of ethnographic data, and her long-term thinking about the conceptual and theoretical framing of the material as well as the methodological questions emerging from it. Structured in three parts around emergent concepts—unhomeliness, worldliness, and timeliness—that help to make sense of the complexities and ambiguities of the contemporary postcolonial situation, An Intimate Rebuke develops a highly innovative and critical theoretical approach, and it carefully navigates the methodological challenges inherent to a project like this. Truly multidisciplinary, the book builds on, and considerably expands, current debates in fields and disciplines as wide-ranging as African studies, anthropology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, religious studies, and ritual studies. The book's important contributions are manifold. Let me identify at least three of them, and then leave it to the contributors to this roundtable to discuss these and others in more detail.First, with regard to the study of religions in Africa, the book demonstrates the ongoing salience and significance of indigenous religions, and the importance of studying these traditions in order to understand the religious, social, and political current on the continent. The contemporary study of religions in Africa sometimes appears to be predominantly concerned with Christianity and Islam as major sites of religious vitality and change, yet this book exemplifies how in a country like Côte d'Ivoire indigenous ritual practices continue to appeal to deeply rooted religious sensitivities and to hold moral authority and spiritual power. This affects how we conceptualize and analyze religious modernity in Africa, and indeed how we understand processes of cultural, social, and political change in Africa more generally, especially with regard to “local” phenomena such as FGP in the context of globalization. The unique contribution of An Intimate Rebuke is its analysis of these questions through an explicit focus on women and the critical analytical lens of gender, clearly addressing a gap in the existing scholarship on African indigenous religions. In these religions, as Jacob Olupona observes in his contribution to this roundtable with specific reference to Yoruba religions, there is a strong tradition of feminine power as “subversive and transformative.” Yet Grillo's is the first study to offer us a thorough and incisive insight into this phenomenon, and she convincingly demonstrates that, far from being marginal, feminine ritual power is at the heart of religious mythology and cosmology. Obviously, the implications of the book's analysis and argument further extend to the study of African diaspora religions, as Dianne Stewart makes clear in her contribution. There are also ramifications for the ways in which we conceptualize and operationalize the very key terms in the field, such as religion and gender, as Sîan Hawthorne underlines in her contribution. Grillo's successful attempt at consistently questioning and radically rethinking such categories is what, in Hawthorne's words, renders her book an exemplary study of “gender and religion in the aftermath of postcolonial criticism.”Second, the book nuances and interrogates prevalent West-centric perceptions of women in Africa as powerless and in need of “liberation.” The very term female genital power was coined by Grillo deliberately to counter the more well-known deeply problematic practices concerned with women's genitals in Africa: female genital mutilation. Where the latter has come to represent the harmful cultural practices done to women in “traditional” patriarchal African societies, Grillo's study draws attention to the agency that women traditionally have had, and still have, in many African societies. Without romanticizing the ritual and the power embedded in it through an orientalist gaze, Grillo successfully foregrounds spiritual power as a site of women's resistance. Where postcolonial feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak famously asked whether the subaltern can speak, this book draws critical attention to the ritual vernacular through which women perform agency and authority. As Stewart rightly points out, with this book Grillo successfully takes up the “unfinished project” of Ifi Amadiume's book Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture by accessing “the indigenous ethical foundations for reinventing Africa.” As Joseph Hellweg foregrounds in his contribution, this has particular political salience in the context of the troubled recent history of Côte d'Ivoire, but the role of matrifocal morality “as the standard by which to judge political legitimacy” can be observed across West Africa and beyond. Hence, Grillo's book raises questions even for African political studies, as Stewart notes, because it subverts the traditional focus on political power as represented by the nation-state.Third, this book is such an important contribution to scholarship and worth reading by any student of religion, gender, or Africa because it is beautiful. Beautiful not only for its content but also for the style of its writing. The aesthetics of academic writing sometimes is rather poor, yet this book has been written with great care and has been given the time to mature. In Hellweg's words, it “leaves the reader breathless with its erudition.” An Intimate Rebuke reads like prose and poetry while simultaneously upholding sustained critical intellectual and political engagement. This is most visible in the remarkable exercises of reflexivity, positionality, and self-narration through which the author does not hide behind a “scholarly self” but creatively engages her autobiography and embodiment in intimate and critical ways. Importantly, this aesthetic is informed by the methodological principles underlying the project, including critical postcolonial sensitivity, and it thus presents exemplary scholarship.This roundtable is based on a book panel dedicated to An Intimate Rebuke, hosted by the African Religions Unit at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion that took place in Denver, Colorado, on November 17–20, 2018. The African Religions Unit was particularly pleased to host this panel, first and foremost because of the book's academic merit and its contribution to the field of scholarship the unit promotes. In addition, the book's author has played a major role in the growth of the unit, not least during her dedicated service as steering committee member and cochair from 2005 to 2012. With her flair and charm, her in-depth knowledge and understanding of the field, and her meticulous administrative skills, Laura Grillo has made a tremendous contribution to establishing African Religions as a key unit in the American Academy of Religion, for which we owe her a great deal of thanks.The contributors to this roundtable are senior scholars with well-established reputations in their respective fields. Each engages critically with the book, reflecting on its key methodological questions and implications. In addition to Laura Grillo herself, whose response to the contributions concludes the roundtable, the four contributors are Joseph Hellweg, a specialist of religion in West Africa and, like Laura, an expert of the specific context of Côte d'Ivoire; Dianne Stewart, a scholar of African heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas, with a particular interest in gender and matrifocality in Africana religions; Sîan Hawthorne, a specialist in religion and gender who is well-versed in critical theory, specifically postcolonial theory; and Jacob Olupona, a leading scholar of the indigenous religious cultures in and from West Africa. The contributors raise questions and share critical reflections, yet they agree in their positive appraisal of An Intimate Rebuke as a remarkable, innovative, and thoughtful study worth reading by any student of religion, ritual, or gender in Africa and the African diaspora. Undoubtedly, this roundtable will launch important conversations about the book under discussion, and readers who have not yet familiarized themselves with An Intimate Rebuke will feel the urge to read and engage with this book immediately.