Call for panel member: Materiality of Religion in Africa during the European Expansion to be hosted at the CHAM Conference in Lisbon

Posted January 14, 2013

CFP: Kalle Kananoja (EUI, Florence) and Madalina Florescu (CEAUP, Porto)
would welcome proposals for their panel on the Materiality of Religion in
Africa during the European Expansion to be hosted at the CHAM Conference in
Lisbon
17-20 July.

Abstract:

Religious encounters were a major source of misunderstanding between
Africans and Europeans. The contributions in this panel examine religion in
precolonial and early colonial Africa through the lens of cultural
materiality. Missionaries of different denominations had varying views on
religion and materiality. While Catholic Fathers sought to replace
indigenous objects with Catholic images, Protestants placed the emphasis on
“inner belief” and shunned objects altogether, which was close to the
strategy adopted by some New Christian or Jewish settlers in West Africa.
The wide and varied practices of using religious objects in rituals and for
protection of people and communities have been addressed to a great extent
by archaeologists, art historians and anthropologists of Africa, yet the
changes that took place over time and in contact with Europeans are poorly
understood. How did things that linked the visible/material to the
invisible/immaterial transform when African traditional religions and Islam
came into contact with Christianity and Judaism in different parts of the
continent? What role did materiality – amulets, images of deities and
ancestors, natural objects, iconography, crucifixes, prayer beads, relics
play in African popular religion across time and space? The panel will also
interrogate and explore the kinds of expectations, conflicts and
(mis)interpretations that rose over the uses of material objects in
religious life.

Please follow the links below for details of the conference:

http://www.cham.fcsh.unl.pt/CHAMInternacionalConference.html

to propose a paper:

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/cham/cham2013/panels.php5?PanelID=2303