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Evil in Africa
Encounters with the Everyday
Edited by William C. Olsen and Walter E. A. van Beek
Contributions by Jennie E. Burnet, Linda van de Kamp, Léocadie Ekoué, Judy Rosenthal, Dorothy L. Hodgson, Diane Ciekawy, Ulrika Trovalla, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Roy Martin Dilley, Kjersti Larsen, René Joseph Devisch, Susan J. Rasmussen, Wyatt MacGaffey, Sónia Silva, Susan Reynolds Whyte, Lotte Meinert, Jok Madut Jok, Julaina A. Obika, Maia Green and Adam Ashforth
Foreword by David Parkin
Published by: Indiana University Press
402 Pages
- eBook
- 9780253017505
- Published: August 2015
$9.99
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William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.
Introduction: African Notions of Evil: The Chimera of Justice
Walter E.A. van Beek and William C. Olsen
Part I. Evil and the State/War
1. Political Evil: Witchcraft from the Perspective of the Bewitched
Sónia Silva
2. Untying Wrongs in Northern Uganda
Susan Reynolds Whyte, Lotte Meinert, Julaina Obika
3. The Evil of Insecurity in South Sudan: Violence and Impunity in Africa's Newest State
Jok Madut Jok
4. Genocide, Evil and Human Agency: The Concept of Evil in Rwandan Explanations of the 1994 Genocide
Jennie E. Burnet
5. Politics and Cosmographic Anxiety: Kongo and Dagbon Compared
Wyatt MacGaffey
Part II. Evil and Religion
6. Ambivalence and the Work of the Negative Among the Yaka
René Devisch
7. Azé and the Incommensurable
Léocadie Ekoué with Judy Rosenthal
8. Evil and the Art of Revenge in the Mandara Mountains
Walter E.A. van Beek
9. Distinctions in the Imagination of Harm in Contemporary Mijikenda Thought: The Existential Challenge of Majini
Diane Ciekawy
10. Haunted by Absent Others: Movements of Evil in a Nigerian City
Ulrika Trovalla
11. Attributions of Evil among Haalpulaaren, Senegal
Roy Dilley
12. Reflections regarding Good and Evil: The Complexity of Words in Zanzibar
Kjersti Larsen
13. Constructing Moral Personhood: The Moral Test in Tuareg Sociability as a Commentary on Honor and Dishonor
Susan J. Rasmussen
14. The Gender of Evil: Maasai Experiences and Expressions
Dorothy L. Hodgson
Part III. Evil and Modernity
15. Neo-Cannibalism, Military Bio-Politics, and the Problem of Human Evil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
16. Theft and Evil in Asante
William C. Olsen
17. Sorcery after Socialism: Liberalization and Anti Witchcraft Practices in Southern Tanzania
Maia Green
18. Transatlantic Pentecostal Demons in Maputo
Linda van de Kamp
19. The Meaning of "Apartheid" and the Epistemology of Evil
Adam Ashforth
List of Contributors and Affiliations
Index
William C. Olsen lectures in the African Studies Program at Georgetown University.
Walter E. A. van Beek is Professor of Anthropology of Religion at Tilburg University.
"
The volume's richly detailed case studies build bridges between the anthropology of religion and current anthropological theories of morality, ethics, and social suffering.
" ~American Ethnologist
"
This volume will be widely welcomed as dovetailing with a range of recent treatments, notably by Peter Geschiere and Richard Werbner, of how practical wisdom may consist of identifying apparently familiar others as uncanny threats, or alternately of recognizing distortions of the familiar within oneself.
" ~Journal of African History
"This timely book adds to knowledge in the area of African religions. . . . [T]he book is valuable in highlighting how complex evil is as expressed and experienced in Africa."
~Reading Religion
"Particularly valuable for the manner in which religious or mystical notions of evil are linked to more secular ones, notably violence and warfare, fetishes, gender constructs, psychoanalytic processes, personhood, theft, transnational connections, and apartheid."
~Isak Niehaus, co-author of Witchcraft, Power and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld
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