AFRICAN
SPIRITUALITY
an approach from intercultural philosophy
Wim van Binsbergen
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1. INTRODUCTION 1
There is currently a hype in the production of encyclopedias on
Africa, and in this context Valentin Mudimbe approached me a few
years ago whether I would be willing to write the entry on
'African spirituality' for an encyclopaedia of Africa and the
African diaspora which he was editing. Never having used the word
'spirituality' in any of my own writings on African religion so
far, and bargaining for time, I asked him what I was to
understand by it: time-honoured expressions of historical African
religion such as prayers at the village shrine; the wider
conceptual context of such expression, including African views of
causality, sorcery, witchraft, medicine, the order of the visible
and invisible world, and such concepts as the person, ancestors,
gods, spirits, nature, agency, guilt, responsibility, taboo,
evil, not to forget the ordering of time and space in terms of
religious meaning; the expressions of world religions in Africa,
especially Islam and Christianity; the accommodations between
these various domains. Mudimbe's answer was: all of the above,
and whatever else you wish to bring to the topic. Though unduly
flattered by his request, I never came round to writing the
entry: I could not overcome the fear of exposing myself as
ignorant of the essence of African religion.
Very recently, I brought together in one website2 a considerable
number of my papers on African religion as written over the
years, also in preparation for a book largely to consist of the
same material. This has made me reflect on the very topic Mudimbe
invited me in vain to write on.
The readily available material from the website contains only
some fifteen of the myriad writings on African spirituality which
are in existence, and in that respect there is no special reason
to take these specific writings as our point of departure. Yet I
will do so, for the following reason: as far as these writings
are concerned, I have first-hand knowledge of the specific
empirical and existential conditions under which the statements
they contain came into being, and of the personal evolution of
the author who made these statements. Implicitly this means that
I appeal to introspection as one of my sources of knowledge.
While a time-honoured tool in the history of philosophy (think
e.g. of Socrates' daimôn and Descartes 'cogito ergo sum'), we
are only too well aware of the dangers of introspection.3 The
public representation of self in what may be alleged to be pure
introspection inevitably contains elements of performativity,
selection, structuring, and is likely to be imbued with elements
of transference reflecting the introspecting author's
subconscious conflicts and desires. Incidentally the same
criticism applies, in varying degrees which have hardly been
investigated, to all other philosophical and social scientific
statements. Be this as it may, I rely on introspection only
implicitly in the present argument: mainly I will acknowledge my
personal recollection of the specific social processes of my own
gaining knowledge, or ignorance, of African spirituality.
The present argument may ultimately, in more final form, serve
towards the introduction of my book in the making, and this is
another incentive to write it. The extensive references to my own
published work merely serve to cover as many as possible of the
articles to be included in the prospective book.
What I wish to do is pose a number of obvious and
straight-forward questions, and attempt to give very provisional
answers to them, in order to initiate our further discussion on
these points:
• Is there a specifically African spirituality?
• Can we know African spirituality?
• What specific themes may be discerned in African
spirituality?
• To what extent is African spirituality a process of
boundary production and boundary crossing at the same time?
• Within these boundaries, what is being produced: group
sociability, the individual self, or both?
• How can we negotiate the tension between local practice
and global description of African spirituality?
2. IS THERE A SPECIFICALLY AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY?
It is almost impossible to separate this question from the next
one, concerning the epistemology of African spirituality.
However, we have to start somewhere, and it may be best to start
where the controversies and the politics of intercultural
knowledge production are most in evidence. The existence of a
massive body of writing specifically on African religion, and the
institutionalisation of this field in terms of academic journals,
professorial chairs, scholarly institutions, at least one
world-wide scholarly association, has helped to make the
existence of specifically African spirituality (or religion, I
will not engage in terminological debate here) into at least a
globally recognised social fact. But to recognise the nature of
social facts as being socially produced at the same time raises
the question of irreality, virtuality, performativity, existence
by appearance only. If we argue that ethnicity is socially
produced, we argue at the same time for the deconstruction of
ethnic identity claims as inescapable, historically determined,
absolute, unequivocal.4 Something similar has been argued for
culture.5 Is it now the turn for African spirituality to undergo
the same treatment?
African spirituality features prominently in the increasingly
vocal expressions by intellectuals, political and ethnic leaders,
and opinion-makers who identify as African or who can claim
recent6 African descent. Of late such discussions have
concentrated around the Afrocentrist movement7 for which I
personally have great sympathy.
Here a dilemma arises.
One could either stress8
(1) the fact that the concept of 'Africa' is a fairly recent
geopolitical construct and therefore is unlikely to correspond to
any ontological reality informing, and mediated through,
spiritual expressions some of which (like royal cults, ancestral
cults, cults of the land) can be demonstrated9 to have existed
for centuries if not millennia on the soil of the African
continent. By taking this view one may have long-term historical
reality on one's side, but at the same time one gives the
impression of seeking to rob those who identify with 'Africa'
from their most cherished possession, their most central
identity.
Or, alternatively, one may
(2) affirm that there is something uniquely African, not just in
sheer terms of geographical location or provenance but also in
substance, thus playing into the cards of the Afrocentrists and
similar consciousness-raising forms of intellectual mobilisation.
But then one must be prepared to run the risk of
oversimplification, seeing one 'African spirituality' where in
fact there are myriad different African spiritual expressions,
some as far apart as:
(a) the cult of royal ancestors in West Africa under the Akan
cultural orientation, and
(b) the ecstatic veneration of the Holy Spirit in Pentecostal
Southern African churches;
or
(c) the veneration of land spirits in the somewhat thin Islamic
trapping of local saints in North Africa, and
(d) the ecstatic cults of affliction associated with misfortune,
a unique personal spiritual quest, and the circulation of persons
and commodities across vast distances of space, as in the South
Central and Southern African ngoma complex;
or
(e) the meticulous cultivation of female domesticity and
sexuality in South Central African girl's initiation cults, and
(f) the annual cult of the descent of the Cassara demiurge,
revenger and cleanser of witchcraft, in westernmost West Africa.
These examples, all within the range of my own African religious
research in over three decades, may be multiplied ad libidum.
If many colleagues clamour to subsume these varieties of
spiritual expression under a common label, as 'African', it is
not so much because these expressions are situated in the African
continental land mass, or manifestly pertain to a recognisable
shared tradition, but largely because all of them may be cited to
represent forms of local identity and symbolic production on the
part of people whose image of dignity, whose image of spiritual
and intellectual capability and autonomy, has been eroded in
recent centuries of a North Atlantic mercantile, colonial and
post colonial hegemonic assault.
'African' in my opinion primarily invokes, not a common origin
not shared with 'non-African' or 'non-Africans', nor a common
structure, form or content, but the communality residing in the
determination to confront and overcome such hegemonic
subordination.
It is especially important to realise that 'African', when
applied to elements of cultural production, usually denotes items
which are neither originally African, nor exclusively, confined
to the African continent. Elsewhere I have extensively argued how
many cultural traits which today are considered the central
characteristics and achievements of African cultures, have
demonstrably a non-African origin, and a global distribution
pattern which extends far beyond Africa.10 This is not in the
least a disqualification of Africa, for exactly the same
argument, and even more so, may be made for so-called European
characteristics and achievements, including Christianity and
modern science. It is only a reminder that broad continental
categories are part of geopolitics, of ideology and identity
construction, and not of detached analytic thought. There is a
famous passage in Linton's Study of man11 in which he describes
the morning ritual of the average modern inhabitant of the North
Atlantic: from the slippers he puts on his feet to the God to
whom he prays, the cultural items involved in that process have a
heterogeneous and global provenance, most hailing from outside
Europe.
The cultural and intellectual achievements commonly claimed as
exclusive to the European continent, are a concoction of
transcultural intercontinental borrowings such as one may only
expect in a small peninsula attached to the Asian land mass and
due north of the African land mass, thrice the size of Europe.
What makes things European to be European, and things African to
be African, for that matter, is the transformative localisation
after diffusion.12 Transformative localisation gave rise to
unmistakably, uniquely and genially Greek myths, philosophy,
mathematics, politics, although virtually all the ingredients of
these domains of Greek achievement had been borrowed from
Phoenicia, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Thracia, and the Danube
lands. And a similar argument could be made for many splendid
kingdoms and cultures of Africa.13
If we accept that 'African' today is primarily a political
category reflecting the desire to assert self-identity and
dignity in the face of subjugation and humiliation under North
Atlantic hegemony, then 'African spirituality' can no longer be
defined, naively, as a particular way in which the inhabitants of
the African continent go about their time-honoured religion,
today, and in presumed continuity, to a greater or lesser extent,
with the religious patterns such as these existed before European
colonial conquest. We know that 'African' is a meaningless
category except in contrast with the 'non-African' implied in the
term, and implicated in a particular political history of
hegemony vis-à-vis what is so-called 'African'. As befits the
place of origin of mankind, the African continent has the
greatest variety of somatic, cultural and religious forms in the
world. We cannot define Africans by reference to that variety.
What makes Africans Africans is not that they tend to have
heavily pigmented skins and woolly curly hair covering their
heads (this does not apply to all people residing in the African
continent, and moreover it does apply to many people outside the
African continent, including many not of recent African descent,
such as the original inhabitants of Southern India, Melanesia,
New Guinea and Australia), but that they have shared in the
experience of recent intercontinental political, military and
economic history. In asking the question as to the nature of
African spirituality, we are no longer primarily interested in
the ways in which 'Africans', of all people, use the concepts of
spirit, and the actions of prayer, sacrifice, ritual, to endow
their world with meaning, order, and intent, as if things African
constitute their entire world. African spirituality can only be a
political category, which seeks to define a local spirituality
(better probably: a locality of the spirit) in the face of the
threats, lures and inroads of global processes beyond the local.
'African spirituality' then is a scenario of tension between
local and outside, utilising spiritual means (the production,
social enactment, and ritual transformation, of symbols by a
group which constitutes itself in that very process) in order to
try and resolve that tension. In the last analysis, African
spirituality is not a fixed collection of such spiritual means
('spiritual technologies') which might be labelled specifically
'African' if that epithet is to denote geographical provenance.
The means are extremely varied, as we have seen. And in many
cases these means are imported intercontinentally from outside
Africa. These cases probably include spirit possession,14 and
certainly such world religions as Islam and Christianity, --
these three forms of African spirituality together already sum up
by far the major religious expressions on the African continent
today.
The latter does not mean that these three forms of African
spirituality are inherently un-African and alien to the longue
durée of African cultural history. Spirit possession is
increasingly agreed to constitute a transformation, in recent
millennia, of the religion of Palaeolithic hunters whose
religious expression has been world-wide mediated (often in
shamanistic forms iconographically marked by deer15 and
circle-dot motives,16 which passed through Mesopotamia and the
eastern Mediterranean basin in the second millennium BCE) in the
particular form it took in the Northern half of Eurasia by the
onset of the Neolithic. It is likely that this North and Central
Eurasian spiritual expression was considerably indebted to the
emergence of art, symbolic thought, and language by somatically
modern man in Africa from 200,000 BP (and especially 100,000 BP)
onwards.17 Yet it is my impression that African cults of
possession and mediumship derive primarily from a common Old
World stock emanating from North and Central Eurasia, and not so
much from the direct intra-African descendent forms of the Later
Palaeolithic. More recently, both Islam and Christianity emerged
in a Semitic-speaking cultural environment which was not only
geographically close to Africa, but towards whose genesis African
influences have been highly important: Mesopotamian influences on
ancient Judaism have been stressed by scholarship from the late
nineteenth century,18 but it is only in recent decades that the
great influence of ancient Egypt on that seminal world religion
is widely admitted and studied in detail;19 by the same token, it
is increasingly clear that the cradle of the Semitic languages is
to be sought in Northeast Africa (where even today the wider
linguistic super-family of Afroasiatic has its greatest
typological variety), and that many of the basic orientations of
the Semitic civilisations of Western Asia may have parallels if
not origins in the African continent.
To try and define the conditions under which the process of the
creation of locality in the face of a confusing and
identity-destroying outside world takes place, is the main
challenge of cultural globalisation studies today.20 Also in some
of my own writings, typically including those not emphatically
appearing under the heading of African religious studies, this
process has been explored.21 Invariably, the process hinges on
the creation of a sense of community which involves the
installation, both conceptually (in shared language) and
actionally (through control of the flow of people and
commodities) of boundaries defining 'us' (a 'we' into which the
acting and reasoning 'I' inserts herself) as against 'them'.
Without such boundaries, no spirituality, yet, as we shall see,
the very working of spirituality is to both affirm and transgress
these boundaries at the same time -- so that ultimately, African
spirituality is about both the affirmation of a South identity
based on a particular historical experience, and the dissolution
of that identity into an even wider, global world.
3. EPISTEMOLOGY: CAN WE KNOW AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY?
The above positioning of African spirituality has deliberately
deprived the concept from most of its entrenchedly parochial and
mystical implications. If the creation of community through
symbols is a social process aiming at selective and situational
inclusion and exclusion through conceptual and actional means,
and if the process is not limited to a specific selection of
cultural materials supposed to constitute, intrinsically,
'African spirituality', then the vast majority of people
identifying as 'Africans' would at most times be excluded from
the creation of community undertaken by other 'Africans' in a
specific context of space, time and organisation.
For instance, a number of spiritual complexes, including one
revolving on the veneration of dead kings, another on girl's
initiation and the spirit of menstruation and maturation named
Kanga, another on commoner villagers' ancestral spirits, yet
another on spirits of the wild as venerated in cults of
affliction and in the guilds of hunters and healers, together
make up the spiritual life world of the contemporary Nkoya ethnic
group.22 This statement needs to be qualified in view of the fact
that many who today identify as Nkoya, including the groups
dominant ethnic brokers and elite, have undergone considerable
Christian influence and would primarily identify as Christians of
various denominations, primarily the Evangelic Church of Zambia,
Roman Catholicism, and recent varieties of Pentecostalism.
Moreover, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Islamic
Swahili long-distance traders penetrated into the land of Nkoya
and left some small cultural traces there. All these complexes
define insiders and outsiders in their own right, to such an
extent that most Nkoya tpople today could be said to be outsiders
to most of what in some collective dream of Nkoya-ness would be
summed up as the basic constituent features of the Nkoya
spiritual world! All Nkoya men are in principle excluded from
participation in and knowledge of the world of female initiation;
women and all male non-initiate hunters are excluded from the
hunters' guild's cults except from the most public performances
of its dances and songs, and so on. Over the pastdecade, my
research on identity, culture and globalisation in Zambia has
concentrated on the annual Kazanga festival,23 the main rural
outcome of a process of ethnicisation by elite urban-based Nkoya
in the 1980s. The main feature of this festival is that elements
from all these spiritual domains (with exception of Christianity,
which however contributes the festival's opening prayer and the
canons of decency governing dancers' clothing and bodily
movements) are pressed into service in the two-day's repertoire
of the festival. The effect is that thus all people attending the
festival, whose globally-derived format (including a formal
programme of events, the participation of more than one royal
chiefs seated together, the re-enactment of girl's initiation
dances by young women who have already been initiated, the use of
loudspeakers, the opening prayer and national anthem, the careful
orchestration of dancing movements by dancers who are uniformly
dressed, and who receive payment for their activities, etc. etc.)
is entirely non-local, are forged into a performative, vicarious
insidership, by partaking of a recycled form of spirituality
devoid of its localising exclusivity. Here boundaries are crossed
and dissolved, and the most amazing thing is that -- as I argued
at greater length elsewhere -- the Nkoya people involved do not
seem to notice the difference between the original spiritual
dynamics, and its transformation and routinisation in the Kazanga
context. Or rather, if they notice the difference they appreciate
the modern, virtualised form even more than the original village
forms. However, one might also argue that it is only by
sleight-of-hand that the illusion of a more extensive insidership
is created here whereas in fact the essence of the virtualisation
involved is that all people involved, also the original insiders,
are turned into outsiders, banned from the domain where the
original spiritual scenario could be seen to be effective.
When such transformations of inside participation and outside
contemplation and exclusion exist, already within one cultural an
linguistic community with a small window on the wider, ultimately
global world, we should be very careful with claims as to the
sharing or not sharing of the spirituality involved. Central to
my argument is that African spirituality consists in a political
scenario, and that in that context the minutiae of contents of a
specific cultural repertoire, and a specific biologically or
socially underpinned birth-right, are largely or even totally
irrelevant.
This may be a difficult position to accept for cultural
essentialists including many Afrocentrists. Yet it is a position
which I have extensively elaborated and which subsumes my entire
intellectual career.24 It is the position in which I claim to be
a Dutchman, a professor of intercultural philosophy, a Southern
African sangoma, and an adoptive member of a Nkoya royal family,
all at the same time.
In the light of the constructed nature of any domain surrounded
by the boundaries that spirituality both creates and
transgresses, any spiritual domain, African or otherwise, is by
definition porous and penetrable -- in fact, it invites being
entered, but at a cost defined by the spiritual boundaries
surrounding it.
That cost is both interactional and conceptual. An exploration of
this cost amounts to defining the place and structure of
anthropological field-work as a technique of intercultural
knowledge production; it is here that the introspection mentioned
in my introduction comes in. Without engaging with the insiders
along the locally defined lines of etiquette, implied meanings,
shared local secrets, it is impossible to attain and to claim
insidership. Without engaging with the linguistic and conceptual
bases of such communality as the insiders create by means of
their spirituality, it is impossible to achieve insidership in
their midst. Such insidership is a social process also in this
sense that it cannot just be claimed by the person aspiring it;
quite to the contrary, it has to be extended, recognised and
affirmed by those who are already insiders, and who as such are
the rightful owners of the spiritual domain in question. These
are complex processes indeed. Not only the original outsider such
as the anthropologist seeking to enter from a background which
was initially far removed from that of the earlier insiders, but
also these insiders themselves in their process of affirming
themselves as insiders, have to struggle with massive problems of
acquisition of cognitive knowledge, language skills, details of
organisational, mythical, theological and ritual nature. Their
credentials as insiders are socially and perceptively mediated,
and as such contain a considerable element of performativity,
which in principle stands in tension vis-à-vis actual spiritual
knowledge and attitudes, for in the public production and
perception of the latter a non-per formative existential
authenticity tends to be taken for granted. Also the initial
outsider seeking to become insider must perform in order to
affirm her eligibility as insider, and this adds a layer of
potential insincerity to all claims of intimate spiritual
knowledge of secluded local domains.
Yet, despite all these qualifications, I can only affirm that,
yes, the very many distinct domains of locality created by
African spiritualities are as knowable to the initial outsider as
they are to the earlier insiders. The difference is one of degree
and not of kind. Paramount is the political scenario of
insertion, not the immutable facts of an allegedly fixed cultural
repertoire or birth-right; least of all a congenital
predisposition to acquire and appreciate a specific, reified
cultural repertoire - as racists, including racist variants of
Afrocentrism, would affirm.
Meanwhile knowing is not the same as revealing, and an entirely
new problematic arises when one considers the problem of how much
or how little the outsider having become insider in a specific
domain of African spirituality, is capable of revealing the
knowledge she has gained, to the outside world, globally, and in
principle in a globally understood international language. Here
at least three problems loom large:
• Can everything, especially everything spiritual, be
expressed in language? The answer is inevitably: no, of course
not.25
• Can everything, especially everything spiritual, be
transferred from the specific domain of one language to that of
another language? Here the answer is: yes, to a considerable
extent, but not totally, cf. Quine's principle of the
indeterminacy of translation).26
• Can one mediate inside knowledge to outsiders without
betraying the trust of fellow-insiders? Here the answer is: that
depends on the extent to which one allows the process of
reporting to be governed by the agency of these fellow-insiders
-- if that extent is minimal one's reporting is downright
betrayal and intellectual raiding in the worst tradition of
hegemonic anthropology; but it is not impossible to mobilise the
earlier insiders' agency, for many insiders today welcome global
mediation of their identity, and therefore may help to define the
forms in which they wish to see their own spiritual insidership
mediated.27
4. THEMES IN AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY
I have claimed that in principle African spirituality is a
political scenario devoid of specific cultural contents. In
actual fact however the range of variation in the cultural
material that has gone into the myriad specific constructions of
African spirituality, although wide, is not entirely unlimited.
Let me give an example. In 1981, when guided by a hospitable new
roadside acquaintance into a West African village in Guinea
Bissau for the first time in my life, I could blindly point out
the village shrine and improvise meaningfully on its social and
spiritual significance, merely on the basis of having extensively
participated in village shrine ritual in South Central Africa, at
a distance of 5,000 km across the continent, and having written
comparative accounts of shrines in South Central and Northern
Africa.28 The same applies to spirit possession, to whose South
Central African forms I could relate on the basis of my earlier
research into similar phenomena in North Africa.29 The forms of
kinship ritual and royal ritual in West and Southern Africa are
amazingly reminiscent of each other, and I am gradually beginning
to understand the historical reasons for this, especially the
diffusion (taken for granted in the first half of the twentieth
century, and ridiculed in the second half) of royal themes from
Ancient Egypt.30 The same similarity exists in the field of
divination methods, albeit that here the underlying common source
is not Ancient Egypt but late first-millennium CE Middle-Eastern
Islam having undergone the distant influence of Chinese I Ching
which goes back to the second millennium BCE.31 But as the latter
forms of oracular ritual already indicate, there is no compelling
reason to limit our comparisons to the African continent, and in
fact there are continuities and similarities extending all across
Africa extending all over the Old World and occasionally even
into the New World.32 It would be easy to spell out these themes
and communalities more fully, but for our present
intercultural-philosophical argument they are not essential; what
is more, they would only detract us.
5. AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY AS BOUNDARY PRODUCTION AND BOUNDARY
CROSSING AT THE SAME TIME -- IN OTHER WORDS AS INTERCULTURAL
PHILOSOPHY
Adopting a formal perspective that takes the greatest possible
(or should I say: an impossibly great) distance from cultural
specificities, I have suggested that African spirituality is a
political scenario of community generation through spiritual
means. In other words, African spirituality is a machine to
generate boundaries.33 However, a boundary which is entirely
sealed is no longer negotiable and amounts to the end of the
world. The very nature of a boundary in the human domain is that
it is negotiable, albeit only under certain conditions, and at a
certain cost. I have attempted to spell out some of these
conditions and costs.
The argument, if found not to be totally devoid of sense, has
implications for intercultural philosophy beyond the mere
analytical study of African spirituality. For also intercultural
philosophy itself could be very well defined in the very same
terms I have now employed for African spirituality. While forging
a specialist inside language amongst ourselves as intercultural
philosophers, we intend the boundary which we thus erect around
ourselves to be porous, and to be capable of being transgressed
by those we seek to understand, and by whom we seek to be
understood. Both within, and across, that boundaries there will
be limitations to the extent to which we can know, understand,
represent and mediate; but the possibilities are well above zero.
There is an unmistakable kinship between my approach to African
spirituality as a content-unspecific boundary strategy towards
community, and Derrida's approach to différance as a strategy to
both affirm and postpone the affirmation of difference; little
wonder that the above argument was written shortly after I
attempted to critically reflect on Derrida's 1996 argument on
religion.34
Besides my reluctance to spell out, at this point, whatever would
appear to be the specific contents of African spirituality after
all, another set of questions continue to bother me, leaving me
rather dissatisfied with the above argument while upholding its
general thrust, which would ultimately point to a definition of
religion beyond ontology, beyond metaphysics, as mainly a
(necessarily contentless) vector of sociability.
6. THE POLITICS OF SOCIABILITY VERSUS THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE
INDIVIDUAL SELF IN AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY
The following dilemma arises at this point. Such boundary
creation and boundary crossing as goes on in the context of
African spirituality, does not only create situational and
contextual communities to which one may or may not be co-opted --
it also articulates an I who by having the experiences engendered
by these various spiritual technologies, involves herself or
himself in these domains of community, and in the very process
constitutes itself. Therefore my emphasis, in the above argument,
on the implied political dimension of African spirituality, is
demonstrably one-sided. It is not the ad hoc community created
within spirituality-based boundaries, but the I who is the locus
of these experiences, because it is only the individual who
possesses the corporeality indispensable as the seat of
experience at the interface between self and outside world. As
Henk Oosterling aptly pointed out,35 spirituality necessarily
amounts to an embodied project. African spirituality then is not
only a social technology but also a technology of individuality,
of self. Is this reason to distinguish between, let us say,
social spirituality (the technology of community) and religious
spirituality (the technology of self)? Is such a distinction at
all possible? Or is spirituality best understood as the nexus
between self and community, as the technology which (in the
classic Durkheimian sense)36 renders the social possible despite
the centrifugal fragmentation of the myriad individual conscious
bodies out of which humanity consists.
7. SPIRITUALITY BETWEEN LOCAL PRACTICE AND GLOBAL ETHNOGRAPHIC/
INTERCULTURAL-PHILOSOPHICAL DESCRIPTION
A second and related point addresses my own positioning within
the above dilemma. I came to intercultural philosophy in the late
1990s out of dissatisfaction with the objectifying stance of
cultural anthropology; before reaching that point, this
dissatisfaction had brought me to suspend professional
anthropological distance: I joined (1990-1991) the ranks of those
whom I was supposed to merely study, and became a Southern
African diviner-priest (sangoma), in ways described in several of
my papers.37 The present argument goes a long way towards
explaining how I can be a sangoma, a North Atlantic professor of
philosophy, and a senior Africanist social researcher, at the
same time: if the essence of African spirituality (and any other
spirituality) is contentless, then the affirmation of belief is
secondary to the action of participation.38 The problem of
actually believing in the central tenets of the sangoma
world-view (ancestral intervention, reincarnation, sorcery,
mediumship) then scarcely arises, and largely amounts to a sham
problem.
But not quite. For at the existential level one can only practice
sangomahood, and bestow its spiritual and therapeutic benefits
onto others as clients and adepts, if and when these beliefs take
on a considerable measure of validity, not to say absolute
validity, at least within the specific ritual situation within
which these practices are engaged in. The community which this
form of African spirituality (and other forms of African and
non-African spirituality) generates, clearly extends beyond the
level of sociability, and has distinct implications for
experience and cognition. It is a political stance39 to insist on
the validity of these sangoma beliefs and to engage in the
practices they stipulate, and thus not to submit one-sidedly to
the sociability pressures exerted by another reference group
(North Atlantic academic) and the belief system (in terms of a
secular, rational, scientific world-view) they uphold; yet the
latter belief system is worthy of the same kind of respect and
the same kind of politically motivated sociability, as the
sangoma one.
The dilemma is unmistakable, and amounts to an aporia. I solve it
in practice, day after day, by negotiating the dilemma
situationally and being, serially in subsequent situations I
engage in within the same day, both a sangoma and a philosopher/
Africanist. But as yet I do not manage to argue the satisfactory
nature of this solution in discursive language. And I suspect
that this is largely because the kind of practical negotiations
that produce a sense of solution and that alleviate the tension
around which the dilemma revolves, defy the consistency,
boundedness and linearity of discursive conceptual thought, -- in
other words, the dilemma itself seems a rather artificial
by-product of rational theoretical verbalising on intercultural
and spiritual matters. As I argued elsewhere,40 discursive
language is probably the worst, instead of the most appropriate,
vehicle for the expression and negotiation of interculturality.
And this renders all academic writing on African spirituality of
limited validity and relevance. But why confine ourselves to
writing and reading, if the real thing is available at our very
doorstep?
NOTES
1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the June 2000
meeting of the Research Group on Spirituality, an initiative of
the Dutch-Flemish Association for Intercultural Philosophy NVVIF,
held at the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
I am indebted to the participants for their constructive remarks,
and particularly to Henk Oosterling, Cornée Jacobs, and Frank
Uyanne.
2 http://come.to/african_religion .
3 Dalmiya, V., 1993, 'Introspection', in: Dancy, J., & E.
Sosa, eds., A companion to epistemology, Oxford/ Cambridge
(Mass.): Blackwell's, first published 1992; Shoemaker, S., 1986,
'Introspection and the Self', Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 9.
4 van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, Kazanga: Etniciteit in Afrika
tussen staat en traditie, inaugural lecture, Amsterdam: Vrije
Universiteit; shortened French version: 'Kazanga: Ethnicité en
Afrique entre Etat et tradition', in: Binsbergen, W.M.J. van,
& Schilder, K., ed., Perspectives on ethnicity in Africa,
special issue, Afrika Focus, Gent, 1993, 1: 9-40; English version
with postscript: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, 'The Kazanga
festival: Ethnicity as cultural mediation and transformation in
central western Zambia', African Studies, 53, 2, 1994, pp 92-125;
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, 'Culturen bestaan niet': Het
onderzoek van interculturaliteit als een openbreken van
vanzelfsprekendheden, inaugural lecture, chair of intercultural
philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam: Rotterdamse
Filosofische Studies; English version in: van Binsbergen,
Intercultural encounters, o.c.; shortened English version also in
http://come.to/vanbinsbergen .
5 van Binsbergen, Culturen bestaan niet, o.c. Davidson even made
a similar claim for languages, which is relevant in this context
since language is among the main indicators of cultural and
ethnic identity: Davidson, D., 1986, 'A coherence theory of truth
and knowledge', in: LePore, E., ed., Perspectives on the
philosophy of Donald Davidson, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 307-19.
6 'Recent' is here taken to mean: 'having ancestors who lived in
the African continent during historical times, and specifically
during the second millennium of the common era'. There is no
doubt whatsoever that the entire human species emerged in the
African continent a few million years ago. There is moreover
increasing consensus among palaeoanthropologists, based on
massive and ever accumulating evidence, that modern humans (Homo
sapiens sapiens) emerged in the African continent between 200,000
and 100,000 years ago, and from there brought language, symbolic
thought, representational art, the use of paint etc. to the other
continents. Cf. Roebroeks, W., 1995, ' ''Policing the boundary''?
Continuity of discussions in 19th and 20th century
palaeoanthropology', in: Corbey, R. & B. Theunissen, eds.,
Ape, man, apeman: Changing views since 1600, Department of
Prehistory, Leiden University. Leiden, pp. 173-179, p. 175.
Gamble, C., 1993, Timewalkers: The prehistory of global
colonisation, Bath: Allan Sutton.
7 On Afrocentrism, cf. the most influential and vocal statement:
Asante, M.K., 1990, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and knowledge,
Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press; and the (largely critical)
secondary literature with extensive bibliographies: Berlinerblau,
J., 1999, Heresy in the university: The Black Athena controversy
and the responsibilities of American intellectuals, New Brunswick
etc.: Rutgers University Press; Howe, Stephen, 1999,
Afrocentrism: Mythical pasts and imagined homes, London/New York:
Verso, first published 1998; Fauvelle-Aymar, F.-X., Chrétien,
J.-P., & Perrot, C.-H., 2000, eds., Afrocentrismes:
L'histoire des Africains entre Égypte et Amérique, Paris:
Karthala; and the discussion on Afrocentrism in Politique
africaine, November 2000 (in the press), to which I contributed a
critique of Howe, while I am also a contributor to Fauvelle,
Afrocentrismes, c.s., and the author of a forthcoming review of
Berlinerblau in the Journal of African History.
8 As I, for one, did in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997,
'Rethinking Africa's contribution to global cultural history:
Lessons from a comparative historical analysis of mankala
board-games and geomantic divination', in: van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp:
Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, special issue,
Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical
Society, vols 28-29, 1996-97, pp. 221-254 -- currently being
reprinted as Black Athena Alive, Hamburg/Muenster: LIT Verlag,
2000.
9 Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., Religious change in Zambia:
Exploratory studies, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International
10 van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 'Islam as a constitutive factor in
so-called African traditional religion and culture: The evidence
from geomantic divination, mankala boardgames, ecstatic religion,
and musical instruments', paper for the conference on
'Transformation processes and Islam in Africa', African Studies
Centre and Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World,
Leiden, 15 October, 1999, forthcoming in: Breedveld, A., van
Santen, J., & van Binsbergen, W.M.J., eds., Dynamics and
Islam in Africa; van Binsbergen, 'Rethinking Africa's
contribution', o.c.
11 Linton, R., 1936, The study of man, New York:
Appleton-Century.
12 On this key concept for contemporary 'modified' (to adopt
Martin Bernal's term) diffusionist approaches, cf. van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, 'Black Athena Ten Years After: Towards
a constructive re-assessment', in: van Binsbergen, Black Athena:
Ten Years After, o.c., pp. 11-64, esp. p. 35f, and passim
thoughout this entire volume.
13 van Binsbergen, W.M.J., in preparation, Global Bee Flight:
Sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, and the World - Beyond the
Black Athena thesis.
14 Eliade, M., 1968, Le chamanisme: Et les techniques archaïques
de l'extase, Paris: Payot; 1st ed 1951; Lommel, A., 1967,
Shamanism, New York: McGraw-Hill; Lewis-Williams, J.D., 1992,
'Ethnographic evidence relating to ''trance'' and ''shamans''
among northern and southern Bushman', South African
Archaeological Bulletin, 47: 56-60; Halifax, J., 1980, Shamanic
voices: The shaman as seer, poet and healer, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books; Bourgignon, E, 1968, World distribution and
patterns of possession states, in: Prince, R., ed., Trance and
possession states, Toronto: [publisher ] , pp. 3-34; Winkelman,
M., 1986, 'Trance states: a theoretical model and cross-cultural
analysis', Ethos, 14: 174-203; Goodman, F., 1990, Where the
spirits ride the wind: trance journeys and other ecstatic
experience, Bloomington, Indiana U.P, 1990; Ginzburg, C., 1992,
Ecstasies: Deciphering the witches' sabbath, tr. R. Rosenthal,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; repr. of the first Engl. edition,
1991, Pantheon Books, tr. of Storia notturna, Torino: Einaudi,
1989; Campbell, J., 1990, The flight of the wild gander,
HarperPerennial; van Binsbergen, 'Islam as a constitutive
factor', o.c.
15 Rostovtsev, M.I., 1929, The animal style in south Russia and
China, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Bunker, E.C.,
Chatwin, C.B., & Farkas, A.R., 1970, 'Animal style', in: Art
from east to west, New York; Cammann, Schuyler v. R., 1958, 'The
animal style art of Eurasia', Journal of Asian Studies,
17:323-39.
16 Segy, L., 1953, 'Circle-dot sign on African ivory carvings',
Zaïre, 7, 1: 35-54.
17 Anati, E., 1999, La religion des origines, Paris: Bayard;
French tr. of La religione delle origini, n.p.: Edizione delle
origini, 1995; Anati, E., 1986, 'The Rock Art of Tanzania and the
East African Sequence', BCSP [ Bolletino des Centro Camuno di
Studi Preistorici ] , 23: 15-68, fig. 5-51; Wendt, W.E., 1976, '
''Art mobilier'' from Apollo 11 Cave, South West Africa: Africa's
oldest dated works of art', South African Archaeological
Bulletin, 31: 5-11; Gamble, Timewalkers, o.c., with very complete
bibliography.
18 E.g. Rogers, R.W., 1912, Cuneiform parallels to the Old
Testament, London etc.: Frowde, Oxford University Press; Pinches,
T.G., 1893, 'Yâ and Yâwa in Assyro-Babylonian inscriptions',
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, 15: 13-15 (of
course totally obsolete now, but that is not the point). More
recent standard works on this topic include: Heidel, A., 1963,
The Gilgamesh epic and Old Testament parallels, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, third edition, second edition 1949;
Pritchard, J.B., 1950, ed., Ancient Near Eastern texts relating
to the Old Testament, Princeton: Princeton University Press (many
times reprinted); Kitchen, K.A., 1966, Ancient Orient and the Old
Testament, London: Tyndale Press; Craigie, P., 1983, Ugarit and
the Old Testament, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
19 Redford, D.B., 1992, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in ancient
times, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Williams, R.J.,
1971, 'Egypt and Israel', in: Harris, J.R., ed., The legacy of
Egypt, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 257-290; Assmann, J.,
1996, 'The Mosaic distinction: Israel, Egypt and the invention of
paganism', Representations, 56; and especially the comprehensive
project undertaken by M. Görg, editor of the series Fontes atque
pontes, reihe Ägypten und Altes Testament (Wiesbaden), e.g.:
Görg, M., 1977, Komparatistische Untersuchungen an ägyptischer
und israelitischer Literatur, Wiesbaden; Görg, M., 1997, Israel
und Ägypten, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
20 Appadurai, A., 1995, 'The production of locality', in: R.
Fardon, ed., Counterworks: Managing the diversity of knowledge,
ASA decennial conference series 'The uses of knowledge: Global
and local relations, London: Routledge, pp. 204-225; Meyer, B.,
& Geschiere, P., 1998, eds., Globalization and identity:
Dialectics of flow and closure, Oxford: Blackwell; Fardon, R.,
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & van Dijk, R., 1999, eds., Modernity
on a shoestring: Dimensions of globalization, consumption and
development in Africa and beyond, Leiden/London: EIDOS; de Jong,
F., 'Modern secrets: The production of locality in Casamance,
Senegal', Ph.D, University of Amsterdam, forthcoming (2001).
21 van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991, 'De chaos getemd? Samenwonen en
zingeving in modern Afrika', in: H.J.M. Claessen red., De chaos
getemd?, Leiden: Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen,
Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1991, pp. 31-47; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1997, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of
globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of
contemporary Africa, The Hague: WOTRO [ Netherlands Foundation
for Tropical Research, a division of the Netherlands Research
Foundation NWO ] , Working papers on Globalisation and the
construction of communal identity, 3, also available in:
http://come.to/vanbinsbergen ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1998,
'Globalization and virtuality: Analytical problems posed by the
contemporary transformation of African societies', in: Meyer, B.,
& Geschiere, P., eds., Globalization and identity: Dialectics
of flow and closure, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 273-303; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 'Witchcraft in modern Africa as virtualised
boundary conditions of the kinship order', in press in: G. Bond,
& Ciekawy, E., eds., Witchcraft dialogues: New
epistemological and anthropological approaches to African
witchcraft, my contribution available on:
http://come.to/african_religion ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2000,
'Sensus communis or sensus particularis? A social-science
comment', in: Kimmerle, H., & Oosterling, H., 2000, eds.,
Sensus communis in multi- and intercultural perspective: On the
possibility of common judgments in arts and politics, Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 113-128, also available on
http://come.to/vanbinsbergen ; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994,
'Dynamiek van cultuur: Enige dilemma's van hedendaags Afrika in
een context van globalisering', Antropologische Verkenningen, 13,
2, 17-33, English version: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1995, 'Popular
culture in Africa: dynamics of African cultural and ethnic
identity in a context of globalization', in: van der Klei,
J.D.M., ed., Popular culture: Africa, Asia and Europe: beyond
historical legacy and political innocence, Proceedings
Summer-school 1994, Utrecht: CERES, pp. 7-40.
22 van Binsbergen, Religious change, o.c.; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history in central
western Zambia, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., & Geschiere, P.L., 1985, 'Marxist theory
and anthropological practice: The application of French Marxist
anthropology in fieldwork', in : van Binsbergen, W.M.J., &
Geschiere, P.L., ed., Old modes of production and capitalist
encroachment: Anthropological explorations in Africa, Londen/
Boston: Kegan Paul International, pp. 235-289; a shorter version
specifically on religion included in:
http://come.to/african_religion .
23 van Binsbergen, Kazanga, Dutch, English and French version,
oo.c. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, 'Nkoya royal chiefs and the
Kazanga Cultural Association in western central Zambia today:
Resilience, decline, or folklorisation?', in: E.A.B. van Rouveroy
van Nieuwaal & R. van Dijk, eds., African chieftaincy in a
new socio-political landscape, Hamburg/ Münster: LIT-Verlag, pp.
97-133. French version in press. Further discussions of the
Kazanga festival in my Virtuality, o.c., 'Popular culture in
Africa', o.c., and 'Sensus communis or sensus particularis?',
o.c.
24 van Binsbergen, 'Culturen bestaan niet', o.c..
25 Quine, W.V.O., 1960, Word and object, Cambridge: MIT Press.
26 Hookway, C., 1993, 'Indeterminacy of translation', in: Dancy,
J., & Sosa, E., eds., A companion to epistemology, Oxford/
Cambridge (Mass.): Blackwell's, first published 1992; Wright, C.,
1999, 'The indeterminacy of translation', in: Hale, B., &
Wright, C., 1999, eds., A companion to the philosophy of
language, Oxford: Blackwell, first published 1997, pp. 397-426;
Quine, W.V.O., 1970, 'On the reasons for the indeterminacy of
translation', Journal of Philosophy, 67: 178-183; Quine, Words,
o.c.
27 Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1984, 'Can anthropology become the
theory of peripheral class struggle? Reflexions on the work of
P.P.Rey', in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & G.S.C.M. Hesseling, G
.S.C.M., eds, Aspecten van staat en maatschappij in Afrika:
Recent Dutch and Belgian Research on the African state, Leiden:
African Studies Centre, pp. 163-80; earlier German version in:
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1984, 'Kann die Ethnologie zur Theorie
des Klassenkampfes in der Peripherie werden?', Österreichische
Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 9, 4: 138-48. An extensive attempt
to create intercultural intersubjectivity in the rendering of
ethnographic knowledge is described in: van Binsbergen, Tears,
o.c.
28 van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1976, 'Shrines, cults and society in
North and Central Africa: A comparative analysis', paper read at
the Association of Social Anthropologists of Great Britain and
the Commonwealth (ASA) Annual Conference on Regional Cults and
Oracles, Manchester, 35 pp; soon available at
http://come.to/african_religion ; Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1979,
'Explorations in the sociology and history of territorial cults
in Zambia', in: Schoffeleers, J.M., ed, 1979, Guardians of the
land, Gwelo: Mambo Press, pp. 47-88; revised edition in: van
Binsbergen, Religious change, o.c., chapter 3, pp. 100-134,
29 van Binsbergen, Religious change, o.c.; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1985, 'The cult of saints in North-Western Tunisia: an
analysis of contemporary pilgrimage structures', in: E.A.
Gellner, ed., Islamic dilemmas: reformers, nationalists and
industrialization: The Southern shore of the Mediterranean,
Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton, pp. 199-239; Van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1980 'Popular and formal Islam, and supralocal relations:
the highlands of north-western Tunisia, 1800-1970', Middle
Eastern Studies, 16: 71-91; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., forthcoming,
Religion and social organisation in north-western Tunisia, Volume
I: Kinship, spatiality, and segmentation, Volume II: Cults of the
land, and Islam; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1988, Een buik openen,
Haarlem: In de Knipscheer.
30 van Binsbergen, Global Bee Flight, o.c., with extensive
discussion of the literature.
31 van Binsbergen, 'Rethinking', o.c.; van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
1994, 'Divinatie met vier tabletten: Medische technologie in
Zuidelijk Afrika', in: Sjaak van der Geest, Paul ten Have,
Gerhard Nijhoff en Piet Verbeek-Heida, eds., De macht der dingen:
Medische technologie in cultureel perspectief, Amsterdam:
Spinhuis, pp. 61-110; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, 'Time, space
and history in African divination and board-games', in:
Tiemersma, D., & Oosterling, H.A.F., eds., Time and
temporality in intercultural perspective: Studies presented to
Heinz Kimmerle, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 105-125; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., 1995, 'Four-tablet divination as trans-regional medical
technology in Southern Africa', Journal of Religion in Africa,
25, 2: 114-140; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, 'Transregional and
historical connections of four-tablet divination in Southern
Africa', Journal of Religion in Africa, 26, 1: 2-29; van
Binsbergen, 'Islam as a constitutive factor', o.c.; van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1996, 'The astrological origin of Islamic
geomancy', paper read at 'The SSIPS [ Society for the Study of
Islamic Philosophy and Science ] / SAGP [ Society of Ancient
Greek Philosophy ] 1996, 15th Annual Conference: ''Global and
Multicultural Dimensions of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy and
Social Thought: Africana, Christian, Greek, Islamic, Jewish,
Indigenous and Asian Traditions, Binghamton University'',
Department of Philosophy/ Center for Medieval and Renaissance
studies (CEMERS).
32 The latter applies e.g. to cat's cradles (games consisting of
the manual manipulation of a tied string), certain board-games,
and the form of the Southern African divination tablets, which
have amazingly close parallels among the North American
indigenous population; cf. Culin, S., 1975, Games of the North
American Indians, New York: Dover; fascimile reprint of the
original 1907 edition, which was the Accompanying Paper of the
Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology
of the Smithsonian Institution, 1902-1903, by W.H. Holmes, Chief.
33 Partly on the basis of earlier work by Jaspers and Bataille
among others, in the final quarter of the twentieth century the
nature and production of boundaries attracted a considerable
amount of research in philosophy and the social sciences. For
philosophy, cf., for instance, Burg, I. van de, & Meyers, D.,
ed., 1987, Bataille: Kunst, geweld en erotiek als grenservaring,
Amsterdam: SUA; Cornell, D., 1992, The philosophy of the limit,
New York: Routledge; Le passage des frontières: Autour du
travail de Jacques Derrida, Paris: Galilée, 1993; Kimmerle, H.,
1983, 'Dialektik der Grenze und Grenze der Dialektik', in:
Dialektik heute: Rotterdammer Arbeitspapiere, Bochum: Germinal,
pp. 127-141; Kimmerle, H., 1985, 'Schein im Vor-Schein der Kunst:
Grenzüberschreitungen zur Identität und zur Nicht-Identität',
Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 47: 473-492; Procée, H., 1991, Over
de grenzen van culturen: Voorbij universalisme en relativisme,
Meppel: Boom; Oosterling, H., 1996, Door schijn bewogen: Naar een
hyperkritiek van de xenofobe rede, Kampen: Kok Agora, pp. 138ff
and passim. And for the social sciences: Barth, F., 1969, ed.,
Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture
differences, Boston: Little, Brown & Co; Devisch, R., 1981,
'La mort et la dialectique des limites dans une société
d'Afrique centrale', in: Olivetti, M., ed., Filosofia e religione
di fronte alle morte, Archivio di Filosofia, 1-3: 503-527;
Devisch, R., 1986, 'Marge, marginalisation et liminalité: Le
sorcier et le devin dans la culture Yaka au Zaïre',
Anthropologie et Sociétés, 10, 2: 117-37; Anthias, E., &
Yuval-Davis, N., 1992, Racialised boundaries, London: Routledge;
Turner, V.W., 1969, The ritual process, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul; Schlee, G., & Werner, K., 1996, Inklusion und
Exklusion: Die Dynamik von Grenzziehungen im Spannungsfeld von
Markt, Staat und Ethnizität, Koln: Rudiger Koppe Verlag. In a
follow-up to the Research Group on Spirituality, the NVVIF
proposes to investigate the nature of cultural boundaries in the
context of the multicultural society, taking as point of
departure the common observation that such boundaries are often
produced, in public and performative situations, to be
deliberately and emphatically non-pourous.
34 Presumably the argument would win from being combined with my
argument on Derrida's 1996 approach to religion; this will be
attempted in a later version. Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J.,
'Derrida on religion: glimpses of interculturality', paper read
at the April 2000 meeting of the Research Group on Spirituality,
Dutch-Flemish Association for Intercultural Philosophy, now
available on the website of the NVVIF:
http://come.to/interculturality .
35 At the session where this paper was first presented.
36 Durkheim, E., 1912, Les formes élémentaires de la vie
religieuse, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Durkheim
departs from what he considers the fundamental condition for
religion: the distinction between sacred and profane, which may
take all sorts of forms in concrete settings of time and place,
but whose fundamental and universal (!) feature is that it is
absolute. As such the distinction between sacred and profane is
not only the basis for all rational thought, but particularly for
a cosmological partitioning of the world in terms of sacred and
profane. Sacred aspects of the world (given aspects of the
natural world such as animal species (religiously turned into
totems), but also man-made aspects: events, human acts, concepts,
myths) are not sacred by some aspect of their intrinsic nature,
but there sacredness is superimposed by collective human
representations; the selection of things sacred is entirely
arbitrary and therefore can vary from society to society and from
historical period to historical period - what is involved is
merely the application, with endless variation, of the
distinction between sacred and profane. The sacred is nothing in
itself, but a mere symbol -- but of what? The sacred is subject
to a negative cult of avoidance, taboo, but also to a positive
cult of veneration. It is essential that this cult is a
collective thing, in which the group constitutes itself as a
congregation, a church -- Durkheim uses this world ('église') in
the original etymological sense (ekklesia, i.e. 'people's
assembly') and without Christian implications: his own background
was Jewish, and his argument is largely underpinned by
ethnographic reference to the religion of Australian Aborigines,
who at the time had undergone virtually no exposure to
Christianity. Durkheim then makes his genial step of identifying
the social, the group, as the referent which is ultimately
venerated in religion. Here Durkheim is also indebted to Comte's
idea of a 'religion de l'humanité' as a requirement for the
utopian age when a 'positivist', rational science will have
eclipsed all the religious and philosophical chimera of earlier
phases in the development of human society. It is the group
which, through its transformation into a religious symbol -- a
transformation of which the adherents themselves are largely or
completely unaware -- , inspires the believer and the
practitioner of ritual with such absolute respect that their
ritual becomes an 'effervescence', a heated melting together into
social solidarity by which the group constitutes itself and
perpetuates itself, and in which the individual (prone to
profanity, anti-social egotism, sorcery) can transcend his own
limitations, can give up his individuality, and become part of
the group, for which the individual is even prepared to sacrifice
not only ritual prestations, but also himself. Without religion
no society, but it is society itself which is the central object
of religious veneration; and from this spring all human thought,
all logical and rational distinctions, concepts of space and
time, causation etc.
37 van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991, 'Becoming a sangoma: Religious
anthropological field-work in Francistown, Botswana', Journal of
Religion in Africa, 21, 4: 309-344; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1998,
'Sangoma in Nederland: Over integriteit in interculturele
bemiddeling', in: Elias, M., & Reis, R., eds., Getuigen
ondanks zichzelf: Voor Jan-Matthijs Schoffeleers bij zijn
zeventigste verjaardag, Maastricht: Shaker, pp. 1-29; both papers
available in English versions on: http://come.to/vanbinsbergen ,
and in preparation in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., Intercultural
encounters: Towards an empirical philosophy.
38 A point elaborated in: Van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1981,
'Theoretical and experiential dimensions in the study of the
ancestral cult among the Zambian Nkoya', paper read at the
symposium on Plurality in Religion, International Union of
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences Intercongress,
Amsterdam, 22-25 April, 1981, 22 pp; available in:
http://www.geocities.com/africanreligion/ancest.htm .
39 van Binsbergen, 'Becoming', o.c.; 'Sangoma in Nederland', o.c.
40 van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, 'Enige filosofische aspecten van
culturele globalisering: Met bijzondere verwijzing naar Malls
interculturele hermeneutiek', in: Baars, J., & Starmans, E.,
eds, Het eigene en het andere: Filosofie en globalisering: Acta
van de 21 Nederlands-Vlaamse Filosofiedag, Delft: Eburon, pp.
37-52; English version available on: http://come.to/vanbinsbergen
, and in preparation in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., Intercultural
encounters: Towards an empirical philosophy.
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