Evil in Africa :Encounters with the Everyday
Evil in Africa :Encounters with the Everyday
paperback
Published:
30 August, 2015
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Description
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.
More Details
| Type | Book |
|---|---|
| ISBN13 | 9780253017475 |
| ISBN10 | 0253017475 |
| Number Of Pages | 402 |
| Item Weight | 522 g |
| Publisher / Reseller | Indiana University Press |
| Format | paperback |
Media Reviews
"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
Author's Bio
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.