Session 5b: Borders Shifting and Eroding
3rd Global Conference
Thursday 15th March – Saturday 17th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
Healers, Heretics, and Witches: African Diviners and Pagan Witches Contest the Boundaries of African Religion and Magic
Dale Wallace
Religion Studies – University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
The interplay between religion and magic in South Africa today carries the weight of their enforced division in the colonial era. In a post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa the boundaries between religion and magic have weakened as practitioners of magic assert their rights in terms of the Freedom of Religion clause in the Constitution of 1996. The boundaries have also become a site of conflict between magic practitioners themselves. This paper explores these issues in the context of the marginalization of African diviners (Izangoma) in the colonial construction of a ‘religious field’ in South Africa. It will question why the divinatory practices of Izangoma were subsumed under the singular category of ‘witchcraft’ and at the consequences of their criminalization of these practices in the Witchcraft Suppression Act (3) of 1957 that remains in place in South African law. Discussion will further include the fluctuations in the relationship between Izangoma and contemporary Pagan Witches as these two groups of magic practitioners debate and contest legal attempts to define magic, witchcraft and the witch in proposed replacements of this Act. I argue that any study of religion in Africa requires an incorporation of the magical worldview, and yet it continues to lack recognition as either an authentic sub-set, or as the very heart of, religion, from most theological, academic and legal perspectives. Often interpolated as the wholly negative, anti-Christian ‘Other’, the efficacy of magic and magical practice is, however, embedded in the religio-spiritual engagements of Izangoma, Pagan Witches and persists on the boundaries of even dominant religions in South Africa today.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Ethnographic Emersion, Spatial Symmetry, and Material Agency: From Urban Fantasy to Cultural Reality
John Sabol
Independent Scholar, USA
This paper will focus on ethnographic immersion as a participatory field method that is meant to erase distinctions typical of Cartesian dualism (past/present; living/dead; absence/presence; and object/subject). The immersion is a co-emergence of scenes, spaces, and situations where agency is reversed and material object and subject act back on each other (present to past/past to present). This is a para-anthropological approach to the mediation of “spectral traces” that continue to manifest in certain heterotopic spaces within contemporary sites. It is a means to locate and articulate locally-embedded past cultural presence. This engenders a research paradigm that places a “voice-over” to the design, interpretation, and mediation of cultural analysis within the sensorium of those who are the social agency of fieldwork.
In my fieldwork, I explore the sensual nature of cross-cultural encounters and their synaesthesthic interplay in places that embody experience, including the recovery of sensory remains of cultures past. In the process of this recovery of the past through interaction in the present, the space of transformation is revealed to be quite symmetrical, as temporal parameters unfold in this ethnographic exchange. This is a way of digging from the present by performing the past. It is a form of contemporary magic.
It is also an understanding of a cultural place as constituted by temporal movement, memory, layered experience, and biography. These considerations activate spaces, and we can begin a social dialogue with those who remain. This is a practice-based methodology. The use of physical immersions, fictive memory practices, and other qualitative methodologies is a medium for an insertion into the very fabric of those other cultural worlds, and a way of constituting and shaping this world into an embodied and external reality, free of fantasy and imaginative holds on contemporary urban space. Various examples of this methodology will be included in the discussion.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Concrete Labyrinth: Urban Inhabitants Need to Believe in Miracle
Eugenia Kuznetsova
Deusto University, Bilbao, Spain
The double –sided human mentality has lost its balance during the worldwide urbanization. Coexisting mentalities in humans (mystical and rational-logical) are supported by rural and urban culture respectively. The inhabitants of megalopolises suffer from the lack of miracles; whilst they are constantly experienced by the dwellers of rural areas. In modern urban society, people are looking for occult experience to revitalize the magical component in their life. Personal liberty to believe without any social restrictions inevitably leads to the emergence of new beliefs. The magic explosion in the urban culture is antagonistic to both religion and science. Evidently this strive to gain some magical experience is related to that ancient need to build connections between everyday life and nature, finding your own place in the universe. The emergence of urban mythology and legends and their reflection in art and literature is a part of the global process of re-enchantment of the urban world. Art is a mirror of social consciousness. Whole new literature genres emerge to give the readers the feeling of extended reality. In this context, magic realist fiction is a perfect illustration of the need of modern society to create the extended reality. Magic realism is a narrative style where reality serves as a background for miracles that take the form of fantastic flashes, meant not to contrast the reality but rather to augment it. Thus the illusion of uncontrolled and strange but in the same time very real world is created. I am going to analyse why and how the urban dwellers try to extend their technological world through magic realist art and fiction.
Entries (RSS)