Reply to Janzen

REVER - Revista de Estudos da Religião, 2018

Abstract: South Africa is one of some few countries where sizeable communities of black and white people live together which have preserved their distinct cultures. Other than in the Americas, South Africa has a black majority with the Bantu African languages and cultural institutions largely preserved – and it has the most marked history of segregation. Thus few elements of Bantu cultures have been adopted by white South Africans. Yet in recent years a core element of Bantu culture, the shamanism and mediumism of the “Sangomas”, has begun to manifest itself among whites in South Africa – in the characteristic forms of such “calling”. Interestingly this has not happened by “cultural learning” in significant cases. This requires a different model of explanation. In this essay Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphogenetic fields” will be applied to this phenomenon and its implications considered. Resumo: A África do Sul é um dos poucos países onde grandes comunidades de pessoas brancas e negras convivem e preservaram suas culturas distintas. Além das Américas, a África do Sul tem uma maioria negra com as línguas africanas bantus e instituições culturais amplamente preservadas – e tem a história mais evidente da segregação. Por isso, poucos elementos das culturas Bantus são adotados pelos sul-africanos brancos. Porém, nos últimos anos um elemento central da cultura bantu, o xamanismo e a mediunidade dos “sangomas”, começou a se manifestar entre os brancos na África do Sul – nas formas características desse “chamado”. Curiosamente, isso não aconteceu significativamente pro “aprendizagem cultural”, o que requer um modelo diferente de explicação. Nesse artígo, a teoria dos “campos morfogenéticos” de Rupert Sheldrake será aplicada ao fenômeno es suas implicações serão consideradas.

The Religious Studies Project , 2020

This is an interview conducted by Dr. Maxinne Connolly-Panagopoulos (Univ. of Glasgow) for a pod-cast in “The Religious Studies Project” on Bantu Shamanism in an academic perspective. It is accessible here: https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/exploring-african-shamanism-and-white-sangomas-in-south-africa/ The project's website informs: “The Religious Studies Project (RSP) is an international collaborative enterprise producing weekly podcasts with leading scholars on the social-scientific study of religion. Since January 2012 we have released over 290 interviews (of around 30 minutes) on cutting-edge theoretical, methodological and empirical issues, which is available through the website, weekly essays, roundtable discussions, book reviews, resources, and conference reports […] The RSP was launched in 2012 by Christopher R. Cotter (University of Edinburgh) and David G. Robertson (The Open University) to help disseminate contemporary issues in RS to a wider audience and provide a resource for undergraduate students of RS, their teachers, and interested members of the public. We aim to provide engaging, concise and reliable accounts of the most important concepts, traditions, scholars and methodologies in the contemporary study of religion, without pushing a religious or nonreligious agenda […] The RSP is a non-profit charitable organisation supported by the British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR), North American Association for the Study of Religion, International Association for the History of Religions, European Association for the Study of Religions, and Australian Association for the Study of Religions.” https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/about-us/ (17th December, 2018). On the topic of the interview: Bantu shamanism is firmly established in South African culture. It is a form of divination and treatment that requires personal mediumistic endowment, a ‘call’ and rigorous, long training – preferably in the frame of traditional cultural institutions – and the passing of demanding examinations for gradutation. It is not a ‘religious’ practice, but has spiritual aspects. By its inclusion of phenomena and perceptions deemed ‘para-normal’ from a Materialistic point of view, and by its essential connecting to ancestral spirits it is also ‘spiritistic’. On account of these properties, it has been received into the largely Christian society of South Africa, being reframed and endorsed by the majoritarian African Indigenous Churches. It is also adopted by Esotericists and – on a pragmatic basis – by people of secular or Materialist orientation. The majority of South African have had dealings with a bantu shaman – called ‘Sangoma’ in Zulu, ‘Igqirha in Xhosa or ‘Ngaka’ in Sotho/Tswana – at some point in life, often repeatedly. These consultations are for diagnosis, counselling and treatment. In the fields of Medicine, Psychology and Psychiatry the specific phenomenology of mediumistic symptoms, as in the process of ‘calling’, and of those patients with spiritistic disturbances, are recognised as being of distinct symptomatology. Academically this is framed as culturally specific psychology and psychiatry, since about five decades. Over the time this has been received in international medical handbooks of diagnosis as ‘culture-specific syndromes’. Pioneering research has been done on this field in South Africa. At present the specific symptoms, diagnosis and treatments are being integrated with psychiatric and psychotherapeutic treatments. The profession and curative procedures are being integrated legally in South African society as well, providing for professionalization, public recognition, control of quality standards in training and protection of practitioners and patients from quackery and abuse. The profession of a Bantu shaman (‘Sangoma’) is finding its place in modern South African society. The recognition of the profession, of its specific perceptions, manifestations and treatments is being enhanced by the fact that prominent academics in South Africa – as well as qualified, accredited psychotherapists - are also trained and graduated Sangomas, This reinforces the recognition of the field. A tendency observable among academics of a Positivistic / Materialistic orientation in the (post-)Enlightenment cultures of northern America and Europe, to regard these phenomena as ‘non-rational’ or purely ‘imagined’ needs to be criticised as obstructive to a phenomenologically based understanding, as basis of research. The acceptance of these phenomena and of their distinct perceptions them opens the perspective of a range of studies in anthropology, psychology, science of religion, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, therapy and psychology. On the basis of an open-minded, phenomenologically oriented approach, befitting a post-secular culture, a wide field presents itself here for academic studies. Some aspects hereof are discussed in this interview.

Essays in Humanistic Anthropology: A Festschrift in Honor of David Bidney. Bruce T. Grindal and Dennis M. Warren (eds.), pp. 303-325. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America., 1979

2015

This paper examines a strange behaviour associated with a spirit possession called amakhosi which has recently been prevalent in the Eastern and Western Cape. These behaviours were reported by various newspapers and community radio stations, where learners were said to mysteriously climb school walls with their bare hands, groaning violently and intimidating teachers and other learners. In some instances, these occurrences were said to have brought learning to a standstill. Media communications reported that teachers were seriously concerned about a growing trend of children purchasing traditional medicine called amakhosi that makes them behave strangely. Individual interviews, group discussion and observations were conducted in selected schools in Mdantsane Township, East London. The main aim was to ascertain the meaning of amakhosi, the aim for acquiring them and its significance to those who acquire them. The findings of this study suggest that amakhosi is both a spiritual and a ...

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2012

In Mali, during the 1980s Islamization of Bèlèdugu, the local dismantling of secret societies has been followed by an increase of spirit possession cults (jinèton). Their expansion was made possible by their therapeutic success and by their ability to use their initiatory worship apparatus to convert novice "possessees" to a form of relationship with the jinn that was experienced and understood according to the "possession trance" and "executive possession" models. This text describes and analyses how afflicted villagers acquired the singular ability to experience the relinquishing of their own agency and the concomitant take-over of their body by this kind of invisible agent. It argues that these learning processes rely on the prior existence of a type of declarative and procedural religious knowledge regarding other ritualised forms of possession practised in the region. Moreover, it claims that these learning processes consist in the double triggering of an intuitive mind-body dualism and of neurocognitive modules connected to the Theory of Mind.

There is a prevalent assumption that the phenomenal character of a mental experience is an ontological property existing as part of the fabric of the world. This implies that the problem of explaining the phenomenal property of a mental experience is a metaphysical one. Contrary to this assumption, the present paper argues that phenomenal properties of mental experiences are the results of our epistemological perspectives of the world. Consequently, the paper contends that in developing issues for African Philosophy of Mind, care must, ab 132 Fasiku Gbenga and Oyelakin Richard Taye initio, be taken to avoid the metaphysical pitfalls of considering phenomenal characters or properties of mental states to be part of the fabric of the world.

La Española - Isla de Encuentros / Hispaniola - Island of Encounters

Vodou’s rites and the sacred songs that are sung in the course of their services are in Haitian Creole but they contain many lexical items that stem from West African languages like Fon, Yoruba, Ewe, and Igbo, in addition to West Central African languages like Kikongo. Lexical items with an African origin in Haitian Vodou form a significant part of the religion’s lexicon. The identification of the African lexical sources of the religion allows for hypotheses about the origins of Vodou traditions, sheds light on the history of the French slave trade, and provides clues about the ways in which Vodou took form in colonial Saint-Domingue and independent Haiti. The presence of diverse African cultural and linguistic influences in Haitian Vodou demonstrates the religion’s emergence as a system that syncretized various African traditions into a cohesive whole. This African religious fusion is especially strong in the Asogwe Vodou (Kanzo) tradition, whose stronghold is the Department of the West (i.e. Port-au-Prince and Léogâne) in Haiti. I attempt a preliminary reconstruction of the history of the syncretism of diverse African religious traditions and argue that the “African syncretism” represents the fundamental process that gave rise to Asogwe Vodou in Saint-Domingue and Haiti. I will suggest that the phenomenon of spirit migration within the rites of Haitian Vodou sheds light on the Founder Principle (Mufwene 1996): a few important spirits served in the rites that originate in the Bight of Benin have migrated into the rites of West Central African origin, a process that seems to have taken place in Haiti but draws from a deeper African tradition of spirit-migration between neighboring cultures. This process provides evidence that the religion’s founders from the Bight of Benin exerted a central influence even if pan-African religious inclusivity is a dynamic element of the system they created, Asogwe Vodou.

African Renaissance, 2018

Essentially, in the human kingdom language is regarded not only as a medium of communication, but also as a carrier of culture. As a carrier of culture language is of paramount significance in that it controls the way a people, individually and collectively, perceive themselves in relation to other selves in the world, and initiate and sustain their creativity. Unfortunately, for European cultural hegemony language also became a mechanism for launching strategies of domination and alienation of the African personality. The psycho-social effect of the type of displacement that followed this action, as it is described in this article, especially by Biko (1978), Ngara (1985), Ngugi wa Thiongo (1986) and Pityana (1995), is such that the processes of subjugation and domination did not only have to do with the colonised having to inherit alien syntax or lexicology, but also the ways in which they ultimately perceive self and the world, and how to relate with Europeans in their assumed superior status. In this relation, the main aim of this article is to briefly reflect on the history of the use of language as a mechanism that was used to assert European cultural domination in the space of power relations and the disorientation and marginalization of African indigenous languages and cultural heritage, and ultimately the sabotaged the socioeconomic development of the geo-south The African Renaissance

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 1983

International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Science, 2020

This research seeks to understand the study of orality from the African cosmology, as a way of construction of knowledge and paradigms break the post-colonial process of understanding the multiple languages in human communication. Highlights the need to know the representation elements and symbolic understanding of the trailer within the oral interrelationships. Points to the symbolism of the Bantu people and other peoples in their weaving, which uses signals as a spiritual representation and as a means of social communication, with this oral structure expression of differences in the community. Speaks of the extermination of the many languages of indigenous peoples in Brazil, showing that they were exterminated with the advance of the cities into the woods and, the maintenance of linguistic diversity is maintaining biocultural memory of mankind. As a result of the observations, the research seeks to answer questions related to orality and its structural organization within the religious rituals and the formation of knowledge, linking to what is considered by the Bantu community as sacred.