A key issue for the anthropological study of religion – especially of large world religions with long-lasting textual and institutional traditions – has been how to account for the complex duality of religion as an everyday practice and a normative doctrine. The problem is evident and well-known. If we ask people to explain how they understand belief, ritual, life and death, and if we look at the way such issues are presented and debated by experts, institutions, authorities and traditions of learning, we commonly gain an image of a specific religious tradition as a comprehensive metaphysical, moral and spiritual order. In such...

In Senegal and Gambia, as well as in most other African societies, divination forms an important element of religious praxis. Despite of the often private character of divinatory consultation in Senegalese and Gambian society, in most accounts of West African Islamic religious life, the importance of divination and other forms of ritual consultation is acknowledged as a social fact both by the members of these societies as well as by outside observers.¹ In this regard, J. Spencer Trimingham’s statement that ‘the part played by divination cannot be overestimated’ is not exceptional (Trimingham 1959: 119). Similar statements emphasizing the importance of...

Among the Muslim population of the West African state of Burkina Faso, there is a commonly accepted notion that all persons calling themselves Muslims should regularly perform the five daily prayers. In Bobo Dioulasso, the second largest town of Burkina Faso, a country where religious conversion is not uncommon (Langewiesche 2003) and where there is no distinctive Islamic dress code, the question‘I bi seli wa?’(Jula for ‘Do you pray?’) is often used to distinguish a Muslim from a non-Muslim.¹ However, many of my Muslim informants and friends, as well as members of my host family do not pray...

In this chapter I explore the possible reasons for the emergence of everyday ambiguous and relational behaviours among a mostly male Chinese settlement in the province of Manitoba, Canada from 1911 to 1949 when the last Chinese dynasty had ended and the Chinese Nationalist Party (Zhongguo Guomindang) became the de facto government for Chinese living within and outside China.¹ There were very few Chinese women and children in early settlements because of racist immigration laws that were in place beginning in 1885, when all Chinese immigrants, upon entry to Canada were required to pay a $50 head tax. In 1900,...

The above statement by David Schneider seems to perfectly capture the spirit of this book, and it quite appropriately sums up the approach to religion that is experienced in Apiao, the small island in southern Chile to which this chapter is devoted.

In her important review of the complex relationship between anthropological enquiry and Christianity, Fenella Cannell writes that the questions that anthropologists ought to be asking themselves are, ‘what, in any situation is Christianity, and how can one possibly discern its lineaments from that of the social context in which it lives’ (2006: 13).

Many scholars of communities which...

The process of sainthood-making is usually analysed in connection with the notion of popular religion. However, different kinds of hierarchies hide behind this notion, as emphasized by Liza Debevec and Samuli Schielke in the introduction: not only the pure doctrine of the specialists as opposed to the syncretistic practices of the ordinary people, but also class relations, political power and, as I wish to add, gender hierarchies. My purpose in the present chapter is to analyse the social dynamics at work in one case of sainthood-making: far from being a pure expression of mass veneration, the phenomenon is characterized by...

In Catholic Christianity, officially recognized public cults can only be paid to the dead. Nevertheless, it is very often the case that a dead saint’s cult springs from a reputation for sanctity in life. Insofar as they eliminate the need for priestly mediation, living saints pose a problem to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which fears the development of personalized cults (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 7). The institutional church’s attempts to control these saints’ charisma are not always successful (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 110) during their lifetime, mainly due to their great popularity. After their death, control is more easily regained, primarily,...

Sprinkled, at times heavily, throughout the Islamic and Gregorian calendars, Egypt hosts countless saint festivals across the country every year. They take place in urban centres, villages, oases, convents, and even shrines remote from any permanent human settlement, such as that held for Abul-Hassan Al-Shazli in the arid Red Sea mountains. These events are calledmawalid(sg.mulid), a word derived from the classical Arabicmawlidmeaning birthday, although they typically commemorate the death, rather than birth, of a revered pious figure. In the Islamic context, which applies to the vast majority of such festivals and is the focus of...

As this chapter goes to press in early 2012, Egypt is in a state of transition following the January 25 revolution. Some of what is written in the present tense in the following pages already belongs to the past. I have decided not to rewrite the chapter (originally written between 2008 and 2010) to make it up to date. Things are still changing too quickly to do that. The reader should therefore bear in mind the historicity of this chapter, describing not a lasting condition but rather a unique momentum in a changing world.

What can already be said with...

The modern world was not supposed to look the way it does in this book. Modern men and women were not – still at this late date (which means this many years from the European Enlightenment[s]) – supposed to be finding saints beneath the soil of a Greek island, or bringing their needs to a deceased southern Italian holy figure who had for years soaked his sacerdotal clothing with blood from miraculous wounds in his hands, feet and side (cloth cherished now by his devout as precious relics), nor were they supposed to be dancing in the alleys of Egyptian cities to...