The Politics of Hope: Churches and the Weaving of Society in Post-War Angola
The Politics of Hope: Churches and the Weaving of Society in Post-War Angola
Religion (especially Christian religion) in Angolan society has reached a centrality that would have been inconceivable just some years before the end of the war. Luanda is today one of the cities with more churches in the African continent, and religion is getting more and more present on the entire national territory. Despite the fact that some of these churches developed already in the 1990, recently they have ‘exploded' in the public sphere in such a massive way that even within this new project we cannot attempt but to scratch the surface. Yet, we are confident that we can do substantial research and reach some conclusions about the place religion has in creating a new society in Angola, but also (let us not be too naïve about it) in maintaining some structural fissures that lay underneath the healing process of the national community.
We want to explore some of the tensions already sensed in our fieldwork by analyzing not only the sociological dynamics within religious groups, but also the temporal and national imaginations that religions put to work both in the making of modern subjectivities and in the level of citizenry making. Indeed, one of the epistemological pitfalls of both anthropology and religious study is that -for legitimate reasons, no doubt- they are very much ‘memory' oriented. In our project, we want to bring into the analysis of religion and of society the role of political and religious hope and expectation. Among many other things, religion is about imagining a possible (or maybe impossible? but in any case conceivable) future and this proves to be extremely important in postwar situations such as the one Angola is now experiencing.
For almost tautological reasons, this imagination of the future is particularly relevant in the study of prophetic churches, such as the ones we studied (Tokoism and kimbanguism) which are very intimately linked to the historical memory of the kingdom of Kongo. This makes the case study of these (and other prophetic churches in Angola) particularly interesting: to what extent are these churches proposing alternative historical imaginations and ‘inconsistent temporalities' (Rowlands REF) vis-à-vis the modernizing project of the Nation State? What role does the recent UNESCO patrimonialization of Mbanza Kongo play into it? How does the state react to the presence of churches whose historical roots question the very essence of an Angolaness?
Churches in today's Angola collaborate in different ways in the making of a public sphere. Given the tension we already observed within our churches between Kongo vs. Angolan tendencies (whence our title ‘kingdom and nation'), we concluded that a productive way to tackle the issue would be to ethnographically compare Mbanza Kongo and Luanda, studying the role of several churches (prophetic, Pentecostal, and of course the mainstream Catholic) in these two settings. This also cuts our sample along a rural/urban divide, thus allowing (though very prudently) for some generalization about what goes on ‘in Angola'.
PTDC/CS-ANT/112897/2009 - Financed by FCT
Religion,
Angola,
Hope,
Post-War
Religion (especially Christian religion) in Angolan society has reached a centrality that would have been inconceivable just some years before the end of the war. Luanda is today one of the cities with more churches in the African continent, and religion is getting more and more present on the entire national territory. Despite the fact that some of these churches developed already in the 1990, recently they have ‘exploded' in the public sphere in such a massive way that even within this new project we cannot attempt but to scratch the surface. Yet, we are confident that we can do substantial research and reach some conclusions about the place religion has in creating a new society in Angola, but also (let us not be too naïve about it) in maintaining some structural fissures that lay underneath the healing process of the national community.
We want to explore some of the tensions already sensed in our fieldwork by analyzing not only the sociological dynamics within religious groups, but also the temporal and national imaginations that religions put to work both in the making of modern subjectivities and in the level of citizenry making. Indeed, one of the epistemological pitfalls of both anthropology and religious study is that -for legitimate reasons, no doubt- they are very much ‘memory' oriented. In our project, we want to bring into the analysis of religion and of society the role of political and religious hope and expectation. Among many other things, religion is about imagining a possible (or maybe impossible? but in any case conceivable) future and this proves to be extremely important in postwar situations such as the one Angola is now experiencing.
For almost tautological reasons, this imagination of the future is particularly relevant in the study of prophetic churches, such as the ones we studied (Tokoism and kimbanguism) which are very intimately linked to the historical memory of the kingdom of Kongo. This makes the case study of these (and other prophetic churches in Angola) particularly interesting: to what extent are these churches proposing alternative historical imaginations and ‘inconsistent temporalities' (Rowlands REF) vis-à-vis the modernizing project of the Nation State? What role does the recent UNESCO patrimonialization of Mbanza Kongo play into it? How does the state react to the presence of churches whose historical roots question the very essence of an Angolaness?
Churches in today's Angola collaborate in different ways in the making of a public sphere. Given the tension we already observed within our churches between Kongo vs. Angolan tendencies (whence our title ‘kingdom and nation'), we concluded that a productive way to tackle the issue would be to ethnographically compare Mbanza Kongo and Luanda, studying the role of several churches (prophetic, Pentecostal, and of course the mainstream Catholic) in these two settings. This also cuts our sample along a rural/urban divide, thus allowing (though very prudently) for some generalization about what goes on ‘in Angola'.
PTDC/CS-ANT/112897/2009 - Financed by FCT
