Priests, Witches and Power: Popular Christianity after Mission in Southern Tanzania (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 112) - Hardcover

Green, Maia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521621895 ISBN 13: 9780521621892

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2003

Synopsis

This anthropological account of a Catholic community in East Africa reveals how Catholicism came to have widespread acceptance in Southern Tanzania and how this history currently affects practicing Catholics. Maia Green provides a descriptive account of those considering themselves Catholics in Eastern Africa in relationship to Western assumptions of "conversion". She thus encourages a new approach to the consequences of large-scale shifts in religious affiliation. The book also contains information about other ritual practices concerning kinship, aging and death.

About this title

Book Description

This book explains how Christianity came to have widespread acceptance in Eastern Africa. By studying the Catholic practices of a rural community in Tanzania, Maia Green provides an anthropological account of what Catholics actually do in Eastern Africa, and hence what underlies Western assumptions of 'conversion'. This book allows us to rethink what is entailed by large-scale shifts in religious affiliation, and is virtually the only ethnographic account of contemporary Catholic practice in East Africa. It engages with current debates in anthropology about gender, symbolism and religion.

About the Author

MAIA GREEN is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0521621895
• ISBN 13: 9780521621892
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200