Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency: Making Religion in Contemporary West Africa

An English translation of a French study of the rituals of the Mande people in West Africa.

Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency shows through rich ethnographic analysis how Mande people in West Africa resort to multiple ritual practices to address an “episteme of doubt.” In the context of armed conflicts and terrorist attacks, climate disruptions, financial crises, and illness, members of “hunter societies," experts who handle certain agentive artifacts, and adepts in a spiritual possession cult deal with a complex past and uncertain future through creative embodied engagement. Formed within and partially against a predominantly Islamic context and the spread of charismatic Christianities, such embodied ways of acting enable these religious specialists to become “virtuous subjects” to change their relations to the world and to themselves. This is an English translation of Corps rituels. La fabrique du religieux en pays mandingue (Mali, Guinée, Côte d'Ivoire).

Agnieszka Kedzierska Manzon is professor and chair of religious anthropology of Sub-Saharan Africa at the École Pratique des Hautes Études-PSL, and senior researcher at the laboratory Institut des Mondes Africains in Paris. She is the author of Chasseurs Mandingues: Violence, Pouvoir et Religion en l'Afrique de l'Ouest and Guérisseurs et féticheurs: médicine traditionnelle en Afrique de l’Ouest.