Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part One EATING/BEING EATEN
- Part Two TERROR AND HEALING IN TOORO
- 5 Crisis and the Rise of Occult Powers
- 6 The Catholic Church and Religious Pluralism in Tooro
- 7 The Uganda Martyrs Guild
- 8 The Guild's Crusades
- Part Three THE CANNIBAL IN COLONIAL MISSIONARY ENCOUNTERS
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Crisis and the Rise of Occult Powers
from Part Two - TERROR AND HEALING IN TOORO
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part One EATING/BEING EATEN
- Part Two TERROR AND HEALING IN TOORO
- 5 Crisis and the Rise of Occult Powers
- 6 The Catholic Church and Religious Pluralism in Tooro
- 7 The Uganda Martyrs Guild
- 8 The Guild's Crusades
- Part Three THE CANNIBAL IN COLONIAL MISSIONARY ENCOUNTERS
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In recent decades, religion and even the ‘religious’ have resurfaced in various parts of the world with unprecedented force. Numerous religious groups – Islamic as well as Christian – have entered the political arena challenging the notion that secular society and the modern nation state can provide the moral fibre that unites national communities (Juergensmeyer 2000:225). Responding to the forces of globalization, the liberalization of the market, the decline of states and the rise of new media, political theologies have emerged that strongly counter the Western idea of the separation of church and state and the concept of religion as a private, individual matter.
The ‘return of the religious’ has become the object of a complex debate among philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians of religion and anthropologists (de Vries and Weber 2001; de Vries 2008; Meyer and Moors 2006), reinforcing the view that the more or less uncontested narrative of a secular modernity had apparently obscured the fact that in most historical formations, the political in various ways had been contingent upon the authority or explicit sanction of a dominant religion. The clear-cut separation between the domains of the religious and of the state has become problematic and instead the interconnectedness and complementarities of both domains have been placed in the foreground (Derrida 2001).
Among anthropologists working in Africa, the idea of ‘a return of the religious’, however, was shifted more into issues such as ‘the actuality of evil’ and ‘the rise of occult forces’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Resurrecting CannibalsThe Catholic Church, Witch-Hunts and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda, pp. 69 - 84Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011