William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.

About the Author

William C. Olsen lectures in the African Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Walter E. A. van Beek is Professor of Anthropology of Religion at Tilburg University.

Reviews

The volume's richly detailed case studies build bridges between the anthropology of religion and current anthropological theories of morality, ethics, and social suffering.

* American Ethnologist *

This volume will be widely welcomed as dovetailing with a range of recent treatments, notably by Peter Geschiere and Richard Werbner, of how practical wisdom may consist of identifying apparently familiar others as uncanny threats, or alternately of recognizing distortions of the familiar within oneself.

* Journal of African History *

This timely book adds to knowledge in the area of African religions. . . . [T]he book is valuable in highlighting how complex evil is as expressed and experienced in Africa.

* Reading Religion *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253017475
Author William C. Olsen
Format Paperback
Page Count 402
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 522g