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Evil in Africa

Encounters with the Everyday

Walter E A Van Beek editor William C Olsen editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Indiana University Press

Published:30th Aug '15

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Evil in Africa cover

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.

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 Religi

ISBN: 9780253017475

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 522g

402 pages