Religion and Society in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia

"For anyone interested in the meaning and value of religion in the lives of ordinary people in Sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, this book is an extraordinarily important and valuable one. Rakodi lucidly weaves together a deeply captivating range of insights of how religion intersects with the everyday lives and practices of people in the most religious areas of the world. This book will be immensely helpful for undergraduate and graduate-level instruction as well as researchers in the field, and it demonstrates that while religious change remains arguably the most profound and far-reaching influence on social change in Sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, it is perhaps the least empirically researched and understood. It also shows that to understand other forms of social change such as economic and political change, lived religion is sine qua non: no one who thinks about these processes of change can ignore this book!" -- Asonzeh Ukah, Associate Professor and Director, Research Institute for Christianity and Society in Africa [RICSA], the University of Cape Town, South Africa

"This book proposes and elaborates some of the basic knowledge that should be an integral part of the analytic framework for much development work – what we call, often too loosely, 'religious literacy'. Such a framework, Rakodi argues, includes a basic understanding of beliefs and practices, organization, and ways in which religions relate to society more broadly, and her analysis underscores the complexity and dynamism of each of these categories. The vital roles that religious teachings and expectations play in understandings of wide-ranging norms are linked to the ways in which they shape world views. In short, this thought-provoking work introduces a vital and demanding topic. The lessons it offers have relevance far beyond the development policy field." -- Katherine Marshall, Senior Fellow, Berkley Center