Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes

Abstract

The contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and communities. Among other topics, they explore Masowe Apostolic Christianity in relation to experiences of displacement in Harare, Zimbabwe; Muslim identity, belonging, and the global ummah in Ghana; crime, emotions, and conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in Cape Town; and spiritual cleansing in a Congolese branch of a Japanese religious movement. In so doing, the contributors demonstrate how the social and material living conditions of African cities generate diverse affective forms of religious experiences in ways that foster both localized and transnational paths of emotional knowledge.

Biographical Note

Prof. Dr. Marian Burchard (SFB 1199 & Leipzig University)

Marian Burchard is Professor of Sociology at Leipzig University. As a cultural sociologist, he is interested in how diversity shapes institutions and everyday life. His research engages with the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, urban sociology and theories of modernity, and draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods. He is especially interested in how notions of diversity influence social life and public space through nation state regulations, law and urban policy. He is the author of Regulatin Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in theb Secular West (Rutgers UP, 2020) and Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2015)

PD Dr. Astrid Bochow (Göttingen University)

Astrid Bochow is teaching and is supervising students at our institute since 2010. She researches on family relations, health and youth among middle class urbanites in Gaborone, Botswana (2009 – 2011) and Kumasi, Ghana (2004 – 2006). She habilitated at the Social Science Faculty at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in 2019 and did her PhD at Bayreuth University. Her research has been funded and supported by renowned institutes and funding bodies such as the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, the cluster of excellence „Culture and Integration“ of Konstanz University and the Germany Research Council. She was a lecture and researcher at our institute from 2014 till 2018, first in a function as a lecturer of the BA Social Science and later (since 2015) as the principal investigator (eigene Stelle) of the DGF funded research project „Christian and religious activism“ (now directed by Prof. Dr. Roman Loimeier).