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This is a book about understanding an African religion that explores the coherence of the religion and the place of ritual in it, but which also looks at the way studying the religion of a very different society from our own throws up questions and helps to particularize the assumptions we make about religion and ideas we have on personhood.
The essays collected in the volume focus upon the Kuria people of East Africa but range well beyond them. Some of the topics explored are: the ordering of society through ritual; 'belief' as a category central to Christianity but misleading in its application to other religions; life-processes rather than the supernatural as the focus for religious understanding; the nature of sacrifice; ideas of the person; cosmology and ritual; conversion; the values of Western individualism as represented in art forms.
Info autore
Malcolm Ruel, D.Phil. (1959), University of Oxford, Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, was until his retirement a University Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University. He has worked in West and East Africa, and has published extensively in the fields of political anthropology and the anthropology of religion.
