Religious Movements in Africa as Expression of the Sacral Trauma: The Explanatory Approach Reconsidered

• Authors: Grzegorz Kaczyński
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Religious movements are the one type of social visible expressions in the process of the formation of modern societies in sub-Saharan Africa. This article is focussed exclusively on those religious movements of post-Christianity and Afro-Christianity orientation which grew out in an Afro-European context. In spite of numerous theoretical proposals, the explanatory issue of African religious movements is still an open epistemological question. A critical analysis of this proposal leads to the conclusion that an explanatory model should be formulated from an interdisciplinary perspective and it should be appropriated in the first to the African specificity of the phenomenon. In other words, it should be an Afro-model. The unit-idea of the model proposed in this essay follows these prepositions and stands on the concept of sacral trauma elaborated as an expression of discourse of trauma (N. Smelser, P. Sztompka), as a particular configuration of cultural trauma. This is because sacral trauma is linked to a social metamorphosis of crisis that concerns the sacral order or sacral rules that are at the basis of a culture; the sacral trauma finds its congenial configuration particularly in the context of sacral society. In fact, traditional African societies are concrete expressions of the sacral type of society. Consequently it leads us to the consideration that religious movements in Africa represent an expression of sacral trauma in which traditional African society (the ethnic society) happens to exist because of culture clash and modernization. In summary, we can affirm that in a sense the religiosity of the movements corresponds and responds to the sacredness of the traditional cosmos; it is a suggestion of reproduction and reconstruction in a sacred sense in an environment in which the sacred takes on a dominant role in the definition of reality.

• Publisher: Instytut Kultur Śródziemnomorskich i Orientalnych PAN
• Journal: Hemispheres. Studies on Cultures and Societies
• Year: 2012
• Issue: 27
• Pages: 5-19

Contributors

author

Grzegorz Kaczyński