AIDS, religious enthusiasm and spiritual insecurity in Africa

Abstract

The connection between the AIDS epidemic and the efflorescence of religious ‘enthusiasm’ (construed in both classical and contemporary senses) in Africa in recent decades is best understood, this paper argues, by reference to a concept of ‘spiritual insecurity’. The article offers a general description of the condition of spiritual insecurity and argues that it is best studied within a relational realist paradigm. The article presents a critique of the concept of ‘belief’ as commonly used in the social science of religion, arguing instead for an opening of the study of social relations to include the universe of relations within which people experience the world, including their relations with entities such as spiritual beings that might otherwise be considered virtual.

Keywords:

• AIDS
• religion
• Africa
• spiritual insecurity
• religious enthusiasm
• belief

Notes

1. Space precludes a comprehensive review of the literatures relating to healing and religion here. For a good recent survey of literature pertaining to religion, see Harri Englund's introduction to Englund (2011). And for a good recent survey of the literature on healing in Africa, see Manglos and Trinitapoli (2011).

2. It is beyond the scope of this paper to why suffering is experienced as harm. Suffice it to say that the ethnographic record of Africa, exemplified by the enormous literature on witchcraft, is replete with examples showing that this is the case. For a survey of this literature, see Moore and Sanders (2001).

3. Space precludes detailed critique of the large number of publications that are drawn on here. Instead I commend the reader to a single paper, which exemplifies the errors catalogued below. See Kalichman and Simbayi (2004).

4. For a more detailed elaboration, see (Ashforth 2005; Pt 2).

5. For a discussion of an effort to translate the action of ARVs into ‘culturally relevant’ terms, see Ashforth and Nattrass (2005).

6. Nowhere is this more evident than in attitudes to the enormously successful Brazilian church the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. See Van Wyk (2011).

7. For a classic ethnographical description of what can be accomplished in dreams, see Evans-Pritchard (1937).

8. For a study of these ‘herbs’ in Zimbabwe, see Goebel (2002).

9. This period has also seen major political and economic transformations in Africa such as structural adjustment and democratisation, which have also impacted on religious life, but I shall not touch on these here. For a good account of the more general field, see Ellis and Ter Haar (2004).