ETHNOLOGY

The course is taught in English, awards 6 credits and is optional for all the programmes of the master's degree in Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnolinguistics (ACEL). Additionally, the course is optional for students of the master's degree in "History from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary Age".

This course brings together several ethnographic examples of prophetic movements in Africa and the diaspora to widely reflect on key ethnological issues from the role of the individual religious creator to the ways prophets and their followers offer new understanding of place and time, and of the world in general. The course is thus an introduction to the wider theme of the cultural constructions of time and space through the lenses of prophecy, and it contains epistemological reflections on how to compare in anthropology. The students will finish the course with a range of intellectual skills to think about anthropology and history, the ethnographic method, the technologies of comparison, and the role of individual imagination in the making of culture.

The course is addressed to students of Masters level with some previous backing in anthropology.

This course explores several interlinked topics following the instructor’s own ethnographic explorations in Africanist ethnography. The focus is the anthropology of prophecy as a subfield of anthropology of religion, but also as a nexus between anthropology and history. We will reflect on the role of the individual (as opposed to the Durkheimian community) in the study of religion, on the force some charismatic individuals have to impinge change on society, and on how to study their creativity. We will explore how time and space have been studied in anthropology in order to understand how the study of prophecy (and its cognate concepts such as millennialism, apocalypse, messianism) create new understanding of place and time, and we will also discuss how anthropological categories (e.g., “prophet”) emerge and are useful but also epistemologically risky in comparative enterprises. Finally, the course explores the ethics and anxieties of ethnographic fieldwork in the Africa of today and what these ethics and anxieties can tell us about ethnology in general.

The course will span 30 hours in five weeks, divided in three two-hour sessions each week.
Each lecture (most of them divided into two sessions) is linked to the previous or the next one, but also understood as a single lecture in itself. Each one has two articles or book chapters to be discussed in the class. The first lecture is an open departmental seminar that can be listened to in isolation, but it will also introduce many of the topics (space, time, and Kongo prophecy) later discussed in finer resolution in the course. Students following the course would do well in reading the article by the instructor “The Way of the Prophets: History, Structure, Imagination” (soon to be published in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic History, 2023). The text introduces many of the topics and ethnographic contexts detailed in the lectures.

Programme of the classes:
Lecture 1 (Laboratorio DEA): ““Here it Was (Not)”: An Ethnography of the Indeterminacy of Place”.
Lectures 2 and 3: From Anxiety to Method (and Back): Ethnographic Encounters with African Prophets.
Lecture 4 and 5: The Anthropology of Time, Futures, and Prophecy
Lecture 6 and 7: The Anthropology of Place
Lecture 8 and 9: An Ethnography of Prophetic Imagination in Central Africa
Lecture 10 and 11 Prophecy, Invention, and Creativity
Lecture 12 Self, Biography and (Dis)Possession
Lecture 13: Projection of selected bits of the film “Chasing Shadows: The Revitalization of a Prophetic movement in West Africa” (dir. Roger Canals, 2019). And discussion of R. Sarró and M. Temudo: “In the Shade of Religion: The Works of Prophetic Imagination in West Africa” Social Anthropology.
Lecture 14: The Tekhnè of Ethnological Comparison.
Lecture 15: Thinking with Prophets: Ethnographic collaborations in the days of decolonization.

Lecture 1 (Open Departmental Seminar): ““Here it Was (Not)”: An Ethnography of the Indeterminacy of Place”.
Lectures 2 and 3: From Anxiety to Method (and Back): Ethnographic Encounters with African Prophets.
Discussion texts: Michael Jackson. “From Anxiety to Method: a Reappraisal” in his Excursions (Duke University Press, 2007). 2. Marcio Goldman “The Drums of the Dead and the Drums of the Living”. Prologue (pp. 3-12) to his How Democracy Works: An Ethnographic Theory of Politics. (Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston, 2012).
Lecture 4 and 5: The Anthropology of Time, Futures, and Prophecy
Discussion Texts: 1. Edwin Ardener “The Voice of Prophecy” in The Voice of Prophecy, and other essays, Oxford: OUP, 1989). 2. Van Wolputte, Greiner and Bollig “Futuring Africa” Introduction in African Futures (Greiner, van Wolputte, and Bollig eds. 2022).
Lecture 6 and 7: The Anthropology of Place
Discussion texts: 1. E. Ardener “Remote areas” in The Voice of Prophecy, and other essays, Oxford: OUP, 1989) . 2. Yael. Navaro-Yashin. “The Make-Believe Space” chapter one of The Make Belief Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (2012).
Lecture 8 and 9: An Ethnography of Prophetic Imagination in Central Africa
Discussion texts: MacGaffey: 1. MacGaffey, W. “Cultural Roots of Kongo Prophetism” History of Religions, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Nov., 1977), pp. 177-193 . 2. Janzen, J. “Deep Thought: Structure and Intention in Kongo Prophetism, 1910-1921”. Social Research 46 (1):106-139.
Lecture 10 and 11 Prophecy, Invention, and Creativity
Discussion texts: 1 Sarró: Chapter 8 of Inventing an African Alphabet (Cambridge University Press, 2023) 2. Wagner, Roy. Chapter one of Inventing Culture (the University of Chicago Press, 1975).
Lecture 12 Self, Biography and (Dis)Possession
Discussion texts: 1. Ruy Blanes, “Unstable Biographies: The Ethnography of Memory and Historicity in an Angolan Prophetic Movement” History and Anthropology. 22:1. 2. Arnaud Halloy and Vlad Naumescu “Learning Spirit Possession”, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 77 (2) 2012, 155-176.
Lecture 13: Projection of selected bits of the film “Chasing Shadows: The Revitalization of a Prophetic movement in West Africa” (dir. Roger Canals, 2019). And discussion of R. Sarró and M. Temudo: “In the Shade of Religion: The Works of Prophetic Imagination in West Africa” Social Anthropology.
Lecture 14: The Tekhnè of Ethnological Comparison.
Discussion texts: 1. Fox & Gingrich (eds) 2002. Introduction. In Anthropology, by Comparison. London: Routledge, pp 1-24.
2. Marisol de la Cadena and M. Blaser, “Introduction: Pluriverse: proposal for a world of many worlds” In A World of Many Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, pp. 1-22)
Lecture 15: Thinking with Prophets: Ethnographic collaborations in the days of decolonization.
Discussion text 1. MacGaffey, Wyatt. “The Kongo prophet as social theorist: an essay in meta-anthropology”. Cahiers des religions africaines. 18(35), 1984: 31-44. 2. R. Sarró, “The Way of the Prophets: History, Structure, Imagination” (Hau: Journal of Ethnographic History 2023)

A more complete general bibliography will be provided in class.

Attendance is not mandatory, but attending students are required to attend classes with regularity and participation, intervening and animating the debate on the topics under consideration. If they miss more than 4 lectures, they will automatically be considered non-attending students, unless producing medical or other justification. In each lecture two students will be invited to introduce the two mandatory texts to be discussed that day, generating questions and encouraging discussion among colleagues.
At the end of the course, in the session prior to the final one, the instructor will offer a series of six questions. Students must pick one to write an assessed essay about, using the literature cited in this syllabus and other references provided in the course (or at request of the student). The essay must be delivered three days before the exam day. The instructor will go through the questions in the last session so that they are properly clarified and will provide clear assessment criteria upon which the essays will be assessed and marked. The essay cannot exceed 4,500 words (excluding bibliography but including footnotes). Non-attending students will be asked to write two essays instead of one.

The course is taught through lectures, audio-visual materials, and class discussion.

English

The instructor will be happy to meet students in his office upon appointment previously arranged by e-mail.

written

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Human capital, health, education" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development