id 5212 Url https://islam.zmo.de/s/afrique_ouest/item/5212 Modèle de ressource Journal article Classe de ressource bibo:AcademicArticle Titre Religion in – and as – the Public Sphere: A West African-Based Critique of Critical Theory of Democracy Editeur https://islam.zmo.de/s/afrique_ouest/item/25032 Date 2020 Type https://islam.zmo.de/s/afrique_ouest/item/8475 Identifiant https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q115705838 Q115705838 iwac-reference-0000132 Langue https://islam.zmo.de/s/afrique_ouest/item/8322 Résumé This essay is an ethnographic response to Habermas’s estimation of the place of religion in the political public sphere. It examines a network of initiated hunter-healers, called dozos, in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. Since the 1990s, they have drawn on their ritual practices to integrate themselves into Ivoirian public life, often to controversial effect. Their success in this regard, mitigated as it has been, has seen them transform into semi-official security agents and, subsequently, rebel soldiers. These developments follow a history of participation in a precolonial, West African public sphere that oriented dozos toward difference, an openness that continues to infuse their rituals. Because dozos drew on ritual practice to define their security-related and military roles, they introduced religion into the Ivoirian public sphere in unexpected and innovative ways. But because their ritual practices have long mediated their devotion to both Islam and their professed encounters with spirits and other invisible forces in the forest, dozos’ so-called “religion” contains within it dialogical elements that have contributed to broadening the political public sphere in Côte d’Ivoire. Their activities ultimately inspire an alternative definition of religion that concedes the possibility of the public sphere’s encompassment within religion as much as religion’s potential integration into the public sphere. Couverture spatiale https://islam.zmo.de/s/afrique_ouest/item/298 Liste des auteurs https://islam.zmo.de/s/afrique_ouest/item/1755 Numéro 2 Dernière page 106 Première page 81 Volume 4 --