Religion in – and as – the Public Sphere: A West African-Based Critique of Critical Theory of Democracy
- Title
- Religion in – and as – the Public Sphere: A West African-Based Critique of Critical Theory of Democracy
- list of authors
- Joseph Hellweg
- Abstract
- 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.
- volume
- 4
- issue
- 2
- page start
- 81
- page end
- 106
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- Anglais
- Type
- Article de revue
- Spatial Coverage
-
Côte d'Ivoire