398.2
Privileging the Postcolonial: Emerging Epistemologies in the Sociology of African Religions
(Religious Migrants and Marginality in South Africa)
For more than a decade South Africa has seen an enormous influx of migrants from across the continent. Significantly, these migrant communities have visibly impacted the fabric of South African public culture through language, economy, ritual and religion. In the context of South Africa, Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and Nigerian Pentecostals have respectively devised strategies for navigating their distinct national and religious identities. These strategies offer a lens through which to examine how such groups variously mediated their distinct transnational identities through the reconfiguring ritual and liturgical practices. Thus I ask, to what extent do such practices reduce the migrants’ marginality. In particular, I am concerned with how migrants’ religious practices produce new forms of knowledge.
In examining how the embodiment of ritual practice relates to the everyday experience of the migrant, I propose that we turn our gaze and our method to the reading of the migrant body as site of knowledge production in the African context. Situating my sociological practice in the context of postcolonial theory, I draw on the work of Donna Harraway (body in performance and resistance), Bryan Turner (corporealization) and Frantz Fanon (lived experience of the black body) to analyse the various ways in which bodies are regulated, managed and disciplined, and conversely, the ways in which migrant bodies also serve as sites of resistance – sites for the production of new epistemologies.
Quiet significantly, the case studies of the Ethiopian Orthodox and Nigerian Pentecostal migrant communities, point to the multiple ways in which the religious body in ritual performance also ‘act’ in resistance to the muting and governing practices of social exclusion, xenophobia and nationality, while simultaneously forging transnational identities.