The six articles published in Shrines in Africa focus on the practices that accompany the creation of—and various cultural manifestations and manipulations appended to—African sacred focal points (shrines). The perceivable or temporal evidence (especially in archaeology, where the physical is often the only evidence), and ethnographic research form the basis for the researchers’ interpretation. Whereas speculation is commonplace in archaeology, ethnographic information based on multiple interviews tends to be more conclusive. It becomes clear however from the essays presented in the book that contradictory information and a plurality of explanations challenge the notion of earth and ancestral shrines as “fixed” entities with accepted ongoing practices.
In his essay on the Kokomba of Ghana, Dawson writes that behavior contradictory to statements by practitioners “demonstrates the flexibility and dynamic nature of the many earth shrine rituals of the Voltaic people....The religious traditions of many of the Voltaic peoples are very much cosmologies in the making…[they] are in every way unsystematic and their contained meanings, references, and usages continually change and adapt to new social contexts” (84). The archaeological record leads to similar conclusions: “shrines are created, franchised, evolve, mutate, or are neglected or reactivated” (Insoll, Kankpeyeng, and Maclean, 62). Writing about the Dagara and other groups, Carola Lentz states that “the negotiable rapport between the various shrine and cults allowed ritual hierarchies to adapt to changing constellations of power” (84). In a film released in 1988 about the Haya of Tanzania, The Tree of Iron, by Peter O’Neill and Frank Muhly, the producer Peter Schmidt, an archaeologist, concludes that shrines were such important symbols of power that successive political dynasties appropriated the shrines’ local oral history to validate their political hegemony. It thus seems that in both West and East Africa, shrines were major symbols and forces in political movements.
The inclusion of analytical archaeological data is welcome, but I found it disappointing that in a collection of essays featuring the word “Africa” in its title, four of the six articles are based on research conducted in Ghana; a fifth contribution compares shrines in both Ghana and Burkina Faso; and the last article deals with saints in Morocco. Though the comparative approach is always welcome, a title indicating the geographically limited range of the book’s articles would have been appropriate.
The inclusion of the article on Moroccan saints is puzzling: this is the only article with a location outside of sub-Saharan Africa and it offers data on a “major” religion (Islam) associated with spiritual—and architectural—canons that are difficult to compare to both the archaeological and the ethnographic records for sub-Saharan Africa. Though no one will deny that major religions have impacted religious practices on the entire continent, there has been an accepted—and historically-based—justification for considering sub-Saharan Africa as having more in common internally than with the areas bordering the Mediterranean. In addition, the Moroccan shrines are dedicated to specific individuals considered virtuous or remarkable, whereas the referents for earth and ancestral shrines are lineage ancestors and/or spiritual forces marking ethnic identity and/or territorial claims.
The articles included present some interesting information on traveling earth shrines as well as on the use of shrines for territorial control. The juxtaposition of both ethnographic and archaeological data and interpretations makes this book a good contribution to cross-disciplinary perspectives.
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[Review length: 542 words • Review posted on October 27, 2009]