Charismatic Healers in Contemporary Africa. Deliverance in Muslim and Christian Worlds

Sandra Fancello & Alessandro Gusman (eds.), London, Bloomsbury, 2022

Based on ethnographic studies conducted in several African countries, this volume analyses the phenomenon of deliverance – which is promoted both in charismatic churches and in Islam as a weapon against witchcraft – in order to clarify the political dimensions of spiritual warfare in contemporary African societies.

Deliverance from evil is part and parcel of the contemporary discourse on the struggle against witchcraft in most African contexts.

However, contributors show how its importance extends beyond this, highlighting a pluralism of approaches to deliverance in geographically distant religious movements, which coexist in Africa. Against this background, the book reflects on the responsibilities of Pentecostal deliverance politics within the condition of ‘epistemic anxiety’ of contemporary African societies – to shed light on complex relational dimensions in which individual deliverance is part of a wider social and spiritual struggle.

Spanning across the study of religion, healing and politics, this book contributes to ongoing debates about witchcraft and deliverance in Africa.

 

Sandra Fancello is Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research, France.

Alessandro Gusman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Turin, Italy.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/charismatic-healers-in-contemporary-africa-9781350295445

Table of Contents

Introduction                                                                                                                        Sandra Fancello and Alessandro Gusman

Part I   Deliverance and spiritual insecurity

1 Battling Satan’s minions: Christian-Muslim entanglements in an age of spiritual insecurity                                                                                                         Adeline Masquelier

2 Deliverance Centers, Spiritual Insecurity and a Pragmatic Approach to Healing in Ugandan Pentecostalism                                                               Alessandro Gusman

3 Everyday deliverances in Tanzania                                                                              Martin Lindhardt

Part II   Charismatic healing in the markets of well-being

4 Kapopo, the ‘incurable illness’: Structural violence, social suffering and spiritual healers in the Democratic Republic of Congo                                    Edoardo Quaretta

5 Resisting deliverance: Majini spirits, matriliny and religious change in northern Mozambique                                                                                                     Daria Trentini

6 Churches against hospitals?: Deliverance and healers in the field of public health                                                                                                                                      Sandra Fancello

Part III    Healing and social change

7 Healers versus Prayer Teams: Contesting deliverance and healing among Ugandan Charismatic Catholics                                                                                  Alison Fitchett-Climenhaga

8 Staking out God’s Kingdom: Moral geographies, land and healing in Southern African charismatic Christian farming                                                  Hans Olsson and Karen Lauterbach

9 Possessed by the post-socialist zeitgeist: History, spirits and the problem of generational (dis)continuity in an Ethiopian Orthodox exorcism          Diego Maria Malara and Bethlehem Hailu Dejene

 

The book has been published with the support of Italian public funds MUR-PRIN 2017 Linea A – Genealogies of African Freedoms (GAF) – CUP D14I20000070001 and of the Institut des mondes africains (IMAf, UMR CNRS 8171).

                          

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