Expatriate Encounters with African Religion in Kenya

FAIN: FT-52778-04

Janet Susan McIntosh
Brandeis University (Waltham, MA 02453-2728)

I am applying for an NEH Summer Stipend to fund two months of research on British expatriate encounters with African religions in Malindi, Kenya. This research plan emerges from my previous fieldwork on ethnicity and religion among Swahili and Mijikenda peoples, when I found that British residents occasionally participated in local religious practices. I plan to return to study the ways in which British expatriates interact with local cosmologies, the ambivalence with in which they narrate these experiences, and the ways in which these close encounters with African religion affect expatriates’ perceptions of and relationships with locals, whom they generally know as domestic staff and low-wage laborers.

Associated Products

"Going Bush": Black Magic, White Ambivalence, and Boundaries of Belief in Postcolonial Kenya (Article)
Title: "Going Bush": Black Magic, White Ambivalence, and Boundaries of Belief in Postcolonial Kenya
Author: Janet McIntosh
Abstract: This article examines the ways in which contemporary white Kenyans know about, talk about and sometimes interact with what they call 'witchcraft' and 'magic' in ways they find deeply discomfiting. Although white kenyans are at pains to justify their postcolonial advantages in Kenya in terms of a level-headed and pragmatic kind of personhood, many of them interact with indigenous religious ontologies more than ever, sometimes as manipulators of the occult and sometimes as its fear-stricken victims. Because of these contradictions between ideology and experience, white narratives about 'witchcraft' and 'magic' are frequently riddled with tensions and equivocations. Many white Kenyans find creative rhetorical strategies for dealing with these tensions, strategies that sometimes fly in the face of simple models of 'belief ' as a commitment to truth value by treating it as a state of vulnerability that can lay one open to mysterious ontological forces.
Year: 2006
Primary URL: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/157006606778941922
Primary URL Description: Brill website
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Religion in Africa
Publisher: Brill

---