Calling a Trickster Deity a “Bad” Name in Order to Hang It? Deconstructing Indigenous African Epistemologies Within Global Religious Maps of the Universe

Abstract

The historiography of African religions and spiritualities provides a significant template for understanding and deconstructing indigenous epistemologies within global academic studies. The chapter seeks to answer how and to what extent indigenous religious epistemologies make sense in African ritual cosmos. I draw specific examples from indigenous religious forms and new African Christianities to show how indigenous religious knowledge systems are hardly static paradigms. They are dynamic and highly adaptive, with change often driven by the quest for sharp reflexivity, creativity and innovation. Scholars often ignore and underrate the internal religious dynamics that largely account for their public visibility, mobility and social relevance in contradistinction to external impulses. Any analysis and interpretation of existing or changing cultural patterns and societal institutions cannot claim validity without full recognition of the important role indigenous knowledge systems play, a fact largely discarded by colonial knowledge hegemony. Explaining African spiritualities and religious life in western categories can be informing, illuminating and offering useful insights; just as it can be misleading and obscuring. I contend that an understanding of indigenous religious epistemologies is quintessential for coming to grips with the relationship between the “old” and the “new” more than some of the more grandiose theories of globalization and post-modernity.