i am mildly interested in this topic, and feel the framing is everything. toyin does a good job below in making an effort to enable those who wish to engage the occult seriously find a way to do so.
the speech that was cited and is being debated demonstrated a terrible way to do so.
i think the question has to be one of framing. if we ask for a discussion that represents "facts," it already presupposes a frame in which the logics/horizon of scientific thought predetermines the discussion. it is always perhaps advisable to set the scientific discourse in relation to the occult, rather than to try to re-present the occult as functioning within a scientific discourse. when the latter happens, i automatically turn off.
just as i do when it is presented as western vs african, or any other dumb binary of that sort.
there are zillions of brilliant thinkers who avoid that trap, the "objective" truth or whatever; or who misrepresent quantum or relativity so as to stretch their actual meanings; or who are desperate to validate african beliefs, and wind up all all all too often by replicating a european paradigm, or a western paradigm, or a scientific paradigm, so as to validate the african horizons of knowledge.
the framing is everything. mbiti's classic text on african religions repeatedly told us african notions of god were just like western ones, just like christianity, and thus had to be equally valid!!!!
come on. how often have we suffered from such approaches.
ok, i would add to the praise for mccall's account of his entry into dibia-ness the incomparable accounts of mouridism, and of bamba, by allen roberton in Sufi in the City, where he also attempts to give account to sufi mysticism, or, more mundanely put, the power of the image of bamba, which you will find, with his robes and face covered, on half of senegal's surfaces. a magnificent account. without any humbug or apologetics.
there is so much to be said on the topic: nuff said for now
ken
well, another word. the framing by birago diop was magical, poetic, incomparable: les morts qui ne sont pas morts, cited over the years repeatedly, demonstrates the way we can resonate, like the spirit in the wind, or all the other images in the poem, inhaling and exhaling a power through the words. this is what we should expect and long for, the master of the word, le maitre de la parole.
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
Sent: Monday, May 6, 2019 10:46:09 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academicsare Culpable
What makes him convinced that witches can see across distances without conventional technology, can harm people at a distance and that spirits rove about in space"?
Witchcraft is a recognized religion in the West, one of the fastest growing perhaps.
There is a lot of overlap between modern Western witchcraft and Yoruba Iyami aje beliefs.
Occultism is big in the West.
A significant no of the claims made for witches in Africa are also made for occultists in the West.
Do Western scholars, including those who are openly witches and occultists, even when writing about about their belief systems in academic contexts, uncritically present those belief systems as factual and as equivalent to scientific technology, as Nwolise seems to be doing?
Relevant examples are Neville Drury, who crowned a lifetime as magical practitioner and writer on magic with his published PhD thesis Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic ( Oxford UP, 2011).
In African Studies, a superb example of critical presentation of religious subjectivity in scholarship is John McCall's "Making Peace with Agwu", his account of his initiation into Igbo dibia, in which he is careful to delineate the fact that he is describing a subjective experience, not objective fact, as he carefully negotiates relationships between the mode of knowing offered by the initiation and the epistemic methods he has been trained in as an anthropologist.
A classic effort to develop an understanding of religion in terms of various accounts of religious experience is Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy, demonstrating a rigorous balance between description and analysis.
At no point in these texts is bald statement of belief without critical contextualization ever presented.
Subjectivity has a place in critical scholarship, even the description of the subjectivity of the scholar, but it needs to be a critical, reflexive subjectivity, not an uncritical one.
That is an ideal, but the closer the scholar is to that ideal, the closer they are to the essence of scholarship in the Western tradition as an effort to understand reality rather than be mastered by reality, including the reality of one's own subjectivity, an approach that empowers the human being in terms of balance between aspects of consciousness, the subjective and the critical, the intellectual and the emotional.
Nwolise needs to explain why he thinks the claims he makes are facts. Are they realities that are part of existence outside one's belief in them? To what degree are these claims about the nature of reality valid beyond their effects, if any beyond the psychological, on those who believe in them?
What makes him convinced that witches can see across distances without conventional technology, can harm people at a distance and that spirits rove about in space"?
The quality of analysis or critical contextualization of one's beliefs represents the quality of one's scholarship.
toyin.
On Mon, 6 May 2019 at 14:40, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:
My concern is not so much about Prof Nwolise but with the logic of my good friend Prof. Ochonu.How can the utterance of one professsor spell doom for the entire academic arena?--
I think Nwolise made the mistake of not substituting the word "angel " for witches and spirits.I don't think he would have escaped the scrutiny of Moses but there are a lot of folks in this forum who would have given him a free pass. In any case, I am disappointed that Nwolise's witches did not turn water into wine.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 6, 2019 8:17:30 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academicsare CulpableI really can't DISAGREE more with your defence of OBC here!
He is simply playing to the gallery of the priests coining it in on the insecurities of Nigerians and trying to fashion how the academia can profit from the gravy train.
He is taking too seriously banter from the likes of TF that academics are in the wrong profession because they are not turning into millionaires(unlike the priesthood) for all the efforts they put into their lives and work.
OAASent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: 'Adeshina Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Date: 06/05/2019 12:30 (GMT+00:00)Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academicsare Culpable
--
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com) Add cleanup rule | More info
I also need to add that Prof. Nwolise must have taken the Comaroff's advice on anthropological research. In "Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction," they advised that the encounters between the global (i.e. the cultural manifestations of neoliberalism) and the local (i.e. the enchantments of witchcraft and pentecostalism) should challenge us "to do ethnography on an 'awkward' scale, on planes that transect the here and now, then and there."
This is good advice that will not scream doom.
Adeshina Afolayan, PhD
Department of Philosophy
University of Ibadan
+23480-3928-8429
--On Monday, May 6, 2019, 1:04:39 AM GMT+1, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
--Question:
Is the professor expressing a belief system or affirming a belief system? If expressing a belief system, there is nothing new in what he has said. If he is affirming it, can you and I deny him of his faith? Pentecostalists tend to believe in magic and witchcraft. There is a clue in one sentence:
"In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic."
Suppose the professor is a practicing Muslim who is observing the Ramadan and he talks about Allah and the rewards of heaven, is this not similar to his ideas on Nigerian religion?
And what about he a Christian, do we accept his faith-derived statement? A fundamentalist Christian can win the Nobel Prize in medicine.
I am not sure that one can win the argument in many parts of Africa that it is possible to disconnect this kind of belief from the work they do. In many Nollywood movies, the medical doctors tell their patients to forget about modern medicine and see the "native doctor". The campuses are littered with sacrifices, and when I was at Ife, one was put in my office.
There must be an examination of his essays and books to conclude on the degree to which his faith as affected his findings. Human beings can "fragment" one part of the brain to write the most brilliant essay today and another part can see witches the next day.
The assumption that human beings are rational all the time is actually not correct. Indeed, they are not, in the secularist understanding of faith.
In any case, I hope the professor is reading this so that he can teach Moses a lesson by breaking his two legs!!!
TF
From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, May 5, 2019 at 4:56 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable
This message is from an external sender. Learn more about why this matters.
I am reading Professor Ebenezer Obadare's brilliant new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018), and I came across the quote below, one of those he advances as touchstones for his central argument.
It is not lifted from a sermon or a facebook post. It is not extracted from a theological or hermeneutical document.
On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen of Facebook Nigeriana, it is an excerpt from the inaugural professorial lecture of a certain Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise, a Professor of Political Science (a social science that teaches logic, empirical proof, rigor, verifiability, and rational analysis) at the University of Ibadan.
This is the most important lecture of his academic career, delivered in a university to an academic audience. And yet if I did not know its context I would have surmised that this was a sermon delivered in one of the parishes of my home church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God.
Here is an academic lending his professorial weight to the Nigerian pastime of spiritualizing sociopolitical, security, and economic problems--our culture of conflating piety and politics, or neglecting political action for pietistic escapism.
We try to pray away our problems when we should be acting against them. Now, our professors who should know better are uncritically legitimizing and trying to intellectualize this culture of fatalistic spiritualization of secular, practical problems.
Farooq Kperogi is right; our problem is not just leadership but also a national scourge of illiteracy (literal and figurative) and irrationality. How can a country whose professors profess such nonsense make progress or solve its problems?
And how can a people challenge their oppressors and tormentors in power when even their professors subscribe to such drivel, such spiritual causality for everything, including election rigging, bad governance and incompetent leadership?
Read and weep for what remains of the diminishing country called Nigeria.
"When we want to watch our television, we switch it on with our remote control by pressing a button. Then we can stay in Ibadan and watch a football match being played in Athens, Sydney or Paris. In the same way, a witch stays in her house in Lokoja or any other town, stirs water in a pot, or conjurs(sic) a mirror, and can monitor any targeted person or object in London, Athens, or Sydney. In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic. A witch can also stay in South Africa or the United Kingdom and break the leg of an effigy spiritually programmed to represent a person domiciled in the United States, and the person's leg will break mysteriously there. The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual. There are spirits attached to walls, plants, leaves, found in bushes, on people's clothes, etc.; and there are roving spirits that move about especially between 12 noon and 2.00 pm, and at night. Some of these spirits are benevolent, while others are malevolent. It is the malevolent spirits that constitute threats to humans. They can project sickness into people's bodies, change people's star or destiny, or change the sex of a baby in the womb, remove the baby completely or turn it into a stone, or tortoise, snail, horse, snake, or a disabled [person]. If it were possible to carve out a block of the air for spiritual analysis, we can find several arrows, and many other dangerous pollutants, spiritual weapons of mass destruction flying in various directions 24 hours of the day."
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment