Occult Economies, Demonic Gifts, and Ontological Alterity: An Evangelical Biography of Evil and Redemption in Rural South Sudan
In: Journal of Religion in AfricaSearch for other papers by Ryan Joseph O’Byrne in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
This paper recounts the autobiography of an evangelical South Sudanese pastor who has been under water to the land of demons, telling of cosmic flows of persons, power, and wealth between times, places, and dimensions. Although it builds on stories circulating across Africa since colonial times and emphasises paradigms found throughout the occult economies literature, what is significant about this autobiography is that it relates the narrator’s own experience. This is important because although these occult elements reference global processes, the narrative given is as much about the local as it is the global. Likewise, it as much spiritual as it is material or economic. My analysis thus goes beyond the occult economy or its material effects and instead demonstrates the ontological alterity and spiritual meaningfulness of such incursions and attempts to push the envelope of academic analyses and interpretations relating to the diverse complexity of religious experience, African or otherwise.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Allen, Tim. 2015. ‘Vigilantes, Witches and Vampires: How Moral Populism Shapes Social Accountability in Northern Uganda’. International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 22.3, 360–386.
-
Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
-
Apter, Andrew. 2012. ‘Matrilineal Motives: Kinship, Witchcraft, and Repatriation among Congolese Refugees’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18.1, 22–44.
-
Bonhomme, Julien. 2012. ‘The Dangers of Anonymity: Witchcraft, Rumor, and Modernity in Africa’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2.2, 205–233.
-
Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1999. ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony’. American Ethnologist 26.2, 279–303.
-
Dalfovo, Albert Titus. 1998. ‘The Divinity among the Lugbara’. Journal of Religion in Africa 28.4, 468–493.
-
De Boeck, Filip. 2005. ‘The Divine Seed: Children, Gift and Witchcraft in the Democratic Republic of Congo’. In A. Honwana and F. De Boeck (eds.), Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa. Oxford: James Currey, 188–214.
-
De Waal, Alex. 2015. The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.
-
Douglas, Mary. 1990. ‘Foreword: No Free Gifts’. In Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge, ix–xxiii.
-
Eni, Emmanuel. 1987. Delivered from the Powers of Darkness. Nairobi: Kijabe Printing Press, Script Union of Kenya and Nigeria.
-
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1956. Nuer Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.
-
Finnström, Sverker. 2015. ‘War Stories and Troubled Peace: Revisiting some Secrets of Northern Uganda’. Current Anthropology 56, Supplement 12, S222-S230.
-
Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
-
Geschiere, Peter. 2013. Witchcraft, Intimacy and Trust: Africa in Comparison. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
-
Girling, Frank Knowles. 1960. The Acholi of Uganda. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
-
Godbout, Jacques T. 1998. ‘The Moral of the Gift’. The Journal of Socio-Economics 27.4, 557–570.
-
Grove, E.T.N. 1919. ‘Customs of the Acholi’. Sudan Notes and Records 2.3, 157–182.
-
Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
-
Jackson, Michael. 1996. Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
-
Jackson, Michael. 2002. Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.
-
Kenny, Michael G. 1977. ‘The Powers of Lake Victoria’. Anthropos 72.5/6, 717–733.
-
La Fontaine, Jean S. 1959. The Gisu of Uganda. London: International African Institute.
-
Laidlaw, James. 2000. ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6.4, 617–634.
-
Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1954. ‘The Shilluk of the Upper Nile’. In Daryl Forde (ed.), African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 138–163.
-
Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1961. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
-
Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge.
-
Meyer, Birgit. 1995. ‘“Delivered from the Powers of Darkness”: Confessions of Satanic Riches in Christian Ghana’. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 65.2, 236–255
-
Meyer, Birgit. 1998. ‘“Make a Complete Break with the Past”: Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse’. Journal of Religion in Africa 28.3, 316–349.
-
Middleton, John. 1965. The Lugbara of Uganda. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
-
Moore, Henrietta L., and Todd Sanders. 2001. Magical Interpretations and Material Realities: An Introduction’. In H.L. Moore and Todd Sanders (eds.), Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft, and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge, 1–27.
-
Niehaus, Isak A. 2005. ‘Witches and Zombies of the South African Lowveld: Discourse, Accusations and Subjective Reality’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11.2, 191–210.
-
O’Byrne, Ryan Joseph. 2015. Deities, Demons, and Outsiders: The Cosmological Dimensions of (In)Security and (In)Justice in Pajok, South Sudan. London: London School of Economics, JSRP Research Paper 21.
-
O’Byrne, Ryan Joseph. 2017. Becoming Christian: Personhood and Moral Cosmology in Acholi South Sudan. PhD Thesis: University College London.
-
Parry, Jonathan. 1986. ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’. Man N.S. 21.3, 453–473.
-
Piot, Charles. 1999. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
-
Porter, Holly E. 2016. After Rape: Violence, Justice and Social Harmony in Uganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Pype, Katrien. 2016. ‘Blackberry Girls and Jesus’s Brides: Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity and the (Im-)Moralization of Urban Femininities in Contemporary Kinshasa’. Journal of Religion in Africa 46: 390–416.
-
Pype, Katrien. 2017. ‘Branhamist Kindoki: Ethnographic Notes on Connectivity, Technology, and Urban Witchcraft in Contemporary Kinshasa’. In K. Rio, M. MacCarthy, and R. Blanes (eds.), Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 115–144.
-
Rio, Knut. 2010. ‘Handling Sorcery in a State System of Law: Magic, Violence and Kastom in Vanuatu’. Oceania 80.2, 183–197.
-
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-
Sahlins, Marshall. 1987. Islands of History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
-
Sahlins, Marshall. 1997. ‘The Spirit of the Gift’. In A.D. Schrift (ed.), The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. New York: Routledge, 70–99.
-
Seligman, C.G., and B.Z. Seligman. 1932. Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
-
Stewart, Pamela J., and Andrew Strathern. 2004. Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Stroeken, Koen. 2010. Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft. New York: Berghahn Books.
-
Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
-
Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge.
-
Victor, Letha. 2019. ‘Those Who Go Underwater: Indignation, Sentiment, and Ethical Immanence in Northern Uganda’. Anthropological Theory 19.3, 385–411.
-
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-
White, Luise. 2000. Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 4310 | 545 | 41 |
| Full Text Views | 70 | 13 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 164 | 41 | 1 |
Occult Economies, Demonic Gifts, and Ontological Alterity: An Evangelical Biography of Evil and Redemption in Rural South Sudan
In: Journal of Religion in AfricaSearch for other papers by Ryan Joseph O’Byrne in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
This paper recounts the autobiography of an evangelical South Sudanese pastor who has been under water to the land of demons, telling of cosmic flows of persons, power, and wealth between times, places, and dimensions. Although it builds on stories circulating across Africa since colonial times and emphasises paradigms found throughout the occult economies literature, what is significant about this autobiography is that it relates the narrator’s own experience. This is important because although these occult elements reference global processes, the narrative given is as much about the local as it is the global. Likewise, it as much spiritual as it is material or economic. My analysis thus goes beyond the occult economy or its material effects and instead demonstrates the ontological alterity and spiritual meaningfulness of such incursions and attempts to push the envelope of academic analyses and interpretations relating to the diverse complexity of religious experience, African or otherwise.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 4310 | 545 | 41 |
| Full Text Views | 70 | 13 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 164 | 41 | 1 |