Belief, ritual and the securing of life : : reflexive essays on a Bantu religion / / Malcolm Ruel.

• VerfasserIn: Ruel, Malcolm,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden : : BRILL,, 1997.
• Year of Publication: 1997
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (viii, 270 pages)

This is a book about understanding an African religion that explores the coherence of the religion and the place of ritual in it, but which also looks at the way studying the religion of a very different society from our own throws up questions and helps to particularize the assumptions we make about religion and ideas we have on personhood. The essays collected in the volume focus upon the Kuria people of East Africa but range well beyond them. Some of the topics explored are: the ordering of society through ritual; 'belief' as a category central to Christianity but misleading in its application to other religions; life-processes rather than the supernatural as the focus for religious understanding; the nature of sacrifice; ideas of the person; cosmology and ritual; conversion; the values of Western individualism as represented in art forms.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements -- Illustrations -- Prayer to the sun -- Introduction -- 1 Religion and society among Kuria of East Africa -- 2 Christians as believers -- 3 Icons, indexical symbols and metaphorical action -- 4 Growing the girl -- 5 Non-sacrificial ritual killing -- 6 Passages and the person -- 7 Ritual and cosmology -- 8 Kuria conversion -- 9 Kuria seers -- 10 Two representations of Western Individualism -- 1 Auguste Rodin and the sacredness of the self -- 2 Lucian Freud and the naked self -- A personal envoy: looking through categories and not just at them -- Appendix 1 A note on Kuria generation classes -- Appendix 2 The giving of names -- Bibliography -- Index.