Rosalind Shaw

Dreaming, religion and society in Africa

This book explores dream discourse in the negotiation of specialist identity among Zezuru (Zimbabwe), Temne (Sierra Leone), Igbo (Nigeria) and Tukolor (Senegal); in everyday life among Berti (Sudan), Yansi (Zaire) and Ingessana (Sudan); and in the construction of Christian experience in nineteenth-century Yoruba history (Nigeria) and in independent African churches.

Gender and the structuring of reality in Temne divination: an interactive study

The contention of this article is that this kind of selection far from being abnormal typifies the kinds of strategy that social subordinates in general and women in particular engage in order to restructure disadvantageous but dominant conceptions of reality in their society. Along with other kinds of ritual and social practices divination provides a vehicle for the active negotiation of meanings and categorizations which are themselves constitutive of different interests within society. This article then concerns the interrelation between conceptual structures and social strategy. (excerpt)

The TRC, the NGO and the child: young people and post‐conflict futures in Sierra Leone

This article concerns post-conflict interventions as technologies of future making, and their intersection with children as temporalised figures. Global concepts of childhood undergird a discourse of ‘lost childhoods’ as endangering both children and liberal time itself. After Sierra Leones civil war, child protection agencies and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to restore children ‘out of sequence’ to a presumed childhood origin and thereby re-set the timeline of both children and nation. A politics of future-making emerged in the unequal encounter through which children and post-conflict interventions each sought to achieve a desired future through the other.

Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis

Contributors: Mariane Ferme, University of California, Berkeley David Guss, Harvard University Wolfgang Kempf, University of TUbingen Jim Kiernan, University of Natal, South Africa Klaus-Peter Koepping, University of Heidelberg, Birgit Meyer, Amsterdam School for Social Research David Mosse, University of Wales Rosalind Shaw, Tufts University, USA Charles Stewart, University College London Peter van der Veer, University of Amsterdam Richard Werbner, University of Manchester Lale Yalsin-Heckmann, University of Bamberg