Christianity and Social Change in Africa. Essays in Honor of J. D. Y. Peel (review)

The title of this book should perhaps be reversed; it is as much a fitting tribute to J. D. Y. Peels's life work, rooted in the Yoruba past but reaching out to theoretical comparison and the analysis of larger social patterns, as it is about Christianity and social change in Africa. The authors of twenty-six chapters (and more than six hundred pages) represent a wide variety of Peel's students, friends and colleagues—anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists, and theologians, as well as experts on development, refugees, drugs and gender, and others. While most chapters are set in Peel's familiar territory of Nigeria, many areas of Africa and the diaspora are represented. Collectively, they explore a wide range of the issues that Peel addressed throughout his life. M. C. McCaskie also contributes a biography that traces Peel's scholarly life—as a sociologist trained as a classicist, a scholar spending as much time in the CMS archives as in fieldwork.

The essays repeatedly seek to problematize the dualistic oppositions of African religion and Christianity, and between the concepts of "tradition" and "modernity." Following Peel, these essays treat Christianity as fully part of the African context rather than as an alien force, and demonstrate considerable continuity through, for example, the religious use of white cloth (Elisha Renee), the practice of sanctuary (Sandra Barnes), or the search for empowerment (David Pratten). Birgit Meyers picks up the theme of dualism in the invention of tradition represented in Ghanian popular films. Hermione Harris's study of Aladura and born-again Yoruba Christianity in London demonstrates the false dichotomy between continuity and rupture in the Pentecostal movement toward individual subjectivity. McCaskie explores the encounters of different religious systems through an exiled Asante ruler who sought to be "an Asantehene and a Christian, and not a Christian Asantehene" (490). Murray Last portrays healing practices in Muslim northern Nigeria, involving not syncretism, but two parallel gendered systems operating simultaneously.

Falola introduces the essays with his own stories about religious practice within the Yoruba diaspora of Austin, Texas, illustrating how Peel's idea of "religious encounters" can now be taken into a globalized, transnational context in which a "reverse mission" is in progress. Stephan Palmié's work on "Yoruba ecclesiogenesis" in Cuba and Brazil complements Peel's work on Yoruba ethnogenesis in Nigeria, demonstrating the cultural work of "becoming Yoruba" through religious organization and historicizing the analysis of "African survivals." Globalization and the changing construction of cultural nationalism over time are also followed through the study of media: in Yoruba/English newspapers (Karin Barber), in Wole Soyinka's novel Isara (Insa Nolte), and in religious coverage of the Nigerian press (Matthews A. Ojo).

Some of the works go beyond the particular societies in question and deal more with larger methodological or epistemological debates. Jane Guyer analyzes biblical and Yoruba ways of understanding Peel's concept of "an era of confusion." Andrea Cornwall contrasts two versions of the past in contemporary discourse about misbehaving women using an appeal to the "olden days" and the historical "truth" about women's lives. Other chapters are concerned with memory and selective forgetting in the ways that identity is constructed (Matthew Hassan Kukah), or the analysis of ethnicity or gender (Axel Kein). Two chapters extend Peel's analysis to Islamic Africa (Kai Kresse and Murray Last).

Peel's students and colleagues honor him best by extending his approach in emphasizing African agency in the study of religious change, especially in Pool's analysis of Aladura to the rise of neo-Pentecostal churches and the gospel of prosperity. Asonzeh F.-K. Ukah portrays this movement as a creative response to the stresses of economic determination and military dictatorship in Nigeria today. Ogbu U. Kalu, David Pratten, and Carola Lentz extend Peel's Yoruba analyses to other ethnic groups within West Africa. John Lonsdale looks at...