Christianity and Public Culture in Africa

Contributors

233 Contributors bArbArA m. CooPer is a professor of history at rutgers university. Her research explores the intersections between culture and political economy, with a focus on gender, religion, and family life. She is author of Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 and Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel, which won the melville J. Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association. HArri englund is a reader in the department of Social Anthropology at the university of Cambridge. His research interests include human rights and the moral imagination, and African-language debates on socioeconomic inequality. He has written and edited several books on the social and cultural dimensions of liberalization in Africa, including Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor, which won the Amaury talbot Prize of the royal Anthropological institute. mArJA HinfelAAr is an affiliate of the national Archives of Zambia. Her current research interests are church-state relations and the political history of Zambia. She is author of Respectable and Responsible Women: Methodist and Roman Catholic Women’s Organizations in Harare, Zimbabwe (1919–1985) and coeditor (with Jan-bart gewald and giacomo macola) of One Zambia, Many Histories: Towards a History of Post-colonial Zambia. niCHolAS KAmAu-goro lectures in the department of literary and Communication Studies, laikipia university College, egerton university, Kenya. His recently completed Phd dissertation examines the poetics of language and the quest for a socially relevant aesthetic ideology in the work of ngũgı̃ wa thiong’o. birgit meYer is professor of cultural anthropology at Amsterdam’s vrije universiteit. She is author of Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana; editor of Aesthetic Formations: Religion, Media, and the Senses; and coeditor (with Peter geschiere) of Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure, (with Peter 234 Contributors Pels) of Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, and (with Annelies moors) of Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. miCHAel PerrY KWeKu oKYerefo lectures in sociology at the university of ghana. His research interests span the fields of religion and public culture, the sociology of literature, and the sociology of education. He is author of The Cultural Crisis of Sub-Saharan Africa as Depicted in the African Writers’ Series: A Sociological Perspective. dAmAriS PArSitAu lectures in African Christianities at egerton university, Kenya. She is finalizing her doctoral dissertation on Pentecostalism and civic engagement in Kenya. Her areas of interest include global Pentecostalism, religion and gender, feminist theologies, religion and health, and religion and popular culture. rutH PrinCe is Smuts fellow at the Centre of African Studies, university of Cambridge. Her research focuses on east Africa and explores Christianity, kinship and gender, healing, medicine, and historical anthropology. She is coauthor (with Paul Wenzel geissler) of The Land Is Dying: Contingency, Creativity, and Conflict in Western Kenya and coeditor (with Philippe denis and rijk van dijk) of a special issue of Africa Today on Christianity and AidS in Africa. JAmeS A. PritCHett is a professor of anthropology and director of the African Studies Center at michigan State university. He is author of The Lunda-Ndembu: Style, Change, and Social Transformation in South Central Africa and Friends for Life,Friends for Death:Cohorts and Consciousness among the Lunda-Ndembu. He also has an interest in the African diaspora and has studied communities of African-descended people in the Caribbean and in South and Central America. ilAnA vAn WYK holds a research fellowship at the london School of economics and Political Science. Her doctoral research was on the universal Church of the Kingdom of god in durban, South Africa. Her current research focuses on gambling, the national lottery, and the perceptions of luck in a Cape town settlement. ...