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Date: Thursday 15 September 2011
Time: 15.30-17.00
Place: Room 3A06, Pieter de la Court building, Wassenaarseweg 52,
Leiden.
Speaker:
Ramon Sarró, Institute of Social Studies, Lisbon University
Discussant:
Dr Inge
Brinkman
You are kindly requested to register for this seminar.
The mandombe writing system is mainly used by members of the
Kimbanguist Church to transcribe Kikongo and Lingala in Congo and other
Central African countries and, to a lesser extent, in the diaspora too.
While most Kimbanguists believe that the script was revealed by God to a
man called Wabeladio in order to empower Africans with their own
alphabet, his version is that he ‘invented’ it. Based on discussions
with Wabeladio and other Kimbanguists in Congo, Angola and various
European countries, this seminar will consider the agency (or lack of
it) involved in this technology. While some see it as a prophetic gift
to humans, others, following the inventor, see it as a human invention
created to change society and make a better world more in tune with
God’s designs. In both cases, the new writing connects humans with God,
but mediation operates in an opposite way.
Ramon Sarró has a PhD in social anthropology from University College
London and is currently working at the Institute of Social Sciences at
the University of Lisbon where he is the coordinator of the MA programme
in social and cultural anthropology and of the European research team on
the ‘Recognizing Christianity: How African Migrants Redefine the
European Religious Heritage’ project. He has conducted extensive
fieldwork on the Kimbanguist Church in Lisbon, Angola, Paris, Belgium,
Kinshasa and Nkamba and directed the project entitled ‘A Christian
Atlantic: Ethnographies of Religious Encounters in Lisbon’. His recent
publications include The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper
Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone (Edinburgh University Press,
2009) and, with David Berliner, Learning Religion: Anthropological
Approaches (Berghahn Books, 2007). With Prof. Simon Coleman, he is also
editing a new annual review of anthropology of religion for Berghahn
Books entitled Religion in Society: Advances in Research.
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