Religious PRactice & belief 99notions of morality, spirituality and of the afterworld which have little
to do with the world religions. This is especially true with respect to the
understanding and treatment of episodes of illness and other misfortune.
However, the tendency in much ethnographic literature to dignify every
minor belief as a part of local religion is not always helpful. In my own
accounts of the Uduk people of Southern Blue Nile I have generally
avoided the term, preferring to reserve it for contexts in which a central-
ized conception of divinity, as distinct from humanity, is associated with
social authority. In those cases where we can indeed convincingly speak
of traditional African religion, the formal manifestations of cosmology
and public ritual rest within a rich seedbed of practices concerning human
life and death at the domestic or private level.
The old term ‘animism’ has recently gained currency in the language
both of missionaries and of journalists writing about the southern
Sudan, as though this somehow dignified pre-Islamic and pre-Christian
beliefs by putting them on the same plane. There are problems with the
term ‘animism’, however, and I have preferred to write of ‘traditional
African religions’. In the first place, animism belongs to a former era of
anthropological debate about ‘primitive religion’ and has not escaped its
association with the ascription of limited intellectual and moral capacity
to believers. Second, the notion of animism focuses on ‘beliefs’ almost
in a vacuum, without recognizing the forms of religious authority which
go with political leadership, or the historical continuity of those forms as
reflected in the material record of sacred sites. In its blandness it fails to
capture the strength, and indeed inherent claims to validity, and translat-
ability, of the ideas it describes – that is, in effect, the universal quality
of their spiritual apprehension. It thus underestimates the emotional
complexity of people’s lives outside the church and schoolroom context,
and overestimates the singularity and specificity of conversion. Third, in
journalese, ‘animists’ is used selectively. It appears only in relation to
the southern Sudan, not other places such as Ethiopia, or East and West
Africa, or Britain, or America, or Japan.
The great indigenous traditions of the upper Nile, mainly those ofThe Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors the^ large-scale,^ predominantly^ pastoral,^ transhumant^ Nilotic-speaking^
(www.riftvalley.net).