"This is Ghanaian territory!" Land conflicts in transnational localities on the Burkina Faso-Ghana border

Traditional land rights in Dagara and Sisala societies in Burkina Faso and Ghana which were stateless in pre-colonial times are closely connected with the concept of earth-shrine parishes under the protection of a local land god and ideally under the control of the “first-comers” to the area. The earth priests perform regular sacrifices at the shrine and allocate land to later immigrants as well as the right to build houses and to bury their dead, often in exchange for gifts. The international border between Ghana and Burkina Faso, which was drawn up in 1898 and runs along the 11th parallel, often cuts across earth-shrine parishes. Particularly since the border demarcation exercise in the 1970s, the spatial separation of the Sisala earth priests on one side of the border from the Dagara immigrants on the other side has given rise to intricate conflicts over land rights. The paper will present the history of one such conflict and look at the various landrelated discourses – traditionalist, nationalist, and Christian – which the adversaries put forward in order to substantiate their claims

Home shrines in Britain and associated spiritual values

In a quantitative survey of religious attitudes and practices in a multi-religious sample of 369 school pupils aged between 13 and 15 in London, the presence of a home shrine was found widespread in 11% of adolescents spanning several religious affiliations and ethnicities – especially Buddhists, Hindus and those of Indian, Chinese and ‘Other Asian’ ethnicity. Having a home shrine correlated significantly with spiritual attitudes such as agreement with filial piety, the Eightfold Path, subjectivity of happiness, meditation, Sikh festivals, reincarnation and opening Gurdwaras to all. It is suggested that teachers and the social services should be aware of the importance of shrines to many religious communities and recognize their potential as a spiritual asset and manifestation of religion outside the congregational place of worship

Gendered spaces and practice,relationality, emotion and affect at the Marian shrine of Ta Pinu, Gozo, Malta

In this chapter the case study of Ta’ Pinu, Gozo, a site of pilgrimage for Marian devotion and the national shrine of Malta, is analysed as a gendered assemblage and an example of the intersection of gender and religion, with attention to the spatial and power relations associated with these flows and processes. Islands have functioned as places of spiritual retreat and subsequent pilgrimage throughout the history of the Christian faith, the liminal character of their coastal landscapes and environments creating particular intertwinings of experience and spiritual practice; yet, whilst this experiential nexus may be extraordinary for visitors, it is the everyday context of daily life for inhabitants (see Maddrell 2011, 2013, Maddrell and della Dora 2013, Maddrell et al 2015, Maddrell and Scriven (forthcoming)). Here my attention is turned to the island of Gozo in Malta, analysing the Roman Catholic shrine of Ta’ Pinu, in order to offer a spatial perspective on gender and religion within this specific context and arena. Whilst the journeys to this island shrine can have significance, drawing on feminist theories of embodiment, my focus here is less on the journey per se and more on the spaces and practices of religious performance and related geographies of spiritual encounter, emotion and affect, with particular attention to the gendered dimensions of these practices at Ta’ Pinu. This will be set within the wider context of an overarching analysis of faith practices as embodied in everyday spaces and practices, reflecting a need for more scholarly attention to examining those pilgrimages which are embedded in everyday practice rather than a stand-alone extraordinary event (Maddrell 2013). It is hoped that this meshing of perspectives and themes will yield fresh understanding of the specific place-time dynamics of gender and religion at Ta’ Pinu, and in turn contribute to a spiritually-inflected understanding of gendered discourses and practices. Before turning to the core discussion, Marian veneration as a form of pilgrimage practice and the history of the Ta’ Pinu shrine are briefly outlined, and fieldwork methodologies explained

Fashioning liminal space : the meaning of things and women's experience in the practice of domestic shrine making in Aotearoa/New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University

This paper aims to bring together two lines of analysis that converge upon the specific spaces that are women's domestic shrines. One line examines the material culture of the spaces and objects on the shrines of ten different women and seeks to reveal the "agency" of these things in themselves. The other line is a phenomenological one and responds to the shrine as a site in which issues of practice, embodiment and intentionality in the daily life of the subjects is explored. The material culture of the shrine is investigated as part of the intersubjective experience of its creator and scrutinized as a fruitful place in which to develop an ethnographic understanding of the truth of life-as-lived. This study strives to give voice to ordinary New Zealand women and their precious things within their own homes. Key Words: Domestic Shrines/Altars, Feminist Ethnography, Material Culture, Objects, Spaccs, Phenomenology, Practice, Intersubjectivity, Embodiment, Agency, Women's Experience, Liminality

Marking boundaries and identities: the precolonial expansion of segmentary societies in Southwestern Burkina Faso

Over approximately the last 200 years, north-west Ghana and large areas of neighbouring southern Burkina Faso were the stage for a highly successful expansion of Dagara-speaking peoples. Probably setting out from an area around Wa, small groups of Dagara migrated towards the north, some of them taking a westward route, crossing the Black Volta river into today’s Burkina Faso. They rarely advanced into nomansland but rather displaced peoples such as Sisala-, Dyan-, Phuie- and Bwamu-speaking groups, who then moved further west and north. Today, the Dagara occupy about 3500 km2 in southern Burkina Faso, where they represent the sixth largest language group. In this paper I wish to explore the history of the north-west frontier of Dagara expansion and the interaction between the “land-owning” Phuo and the incoming Dagara

Proton magnetometer survey at the Menelaion and environs

Two short seasons of geophysical survey with a proton magnetometer were carried out at the Menelaion and its environs during the excavation seasons in 1974 and 1975 with a view to locating buried structures or other features in the following areas: close to the Mycenaean site, between this site and the Menelaion shrine, around the Menelaion shrine itself, the North Hill and the Chapel site. This report presents the results of the survey of these areas in 1975 which are shown in FIG. J.1. The geological environment and topography of the Menelaion plateau and environs are described elsewhere in this volume

Four Scottish indulgences at Sens

English interest in the great Cistercian abbey of Pontigny was stimulated by the exiles there of two archbishops of Canterbury, Thomas Becket and Stephen Langton.1 As archbishops of Canterbury, Langton and Edmund of Abingdon made gifts to Pontigny abbey in consideration of the welcome given to Becket.2 Edmund did not die at Pontigny, but was a confrater of the community, and the abbot claimed the body, asserting that Edmund had expressed a wish to be buried there. The process of canonisation was rapid.3 After Edmund's canonisation, Henry III sent a chasuble and a chalice for the first celebration of the feast, and granted money to maintain four candles round the saint's shrine.4 In 1254, en route from Gascony to meet Louis IX in Chartres and Paris,5 Henry visited Pontigny, as his brother Richard of Cornwall, who seems to have pressed for canonisation, had done in 1247.6 Archbishop Boniface of Canterbury ordered the celebration of the feast to be observed throughout his province.7 Pope Alexander IV granted a dispensation to allow Englishwomen to enter the precinct of Pontigny abbey on the feast of the translation of the relics of St Edmund8 (women were normally forbidden to enter a Cistercian monastery). Matthew Paris, the greatest English chronicler of the age, wrote a life of the saint.9 English interest continued into the fourteenth century. In 1331 an English priest was given a licence to visit the shrine,10 but it seems likely that the Hundred Years’ War made pilgrimage to Pontigny difficult.11 The indulgences preserved by the abbey reveal an interest in the shrine throughout the Western Church, granted as they were by prelates from Tortosa to Livonia and Estonia, and from Messina to Lübeck.1

The changing perspectives on three Muslim men on the question of saint worship over a 10-year period in Gujarat, western India

In many religious traditions, those who mediate relations between men and gods are often the focus of controversy and moral ambiguity. The ethnography in this paper outlines a number of perspectives on the role of such intermediaries (here ‘saints’) in Muslim society in western India. In the South Asian literature, historians have provided a thorough treatment of the doctrinal history and content of these debates. However, very little attention has been paid to how living individuals interpret and rehearse these debates in practice. The examination of the changing perspectives of three Muslim men on the question of saint worship over a ten-year period reveals the following. First, an individual’s relationship with ‘saints’ is often determined primarily by social context rather than simply by doctrinal allegiance or the compulsions of particular ‘beliefs’. Second, discourses of religious reform are also powerful social objects that can be used as political instruments for purposes other than simply refining the religious practices of a community. Finally, many commonplace assumptions in the literature – notably on the nature of belief and the significance of doctrinal divisions among Muslims – do not withstand ethnographic scrutiny

Alawi syncretism : beliefs and traditions in the shrine of Hüseyin Gazi

Religious Anthropology studies the origins, evolution and functions of religions. The discipline researching religious beliefs and rituals comparatively with cross-cultural perspectives tries to enlighten the belief world of the mankind. Religion, as a term, can be defined as "believing as well as worshipping to the supernatural powers and/or beings by the individual who are emotionally or consciously devoted to them" (Örnek 1988: 127). There have been a number of theories so far which try to bring an explanation to the origins and the evolution of religion. In these theories, Fetishism, cults of nature, animism, Totemism, dynamism, Manism, magic, polytheism, monotheism as well as certain physiological phenomena have been particularized as evolutionary stages and forms of belief (Evans-Pritchard 1998: 124). All of these theories have the perspective of so called "progressive" and / or "unilinear" that maintain a religion which has reached ongoing stages and that communities which have developed from primitiveness to civilization. They argue that there has only been one single line of progress, and all of the communities are bound to go through the same evolutionary stages