Thursday, April 23 (5pm, Seminar Room) 

‘Unity through Diversity: Chrislam’s Proliferation in Lagos (Nigeria)’ 

Dr. Marloes Janson (SOAS)

Abstract: This paper presents an ethnographic case study of Chrislam, a religious movement that fuses Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices, in its socio-cultural and political-economic setting in Nigeria’s former capital Lagos. Against conventional approaches to study religious movements in Africa as syncretic forms of ‘African Christianity’ or ‘African Islam’, I suggest that ‘syncretism’ is a misleading appellation for Chrislam. In fact, Chrislam practice provides a rationale for scrutinizing the very concept of syncretism and offers an alternative analytical tool for understanding its mode of religious pluralism. To account for the religious plurality in Chrislam, I employ assemblage theory (cf. Collier and Ong 2005) as it proposes an alternative way for looking at Chrislam’s religious mixing that is in line with how its worshippers perceive their religiosity. Drawing upon Larkin’s and Meyer’s (2006) pioneering article, the paper concludes that Chrislam’s religious assemblage calls for more encompassing concepts than those employed in the distinct fields of the Anthropology of Christianity and the Anthropology of Islam. The point is to develop a new conceptual framework to explore mutual influences and interactions between Christians and Muslims.

 

Bio: Marloes Janson is reader in West African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, with her special area of interest in the intersection of anthropology and religion in West Africa. Janson has conducted extensive ethnographic research in the Gambia on various research projects relating to popular culture, oral history, Islamic reform, gender and youth. Recently she switched her research field to Lagos, Nigeria, where she is exploring the emergence of Chrislam, a religious movement that fuses Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices. Janson is the author of the monograph Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jama’at (Cambridge University Press/International African Institute, 2014). She is the book reviews editor of Journal of Religion in Africa. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Leiden University, the Netherlands.