Laura Grillo

Georgetown University | GU

Throughout West African societies, at times of social crises, postmenopausal women — the Mothers — make a ritual appeal to their innate moral authority. The seat of this power is the female genitalia. Wielding branches or pestles, they strip naked and slap their genitals and bare breasts to curse and expel the forces of evil. In An Intimate Rebuke...

Achille Mbembe shows how the West’s denigrating projections on Africa as a chaotic void perpetrated a founding epistemic violence. The matrix of Black Reason, Blackness, and The Black worked systematically to justify colonialism and undermine African subjectivity. By maintaining its grip over the psyche, the postcolonial commandement effortlessly a...

The very nature of fieldwork constructs the conditions for “exceptional experience.” Learning to inhabit an unfamiliar world and operate outside one’s normal frame of reference makes one vulnerable. The “participant observer” is inevitably changed. This may be especially true when the effort to bridge perspectives involves experimentation of a kind...

Jacob Olupona's City of 201 Gods critically engages the question of interpretation and understanding in the analysis of specific African lifeworlds (re)defined by religious culture. Olupona's interpretation invites further interpretation of how emergent symbolic forms in a context of plural religious practices provoke both consensus and dissensus w...

Olupona's “indigenous hermeneutic” offers a privileged guided journey into the dense ritual space of a vital city. I underscore a subtle leitmotif—gender and female agency—running throughout this interpretive account to show women's power to be both a sustaining force and source of ironic reversals in the fate of Ilé-Ifè

Ivoirian women vehemently protest the violence and calamity of civil war by deploying an embodied rhetoric of ritual, appealing to the traditional religious concept of “Female Genital Power”. I propose that their imagistic resistance to the postcolonial state represents a catachresis, with a few interesting twists. Most salient is that what women r...

Ivoirian women vehemently protest the violence and calamity of civil war by deploying an embodied rhetoric of ritual, appealing to the traditional religious concept of “Female Genital Power.” I propose that their imagistic resistance to the postcolonial state represents a catachresis , with a few interesting twists. Most salient is that what women...

The Place of Ritual in African ReligionsEmbodiment, Rhetoric, Performance, and DynamicsGender and PowerInnovation and Adaptation: Ritual and History

Based on fieldwork in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, undertaken in 1997 and 2009, as well as residence in the country in periods that spanned two decades, this study of contemporary urban divination in West Africa shows that it thrives even in the ethnically heterogeneous and religiously plural city. In stark contrast to the stereotypical view that Africa...

West African Divination: Moral Philosophy and Ethical EnterpriseDogon of Mali: Responsiveness to Cosmic DynamicYoruba of Nigeria: Negotiating Moral Identity and Ethical AgencyTrajectories for West African Ethics