From Protestant Temple to Ancestral Ox Park: Ostentatious Travels and Practices of the Malagasy Protestant Movement Exorcists
Issue: Vol 47 No. 1 (2018) Bulletin for the Study of Religion
Journal: Bulletin for the Study of Religion
Subject Areas: Religious Studies Buddhist Studies Islamic Studies Biblical Studies
DOI: 10.1558/bsor.33591
Abstract:
This article proposes to question the movements and the practices of groups of lay exorcists (mpiandry) of the Malagasy Protestant movement of Revival (fifohazana). These groups of a decade of exorcists dressed in white pastoral robes walk through urban neighborhoodsn from the treatment and prayer rooms located in the reception centers of the movement, and the hamlets or rural villages, to the patient's home to take care of. The performance of exorcists fits not only outside the institutional space, but also outside of temporality usually reserved for hunting demons. At the time of exorcism and the burning of magical-religious protection charms, religious takes center stage, and the residential area of the patient's family is temporaly infiltrate by mpiandry. Therefore, the emotions engendered take a more complex dimension that support or rejection of exorcists practices. Exorcists move and surround the hamlet, and religious interferes in the houses of the ancestral village, the court, cultivated land and the ox park (family representations of the Betsileo region and also the economic resources). The neighborhood (sometimes distant) approaches. The exorcists are moving away from their reasons for coming (the illness of a family member) to impose practices on religious territory of ancestor worship. Through this ethnographic case, we will seize religious events in the public space, and the confrontation of secular Protestantism practiced outside institution and ancestor worship. Lutheran Protestantism then come into the ancestral religious territoriality, to its deterritorialization.
Author: Olivia Legrip-Randriambelo
References :
Aubourg, Valérie. 2014. Christianismes charismatiques à l’île de La
Réunion. Paris: Karthala.
Austnaberg, Hans. 2008. Shepherds and Demons. A Study of Exorcism as
Practiced and Understood by Shepherds in the Malagasy Lutheran
Church. New York: Peter Lang.
Estrade, Jean-Marie. 1985. Un culte de possession à Madagascar: le
tromba. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Fer, Yannick. 2005. ‘‘Genèse des émotions au sein des assemblées de
Dieu polynésiennes.” Archives des sciences sociales des religions
131–132; 143–63.
Freeman, Luke. 2001. Knowledge, Education and Social Differentiation
amongst the Betsileo of Fisakana, Madagascar. PhD diss., University
of London.
Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 1990. ‘‘Renouveaux émotionnels
contemporains. Fin de la sécularisation ou fin de la religion?’’ in
De l’émotion en religion: Renouveaux et traditions, edited by
Françoise Champion and Danièle Hervieu-Léger, 217–48. Paris:
Centurion.
Jacquier-Dubourdieu, Lucille. 1996. ‘’Représentation de l’esclavage
et conversion: un aspect du mouvement du réveil à Madagascar,’’ in
Cahiers Sciences Humaines 32 (3): 597–610.
Kottak, Conrad. 1980. The Past in the Present: History, Ecology and
Variation in Highland Madagascar. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Kus, Susan, and Victor Raharijaona. 1990. “Domestic Space and the
Tenacity of Tradition among some Betsileo of Madagascar.” In
Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary
Cross-Cultural Study, edited by Susan Kent, 21–33. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Legrip-Randriambelo, Olivia. 2014. (Dé)loger le mal: Spatialité et
pratiques religieuses de guérison (Madagascar). PhD thesis.
Université Lyon 2.
Legrip-Randriambelo, Olivia, and Denis Regnier. 2014. “The Place of
Healers-Diviners (Ombiasa) in Betsileo Medical Pluralism.” Health,
Culture & Society 7(1): 28–37.
href="https://doi.org/10.5195/HCS.2014.188">https://doi.org/10.5195/HCS.2014.188.
Mary, André. 1998. ‘‘Retour sur la ‘conversion africaine’: Horton,
Peel et les autres.’’ Journal des africanistes 68(1):
11–20. https://doi.org/10.3406/jafr.1998.1159.
Piette, Albert. 2003. Le fait religieux: Une théorie de la religion
ordinaire. Paris: Economica.
Rakotomalala, Malanjaona, Sophie Blanchy, Françoise Raison-Jourde.
2001. Madagascar: les ancêtres au quotidien: Usages sociaux du
religieux sur les Hautes-Terres malgaches. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Rasolondraibe, Seth Andriamanalina. 2010. Le ministère de “berger”
dans les Eglises protestantes de Madagascar (de la fin du XIXe
siècle à nos jours): Tensions et compromis entre mouvements de
Réveil, institutions protestantes et religions traditionnelles. PhD
thesis. Paris: EPHE.
Sharp, Lesley. 1993. The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits,
Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town. Berkeley:
University of California Press.