Evil in Africa: Encounters with the Everyday
ISBN: 9780253017505
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Indiana University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Good and evil; Good and evil -- Social aspects -- Africa;

William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.


William C. Olsen lectures in the African Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Walter E. A. van Beek is Professor of Anthropology of Religion at Tilburg University.

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