Spirit and society: in defence of a critical anthropology of religious life

Abstract

According to recent criticisms, the critical anthropology of religious life in Africa, associated especially with the Comaroffs, has failed to take relations with invisible beings at face value. In this view, we should explore the social work that such relations do, rather than interrogating their ties to the economic and political forms of African modernity. Drawing on ethnography from my research on relations with ancestral spirits in rural KwaZulu-Natal, I argue that this criticism is misplaced. Relations with ancestral spirits are channels for the circulation of value, and here I show how that circulation depends upon the circulation of money for its pragmatic constitution. No amount of taking things at face value can account for this dependency of personal ties on impersonal ones that are organized by structures of political economy. Only an anthropology that is critical is up to the task of comprehending social ties, including ties with spirits, in an epoch such as ours.