ABSTRACT
A pervasive concern of Africanist anthropology since the 1970s has been to dispel the legacy of the discipline’s association with European colonialism. Since the middle of the 1980s, Africanist scholarship branched out into several directions while seeking to elucidate the historical processes that define Africa’s place in the world. Early in the 1990s, debates in Africanist anthropology came to center on the notion of modernity. Studies on religious and ritual practice as engagements with modernity, like scholarship on Christian and Muslim settings, demonstrated the porous boundaries between traditional or indigenous religions, and imported world religions. The revival of attention to witchcraft in Africanist research since the middle of the 1990s reflected a remarkable upsurge of witchcraft accusations and practices, but it also allowed scholars to address the epistemological and conceptual challenges posed by postcolonialism. Explorations of politics in Africa, and an appreciation of the workings and paradoxes of state-making in former colonies, may allow scholars to project a global.
