Rule and process [1979]

Anthropological study of African religious movements is characterized by a non-paradigmatic state of scientific organization, internally, and by little respect for external boundaries. Cultural anthropologists are holding, however vaguely and confusedly, a notion of society as a normally stable arrangement of structures, roles, and institutions. Connections between religious and political mobilization has acknowledged since the beginnings of anthropological studies of African religious movements. Some anthropologists stressed the aesthetic integration of cultural symbols and beliefs; others emphasized the value-oriented, motivational, in short, the moral nature of a common culture. The anthropological concept of culture is too general when it stresses the formal integration of beliefs and values as a functional prerequisite of equilibrium in a given society. The Zairean anthropologist Ngokwey Ndolamb has given a most interesting account and interpretation of a rural movement among the Lele of the Kasai that is of Christian inspiration but also clearly part of a long tradition of anti-witchcraft movements.