Social Ecologies of Religion in Malawi

• In Event: 2253 - Religion

Abstract

Scholarship on development is beginning to recognize that coordination among elites often facilitates development goals. Despite enormous variation across sub-Saharan Africa, in many places where neither the market nor the state can coordinate collective action, this task falls to informal leaders, among them chiefs and other traditional authorities and pastors and other religious leaders. This paper examines how patterns of cross-cutting ties among congregations, their members, and their leaders create bases for wider collective action. These ties have both a spiritual and a practical dimension. Individuals choose (and sometimes change) congregations and denominations at a distance from their villages, creating an alternative set of ties—and acquiring an alternative source of spiritual power—outside the confining interdependence of kin and clan in the village. The practices that extend individuals spiritual and practical range beyond the village create a wider ecology of interconnection among churches, but also among villages, chiefs, pastors, and sometimes NGOs and politicians.

Author

• Ann Swidler, University of California-Berkeley