Abstract
In the international development field, recent years have seen what has been termed a “rush to the religious”—that is to say, growing excitement about the prospect of collaboration with faith-based actors. That this “rush” has been touched by naivety is demonstrated by what I term “the conundrum of representation”. While it is commonly assumed by development actors that FBOs represent the shared values and interests of a wide collective of believers, and while FBOs themselves may like to think of themselves in such terms, such claims suffer from major omissions, such as the risks of essentializing traditions, of flattening complex individual identities and of exaggerating religious differences. In this introductory chapter, I propose a bird’s eye view of this conundrum and tackle it from both collective and individual perspectives. Making the case for everyday religious identities as overflowing clear-cut categories of exclusive affiliation, I then draw on my research team’s work in Kenya and Ghana to introduce the butinage metaphor as a heuristic through which we can develop an alternative, actor-centred and dynamic approach.
This paper was written with the generous support of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jeursalem.
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Notes
- 1.
Shawn Teresa Flanigan, For the Love of God: NGOs and Religious Identity in a Violent World (Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2010), 147; Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1995).
- 2.
R. Michael Feener and Philip Fountain, “Religion in the Age of Development,” Religions 9, no. 12 (2018): 13.
- 3.
It should be noted that, in the literature, the distinction is not always clear between organizations purely preoccupied with development aid and other types of associations—political or otherwise—of believers. This ambiguity partially follows from the nature of religious organizations, where service provision is often entwined with advocacy and other activities.
- 4.
Gerard Clarke, “Faith Matters: Faith-Based Organisations, Civil Society and International Development,” Journal of International Development 18 (2006): 840.
- 5.
A simple search on Google Scholar (August 2019) returns twice as many articles for “Christian FBOs Africa” than for “Muslim FBOs Africa” and about a third more articles for “Christian Faith-Based Organizations Africa” than for “Muslim Faith-Based Organizations Africa”.
- 6.
Feener and Fountain, “Religion in the Age of Development.”
- 7.
Marie Juul Petersen, “Trajectories of Transnational Muslim NGOs,” Development in Practice 22, nos. 5–6 (2012): 763–778.
- 8.
Words by James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank. Martin Palmer and Victoria Finlay, Faith in Conservation: New Approaches to Religions and the Environment (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2003).
- 9.
For a critique of this distinction as artificial and ideological, see Philip Fountain, “The Myth of Religious NGOs: Development Studies and the Return of Religion,” International Development Policy 4, no. 1 (2013): 9–30.
- 10.
Gerrie Ter Haar, “Religion and Development: Introducing a New Debate,” in Religion and Development: Ways of Transforming the World, ed. Gerrie Ter Haar (London: Hurst & Company, 2011), 3–27. However, while recognizing the many advantages of such enlargement of the circle of development partners, it also met with substantial opposition and backlash. See, for example, the telling case of the rise and fall of the World Bank’s engagement with faith-based actors. Jeffrey Haynes, “Faith-Based Organisations, Development and the World Bank,” International Development Policy 4, no. 1 (2013): 49–64.
- 11.
UNDP, “UNDP Guidelines on Engaging with Faith-Based Organizations and Religious Leaders,” UNDP, New York, 2014, 7.
- 12.
Mariz Tadros, Faith-Based Organizations and Service Delivery: Some Gender Conundrums, Gender and Development Programme Paper Series (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2010), 23.
- 13.
Cassandra Balchin, “Religion and Development: A Practitioner’s Perspective on Instrumentalisation,” IDS Bulletin 42, no. 1 (2011): 17.
- 14.
Emma Tomalin, Religions and Development (Routledge Perspectives on Development) (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 169.
- 15.
Tadros, “Faith-Based Organizations and Service Delivery: Some Gender Conundrums,” 11.
- 16.
J. Ibrahim and C. Bagu, “Religious Leaders, Faith Based Organizations and Peace-Building in Nigeria,” Report for International Alert Project on Building Peace on the Frontline of Fire, Abuja, 2004, 14.
- 17.
Julia Berger, “Religious Nongovernmental Organizations: An Exploratory Analysis,” Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 14, no. 1 (2003): 36.
- 18.
Berger, “Religious Nongovernmental Organizations: An Exploratory Analysis,” 34.
- 19.
James T. Richardson, “Regulating Religion: A Sociological and Historical Introduction,” in Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe, ed. James T Richardson (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2004), 11.
- 20.
Danielle Dierckx, Jan Vranken and Wendy Kerstens, eds., Faith-Based Organizations and Social Exclusion in European Cities (Leuven: Acco, 2009), 46.
- 21.
Yvan Droz and Hervé Maupeu, “Christianismes Et Démocratisation Au Kenya,” Social Compass 60, no. 1 (2013): 79–96. Consider, for example, attempts to block the registration of the group Atheists In Kenya (AIK) on Christian grounds and the ensuing debate that has only recently been settled by the High Court.
- 22.
Joachim Osur, The Great Controversy: A Story of Abortion, the Church, and Constitution-Making in Kenya (Nairobi: Majestic Printing Works, 2011).
- 23.
Fathima Azmiya Badurdeen, “Socio-Legal Implications of the Laws to Combat Religious Extremism in Kenya,” in Religion, Law and Security in Africa, eds. Christian Green, Jeremy Gunn and Mark Hill (Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2017), 124.
- 24.
Rebecca Sager, Faith, Politics, and Power: The Politics of Faith-Based Initiatives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 101.
- 25.
Josef Boehle, “Religious NGOs at the UN and the Millennium Development Goals: An Introduction,” Global Change, Peace & Security 22, no. 3 (2010): 283. The centralized nature of Catholic FBOs can also be contrasted with that of Protestant FBOs, who “tend to have a more federal structure with a central office coordinating between various sub-entities”. Carlo Benedetti, “Islamic and Christian Inspired Relief NGOs: Between Tactical Collaboration and Strategic Difference?,” Journal of International Development 18 (2006): 853.
- 26.
Gerard Clarke, “Agents of Transformation? Donors, Faith-Based Organisations and International Development,” Third World Quarterly 28, no. 1 (2007): 88.
- 27.
Jane I. Smith, Muslims, Christians, and the Challenge of Interfaith Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 89.
- 28.
Victoria S. Harrison, “The Pragmatics of Defining Religion in a Multi-Cultural World,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 59, no. 3 (2006): 148.
- 29.
Richard Amesbury, “Inter-Religious Declarations of Human Rights: Grounding Rights or Constructing ‘Religion’?,” Religion & Human Rights 5, no. 1 (2010): 63–64.
- 30.
Ruth Pearson and Emma Tomalin, “Intelligent Design?: A Gender-Sensitive Interrogation of Religion and Development,” in Development, Civil Society and Faith-Based Organizations: Bridging the Sacred and the Secular, eds. Gerard Clarke and Michael Jennings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 46–71.
- 31.
Séverine Deneulin and Masooda Bano, Religion in Development: Rewriting the Secular Script (London and New York, NY: Zed Books, 2013), 25.
- 32.
Flanigan, For the Love of God; Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 33.
Flanigan, For the Love of God, 3. Highlight in the original.
- 34.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
- 35.
Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 10.
- 36.
Ter Haar, “Religion and Development: Introducing a New Debate,” 8.
- 37.
Tomalin, Religions and Development, 86; James A Beckford, Social Theory and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 28.
- 38.
David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 39.
Recognizing these politics, we can understand why scholars warn us against reading too much into statistics on religious membership, where communities and institutions may seek to inflate their advertised rate of adherents in order to boost their influence. As Frans Wijsen, writing about East Africa, proposes, “in many countries in Africa, religious statistics are highly politicized”. Frans Wijsen, Seeds of Conflict in a Haven of Peace: From Religious Studies to Interreligious Studies in Africa (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 34n45.
- 40.
Katherine Marshall and Marisa Van Saanen, Development and Faith: Where Mind, Heart, and Soul Work Together (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2007), 156.
- 41.
Tomalin, Religions and Development, 86.
- 42.
Berger, “Religious Nongovernmental Organizations: An Exploratory Analysis.” In the case of Muslim FBOs, Marie Juul Petersen shows how Muslim NGOs do not speak in a single voice, but offer a continuum ranging from fully embedded and “thoroughly Islamize aid” to secularize-like, “invisible Islam”, see Marie Juul Petersen, “Islamizing Aid: Transnational Muslim NGOs After 9.11,” Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 23, no. 1 (2012): 126–155.
- 43.
Erica Bornstein, The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
- 44.
Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961).
- 45.
Emerging from this, one may argue for a third challenge, that of institutional self-representation, and whether speakers on behalf of FBOs adequately represent the organization on behalf of which they claim to speak and the community that supposedly stands behind it. In other words, we can ask not only whether the organization adequately represents the individual, but also whether the individual adequately represents the organizations.
- 46.
Jörg Stolz et al., Religion Und Spiritualität in Der Ich-Gesellschaft. Vier Gestalten Des (Un-)Glaubens (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2014).
- 47.
The project, which was titled Structures anthropologiques du religieux: butinage et voisinage, focused on Brazil, Kenya, Ghana and Switzerland (project number: 100013-130340, 100013-146301). I thank the project’s team members: Yvan Droz, Jeanne Rey and Edio Soares, for the use of our collective ideas and data. See Gez, Yonatan N., Yvan Droz, Jeanne Rey, and Edio Soares. Forthcoming. Butinage: The Art of Religious Mobility (Toronto: Toronto University Press).
- 48.
Edio Soares, Le Butinage Religieux: Pratiques Et Pratiquants Au Brésil (Genève and Paris: Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement; Karthala, 2009), 20. My translation.
- 49.
Soares, Le Butinage Religieux, 54–55. My translation.
- 50.
McGuire, Lived Religion; Hall, Lived Religion in America.
- 51.
Yonatan N. Gez et al., “From Converts to Itinerants: Religious Butinage as Dynamic Identity,” Current Anthropology 58, no. 2 (2017): 155.
- 52.
For example, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
- 53.
Consider, for example, the curious case of “Chrislam” in Nigeria. Marloes Janson, “Unity Through Diversity: A Case Study of Chrislam in Lagos,” Africa 86, no. 4 (2016): 646–672.
- 54.
Janet McIntosh, “Polyontologism: When ‘Syncretism’ Does Not Suffice,” Journal of Africana Religions 7, no. 1 (2019): 112–120; Janet McIntosh, The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
- 55.
Azza Karam, “Concluding Thoughts on Religion and the United Nations: Redesigning the Culture of Development,” CrossCurrents 60, no. 3 (2010): 466.
- 56.
Karam, “Concluding Thoughts on Religion and the United Nations.”
- 57.
Dierckx, Vranken and Kerstens, “Faith-Based Organizations and Social Exclusion in European Cities.”
- 58.
Deepa Narayan et al., Voices of the Poor: Crying out for Change (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 2000).
- 59.
Yvan Droz and Yonatan N. Gez, “Pentecôtisation Du Christianisme Et Butinage Religieux Au Kenya: Entre Fondamentalisme Et Mode Populaire D’action Politico-Religieuse,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines (2019): 1–19.
- 60.
Sarah C. White, “Depoliticising Development: The Uses and Abuses of Participation,” Development in Practice 6, no. 1 (1996): 6–15. Participation, White suggests, falls into four possible categories: ‘nominal’ (participation is visible but translates into little actual influence), ‘utilitarian’ (participation is meant to improve the efficiency of a project but is not seen as an end in and of itself), ‘representative’ (it is recognized that the group has a legitimate voice and is allowed to exert due influence) and ‘transformative’ (a fundamental sharing of power by all relevant stakeholders).
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Gez, Y.N. (2020). Who Do FBOs Speak For? The Conundrum of Representation. In: Weiss, H. (eds) Muslim Faith-Based Organizations and Social Welfare in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38308-4_2
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