Abstract
When elders in Gorongosa, a rural district in central Mozambique, talk about societal changes, they often invoke the strength of “tradition” in the time they grew up. When they talk about tradition, they are usually referring to the traditional belief system and the rules derived from it rather than the traditional authority structure, a politically loaded concept in Mozambique. They refer especially to the strength of the belief in spiritual forces that play a regulatory role in society. In this chapter, I follow their conceptual usage. Although the term “tradition” could evoke associations with a historical past, I want to emphasize here that I consider tradition to be a dynamic force that is rooted in the past but is continuously subject to change. Traditional prescriptions about how to organize one’s life cannot be static. For traditional religion to retain its legitimacy as a cognitive and normative order, people constantly “remould and develop it until it attains, once more, its pristine level of explanatory coverage” (Horton, 1971, p. 102). In this chapter, I use the terms “tradition” and “traditional” as a form of shorthand for traditional religion—a dynamic and still to this day influential regulatory force for a large part of the population of Gorongosa.
This chapter is largely based on my doctoral dissertation (Jacobs, 2010). The research was funded by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.
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© 2013 Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann Martin Ramstedt, and Bertram Turner
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Jacobs, C. (2013). Toward Reconciliation. In: von Benda-Beckmann, F., von Benda-Beckmann, K., Ramstedt, M., Turner, B. (eds) Religion in Disputes. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318343_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318343_6
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