Divine Rulers in a Secular State pdf download

Divine Rulers in a Secular State – by Timo kallinen

DIVINE RULERS IN A SECULAR STATE

Book conclusion

. It has been maintained that individual conversion had certain very powerful social consequences which the colonial officials and missionaries sought to control; in so doing, they relied on the categories of their own culture.

During the early days of the colonial era, the number of Christian converts was very low, but it was their radically uncompromising and direct adoption and adaptation of Christian teachings that set the transformative processes in motion.

The encounter between the all-encompassing nature of fetishism and culturally-oriented Christian individualism was of decisive importance. For the Asante, coming to terms with these processes meant a total redefinition of their society in terms of secular and religious spheres, freedom of conscience, citizenship, and the like.

The two chapters of the first part of the book, which posited the exchanges between the chiefs and the spirit world in the nucleus of the pre-colonial ‘political’ structure, provide the template against which one is able to assess the extreme nature of this transformation: a comparative angle adopted from Dumont’s project.

The community of people that existed to communicate with the spirits of the dead and the gods became a self-contained system: the chief priest and sacrifier were transformed into an ‘earthly ruler’, a union of lineages following an ancestral chief became a gathering of individual citizens, and so on.

At the same time, when the missionaries were envisioning their models, grand theories about Asante as a state based on political contract and representation were produced by African intellectuals and colonial ethnographers. Secularism was also a part of colonial statecraft: it was politically expedient to promote an ideology, in which a person’s ‘real identity was permanently tied to the ‘native state’ to which he/she belonged, while ‘religion’ was a matter of private belief and thus liable to change and reconsideration.

Ever since the colonial-era transformation, the mainstream of discussions about chieftaincy in Asante, and Ghana in general, has revolved around