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Under the Canopy
Ritual Process and Spiritual Resilience
in South Africa
Linda E. Thomas
“Through this book readers gain a great deal of insight into religious developments in
South Africa and the connection between these developments and continuing political realities.”—Journal of the American Academy of Religion
A case study in the transcendent powers of ritual and faith, Under the Canopy illustrates
how the healing rites performed at St. John’s Apostolic Faith Mission Church, located
in Guguletu, an African township in Cape Town, offered a means by which poor black
South Africans liberated themselves from oppressive systems. Linda E. Thomas argues
that the healing rites, and the folk medicine they involved, reoriented the community’s
focus away from conditions under apartheid. Thomas’s ethnographic study underscores the remarkable ability of economically disadvantaged people in South Africa
to use their few material resources to create powerful and transformative rituals that
helped them endure and overcome inhuman circumstances.
Drawing from interviews conducted with members of St. John’s, Thomas shows how
the independent church fostered a community capable of drawing from the surrounding disorder a purposeful, orderly, and unified outlook at both personal and communal
levels. The ritual action performed by this community contested the articulation, distribution, and control of knowledge by a white elite and developed new cultural meanings specifically for the marginalized. Under the blue and white canopy of St. John’s,
Thomas found healing rituals to be transformative expressions of protest.
Linda E. Thomas is a professor of
theology and anthropology at the
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and the editor of Living Stones in
the Household of God: The Legacy and
Future of Black Theology.
Studies in Comparative Religion • Frederick M. Denny, series editor
December 2007, 200 pages, 8 illus.
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