Dr. Katharina Wilkens

In contemporary African communities, rituals of communication with the ancestors navigate between fields of religion, kinship, heritage and art. In urban centres, and through global migration, traditional forms of kinship are being broken up, but the dynamic re-imaginings of ancestral rituals indicate that ancestry as part of collective identity continues to be a vital part of social organisation. In the post-colonial setting, urban generations are characterised by a subjectivity of rupture from the pre-colonial past. Current revitalisation of traditional practices of ancestral rituals explicitly addresses this gap by creating imagined webs of kinship, based both on factual genealogy and the re-rooting of identity in spaces of ancestral homeland. My research, therefore, focuses on the possibilities and the limits of imagined spaces and factual materiality, in discourses of ancestral identities in mobile urban communities of the 21st century.

Methodological and typological reflections in this project concern the ways in which spirit agency can be conceptualised, ranging from (archival) ancestors-as-forebears, to ancestor spirits with disruptive powers over their descendants, and mediumship. Following from Seiwert's discussion of ancestor veneration in China, in which he distinguishes between naturalist and supranaturalist attitudes, I trace the reframing of African practices, as they reflect changing normativities. While traditional medicine is divested of spiritual agency in a process of biomedicalisation, heritage is spiritualised through sacrifices in football stadiums, or through spirit mediumship as genealogical work.

Even though the agency of spirit beings might put ancestral mediation squarely in the bracket of 'religion', the motivation for communicating with them highlights the search for distinct family histories, thus re-defining one's own and one's family's place over and against ruling administrations and dominant religious institutions. Taking secularity as a "modality of making distinctions", this project aims at theorising the place of kinship and ancestry in modern African communities. I describe identities premised on social and geographical mobility, thus creating imagined kinship communities beyond the boundaries of village shrines and closely defined lineages.