Évènements

Pour cette nouvelle séance de l'atelier d'anthropologie africaniste, nous accueillons Diego Maria Malara (Université de Glasgow)

This talk focuses on the ways in which sacred substances such as the Eucharist and holy water are produced, accessed and consumed in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Whilst the first is subjected to stringent purity rules and strictly controlled by the clergy in churches, the latter lends itself to more democratic uses. Holy water is fetched from churches and other holy sites and brought into households, where it is administered to children by mothers, shared with neighbours in need, and used to address practical emergencies and mend the relational frictions of everyday life. Following the flow of the holy water into the social world, this paper explores how sacred substance enters, thickens and reconfigures networks of everyday relatedness, enhancing women’s control over sacred potency and their religious agency – as opposed to the priestly prerogatives over the administration of the Eucharist. The talk traces how the specific physical characteristics and material affordances of sacred substance produce sociality and religious subjectivities in an urban landscape saturated by environmental sin.