Code Switching in Religion: From Ancestors to Christian Prophets in Southern Africa

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 장로회신학대학교 세계선교연구원
· 수록지 정보 : 선교와신학 / 22호 / 203 ~ 254페이지
· 저자명 : 아네키 쥬베르트

초록

With their hands humans create religious objects, with their eyes they view them as part of a religiously meaningful whole, and with their minds and bodies they engage in rites that have decisive symbolic meaning. All these codes, be it material objects, verbal, or non-verbal actions, are interrelated, and together they signify a coherent way of understanding human life. But religion would be no religion if humans do not, through their bodily actions, communicate to each other that supernatural forces are also involved in their common world and individual lives. The involvement of supernatural forces are constantly communicated in experienced by community members in their religious human actions. During their first encounters it was impossible for Europeans, who understood their world in terms of the great stories from the Judeo-Christian tradition, to understand the religious codes of the indigenous African inhabitants.

Because of the European agent's inability to recognize the Khoikhoi language, Khoe, with its many clicks as a linguistic code, this difficult language was often equated with animals sounds and became the natural link between the language of men and that of animals. The Khoikhoi were regarded by the Europeans as the creatures that bridge human and animal domains. The denial of Khoikhoi religion was based on the perceived absence of language, Christian doctrines and practice in the lives of indigenous people.

From the position of mediating true revelation about God, and his salvation of the world through Christ, the tendency of western Christianity was to uproot heathen objects, actions and words, and to replace these with a new cultural and religious order based on the norms and principles of Christianity. Mission influence therefore stretched beyond merely providing a religious framework to the cultural transformation of the societies touched by their work. Apart from not understanding the importance of the indigenous practices for the indigenous people, missionaries also failed to switch religious and cultural codes into viable alternatives for the advancement of indigenous societies. This situation caused the distortion of Christian references by indigenous converts, since new African meanings were assigned to old Christian/European signs/codes.

The close association of the missionaries and their Christian faith with the European culture led to a crisis on the part of the indigenous people, who were the recipients of the mission wo가. This crisis led to an explosion of African religious codes into various new forms of African religion, resulting in the emergence of African Indigenous Churches, whose leaders play important roles in religious code-switching in Southern Africa. Breaking away from the traditional western churches, African Independent Churches (AICs) have been formed. The founders of the AICs have remolded Christianity from their experience of traditional African religion, The liturgies, diction, ethos, ceremonies, style and protocol are designed to serve the needs and character of the African people. African Independent Churches are a result of the interaction between African people's peculiar African indigenous approach to a western Christianity and their own traditional customs and ideals. The adaptation of a western religious ethos to a traditional African sometimes borders on syncretic distortion. The other side is also true where adaptations lead to "an imaginative transformation of ancient customs so that it amount to a legitimate christianizing of Christian indigenisation."

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