Making Religion in Contemporary West Africa
By Agnieszka Kedzierska Manzon
An English translation of a French study of the rituals of the Mande people in West Africa.
Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency shows through rich ethnographic analysis how Mande people in West Africa resort to multiple ritual practices to address an “episteme of doubt.” In the context of armed conflicts and terrorist attacks, climate disruptions, financial crises, and illness, members of “hunter societies,” experts who handle certain agentive artifacts, and adepts in a spiritual possession cult deal with a complex past and uncertain future through creative embodied engagement. Formed within and partially against a predominantly Islamic context and the spread of charismatic Christianities, such embodied ways of acting enable these religious specialists to become “virtuous subjects” to change their relations to the world and to themselves.
“Agnieszka Kedzierska Manzon’s event-centered ethnography shows how people recover a sense of purpose and agency in the face of violence, climate change, and radical uncertainty. Particularly compelling is Manzon’s empathetic and immersive fieldwork, and her insights into how the world of the wild (the more-than-human) affords Mande people oblique and imaginative strategies for coping with recurring crises of comprehension and control.”
— Michael Jackson, author of Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want
“Combining careful ethnographic description with captivating portraits, Ritual, Embodiment, and Agency is a landmark study that brings together three domains of non-Islamic practice among Mande in West Africa—hunters’ rituals, the use of power objects (“fetishes”), and spirit possession—into the same analytical frame, something no scholar has attempted before. A penetrating analysis of the ways in which religious phenomena, their agents, and selves are made within an “episteme of doubt,” this excellent book disrupts conventional ways African “traditional religion” has been studied and misunderstood. — Benjamin Soares, author of Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town.”
— Benjamin Soares, author of Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town
“In her striking ethnography of the Mande religious landscape, Kedzierska Manzon revisits an “old” anthropological theme, ritual, and reinvigorates it. This book is a luminous account of human and nonhuman relations that provides fresh insights into the knowledges and technologies deployed by ritual specialists in contexts of epistemic uncertainty.”
— Adeline Masquelier, author of Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger
Agnieszka Kedzierska Manzon is professor and chair of religious anthropology of Sub-Saharan Africa at the École Pratique des Hautes Études-PSL, and senior researcher at the laboratory Institut des Mondes Africains in Paris. She is the author of Chasseurs Mandingues: Violence, Pouvoir et Religion en l’Afrique de l’Ouest and Guérisseurs et féticheurs: médicine traditionnelle en Afrique de l’Ouest.
© HAU Books 2026
This new, translated edition has been revised by the author from the original French edition, Corps rituels: La Fabrique du religieux en pays Mandingue (Mali, Guinée, Côtes d’Ivoire). © 2023 Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.
ISBN: 9781914363191 [paperback]
ISBN: 9781914363207 [PDF]
6″ x 9″, 335 pp.
50 halftones
$30
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