Discourses of Demonization in Africa and Beyond

Abstract

The work of those scholars who see an implicit relationship between religion and violence has of late assumed greater prominence and relevance. For example, in a recent volume entitled Religion and Violence , Hent de Vries states: ‘[v]iolence … finds its prime model - its source, force, and counterforce - in key elements of the tradition called religious. It can be seen as the very element of religion. No violence without (some) religion; no religion without (some) violence (Vries, 2001: 1). He elaborates further: ‘“religion” is the relation between the self (or some selves) and the other - some Other … “religion” also stands for the other - the Other - of violence. It evokes its counter-image, its opposite, its redemption, and critique’ (ibid. , my emphasis). Similarly, Bruce Lincoln, writing of the social and political processes that underpin cultural, especially religious, groups, states that ‘“culture” is the prime instrument through which groups mobilize themselves, construct their collective identity and effect their solidarity by excluding those whom they identify as outsiders , while simultaneously establishing their own internal hierarchy, based on varying degrees of adherence to the values that define the group and its members’ (Lincoln, 2000: 411, my emphasis).

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