Sacred and the materialities of religion in Uganda: How God finds expression in different cultures and economies

Sacred and the materialities of religion in Uganda: How God finds expression in different cultures and economies

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Materiality in Uganda can refer to a number of topics such as the country’s history, culture, politics and economy, as well as the material expressions of religion, according to Niall P. Finneran.

The materiality of religion is the study of how religion is expressed through material thingssuch as spaces, objects, images,and buildings. It also includes how people use, value and appeal to these things. 

The study of materiality and religion is interdisciplinary, not disciplinary and it can include the study of religious practices, opposition and conflict. It therefore, depends on the interaction of many disciplines to adequately delve into it. 

The concept of materiality of religion has largely been developed within the discipline of the history of religions and follows the works of Charles H. Long (b. 1926) and Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Both of these scholars were concerned with the origin of religion distinctly from spirituality.

In the case of Eliade the origin of religion is associated with the human connection to the material world. For Long the origin of religion emerges through intercultural contact, a term that refers not just to interhuman contact, but to contact between distinctive orientations to material life or a cosmology of relationships. Of dramatic significance for the origins of religion has been modernity, which followed the Age of Discovery with all its materialities.

Whitehead (2023) records that academic attention to indigenous religions has grown steadily since the 1990s in parallel with increasing attention to the lived, material dimensions of religions. The global emergence of the subfield of material religion in the late 1990s began to highlight the often taken-for-granted and marginalised material aspects of religions by placing religious “things” front and centre within cutting-edge debates

Anthropomorphic (i.e. the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal or object) positions about material cultures, offering relational theories (such as the new animism and the new materialism) that allow indigenous religious materialities to reveal new understandings about the ontological and other potentialities of so-called “things”.

Sacred things in religion are things that are set apart for worship or devotion, or that are considered tbe worthy of spiritual respect. They can include: 

  • People: Sacred officials, such as priests, pastors, kings and even presidents are considered to be special agents in the religious cult 
  • Places: Temples, shrines and other buildings dedicated to God are considered to be the abode of the sacred 
  • Images: Certain images of God are considered to be uniquely powerful and true expressions of divine reality 
  • Objects: Sacred artifacts are venerated and blessed. For example, in some Hindu and Native American traditions, dancers’ masks and jewels are individually worshipped 
  • Natural objects: Rivers, the sun, mountains or trees can be considered sacred 
  • Beliefs, doctrines, laws and customs: These can be considered sacred if they are associated with religious purposes 
  • Human life: Some consider human life to be sacred, as each person has a “divine nature and destiny” 
  • Families: Some consider families and family relationships to be sacred 
  • Covenants: Some consider covenants to be sacred 
  • Scriptures: Some consider scriptures to be sacred 
  • Human body: Some consider the human body to be sacred
  • Burial sites: Some people or communities consider burial sites sacred and those who desecrate them vandals
  • Tithes and offerings: Some consider tithes and offerings to be sacred 
  • Name of God: Some consider the name of God to be sacred.

Sacredness is manifested in sacred officials, such as priests and kings; in specially designated sacred places, such as temples and burial sites. Sacred describes something that is dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity; is considered worthy of spiritual respect or worship.

The term sacred means the opposite of profane. It refers to things that are associated with religious purposes and relate to God. Inside, the church overflowed with sacred things: statues and pictures of saints, stations of the csross, candles, baptismal fonts, holy water.

In Uganda we hear of Kakande’s holy rice and Bugingo’s holy soda, and the spiritually poor tend to fall victims to the sacredness of the materials and the pastors who cast themselves as next to God. There is the Nakayima tree in Mubende/Mityana area, which recently lost one of its branches that ended up killing at least four people and injuring many. That tree is taken to be sacred and associated with spirits and thus spirituality. To those who worship their spirits at its base, their gods are enough and there is nothing like a Supreme God. Such God is a foreign god. Their spiritual gods are sacred while the Supreme God is profane (i.e not relating to that which is sacred or religious) or sacred to the foreign lands where they perceive that God to belong.

Again, those who profess the supreme God, either as Muslims or Christians tend to make certain ritually visited places or to which they pay pilgrimage to, sacred. To the Muslims of Uganda and other countries, Mecca in Arabia is a sacred place. To which the make yearly pilgrimages. Their religion become empty without continuous association with Mecca as a sacred place. To the Catholics, the Vatican is a sacred city. To the various protestant Christian groups, different places are taken as sacred. For example, the rocky formations in Mayuge, where Bishop Hannington was murdered, constitute a sacred place than scores of Christians visit every year to remember the bishop and worship their God.

On the sacred and the profane would be a good article to show the “perceptions” of things as sacred or profane by both religious or non-religious people. The personal experience is a critical component of religious expression and serves to make space sacred. Ritual performances, evoked emotion and the physical body act as mediums and allow space to be perceived as sacred.

The use, influence, power and placement of sacred space have been consistent elements of religion and communities throughout time. The human experience and interaction with sacred space has always been an observable trait of mortal history

For God and my country

  • A Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.

 About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)

The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).

Further reading

Ahava, Sophie ; Nicholas Buccella; and Olivia Mason-Lucas – Sacred spaces: an open introduction to the geographic study of religions and belief systems. PressBooks, https://pressbooks.pub/opengeo/chapter/the-power-of-human-experience-within-sacred-space/

Caitlin Finlayson (Editor): Sacred Spaces: An Open Introduction to the Geographic Study of Religions and Belief Systems. Written by Undergraduates at the University of Mary Washington PressBooks, https://pressbooks.pub/opengeo/front-matter/sacred-spaces-an-open-introduction-to-the-geographic-study-of-religions-and-belief-systems/ Visited 22 December 2024 at 14:50pm EAT

DICK HOUTMAN and BIRGIT MEYER (2012). Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality. Published by: Fordham University Press Pages: 496 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c5chw4, Review by: THOMAS J. CSORDAS American Ethnologist, Vol. 42, No. 4 (NOVEMBER 2015), pp. 799-800

Finneran, Niall P. (2017). The materiality of human–water interaction in the Caribbean: an archaeological perspective. Wires Water, 21 July 2017, https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wat2.1235, Visited on 22 December 2024 at 14:22 pm EAT

Niall Finneran, Christina Welch (2024). Materialities of Religion: Spiritual Traditions of the Colonial and Neocolonial Caribbean. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Materialities-of-Religion-Spiritual-Traditions-of-the-colonial-and-post-colonial-Caribbean/Finneran-Welch/p/book/9781032575346?srsltid=AfmBOoqhgLzN4BVCDGuQVopjO0rrcIEdW5IHRFNbroikuFKwhEpTrwnf

Webb Keane (2008). The evidence of the senses and the materiality of religion. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/128/2014/07/evidence_ofthe_sense.pdf Visited 22 December 2024 at 13:41pm EAT

Keane, W. (2008). On the materiality of religion. Material Religion, 4(2), 230–231. https://doi.org/10.2752/175183408X328343

Whitehead, Amy R. (2023).  Materiality and the Study of Indigenous Religions

Religionhttps://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.1176

Published online: 23 August 2023 https://oxfordre.com/religion/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-1176?d=%2F10.1093%2Facrefore%2F9780199340378.001.0001%2Facrefore-9780199340378-e-1176&p=emailAODk1AU2i8cns Visited 22 December 2024 at 13 :53 pm EAT

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