Religious and Identity Trajectories Among the Ebrie of Anono and Blockhaus(Ivory Coast)

In the villages of Anono and Blockhaus,inserted in the district of Abidjan,three religious communities,notably Harrist,Catholic,and Methodist are socially accepted and recognized in the village space.These churches are adopted because they allow religious,cultural,and Christianized practices to coexist within their religious spaces.Social rules and sanctions operate there as a control mechanism for their sustainability.However,several faithful of these local churches are swarming for the benefit of the so-called“Evangelical”churches.This break is regarded by the collective memory as an act of deviance which involves stigma.We try to explore in what follows,20 biographical journeys of the faithful who abandon locally recognized churches.It is from the life story,the main data collection tool that we will first demonstrate the social situations of their affiliation to these churches(past experiences).Secondly,we will describe the social conditions of their disaffiliation(lived experiences)and thirdly,we will identify identity reconstruction strategies(experiences to be lived).They constitute an adaptive response to the process of social stigmatization maintained by the local chiefdom and large families.

Cultural Practice in Cote d'Ivoire: An Ethnography of the Feminization of Funeral Expenses

The“Letagonins”:a concept socially constructed to designate the“beating”women of Ivorian society,evokes those who have as their leitmotif,a self-realization through work.The purpose lies in their ability to free themselves from male domination.This concept means in one of the local Ivorian languages,notably the Gouro1:female boy.These women of Gouro ethnicity show a deep passion for the marketing of food products in Abidjan.However,behind this passion for food is their commitment to funeral expenses;a cultural activity customary lying with agnatic parentage.The transgression of custom by the latter under the prism of their social repositioning is the symbolic manifestation of the destandardization of the traditional relationship between man and woman in the organization of funerals in Gouro country,in the central West Ivorian.Understanding this relational reconfiguration has fuelled our passion as a researcher.In fact,ethnography has been mobilized as a method of observing the funeral practices of these women.In this regard,the study traces the strategies for negotiating access to the land as well as those used to negotiate access to information.