TY - JOUR
T1 - On the Non-worshipping Character of the Akan of Africa
AU - Ani, Emmanuel Ifeanyi
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
PY - 2019/6/15
Y1 - 2019/6/15
N2 - According to Wiredu, the Akan profess secular esteem rather than religious worship to supra-natural beings (including the Supreme Being), who they perceive in an empirical sense. He backs this up by re-reading what he sees as the Akan general ontology in a way that denies them of the concepts of the supernatural, the transcendental, the mental, the spiritual, and an ontologically distinct mind. At the end of denying the three criteria of worship as well as all of these other concepts which might otherwise be available to the Akan, one might struggle to find any evidence that the Akan even had a religion. I dispute this secular reading, and I more generally demonstrate that the characterizations of the Akan attitude to divinity as non-worshipping, non-supernatural, non-transcendent, and non-spiritual, are either conceptually flawed, factually incorrect, or both.
AB - According to Wiredu, the Akan profess secular esteem rather than religious worship to supra-natural beings (including the Supreme Being), who they perceive in an empirical sense. He backs this up by re-reading what he sees as the Akan general ontology in a way that denies them of the concepts of the supernatural, the transcendental, the mental, the spiritual, and an ontologically distinct mind. At the end of denying the three criteria of worship as well as all of these other concepts which might otherwise be available to the Akan, one might struggle to find any evidence that the Akan even had a religion. I dispute this secular reading, and I more generally demonstrate that the characterizations of the Akan attitude to divinity as non-worshipping, non-supernatural, non-transcendent, and non-spiritual, are either conceptually flawed, factually incorrect, or both.
KW - African religion
KW - Supernatural
KW - Supreme Being
KW - Transcendental
KW - Worship
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85016102423&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11841-017-0583-z
DO - 10.1007/s11841-017-0583-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85016102423
SN - 0038-1527
VL - 58
SP - 225
EP - 238
JO - Sophia
JF - Sophia
IS - 2
ER -