MARLOES JANSON is a Reader in West African Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Leiden University. Her research interests are at the intersection of anthropology and religion. West Africa (the Gambia and Nigeria) is her ethnographic area of specialization. Before joining SOAS in 2012, she had been a Researcher at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. Her publications include Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jama‘at (2014), which has been awarded the RAI Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology. She co-edits the Brill series “Studies of Religion in Africa.” E-mail: mj19@soas.ac.uk
WALE ADEBANWI is the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations in the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Oxford University. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He was until recently a Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies, University of California-Davis. J. D. Y. Peel supervised his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge. E-mail: wale.adebanwi@africa.ox.ac.uk
DAVID PRATTEN is an Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa at the University of Oxford. His research is located in southeastern Nigeria and focuses on themes of history, violence, and the state. He is the author of The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (2007). E-mail: david.pratten@sant.ox.ac.uk
RUTH MARSHALL is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (2009) and numerous scholarly articles on the political and theoretical implications of evangelical revivalism in Africa and beyond. Her work seeks to clear an analytical space in which the political productivity of religious discourse and practice may be recognized and analyzed non-reductively. E-mail: ruth.marshall@utoronto.ca
STEPHAN PALMIÉ is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (1991), Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002), and The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (2013), as well as the editor of several volumes on Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic anthropology and history. E-mail: palmie@uchicago.edu
AMANDA VILLEPASTOUR is a Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology in the School of Music, Cardiff University. Her research interests are concentrated on Yoruba orisha music in Nigeria and Cuba. She is the author of The Yorùbá God of Drumming: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Wood That Talks (2015) and Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá Bàtá Drum (2010). E-mail: villepastourav@cardiff.ac.uk
J. D. Y. PEEL, FBA, (1941–2015), Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Sociology with reference to Africa at SOAS University of London, was a social theorist, anthropologist, and historian. His many publications on the Yoruba of West Africa included a trilogy on religion—Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (1968), Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (2000), Christianity, Islam, and Oriṣa Religion: Three Traditions in Comparison and Interaction (2016)—as well as the political history Ijeshas and Nigerians: The Incorporation of a Yoruba Kingdom (1983). He was also a prolific writer on theoretical issues, including a biography of the Victorian thinker Herbert Spencer: Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (1971). John particularly enjoyed grounding theoretical speculation in ethnographic particulars, as he does in this essay.
RICHARD FARDON is Professor of West African Anthropology at SOAS University of London. A long-time colleague, he acted as John Peel’s literary executor on behalf of the family and authored the British Academy’s memoir, which can be downloaded on open access from the Academy’s website. His own publications include most recently a book with the French artist Sènga la Rouge, Learning from the Curse: Sembene’s Xala (2017). E-mail: rf@soas.ac.uk
RAMON SARRÓ is an Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. He is the author of The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone (2009) and of several articles on prophetic movements and popular culture in West and Central Africa. E-mail: ramon.sarro@anthro.ox.ac.uk