Africa Seminar – Decolonizing by Demasculinizing: Wisdom Traditions from Matrilineal Mozambique

Presentation by Devaka Premawardhana (Emory University).

In this presentation, Devaka Premawardhana draws upon fieldwork among a Makhuwa-speaking people in northern Mozambique. He argues that, in some cases, rites of passage may be better understood as rites of return. This is especially true in matrilineal societies, like that of the Makhuwa, where women are so central and so honored—where boys learn to become men in matricentric ways.

Devaka Premawardhana is associate professor of religion at Emory University, in Atlanta (USA). He is an ethnographer with extensive fieldwork experience in northern Mozambique. His first book, Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique, develops the concept of existential mobility against the backdrop of Pentecostalism’s failure to displace indigenous traditions in the locale of his research. He is also coeditor of Between Life and Thought: Existential Anthropology and the Study of Religion.