Nazarite women, ritual performance, and the construction of cultural truth and power

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Periodical article

Title:	Nazarite women, ritual performance, and the construction of cultural truth and power
Author:	Muller, Carol
Year:	1994
Periodical:	Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
Volume:	6
Issue:	2
Pages:	127-138
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	African Independent Churches women African religions
Abstract:	The Church of the Nazarites was founded in about 1911 by Isaiah Shembe in the then Native Reserve of Inanda, northwest of Durban, South Africa. The female membership, which includes both young virgin girls and married, or widowed women, plays a central role in the daily and ritual life of the church. This paper examines Nazarite women's religious discourse and performance as mechanisms for the articulation of both the effects of political and gendered power upon individual women, and the articulation of power through the construction of a regime of religious truth. The author analyses three women's narratives collected while pursuing a field research project with the religious community, in both KwaZulu-Natal and Soweto. The narratives demonstrate the dual conceptualization of power as it is located on the peripheries: that is, the effects of centralized State power on the lives of individuals, and the articulation of personal and collective power by the politically marginalized. Bibliogr., notes, ref.