Navigating decolonisation, religion, and gender in Zimbabwe

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour is an anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. Her work examines religious transformations in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in contemporary Zimbabwe. This is a context in which colonization violently upended ideas about personhood, spirituality, and ties between people and place. Raffaella’s work explores how young people navigate a religious landscape that has shifted ever since, and how they devise new forms of spiritual practice. As we discuss in this episode, the experiences of young Zimbabweans in this regard are instructive for people in the global North, especially with respect to how we relate to our ancestors, meaning in life, and cultural power. As the systems of value that made sense of life after World War II come unstuck, a rift is growing between older, more traditional generations, and younger generations who yearn for a different world. There is much that we can learn from Anthropology with respect to navigating this mileau, and Raffaella distils some of this wisdom in conversation with regular host Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick.