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Mariam Goshadze, "The Noise Silence Makes: Secularity and Ghana's Drum Wars" (Duke UP, 2025)
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Eliza Frosparetti
welcome back to the New Book Network. I'm Eliza Frosparetti, the host of the Channel. Today. We'll be talking to Mariam Goschadze about her recent book, the Noise Silence Makes Secularity in Ghana's Drum Wars. The Noise Silence Makes was published by Duke University Press as part of its Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora people series in 2025. Maryam is an assistant professor in the Study of religion at Leipzig University. Maryam, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:21]
Mariam Goschadze
Thank you so much, Elisa, for having me here. I'm super excited to be having this conversation with you today.
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Eliza Frosparetti
Oh, what an honor. We've known each other for quite a long time, so I'm so glad to see this project come to fruition to be able to talk about it with you. So let's start by having you introduce yourself to us.
- [02:42]
Mariam Goschadze
Yeah, so I'm currently based in Leipzig University, where I am an assistant professor, junior professor in German terms, in the history of religions. I met the religious Studies department. I was born and raised in the Republic of Georgia and I moved around quite a bit during my education years. I spent a bit of time in Europe. I did my BA in history at American University in Bulgaria and my first master's degree in nationalism at Central European University. And after that I moved to the US where I did my second master's degree in the study of religion, where I stayed as well. And finally my PhD career took place at Harvard University where I was part of the committee on this study of religion.
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Eliza Frosparetti
Many, many peregrinations Mariam and a really unusual, unusual story and background, especially for an Africanist. Right? You might be party of one for the Georgians who study Africa, that I know for sure.
- [04:10]
Mariam Goschadze
That is very much the case, I think, as far as I'm aware. I think I am the only person who works, who works on Africa from Georgia, especially on African religions. I mean, we have some linguists who work on African languages, but other than that, I think I'm the only one.
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Eliza Frosparetti
Well, I bring this up because it's interesting to think about your background, your story, your perspective and how it influenced the way that you approached your work. And so I wanted to ask you first to begin our conversation about your book, which is about Ghana's drum wars. And we'll get into that topic a little bit later. But I first wanted to really linger on this question because you open your introduction talking about the sense of affinity that you have for the complexities of Ghanaian modernity, as you call it. And you say that there's a lot that is shared or in parallel with some of what you reckoned with growing up in post Soviet Georgia. And I'm interested in talking about some of those similarities.
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Mariam Goschadze
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a great question. Despite the obvious differences, of course, in geography and imperial context and religion and economic structure, I was really struck by the parallels between Ghana after British colonial rule and Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as I started to research the region and more so when I started visiting the country as part of my field work. Both contexts, and generally post colonial and post Soviet contexts share processes of what I would call post imperial state making under very intense geopolitical pressure. I think the Soviet Union fell apart when I was just five years old. So all of my school education took place in an environment of intense flux. During the 90s. We witnessed two civil strives, a total breakdown of infrastructure characterized by power cuts, high levels of unemployment, poverty, industrial collapse. And despite periods of stability and economic advancement and general sense of well being in both contexts, I could also observe a very strong kind of sense of Transitionality and dependence on external political forces on the level of kind of lived experience. And one of the strongest parallels, I would say for me is the search for authenticity in post imperial settings. The question of who are we really? You know, this kind of double, triple identity that accompanies these periods of flux. In Ghana, this has meant a longstanding interest in tradition, African values and so on. And in Georgia also in the revival of traditions in church life, insistence on being modern or having a modern European identity, and so on. So one can speak in a way of a shared sense of post imperial affect that goes beyond institutional sovereignty and encompasses feelings of hope and loss and loss and dependence and search for authenticity. So when I was in Ghana, I very much felt this affinity, even though I was not being read obviously as someone who came from even a remotely similar context. I mean, I was primarily read as an U.S. american or Western European and sometimes I was quite, you know, eager to emphasize the point that I came from a background that had a lot of parallels as well to what was going on in the country.
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Eliza Frosparetti
That's so interesting. As you were talking, it was brought to mind the, you know, Senghor's kind of this fear of the Balkanization of Africa and thinking maybe there are, you know, these deeper parallels of. Yeah. Of Eastern Europe and the postcolonial context. I'm sure Frederick Cooper would absolutely agree. So, okay, so we've laid out this. I thought it was really interesting. Post imperial affect, that's the term you use. Beautiful. And so as you write this book, and I wanted to ask you about this because I'm a historian, you're an anthropologist, and the way that you write is very much to, as you just did in your answer to my previous question, kind of reflect on your positionality. You put yourself into the book, into the analysis, not of course, in a heavy handed way, but to say, you know, this is the moment in the conversation I was in when this idea came up or this information reared its head. And so this is the way I processed it in that moment, this kind of self reflective, taking the reader along the journey and not hiding behind the written word as if we're these impartial containers of supreme objectivity that don't exist. And I wanted to ask you about the choice in writing as to present the analysis in that way.
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Mariam Goschadze
I did try my best to make my writing kind of personable given the fact that methodologically I worked with both historical and ethnographic sources. However, I would not really call myself an anthropologist. At the end of the Day because even though I've been trained in anthropological ethnographic methods, I also did quite a bit of history and the study of religion. And as. As you know, as I was trained in the US it's very much was an interdisciplinary affair. Right. So even though I did ethnographic fieldwork, my project itself did not fully lend itself to the kind of personal storytelling that I so much like in many anthropological works. Even though I tried to insert the characters that I encountered and my personal relationships with them in the storytelling. One of the reasons why I couldn't do the more, you know, classical anthropological approach is because of how my project itself was set up. I worked in the city, you know, lived in my own apartment. That is, I didn't do this complete immersion in the GA community, which is typical of the classical anthropological project. And that was partially also a conscious choice because one of my goals was to show how African religion thrives in urban environments, you know, and not in these kind of remote settings, how it is often portrayed. So a lot of my ethnographic, I mean, a lot of my ethnographic engagement was interview based. So I would conduct interviews with often, you know, high ranking, also officials, representatives of the state, but also members of or heads of traditional communities or heads of Pentecostal charismatic churches where, you know, I was very much limited by the structure of the interviews, you know, the time limits. You had to start at a certain time at a certain time. So there was no opportunity often to have an informal kind of relaxed dialogue. However, I did try to, as I already mentioned, I did try to focus on some important figures, like, for example, Numopla Foe, one of the traditional priests that figures in one of my chapters actively.
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Eliza Frosparetti
So I wanted to highlight that part of kind of that your approach to the storytelling. Because the book is very theoretically sophisticated, but it is written with this kind of accessible, personable style. And so I think that that's a very seductive and really easy to read and makes it just kind of flow as a read. So I just wanted to highlight that for anyone who's interested in checking out the text.
- [13:26]
Mariam Goschadze
I'm really glad to hear that from you.
- [13:28]
Eliza Frosparetti
Absolutely. It was very, very smooth to engage with this. So now we've kind of laid out a little bit your background and some aspects of your method, although we'll talk more about that in a bit. But this book is really about Ghana's drum wars. So I need you to tell us a little bit basic information. What are the drum wars? And why did you get so keenly interested in Them.
- [13:56]
Mariam Goschadze
Okay. Yeah. So at the center of the book are the drum wars. And drum wars is a reference to this conflict that transpired between the Ga community members, who are primarily based in and around Canas capital Accra, and Pentecostal charismatic churches. The reason for this conflict was the annual ban on drumming and noise making, which is a ritual prohibition on noise that takes place as part in the framework of the annual harvest festival called. The Ga community members have been celebrating this festival for decades, if not centuries, as they claim, and the ban has always been part of that. However, in the 1990s, towards the end of the 1990s, Pentecostal charismatic churches started to disobey the noise restrictions that were introduced by the God community members. So when I mean noise restrictions, when I say noise restrictions, I mean we're talking about a period of usually one month when extreme forms of noise making are not allowed. Because, as the Ga community members will explain, the deities are visiting the city to work on the gestation of the harvest, and ritual specialists need time for deliberation and for communing with the deities. Traditionally, drums were the main instruments that were prohibited around this time, because drums are also very important ritual instruments that allow Ga community members, but also many other communities across Ghana and West Africa at large, to communicate with the deities. However, over time, with urbanization and rising noise levels, some other dimensions were added to this prohibition. So the term itself changed from the ban on drumming to ban on drumming and noise making. And this ban started to include loud music as well, which is what obviously Pentecostal charismatic churches are very famous for, for those who know how they operate in. In the West African context. So many of these churches decided to violate the prohibitions, which outraged the God community members and resulted in physical clashes between the representatives of the transgressing churches and traditional authorities and their followers. The conflict escalated to the extent that the state had to interfere and introduce multi body or multi member, a multi member task force that would regulate the period of the ban on drumming. And this task force is known as noise control task force. Up to today, it usually includes members of the Ga community, but also members from police representatives and representatives from the Accra Metropolitan Assembly. So after. After the noise control task force started to operate, the situation started to settle down. And even though there are sometimes still some tensions around this period of the ban on drumming, generally speaking, this one month transpires without any major incidents. And this is an ongoing thing, the ban on drama Gandhi is making. Actually, just six days ago, I saw an announcement from Accra Metropolitan assembly that the one month ban was commencing and the assembly was asking all citizens, but particularly representatives and leaders of Bantecostal Charismatic Churches to follow the regulations.
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Eliza Frosparetti
So what you have is this kind of stunning showdown in a sense between Pentecostal Charismatic Churches and this, which is very well resourced, very popular, quite powerful
- [20:13]
Mariam Goschadze
global
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Eliza Frosparetti
force movement and then this kind of small, very local traditional religion or traditional religions of a community that is really circumscribed kind of geographically and it's really kind of this David and Goliath story. But what's amazing is that, you know, David wins in a sense, which is so fascinating, the center of this puzzle. But so before I think probably people who are listening will have some familiarity with Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, but maybe the God community is a little less well known. So can you kind of explain what they're, you know, a little bit of the history of the God community, but also why they have this trump card, this authority over the management to some extent of Accra.
- [21:12]
Mariam Goschadze
Yeah, that's a great question. And indeed, I mean, this is an unexpected situation that, that's what's true to me from the beginning. Right. And part of the reason is, and that connects to how I came to this project as well is because when I started studying religion in the Context of Ghana. The primary narrative that you hear is indeed that, you know, Pentecostal charismatic Christianity is on the rise. These churches are mushrooming, they're overtaking the religious kind of domain and in the country at the expense often of, you know, traditional religions that are using their vitality. However, when I first visited Accra during it was my second year of doctoral studies, I think, and my plan was not really to work on this topic at all. I was going to go north to study the infamous witch camps. But it was the time of the ban on drumming and someone pointing that out to me, even though we were outside of the city center, that at this time, no music was allowed on the streets. And I was shocked because I did not realize that in such a huge metropolis where different religious groups are present, a small traditional community could be able to impose these kinds of serious noise restrictions on the whole city. Almost so far away also from the city center. And those who have visited Ghana know how important, I mean, beyond the religious music, generally music is to everyday, you know, life to spending time outside, there's always some sort of music playing on the streets. And so the ban on drumming actually also includes restrictions on these kinds of music. So that was very much a kind of a paradigm shift for me that fascinated me. And I want. I started to want to research that. And of course, I had known about the God community before, but that's when I started to look into their history more closely. The God community members have been around, settled around this territory for centuries, and they were actively engaged in trade. They were also present during the colonial period. So they were kind of at the front lines of interacting with colonial administrators. And even in the post independence period, they maintain some kind of status in the capital. And part of the reason for that is the fact that they are considered to be the official guardians of Accra lands. So what does that mean? Right. In much of Ghana, land has been historically understood not as private property owned by individuals or by the state, but rather as ancestral and collective property managed by cultural communities. The system of indirect rule during British colonialism ironically strengthened, at least bureaucratically, the role of chiefs as intermediaries also in land management. Even if the British did repeatedly attempt to bring the so called wastelands or unused lands under crown control, in many instances they were prevented from fully dispossessing customary land holders, Partially due to effective African political resistance. Most notably the Aboriginal Rights Protection Society established in 1896 with Caseleigh Hayford as an important leader of the moment. The British also institutionalized and in the process transformed customary law via processes of selection and codification, much of which was also concerned with kind of ritual elements and custodianship of land right. And this setup guardianship of lands by different communities across what is now Ghana replicated itself in the post colonial state as well through the preservation of institutionalized customary law that runs parallel to the constitutional law. It is through the customary law as well that traditional authorities are recognized as custodians and guardians of land. And in this case the God traditional authorities are considered to be guardians of a cross lands. What this means in practice is that the God community have some say in how the land is managed. The land in the capital, for example. The state has to lease the land from the God community members for various purposes. And this process often involves also has a ritual dimension. This also implies ritual management of the land right. As we see in the case of the ban on drumming, the Ga community members are actually allowed via customary law to impose their ritual regulations on certain traditional areas. Whether that's restriction on noise making or. Or prohibition on fishing on certain days of the week and so on and so forth.
- [27:45]
Eliza Frosparetti
It's really this kind of amazing twist that this, that the Ga were in this place that became, you know, the colonial capital and through these contingencies of history, now have this power to regulate to some extent the way that, you know, the land is used and to manage it in a particular way. And it's really just kind of amazing historical accident. Contingency, maybe accident would get me in trouble to say, but that being the case, it's amazing that it gives the God community an upper hand with respect to, you know, to the, to the Goliath of the story that the Pentecostal and charismatic Christian churches. So as we kind of proceed along your narrative, actually it turns out that the Drum wars are only introduced properly on page 90, which means that there's a whole couple chapters beforehand in which you're setting us up to understand the stakes of this conflict that is kind of the heartbeat or the animating thrust of the analytical puzzle. And so I wanted to ask you why you thought it was important to put it there. I mean, obviously chronologically you're talking about the 90s and the early 2000s, so I see that. But I wondered if there were other kind of analytical reasonings that you thought, what does the reader need to know to have the context to make sense of the import of these Drum wars in the late 90s?
- [29:22]
Mariam Goschadze
Yeah, that's a good question. Indeed. I mean the, the core of the book comes only somewhere in the middle of the book. Right. And I think that's. That's the historian in me in a way. Even though I primarily work on contemporary events, I just cannot help but be interested in the pre stories and transformations. When I started reading about the drum wars and the ban on drumming, and there are numerous excellent works about that on the subject, among them by my friend and colleague Justice Arthur, as well as by Marlene de Witte and Drake van Dijk. I realized that I really wanted to know more about how the enforcement of the ban on drumming had changed over time, whether it was always a contested issue or if it had to do with kind of specific power struggle between the God community members and Pentecostal Charismatic Christians. Because this conflict was not only or actually about noise as well. I mean, there were other things involved here as well. Right. This is about, you know, land ownership, but also general sense of competition that the God community members felt. These are these Pentecostal charismatic churches, many of which were led by other, you know, communities from G. So they were feeling like they were being ousted as the authorities in their own land. And I think that was part of the problem here. So as I started digging into the sources, particularly so I started looking at the 20th century, but also at the late 19th century archival material. I was not really able to find any mention of the ban on drumming in the late 19th, early 20th century per se. But I did find lots of discussions around noise regulation. I thought that was really relevant to the discussion. The late 19th century, generally speaking, was the time when noise regulation became a really huge concern. And also in the United States and Western Europe, new regulations and laws were drafted. There were attempts to define noise as a category that were very much also informed by sensory hierarchies at the time. And implementation of these practices was almost always skewed in favor of the sensibilities of, you know, the middle and upper classes. That means these noise regulation practices were often targeting, you know, minority communities, immigrant communities, workers, and so on and so forth. And that's partially because noise is such a subjective category, of course. And then these same kinds of the same model of noise regulation was then transported to the Gold coast and mobilized primarily against the local populations and actively against the GA who were concentrated in the capital. Interestingly, religious celebrations and cultural practices were especially targeted for noise regulations, particularly the use of instruments, music, and especially the drum. Right. And I mentioned this in the beginning as well, because drum played such a big role in these communities as a means to communicate with the deities in the kind of noise regulation framework that was very much informed by Christocentric sensibilities. The drum was read as an implement of the devil, right? Something that had to be really controlled. And of course, I mean, this demonstrates how much the very categories of noise and silence themselves were informed by Christian sensibilities, ideas about spiritual pollution and spiritual elevation via sound. In other words, as early as the late 19th century, the drum had emerged as a contested instrument. And drum play and its regulation was an important means of structuring the relationships between also foreigners and local populations, as well as Christians and non Christians. And the Pentecostal charismatic defiance of the ban on drumming in the 20th century can in a way be read against this history. But interestingly, what we are seeing in the late 19th century, right, is a kind of domestication of noise regulation by the God community members. So if in the colonial context, we see a conflation of Christian and secular sensibilities in defining what noise is and what kinds of noises need to be eliminated, in the case of the drum wars, it is the God community members who are saying, who are kind of repackaging their ritual restrictions also in terms of their attempts to establish peace in the capital and to eliminate noise as nuisance. So in a way, we see another form of conflation here of the ga so many sensibilities with secular practices of noise regulation against Christian community that holds a really high status in the country.
- [35:59]
Eliza Frosparetti
It's so interesting the way that you put these things together, because you kind of have, or I had this experience while reading of these, let's say, very well worn, colonial dualities of tradition and modern, of religious and secular, or maybe even enlightenment dualities of civilized and heathen. You know, I saw these kind of dualities refracted and moving in unexpected ways so that they completely get remixed and upended in this conflict, this drum war conflict. So in a sense, the GA as the traditional custodians of the land, or the ancestral custodians of the land and the traditional religious practices, they end up kind of working themselves into a place where they are the. They are the civilized in this duality, you know, and the Pentecostal practices are the heathenists, when that completely upends all of these ideas about how colonial Christianity was supposed to. To cut and divide the society. It's so interesting.
- [37:16]
Mariam Goschadze
That's right. I also found, and if you actually read, because a lot of my research from the 20th century and also the 90s was based on my reading of the Daily Graphic, one of the most popular newspapers In Ghana, you can really see how that transpires also in how people write about noise and Pentecostal charismatic noise making and how in some instances they even plead the GA community members to, you know, more forcefully introduce these regulations to get rid of this horrible noise that they're experiencing in the middle of the night often.
- [37:57]
Eliza Frosparetti
Okay, so chapter one is kind of setting up this colonial context, this idea about noise, all of these ideologies associated with it, et cetera. And then basically this whole thing kind of goes away. Basically. Nkrumah's government, the post independence years, no one seems to be particularly bothered, at least from what you found or didn't find in the archive and in the newspaper. And then in the 70s, Colonel Achenpeng, who's the military head of state in the early and mid-70s, he tries to curry favor, it seems, with the GA community by being photographed at a homo celebration or something. And suddenly it seems like this is the PR thing to do, the public relations move. And then you find this amazing ad of 1985 of a party at the Ambassador Hotel, which was a craft first luxury hotel, saying, come, we're going to have a homo celebration at this fancy hotel. And completely taking out of total context this harvest festival that is about communion with the land and the ancestors and move it into, you know, the standard hotel. So help pick up the story of the return of this noise regulation and these tensions around noise regulation when we get to the 80s or so.
- [39:27]
Mariam Goschadze
That's right. So in kind of the 20th century, mid 20th century, in the post independence period, we do not see any kind of conflicts related to the ban on drumming, which means, I mean, also based on my interviews with people who lived through that time or whose parents lived through that time, which means that those restrictions were followed without kind of any issue. Everybody accepted them as the given. It was totally accepted to just be quiet for that one month. Another important dimension of this is, of course, the role and treatment of African religions and particularly African culture during this time. Right. So we are looking at post independence national identity building has a lot of nationalistic elements, of course, but also Pan Africanist elements, where it is a priority to really emphasize the value of African culture. The importance of African culture, which also, of course, is a general category that includes religion for moving forward. Right. For the country. This means that both on the level of cultural policy, also in scholarship, African religions are being, you know, reconsidered and elevated to a different level. However, there is still a concern about their status or, you know, religiosity in a Way, which has also is informed by, you know, this hierarchies of religiosity that come from, you know, 19th, late 19th century taxonomies of religion as well as missionary presence, missionary descriptions of African religions. There is a general sense of hierarchy with crescented Islam being, you know, more modern and advanced forms of religiosity, and African religions being less so, even though they're being rethought in the process. This rethinking involves culturalization of some of its dimensions in order to modernize them. Right. So the incidents that you were mentioning from the 80s as well have very much to do with that. Right. So getting rid of this very strictly religious and elements that are read as religious and promoting ceremony and ritual, kind of ideological, even dimensions of the festival. And we see that trend also continue. I come back to that a little bit in the last chapter of the book when I talk about this two initiatives, Homo Thanksgiving and Homofest, that also attempt to culturalize Homo Festival, which we
- [42:50]
Eliza Frosparetti
will get back to. As I was reading it, I realized I'd been to homofest in 2016 and I felt very, very pleased I had this context to read your writing on the topic. But what. Okay, so I suppose we're kind of pulling ourselves over to the 80s and 90s, seeing how culture and religion is starting to be used in public ways that are less about the religiosity, the practice of the religious, and more about the occupying public space and playing public roles. And what you kind of lead us to as we get to the conflict of the drum wars is that while Pentecostal charismatic Christian churches and the God community understand the power of noise as this fundamental part of religious practice, in different ways, surely, but that. That it's an essential part of. Of the religious experience that though they agree on this, they have completely different ways of justifying their need or desire to either produce sound when they shouldn't in the side of the. The. The Pentecostal churches during the noise there during the noise band, or for sound not to be produced in the case of the. The. The God community's perspective. And so you are telling us that they are mobilizing these different legalistic and secular justifications to make their case. So outline those two for us and explain how this then brings us back to the question of secularity, which is really what the book's key intervention is. And I want to spend some time on the stakes of this.
- [44:52]
Mariam Goschadze
Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. So that's the legal defense that these two parties are mobilizing indeed represents how I built the theoretical kind of gist of this book. So what's happening is because even though they, of course, yeah, they understand the role of sound in a similar way, or role of noise, both parties. How Pentecostal charismatic Christians defend their case is through their insistence on the right to practice religion, which is, in short, which is their constitutional rights. Then the God Community members, instead of taking the same route, are mobilizing the right to practice culture. So they're taking the kind of customary law path. And that, I mean, there are several reasons for this. First, I think if they had mobilized the right to religion defense, they would not have been able to argue their case as well, because right to religion allows one to practice their religion, but it doesn't mean that the community has the right to impose their religious directives on other communities. And that's what we are seeing happening here, right? Yes, indeed. I mean, customary law is below constitutional law in legal hierarchy. However, giving the long history of culturalization of traditional religions discursively in the country, but also through different kinds of policies, the GoG community members started to argue for their case in this way. If the conflict didn't actually reach the court, if it had, I think they would have lost the case anyway. But this insistence on the right to practice culture was extremely powerful, and I found it extremely interesting as well, because what they're doing is they're using the framework that discriminates their religion and identifies it as culture or places it below religion property. They're using this framework to their own advantage here. Even though overall, these processes of culturalization of traditional religions have had serious ideological disadvantages for the practitioners of traditional religions. In this particular case, religion as culture seems to be working in the favor of GA community members and allows them to gain state support. That is unofficial in a way, because when the state introduces the those control task force, they're saying that the task force is not intended specifically for the period of the ban on drumming because that would be unconstitutional. That means they would be favoring the God community. In this particular case. What they're saying is that the noise control task force will generally measure noise levels in the city and fight noise as nuisance, even though in practice the task force actually only operates during the ban on drowning. Some informal arrangement was found to allow the God community members to continue practicing their ritual prohibitions. Given informal state support, but also general backlash that happened at this time, a lot of of the leaders of Pentecostal charismatic churches also backed down and accepted these circumstances for the sake of, you know, interreligious dialogue and general, you know, peaceful cohabitation.
- [49:31]
Eliza Frosparetti
Amazing. Customary law strikes back. Right? It's like this is what I was saying with these kind of dualities kind of getting remixed in this, in this, in this totally different landscape. So we just talked about how the, let's say, the different parties, the Pentecostal Charismatic Churches and the GUT community couched their reasoning or their arguments for why they should or should not maintain the noise ban during that month in different legalistic discourses, one being about cultural heritage and one being about the right to practice religion. And then how they kind of the state has found this kind of compromise with this task force, but the task force only operates at this moment of the year, et cetera. We kind of come to the crux, I think, of the contribution of the book, obviously, beyond the case study, let's say, of the drum wars, is to think anew about what secular secularity is and can be in contemporary Ghana or places like it, and maybe other places as well. So how do you understand the way that this research has allowed you to theorize contemporary secularity in Africa?
- [50:58]
Mariam Goschadze
Yeah, as I also stated, the book, I mean, generally, research on secularity at ips question of secularity remains very much under examined in Africa. And I thought this case study was really fruitful for problematizing secularity, the question of secularity generally in the context of Ghana, but also in the context of Africa at large. So in my discussion, I differentiate. I use secularity and secularism, both terms, and I wanted to say a few words about that as well. So my engagement with the concept of secularity was very much shaped by my being part of the Multiple Secularities Research project, which was based at the University of Leipzig. The project is over now for the last year or two. And secularity here is understood as not a concept or political setup specific to a particular time period or geographic context, but rather. Rather as a form of differentiation between the secular and the religious that can be observed in multiple geographic settings and time periods. In this understanding, secularism as a political project, with its institutional and ideological dimensions, is simply one expression of secularity that emerges, one form of differentiation between religious and non religious, basically, that emerged in the European, Western European framework. As scholars like Talal Al Assad argue, secularism, this form of secularity is very much opposed Christian formation that prioritizes Christianity in its treatment of religions. Right. And I found. And then this form of secularism travels, of course, has traveled, of course, as a political and institutional setup outside of Western Europe. And There too, it takes different forms. But why I found the idea of secularity helpful was because it allowed me to observe also alternative differentiations between the secular and the religious that continue to exist in parallel to secularism. So in secular states, these kind of cultures of secularity, or in our case the grassroots secularity, might operate simultaneously to secularism and sometimes in contradiction to it, as we can see here. So we can see two forms of differentiation between religious and the secular right. One that is the state is suggesting and the impositions that. Or the restrictions that the state is imposing on, for example, right to religion. As we see, as we saw
- [54:07]
Eliza Frosparetti
in
- [54:08]
Mariam Goschadze
the case of the drum words. And then the differentiation between religion and culture, that is religion and non religion, that the God communities mobilizing. Right. And even though it is not kind of authorized on an institutional and legal level, it nonetheless is very powerful and sometimes will gain an upper hand in certain kinds of conflicts and negotiations, as we've seen in this particular case.
- [54:41]
Eliza Frosparetti
Yeah. What I think is powerful about the way that you deploy this concept is that you're really making an argument for historical specificity, I think. And that is always to me, what makes a concept hold water is as a historian. As a historian, when it's anchored in. In. In. In the place and in the time in which it is right. And that it. And that it emerges out of a set of patterns and conjunctures and contingencies which you've outlined so well in the book. As we begin to come to a close, I wanted to ask you two more questions. The first is a final one in the book. It's called the Noise Silence Makes. I love the title. I wondered if there was any story of how you came to that title.
- [55:33]
Mariam Goschadze
Yeah, I mean there's not really any exciting story behind it. I started. I started developing that title or the idea emerged already when I was a PhD student because as part of this project, even though that didn't make it to the book, I was also thinking about noise and silence as categories and what they mean in different cultural contexts. And it was then that. That I started thinking about the. Because the band on drumming obviously is, you know, attempting to impose some form of non noise, perhaps not silence yet it has caused such a stir. Right. So yeah, that's how the title came about. Unfortunately, I don't have a very good story behind it, but I'm quite happy with it, I must say.
- [56:31]
Eliza Frosparetti
I really like it. So tell us about what you are working on now.
- [56:38]
Mariam Goschadze
Yeah, so I'm currently working on my second manuscript that's gonna involve much less fieldwork or none of this. It's primarily a kind of secondary source analysis where what I'm trying to do is a genealogy of African traditional religion as a concept. So in the study of religion, atr, African traditional religion is often used to refer to indigenous traditional religions of Africa. But it is a very particular conceptualization what of what these religions represent that emerged in the post independence period in African universities, specifically in the Department for the Study of Religion. And it was, as I suggest, a very much a reaction to the ideological currents circulating in Anglophone West Africa at the time. I'm looking particularly at Ghana and Nigeria here and looking especially at, you know, Pan Africanist conceptualization also of religion, because what the concept suggests is that ATR is kind of comparable to other world religions, since it is a category that despite the differences between indigenous religions, still describes them in a way as one and ascribes to them very particular set of characteristics among them. For example, the superiority or importance of God as opposed to, for example, or supreme God as opposed to lesser deities, and so on and so forth. So what I'm trying to do is basically delineate this discourse and differentiate it from other models of studying African religions because often also in contemporary scholarship on African religions, these terms are being conflated. So I want to do a history of the term.
- [59:14]
Eliza Frosparetti
An intellectual history, in a way.
- [59:17]
Mariam Goschadze
An intellectual history. That's right, yeah.
- [59:20]
Eliza Frosparetti
Well, Marian, thank you for your time for speaking to me about your beautiful book. I can't imagine a book that is an academic book, at least that is better suited to podcast form the Sonic world.
- [59:32]
Mariam Goschadze
And that's so nice of you. Thank you so much for this really engaging questions. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
- [59:39]
Eliza Frosparetti
Oh, it's been great fun. Thanks, Mariam.
- [59:42]
Mariam Goschadze
Thank you.