Research
- History of Religions in Africa: Islam, Christianity, indigenous religions (regional focus on West- and East Africa)
- African Travelogues
- Aesthetics of religion, material religion
- Qualitative methods in the study of religions
- Recent theorising in the study of religion and anthropology of religion
- Religion and healing/medicine
- Religion and museums/museality
- Catholicism (with a focus on Marian veneration in Europe and Africa)
- Spirit possession rituals, ancestor spirits in Africa and the diaspora
- Mission history
Field work
2017/2006/2005/2004 Field research in Tanzania
History of religions in Africa: Growing up, encounters with people in Nigeria, Niger and Tanzania awakened my interest in African cultures and religions. In my academic work, I focus on aspects of Islamic and Christian religions in East and West Africa. I particularly wish to bring together research in both these fields from a comparative study of religions perspective as they are generally quite strictly separated by the academic disciplines interested in them respectively (Islamic studies, theology, anthropology). Entanglements with one another and with (neo-)traditional and the corresponding boundary work between religious identities fascinate me and inspire my research questions. For many years my research has been focused on spirit possession and exorcism in various religions and regions. I conducted ethnographic field research in Tanzania for my doctoral dissertation on exorcism in a group called „Marian Faith Healing Ministry“ (Wilkens 2009 „Mary and the Demons“; 2011 Holy Water and Evil Spirits; 2011 „Marianische Heilung“).
In my latest research project, I analyse travelogues which were written around 1900 by East Africans with Sunni, Shii, Christian and Zoroastrian backgrounds. The narratives allow fascinating glimpses into the multilingual and multireligious contact zone of colonial East Africa. Non-Western perspectives on global entanglements and local diversity become apparent in the texts. For example, a Zanzibari Parsi engineer comments on the inefficiency of colonial government in British East Africa, or a Comorian manservant describes his German master’s hunting trip along the Trans-Siberian Railway and their encounters with Kalmyk nomads. Religious metaphors function as ordering categories and help translate between the alterity of foreign cultures and familiar values.
Aesthetics of Religion: Aesthetics of Religion is the study of sensual knowledge in religious contexts. Aesthetic knowledge refers to the fact that our knowledge is always formed by the abilities and restrictions of sensual perception. My research in aesthetics of religion focusses on topics such as ritual healing, cultural memory, Marian veneration and material text practices. In the working group “Aesthetics of Religion”, my colleagues and I have developed concepts and terminologies which realise the central role played by sensuality and perception in the formation of cultural knowledge. Museality thus refers to a specifically Western approach to render visible history (including natural history, but also of the nation, of art, of religions) in a ritually symbolic way (Kugele/Wilkens 2011 „Relocating Religion(s)“). The space created through imagination transcends its groundedness in sensual perception. Individual and collective experiences are divested of their actuality and are rendered as potentials for future actions (Wilkens 2015 „Inkorporierte Imagination“). A practice well known in the entire Islamic world is the religious-therapeutic practice of writing down Qur’anic verses, washing off the ink and drinking the tincture as medicine. In a striking manner, this practice stemming from Prophetic medicine demonstrates the aesthetic connection between medical-bodily and theological-intellectual codifications which become apparent in the handling of religious texts (Wilkens 2013 „Drinking the Qur’an“; 2019 „Text als Medizin“; 2017 „Infusions and Fumigations“, 2019 “Embodying the Qur’an”).
A recurrent theme in my work in aesthetics of religion and history of religion revolves around spirits, gods, saints and possession rituals associated with them. From a comparative perspective I study practices ranging from Voodoo through zar to exorcism. The spectrum of trance phenomena I am interested in also includes respective aspects of the veneration of Christian saints and Mary in particular. The conjunctions of therapy, of narration, of performances of cultural history, of gender politics and of identity formation are fascinating, not least in their ability to resist all straightforward classifications typical of differentiated modernity (Wilkens 2018 „‘Instant miracles are rare‘“, Wilkens 2020 „Narrating spirit possession“). Recently, my research interest has shifted towards the category of the ancestor spirits, which assert their place in ritual praxis in spite of Christianisation, secularisation and modernization. What do ancestors mean for lineages and families under conditions of urbanization, labour migration and the anonymity of social security systems?