Yannick van den Berg

Otium, Religiosity in Everyday Life and the Experience of Church Services in Namibia: A comparative Ethnography of Worshipping in Anglican and Charismatic-Pentecostal Churches of Oukwanyama.

The sub-project P2 Worshipping, contemplation and otium. Religiosity in everyday life and the experience of church services in Namibia studied practices of worshipping. For this I lived an everyday life in Northern Namibia, and I participated in church services of two respective churches: on the one hand an Anglican congregation near the border to Angola, on the other hand one of the newer, charismatic congregations to the south.
The area of study as well as the idea of Muße (otiose leisure) is coined by ambivalences. Only through those, otiose leisure becomes comprehensible as ‘actively doing nothing’, as dwelling in time, or as a particular moment of experienced freedom.
For the sub-project P2 too, such ambivalences were central: For example, take the individual with its experiences, perceptions, and its corporality as well as the mutual relation to a wider, social field. In which ways do possibilities of an alternative way of being emerge through and by practices of worshipping? What kind of actants, meanings or framings are involved?

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