The Spiritual Highway: Religious World Making in Megacity Lagos (Nigeria)
- Submitting institution
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School of Oriental and African Studies
: A - 22A Anthropology
- Unit of assessment
- 22 - Anthropology and Development Studies : A - 22A Anthropology
- Output identifier
- 21322
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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10.1080/17432200.2015.1103484
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Taylor & Francis Group
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- April
- Year
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
-
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- The Spiritual Highway exhibition began as an ethnographic research project as part of the Global Prayers: Redemption and Liberation in the City project – an international network of researchers and artists – funded by Forum Transregional Studies, Berlin. Together with award-winning Nigerian photographer Akinleye, Janson hit the road in 2013 to map how the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway has produced new forms of religiosity and how these have inscribed themselves in urban space. While it has failed as the artery linking north and south Nigeria, the Expressway has succeeded as a stage for the performance of public religiosity in the form of Christian and Muslim prayer camps, earning it the moniker the ‘Spiritual Highway’ – a term that, since Janson and Akinleye first coined it, has been adopted by several scholars in- and outside Nigeria.
Janson and Akinleye’s collaboration at the interface of ethnography and the arts calls for a novel approach to the study of religion. Shifting from the ingrained mentalistic to a material approach, the exhibition catalogue and article visualise and analyse religion as a set of aesthetic and spatial practices of world making. In her review of the exhibition, specialist of religion in Africa Birgit Meyer writes: ‘Presenting an impressive visual account of the “prayer cities” of two religious organizations … the exposition curated by Marloes Janson offers a timely and stimulating invitation to envision new directions for research.’
The exhibition started at SOAS’s Brunei Gallery in 2014 and travelled to Berlin, Leiden, and Florida. In 2020, Janson and Akinleye took part in a panel discussion at the Harn Museum’s Museum Nights (Florida). In 2021 the exhibition will be displayed at Stanford University. The exhibition has been reviewed in Wall Street International Magazine.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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