Inscribing Agency in Religious Change

Abstract

In the wake of the cultural turn, there has been a gradual shift in the theorization of African religions, from the static structural-functionalist oriented models, towards the insertion of agency. This new approach foregrounds the intentional actions of individuals, or collective actors, to create meaning when confronted with external cultural ideas. The African, therefore, is treated as an active agent capable of manipulating and inventing new religious possibilities, rather than being a puppet of a rigid social structure. This paper is cast in this mould. It examines the agentic role played by the Pokot as they navigated the cultural challenges presented to them by western Christianity during the British colonial rule in Kenya. However, because the agentic power to authorize meaning is never uniformly distributed in any society, this article highlights the central role played by Lukas Pkech in mediating the cultural conflict between the indigenous Pokot religion and western Christianity.