Publication of 'Repenser la catégorisation religieuse à partir du Bénin, terre du Vodun'

Delighted to see the publication of the edited volume L'Afrique des religions à l'épreuve des chiffres et des catégorisations, directed by Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, Nathalie Bernard-Maugiron and Aurélien Dasré, to which I contributed a chapter with Fiacre Anato entitled "Repenser la catégorisation religieuse à partir du Bénin, terre du Vodun".

Drawing on the Beninese case, our chapter examines the limits of religious categorisations in censuses and demographic surveys. Statistics suggest a steady decline of Vodun since independence in favour of Christianity and Islam, but fieldwork tells a different story: multiple affiliations, circulation between traditions, hybridities that survey categories struggle to capture.

The interdisciplinary dialogue with the other contributors was particularly enriching, notably with Aurélien Dasré, a demographer, whose expertise shed light on how religious categories are constructed in censuses and Demographic and Health Surveys — data that historians like myself often draw on without sufficiently questioning their limitations.