![]() Inculturation is the incarnation of Christian life and of the Christian message in a particular cultural context, in such a way that this experience not only finds expression through elements proper to the culture in question (this alone would be no more than a superficial adaptation), but becomes a principle that animates, directs and unifies the culture, transforming and remaking it so as to bring about a ‘new creation’. This is well captured in the following early definition of the concept: First, it relates to the adaptations in the modes and frames through which Christian teachings are transmitted to local non-Christians in accordance with their cultural contexts. Footnote 4 Originating in Catholic theological thought of the 1960s, the concept of inculturation in Christianity revolves around two aspects. Expanding on Østebø’s usage of the notion of localization, and in dialogue with Olivier Roy’s recent claims about the ‘deculturation’ that the contemporary globalization of religious traditions often seems to entail, Footnote 3 it will be argued that the most decisive involved mechanism of localization in the cases at hand is best understood rather as inculturation. ![]() The present contribution employs the concept with reference to a different global Islamic movement, that of Shiʿism. The response to this impetus by the actors of a locality, which means paying attention to the strategies applied in appropriating and localising the impetus, and which moreover entails an enterprise which integrates the factors and conditions, both local and translocal, relevant for its appropriation within the particular locality.Østebø focuses on the spread of Salafism among the Oromo Muslims of Ethiopia, but also claims that the concept of localization is more widely applicable to ‘all complex encounters between any Islamic tradition and those of the locality at any point in history’. In delineating his definition of the concept, he notes that any: The concept of localization has recently been foregrounded in the study of Islam by Terje Østebø. I thus argue that such processes lead to the heterogenization of a seemingly coherent and portable phenomenon like Shiʿism. However, the two cases also display significant differences, precisely as a function of their particular localizations in very different contexts. Third, in clear contrast with the earlier post-1979 wave of Shiʿi conversions, Footnote 1 the new Shiʿis of Guajira and Cambodia are in their majority not part of the urban intelligentsia, but of rural or urban lower-class backgrounds. Second, the dissemination of Shiʿism is also in both cases, though to varying degrees, connected to notions of cultural revival and the preservation of local cultures. ![]() First, they display a remarkable degree of ‘localization’ regarding the new religious orientation, driven by its inculturation into the respective cultural and religious milieus. Despite their very different contexts, both are tales of the recent spread of Shiʿism which share three common features. The second half of this study will focus on the adoption of Shiʿism by parts of the indigenous Muslim minority in predominantly Buddhist Cambodia. The first concerns the Guajira Peninsula shared by Colombia and Venezuela, where Teodoro Darnott, a self-declared liberator of the indigenous Wayúu people, has established what he calls the Hezbollah Venezuela organization, which draws on Shiʿi revolutionary ideology to justify a local struggle for self-determination. This contribution will discuss two contemporary cases of the global spread of Shiʿism beyond the Middle East.
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