Seeking Balance

In this essay, I examine how one particular African autobiographical work —Malidoma Patrice Somé’s Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman —embodies the concept of autobiography as philosophy and challenges Western metaphysical frameworks concerning the construction of the ethical self, temporality, and history. I argue that Somé’s autobiographical affirmation of African philosophy serves as a thoroughgoing critique of Western hegemonic thought. Moreover, I claim that this text goes beyond a remedial rebuffing of Eurocentric metaphysics and instead proposes a synthesis between both African and Western ways of knowing and understanding the world. Ultimately, Somé’s Of Water and the Spirit demonstrates that the act of philosophizing is a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon that helps shape the various “commonsensical” realities of modern life around the globe and should therefore be considered a non-exclusionary practice

Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Epistemology · Literature · MAGIC (telescope) · Metaphysics · Shamanism · Sociology · Subjectivity · Theology · African cultural and philosophical studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

• Framing wellbeing through spirituality, space, history, and context

  Open Access•Chioma Ogochukwu Ohajunwa, Gubela Mji et al.•Wellbeing Space and Society•2021

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• The African Indigenous Lens of Understanding Spirituality

  Open Access•Chioma Ogochukwu Ohajunwa, Chioma Ohajunwa et al.•Journal of Religion and Health•2018

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• The Parochial Universalist Conception of 'Philosophy' and 'African Philosophy

  Polycarp Ikuenobe•Philosophy East and West•1997

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• Philosophy and Indigenous Knowledge

  Dismas A Masolo•Africa Today•2003

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