Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa

James W. Fernandez was an anthropologist, and this academic ethnography, published by Princeton University Press, studies Bwiti, a syncretic religious movement in Gabon and Cameroon blending indigenous Fang tradition with Christian elements, based on Fernandez's own extended fieldwork living among Bwiti practitioners. Its strength is sustained direct participant observation of Bwiti ritual and belief at a level of ethnographic detail rarely matched for the movement, treating it as a coherent religious imagination in its own right rather than as a derivative or transitional form. Its limit is that it documents the specific Fang Bwiti communities Fernandez studied in a particular period, and Bwiti practice varies across different lineages and has continued to change since, so more recent or regionally different practice needs separate sources.