Robert Launay (anthropology) has been appointed the executive editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa, published by Brill Academic Publishers. Founded in 1967, the Journal of Religion in Africa publishes studies of the forms and history of religion on the African continent, with particular emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa and the relationships between Christianity and Islam in the region. It is the only English-language journal dedicated to the study of religion and ritual throughout Africa.
A social/cultural anthropologist, Launay has authored several landmark studies in the anthropology of Islam, investigating Islamic identity in West African societies (especially Ivory Coast) and the roles of Muslim minorities historically specializing in trade. He is the author of Traders without Trade: Responses to Change in Two Dyula Communities (Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Beyond the Stream: Islam and Society in a West African Town (University of California Press, 1992), which won the Amaury Talbot Prize for best African ethnography in England in 1992. Launay’s edited volume on Islamic Education in Africa: Writing Boards and Blackboards was published by Indiana University Press in 2016. He has authored over seventy book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and articles in peer-reviewed journals.
After years of teaching the history of anthropology to undergraduates and graduates, Launay began research on the history of the discipline, publishing several articles on the history of ethnography in Africa and, more extensively, on the “prehistory” of the field. His book, Savages, Despots, and Romans: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder (University of Chicago Press, 2018) traces the ways in which “modern Europeans” came to define themselves with reference to nonmoderns (ancient Greeks and Romans in particular) and nonEuropeans from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. He has edited an anthology of early sources in anthropology, Foundations of Anthropological Theory: From Classical Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Wiley/Blackwell, 2010).
Launay has served on the editorial boards of journals including American Anthropologist, Mande Studies, and Islam et Sociétés au sud du Sahara. He has been a deputy editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa since 2019.
Launay succeeds Elias Bongmba as executive editor of the Journal. “Elias is a distinguished and prolific scholar who straddles the boundary between the fields of Religious Studies and Theology. This is no easy task,” Launay observes. “For the past few years, he has tirelessly devoted himself to keeping the Journal up to date and at the forefront of the field. His tenure has also enabled a shift in the field from one dominated by Europeans and North Americans to one where the contributions of African to the study of African religions has taken an ever more central role. It is a challenge to follow in his footsteps, and I am humbled at the prospect.”