Religious and Identity Trajectories Among the Ebrié of Anono and Blockhaus (Ivory Coast)

In the villages of Anono and Blockhaus, inserted in the district of Abidjan, three religious communities, notably Harrist, Catholic, and Methodist are socially accepted and recognized in the village space. These churches are adopted because they allow religious, cultural, and Christianized practices to coexist within their religious spaces. Social rules and sanctions operate there as a control mechanism for their sustainability. However, several faithful of these local churches are swarming for the benefit of the so-called “Evangelical” churches. This break is regarded by the collective memory as an act of deviance which involves stigma. We try to explore in what follows, 20 biographical journeys of the faithful who abandon locally recognized churches. It is from the life story, the main data collection tool that we will first demonstrate the social situations of their affiliation to these churches (past experiences). Secondly, we will describe the social conditions of their disaffiliation (lived experiences) and thirdly, we will identify identity reconstruction strategies (experiences to be lived). They constitute an adaptive response to the process of social stigmatization maintained by the local chiefdom and large families.