ENGLISH

Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa

By Koen Stroeken

Book information

Publisher
Berghahn Books
Year
2018
ISBN
9781785339851
DOI
10.1515/9781785339851
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
2 MB (2054674 bytes)
Series
Methodology & History in Anthropology; 35
Pages
328\328
Library
degruyter.com
Time added
2023-08-20 04:18:01

Description

As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings – and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administrator, the missionary’s divine king, or Vansina’s big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster, both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine, rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.

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