'Cultures do not exist': Exploding self-evidences in the investigation of interculturality

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The Kazanga festival: ethnicity as cultural mediation and transformation in central western Zambia

This paper explores the cultural dynamics of ethnicity in the context of a postcolonial African State, Zambia. The opening sections define ethnicity and pinpoint its central dilemma: while unmistakably constructed and thus selectively empowering the brokers coordinating the construction process, ethnicity nonetheless tends to pose as unchangeable, innate and inescapable. The paper then presents an analysis of the Kazanga festival which has been taking place since 1988 among the Nkoya in western Zambia. As an instance of ethnic self-representation vis-…-vis the national State, the annual festival brings out the extent to which cultural reconstruction in ethnicity radically transforms local historical cultural forms into a global idiom of performance, inequality along class and gender lines, and commodification or folklorization of culture. Yet such transformation is shown to have a revitalizing effect on local expressive culture and on the historic kingship, and is argued to be a survival strategy for local cultural forms in a globalizing world. The author attended the Kazanga festival in 1989, and again in 1994. In a postscript he outlines changes which have taken place since 1989.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

'Cultures do not exist': Exploding self-evidences in the investigation of interculturality

This volume brings together fifteen essays investigating aspects of interculturality. Published between 1969 and 2002, the essays operate at the borderline between anthropology and intercultural philosophy. Ethnographic data are derived from field research carried out in Tunisia, Zambia and Botswana. While a number of chapters focus on specific African contexts, others have a more theoretical focus, or deal with the whole of Africa. The essays are arranged in five parts: 1. Preliminaries; 2. The construction of intercultural knowledge through anthropological fieldwork; 3. From anthropological fieldworker in southern Africa, to North Atlantic diviner-priest: an experiment in intercultural philosophy; 4. From cultural anthropology to intercultural philosophy; 5. Exercises in intercultural philosophy. [ASC Leiden abstract]ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

'Geef hem dan maar aan de krokodillen': staatsvorming, geweld en culturele discontinuïteit in voor-koloniaal Zuidelijk Centraal Afrika

Na een korte bespreking van enige thema's in het onderzoek van staatsvorming in pre-koloniaal Afrika, analyseert de auteur staatsvorming in de 18e en 19e eeuw in het gebied van de Kafue/Zambezi waterscheiding in Centraal Westelijk Zambia (met name de vorming van de Nkoya en Lozi staten) tegen de achtergrond van koloniale en post-koloniale ontwikkelingen in termen van de articulatie van de productiewijzen. Hij bespreekt de uitbuitende relatie tussen vorstenhoven en plaatselijke gemeenschappen, die zich manifesteert in processen van incorporatie en etnicisatie. In tegenstelling tot de heersende opvattingen die culturele and structurele continu‹teit tussen vorstenhoven en de plaatselijke gemeenschappen benadrukken, stelt de auteur dat er bij de staatsvorming in Zambia sprake was van een absolute breuk met de sociale organisatie en culturele ideologie van de voor-statelijke plaatselijke dorpssamenleving. Deze transformatie slaagde weliswaar in de Lozi staat, maar dit was niet het geval in de Nkoya staten. In dit verband benadrukt de auteur de centrale rol van geweld (inclusief rituele moord). Een en ander kan ook relevant zijn voor de beoordeling van het huidige geweld in Zuidelijk Afrika. Bibliogr., notenASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Editorial: The Roman Catholic church, and the hermeneutics of race, as two contexts for African philosophy

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Socio-ritual structures and modern migration among the Manjak of Guinea Bissau: Ideological reproduction in a context of peripheral capitalism

Case study of the position and religious activities of Manjak labour migrants from the administrative divisions of Calequisse and Cai¢ in the Cacheu region, who spend a substantial portion of their lives in urban centers in Senegal and France while maintaining close ritual and therapeutic ties with their area of origin. These ties involve a spectacular expenditure of time and foreign-earned money and bring out clearly the exploitative nature of local gerontocratic power, suggesting that these ritual ties have somehow become crucial in the articulation between capitalism and the local pre-capitalist modes of production. The central question tackled in this article is that of what exactly is being reproduced if the migrants' rituals are considered as cases of ideological reproduction.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Black Athena: ten years after: towards a constructive re-assessment

On June 28, 1996, a conference was held at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, on controversies originating from Martin Bernal's study 'Black Athena: the Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization' (1987, 1991). Papers were presented by Wim van Binsbergen, Martin Bernal, Jan Best, Arno Egberts, and Josine H. Blok. The present publication is an edited versions of Wim van Binsbergen's paper.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Likota lya bankoya: memory, myth and history

Using a structuralist-inspired approach the author analyses a collection of oral historical data from central western Zambia, namely 'Likota lya Bankoya', ('The history of the Nkoya people'), compiled by the first Nkoya Christian pastor, J. Shimunika, in the 1950s-1960s. He focuses on mutative transformations that mark two types of discontinuity: 1) deviations, in the Likota text, from contemporary Nkoya cultural practice; and 2) inconsistencies, in the text, within the pattern of oppositions by which a particular past episode is evoked. These transformations are shown to converge on the same pattern of changes in gender relations in the process of State formation. In conjunction with the contemporary ethnographic evidence on Nkoya society, these mutative transformations indicate that the 'feminist' message in the Likota text is not an historically irrelevant statement concerning a static cosmological order, but a reflection of an actual historical process relegating women in central western Zambia to inferiority in the political, ritual, economic, and kinship domains. ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

The unit of study and the interpretation of ethnicity: studying the Nkoya of Western Zambia

The alternative proposed here for the tribal model as a unit of study is not another, better unit of study (e.g. a mode of production, an expanding social formation, or a well-defined spatio-temporal portion of reality), but a growing awareness of possible problems and interrelations, informed by insights from history and political economy. Thus this paper is an exercise in the interaction of anthropology and history in the analysis of a specific set of data: Introduction - The end of rural anthropology in Zambia? - The unit of study - Studying the Nkoya - Ethnicity, history and the Nkoya experience - Nkoya ethnicity and the dialectics of consciousness - Conclusion: beyond the unit of study.ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde