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

by Koen Stroeken

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781800732148
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	09/17/2021
Series:	Methodology & History in Anthropology , #35
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Koen Stroeken is Associate Professor in Africanist anthropology at Ghent University(CARAM) and the coordinator of a long-term academic exchange with Mzumbe University, Tanzania. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Sukuma healers, his publications – including the monograph Moral Power (2010, Berghahn) – mainly deal with African cosmologies and the sensory materiality of magic.

Table of Contents

Tables and figures
Acknowledgements
Note on Language
List of Abbreviations of Referenced Works

Introduction: Endogenous Kingship

PART I: DIVINATORY SOCIETIES

Chapter 1. The Forest Within
Chapter 2. Beyond Turner’s Watershed Division

PART II: MEDICINAL RULE

Chapter 3. A Sukuma Chief on Medicine
Chapter 4. Endogenizing Vansina’s Equatorial Tradition
Chapter 5. From Cult to Dynasty: Nilotic and Niger–Congo Extensions
Chapter 6. Magic and the Sole Mode of Production
Chapter 7. Tio Shrines of the Forest Master

PART III: THE CEREMONIAL STATE

Chapter 8. Kuba, Kongo and Buganda ‘Miracles’: Reversions in Transition
Chapter 9. From Divinatory to Ceremonial State: Narrative Proof from Rwanda

Conclusion: Reversible Transitions

References
Index

Editorial Reviews

“Koen Stroeken has developed an argument that is subtle and profound… [He] covers immense territory historically and geographically, but without sacrificing rigorous empiricism, deep ethnography, or conceptual sophistication.” • Journal of Anthropological Research

“Admirably clearly written… [the volume exhibits] high scholarship, methodological ingenuity, and sound use of history.” • David Parkin, University of Oxford

From the Publisher