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... Show moreThis 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] Show less
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... Show moreThis 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] Show less
Alcohol can be used as a theme to belittle, patronize and differentiate people. This happens especially when different kinds of beverages are accorded a different status across social and ethnic... Show moreAlcohol can be used as a theme to belittle, patronize and differentiate people. This happens especially when different kinds of beverages are accorded a different status across social and ethnic groups in society. The case study presented in this chapter highlights cultural aspects of social inequality and ethnic stratification by tracing the ambivalent connections between alcohol, power and cultural dominance in the Maji region of southern Ethiopia, where the author carried out fieldwork in 1995/1996. Maji society's 'drinking situation' reflects the area's history of divergent ethnocultural traditions and exposure of people to State narratives of civilization and governance. Historically, the local people, among them the Dizi, Me'en and Suri, were deemed politically and culturally less civilized by the central State and the northern immigrants. The Suri, as agropastoralist lowlanders, were considered especially coarse in their mannerisms and livelihood pursuits. Alcohol (ab)use is explained by many non-Suri northerners in the neighbouring villages as another example of the Suri's 'backward' social behaviour. This chapter explores the basis of such remarks and what they reveal about hegemonic relations and group prestige. Bibliogr., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] Show less
The forms of African divination which revolve around the use of a material apparatus, whose construction and application are more or less institutionalized and professionalized, constitute an... Show moreThe forms of African divination which revolve around the use of a material apparatus, whose construction and application are more or less institutionalized and professionalized, constitute an important field of medical technology. This paper examines a system of divination revolving around four tablets, to which the author was introduced during fieldwork carried out in Francistown in northeast Botswana since 1988. First, it presents the main analytical characteristics of the Francistown divination system. Since the system is a combination of a random generator and an interpretative catalogue, the paper discusses its mathematical properties as well as the high degree of standardization, the classificatory vagaries, and the selective societal referents of its interpretative catalogue. Next, the paper discusses the origin and distribution of the four-tablet system. It emerged in the middle of the second millennium AD in the highlands of Zimbabwe from the interaction between pre-existing local divination systems and Arabian geomancy. After a slow spread over a limited part of southern Africa, the 20th century saw the rapid spread of the system over the entire subcontinent, where it is now the hallmark of noncosmopolitan practitioners. Bibliogr., notes, ref Show less
The current discussion on democratization in Africa tends towards Eurocentrism in that it pays insufficient attention to the analytical and methodological implications of cultural imperialism,... Show moreThe current discussion on democratization in Africa tends towards Eurocentrism in that it pays insufficient attention to the analytical and methodological implications of cultural imperialism, localization, wrongly claimed universality, and the social price of relativism. Conceptually, formal constitutional democracy is only one variant of democracy among others, and besides, it is an item of political culture which has only relatively recently been introduced to Africa. Recent developments among Nkoya peasants of Kaoma district, Zambia, and working-class townsmen from Francistown, Botswana, most of whom identify themselves ethnically as Kalanga or Tswana, suggest that the democratization movement is only another phase in the ongoing political transformation of Africa. In the course of this process, by an interplay of local and national (ultimately global) conceptions of political power, indigenous constitutional, philosophical and sociological alternatives of political legitimacy are tested, and subsequently accommodated or discarded as obsolete. The author carried out anthropological fieldwork among the Zambian Nkoya in 1972-1974, and in Francistown in 1988-1989, and in both cases has made repeated return visits since. Bibliogr., notes, ref Show less
This chapter describes responses to the ecological crisis and political changes in Ethiopia in the early 1990s among the Suri, an agropastoral group in K„fa Region, southern Ethiopia. Data are... Show moreThis chapter describes responses to the ecological crisis and political changes in Ethiopia in the early 1990s among the Suri, an agropastoral group in K„fa Region, southern Ethiopia. Data are derived from fieldwork carried out in the area after the change of regime in 1991. Attention is paid to environmental conditions and the Suri subsistence system, relations between the Suri and neighbouring ethnic groups, drought and famine in the area, in particular in the 1980s, and the Suri attitude towards the interventions of outside agencies, interethnic conflict in the period 1984-1993, Suri recovery and adaptation in the early 1990s, and the effects of drought, famine, and political upheaval on Suri socioeconomic organization, local political relations, and ethnic identities and interethnic relations. Bibliogr., notes, ref Show less
Contents: 1. Introduction (is there a case for a Marxist approach in anthropological fieldwork - the structure of our argument). 2. The level of production as a problem in anthropological fieldwork... Show moreContents: 1. Introduction (is there a case for a Marxist approach in anthropological fieldwork - the structure of our argument). 2. The level of production as a problem in anthropological fieldwork (data on production - the concept of 'mode of production' - variations in the 'lineage mode of production' in Black Africa - the 'lineage mode of production' in North Africa - discussion). 3. Production and politics (the danger of functionalist teleology - Meillassoux and the politics of kin-group composition among the Guro (Ivory Coast) - Rey and determinism - class alliance between elders and capitalists: the Maka case (S.E. Cameroon) - the Zambian Nkoya as a contrasting case - analysis in terms of class? - the extended-case method). 4. The ethnography of articulation (the problem - production at a Zambian chief's court - capturing articulation in ethnographic data). 5. Field-work on ideology, belief and ritual (some theoretical problems - religious plurality and articulation of modes of production: the Nkoya case). 6. Concluding remarks. Notes, ref Show less
