ISBN | 9789970258970 |
Pages | 556 |
Dimensions | 244 x 170 mm |
Published | 2017 |
Publisher | Fountain Publishers, Uganda |
Format | Paperback |
Kings of Disaster
Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan
by Simon Simonse
This is the long awaited, revised and illustrated edition of Kings of Disaster, the study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan that is in many ways a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victim role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster thus proposes an uninvolved solution to the vexed problem of regicide.
Reviews
"Simon Simonse’s Kings of Disaster is a monumental achievement. I believe it is the most important work on the long-mooted topic of divine kingship yet written, a book that brings the questions debated since the time of Sir James Frazer and Evans-Pritchard to a final,definitive resolution: everything from “did Africans really kill their sacred kings?” to “what is the real nature of the principle of sovereignty that still lies behind the bureaucratic forms of the modern nation-state?” The answers are never quite what we expected. If there is such a thing as progress in anthropology, and not just shifting fashion, then this book must stand as the starting-point for any future discussion on these topics."
"It is impossible to overstate the achievement of this book. With an exemplary combination of empirical rigour and theoretical daring, Kings of Disaster transforms the landscape of African studies while forcing us to think in new ways about the origins of political power and the state."
"The ethnographic richness of this volume is astonishing: the author has ransacked archives, combed historical accounts, and carried out superb field-work himself... From this viewpoint, the volume offers a more unified vision of the region and of the problems raised by these kingdoms than the isolated monographs about these peoples written in the wake of Evans-Pritchard."