Papers by Wyatt Macgaffey
Journal of Asian and African Studies, 1982
evitable difficulty of translating one culture’s realities into the language of another is added ... more evitable difficulty of translating one culture’s realities into the language of another is added the need to evade or refute the unfavorable judgments rendered by white America against blacks. These judgments, part of the apparatus of repression, place black Americans in a dilemma to which all of these essays respond in various ways. The authors include black and white Americans and one African; five of the eleven teach religion at American universities. The dilemma itself is thoughtfully discussed by Charles s. Brown and Yvonne R.
Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 1994
... KiKongo pronouns are not gender-specific, so "he" could have been used throughout. ... more ... KiKongo pronouns are not gender-specific, so "he" could have been used throughout. 7. This information is from indigenous manuscripts in the Laman National Archives, Stockholm, 1915. Page 6. 128 RES 25 SPRING 1994 4. Fetish, though separate from the body, functioned ...
Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy, 2021
Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2001
art is and what it means is not really about art at all; it uses the topic and the content of art... more art is and what it means is not really about art at all; it uses the topic and the content of art to campaign for particular definitions of what it is to be civilized, and it changes in tandem with the political concerns of the period. I review this history briefly before turning to a theory of art that promises escape from the invidious distinctions built into the idea, without abandoning it altogether. The theory is the work of the late Alfred Gell (Gell 1998). The modern idea of "art," in contrast to artifact, is fairly recent in Western thought; the date of the first use of the word in its modern sense is given by the OED as 1668, shortly after the founding of the Royal Academy in Paris in 1648 marked the professionalization of Fine Art under the control of the state.1 Art at this time was
Cahiers Des Religions Africaines, 1976
The Journal of African History, 1966
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2008
In modern societies, it is generally assumed that an individual is or ought to be the "owner... more In modern societies, it is generally assumed that an individual is or ought to be the "owner" of his or her own labor and free to offer services to others contractually, in exchange for money or equivalent services. The foundational argument for the natural autonomy of "men" within a consensual political community was made by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Civil Government, and reinforced later by classical economics and utilitarian ethics.1 The necessary alternative Locke envisaged was slavery, which is "nothing else but the state of war continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive," and excludes any compact that the parties might enter into.2 This assumption of autonomy makes possible a (public) labor market and its parallel in the (private) domestic sphere, a romantic ideal of emphatically non-commercial sexual and domestic services exchanged in marriage or concubinage. In this tradition, anthropological discussions of slavery have often been based on an implicit distinction between commercial relations (sale), potentially violent and degrading, and domestic relations (gift), expected to be altruistic and supportive. In nineteenth-century Kongo social relations did not divide up in this way, either in practice or in the minds of participants. In Kongo, as in neighboring areas of Central Africa, everybody was "owned" by somebody; the difference between "free" and "slave" was that ownership of the free was more widely distributed. This article summarizes what BaKongo thought and did then, as reported to us in some detail by indigenous manuscripts written at the beginning of the twentieth century, when colonial rule was just taking over. Neither of the Lockean oppositions "freedom/slavery" and "domestic/commercial" is apparent in the way labor was managed and distributed in Kongo. The texts show that slaves were not "kinless persons," as anthropologists have usually assumed, nor were they necessarily "outsiders" or "criminals," as almost all commentators assume.3 "Slavery," meaning irregular pedigree, was a regular feature of Kongo social structure, the necessary complement to "freedom," defined not as autonomy but as legitimate matrilineal descent. In Kongo, as also in West African societies, it is not possible to think of slavery as an add-on, as "a social sub-system juxtaposed to a society that otherwise remains itself."4 Slaves had been a part of the structure of the Kongo kingdom in the sixteenth century, but the data do not permit us to say that slavery then related in the same way to other elements of the social structure, because the social structure itself changed in response to historical pressures. Matrilineal descent may have emerged only in the eighteenth century as a byproduct of the Atlantic trade. At no time was it the only or necessarily the most significant structural element in Central Africa or anywhere else, as anthropologists and historians have generally assumed.5 Thornton, in his revision of Kongo history, goes so far as to suggest that matrilineal descent developed only in the nineteenth century, because the dominant political traditions of Angolan Kongo until then refer to dynastic "houses" rather than descent groups.6 Hilton, accepting the questionable idea of original matrilineal descent, had already written of it as having been "revived" in the eighteenth century, a position not radically inconsistent with Thornton's view.7 It is certain that Kongo matrilineal clans were and are very different from the rule-governed, genealogically structured groups that anthropologists and historians have imagined.8 There is moreover no necessary incompatibility between corporate matrilineal descent groups and dynastic houses as contemporary features of social organization; their relative importance may have changed with the progressive weakening of the kingdom's central authority from the seventeenth century onwards. The present discussion of slavery in Kongo is based on translations of all the major texts dealing with that subject in the Swedish missionary K. …
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Papers by Wyatt Macgaffey