Kings of Disaster
Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan
Published on 26. September 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
556 pages
978-9970-25-897-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 244 mm
Width: 170 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
947 gr
ISBN-13
978-9970-25-897-0 (9789970258970)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Simon Simonse (1943) studied in Leiden and Paris. Kings of Disaster was his doctoral thesis which he defended at the Free University of Amsterdam in 1990. He taught anthropology in D.R. Congo, Uganda, the Netherlands, South Sudan and Indonesia. Since 1993 he has been working as a conflict transformation expert in the Horn and the Great Lakes of Africa.