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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Manjaco Rulers after a Revolution
Author:Gable, EricISNI
Year:2003
Periodical:Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
Volume:73
Issue:1
Period:March
Pages:88-112
Language:English
Geographic term:Guinea-Bissau
Subjects:Mandjak
traditional rulers
anthropology
Politics and Government
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Anthropology and Archaeology
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3556875
Abstract:This article juxtaposes a series of vignettes that feature the attitudes of the Manjaco of post-revolutionary Guinea-Bissau to traditional rulers with a similar series of vignettes E. E. Evans-Pritchard used to paint a portrait of Azande attitudes towards aristocrats. It poses the question: if what Evans-Pritchard wrote about the Azande reflects the desires and preoccupations of a typical colonialist anthropology, what might the way we write about the Manjaco reveal about postcolonialist anthropology as it is currently being constructed? Evans-Pritchard drew a sharp distinction between the idealized 'before' and the all too unpleasantly real 'after' of the colonial encounter. In the Azande version of this dichotomy authority is ultimately intact and unquestioned on one side of the historic divide. On the other side authority is about to disappear, with colonialism's impositions being the catalyst of this disappearance. By contrast, Manjaco were more likely to revile than revere their kings, and they tended to treat this as an enduring fact rather than to historicize it. Manjaco were also bad subjects and citizens. Or so it has seemed to colonial administrators and revolutionaries. Are we to frame this pervasive cynicism about authority and order as a kind of degeneration - an extension of colonial-era malaise into the era of the postcolony? Or are we to take Manjaco attitudes at face value? The article suggests that, in posing such questions, an emerging postcolonialist anthropology is inevitably a reflection of our view of the capacity of people like the Manjaco to make society work in the postcolonial era. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract]
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