|
Welcome to the Shikanda portal |
| this portal
accommodates Wim van Binsbergen's various websites, which
previously were scattered over a number of free but
desperately unreliable domains. Concentration in one
domain will hopefully mean permanent availability all
over the world, and easy cross-referencing from one site
to the other |
| Wim M.J.
van Binsbergen (*1947,
Amsterdam) is Senior Researcher at the African
Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands, and Professor of the Foundations of Intercultural
Philosophy, Philosophical
Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests include: religion
in Africa (both traditional
African religion, Christianity and Islam -- with emphasis
on divination, ecstatic
cults and healing, and recently
with special emphasis on (cosmogonic) myth, animal
symbolism, shamanism, and long-range comparison, across continents and across millennia,
searching for deep structures that go back to the Upper
Palaeolithic and further – and using recent
developments in molecular biology, long-range
linguistics, and archaeology as auxiliary sciences); intercultural
philosophy especially epistemology; African and Ancient Mediterranean history; Afrocentricity; ethnicity,
ancient and modern statehood; globalisation, commodification, virtuality and
mediatisation. He has pursued these interests during
extensive fieldwork in Tunisia, Zambia, Guinea Bissau,
and Botswana, besides historical projects on South
Central Africa, the Ancient
Near East, the world history of geomantic divination and
shamanism and the Bronze Age
Mediterranean (ethnicity and artisanal cults); in the
last few years he has travelled extensively in South,
South East and South Asia in order to document
Asian-African continuities. He held professorial chairs
at Leiden, Manchester, Berlin, Amsterdam, and
Durban-Westville, and directed Africanist research at the
Leiden centre throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He is the
author of numerous peer-reviewed scholarly articles, most of them also available from the present
website http://www.shikanda.net
. His
books include: Religious Change in Zambia (1981), Theoretical Explorations in African Religion (with Schoffeleers, 1985), Old modes of Production and Capitalist
Encroachment (with Geschiere, 1985), Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and History in
western central Zambia (1992),
Black
Athena Ten Years After
(1997) on the intercontinental antecedents of classic
Greek civilisation (now reprinted in updated form), Modernity on a Shoestring (with Fardon and van Dijk, 1999) on
globalisation outside the North Atlantic region, and Trajectoires
de libération en Afrique contemporaine (with Konings and Hesseling, 2000); his magnum
opus entitled Intercultural
Encounters: African and Anthropological Lessons towards a
Philosophy of Interculturality; The Dynamics of Power and the Rule of Law (on African legal anthropology and
traditional leaders); Situating
Globality: African Agency in the Appropriation of Global
Culture (with van Dijk, 2004); Truth in Politics: Rhetorical Approaches to
Democratic Deliberation in Africa and beyond (with Salazar and Osha), on the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Commodification:
Things, agency and identities: The Social life of
Things revisited
(2005, with Peter Geschiere); and Lines and rhizomes: The transcontinental
element in African philosophies (2007). The year 2009 saw the publication of Expressions
of traditional wisdom from Africa and beyond: An
exploration in intercultural epistemology (Brussels:
Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences. A
major result of his recent work in comparative mythology
appeared in 2010: New Perspectives on Myth (with Eric Venbrux). In 2011 appeared: Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory (with
Fred Woudhuizen, British Archaeological Reports); and Black Athena Comes of Age (LIT; click here and look under August 2011). Currently in the press is: Power and
identity in Power and Identity in African State
Formation: Comparative Perspectives (with Martin
Doornbos, UNISA Press). Other works scheduled for
imminent publication are: Islam and transformations in
Africa (with Josee van Santen and Anneke Breedveld); Islam
and society in north-western Tunisia 1800-1968, volume I:
Kinship, spatiality, and segmentation, volume II: Cults
of the land in the context of Islam, while Wim van
Binsbergen's study of African-Asian connections in pre-
and protohistory (working title Out of Africa or Out
of Sundaland) has now largely been drafted; his
long-standing project on the global ramifications of
African geomantic divination has now largely been
completed and the published chapters are now being
integrated into a book. Wim van Binsbergen has been the
Editor of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy /
Revue Africaine de Philosophie since 2002. He is a published poet/ novelist (anthologised in the authoritative Komrij
canon) and a practising (also
e-based) sangoma
diviner-healer-priest in the
Southern African tradition.
(explore the clickable links above; updated 15.6.2011 17:35) |
4. Contact information
At various points in the various
constituent websites, an e-mail address is given for the site
owner. This address may often be obsolete. Click here for the correct current address.
5. Table of websites incorporated in the present domain:
| These sites are self-contained and each have their own 'index' page, which may also be called 'home page'. The distinct nature of each site is clear from its unique layout, background, vignettes etc. In order to move from one of these sites to the other within the present www.shikanda.net domain, you must click on the leopard vignette which appears near the top, and at the bottom, of each index/home page. |  |
6. Current and imminent projects and
publications
Since 2002, a
detailed log has been kept of the site owner's projects and
publications, with extensive text links and illustrations
7. Bibliography
The site owner's full bibliography
(click to open it) is to
provide links to all those of his publications that are
incorporated in the present Shikanda domain; this process has
only recently been initiated and will take weeks if not months to
complete
|
the leopard theme in the background and vignette of this website reflects Wim van Binsbergen's research in progress on the global historical analysis of leopard symbolism, informing his forthcoming book The leopard's unchanging spots: Long-range comparative research as a key to enduring patterns of African agency |
|
||
|
 |
 |
