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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); 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, and the world history of geomantic divination and shamanism. He held professorial chairs at 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 scholarly articles, most of them available at the Internet. 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, 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) on African politics. From September 2003 onward a number of books were published: his magnum opus entitled Intercultural Encounters: African and Anthropological Lessons towards a Philosophy of Interculturality, as well as four edited collections: 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) (on globalisation in the African context); Truth in Politics: Rhetorical Approaches to Democratic Deliberation in Africa and beyond (with Salazar and Osha), on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including the contested applicability of a Rhetorical, ultimately Aristotelian approach to the latter; and Commodification: Things, agency and identities: The Social life of Things revisited (2005, with Peter Geschiere). In the press is a book on Ethnicity in Mediterranean proto-history (with Woudhuizen), and an edited book on African Islam (with Breedveld and van Santen). Wim van Binsbergen has been the Editor of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy since 2002. He is a published poet/ novelist and a practising (also e-based) sangoma diviner-healer in the Southern African tradition.Click here for a log of Wim van Binsbergen's current and imminent publications and projects. (explore the clickable links above; updated 26.1.2007 8:35) |
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:
| no. | site name |
|
| BASIC NEW |
|
|
| 0 | WHAT IS NEW? News on the Shikanda portal and on Wim van Binsbergen | |
| 1 | Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy | |
| 2 | African religion | |
| 3 | Ethnicity, identity & politics in Africa | |
| 4 | Ancient models of thought: In Africa, the Ancient Near East, and Prehistory | |
| 5 | Afrocentricity & Black Athena debate | |
| 6 | The sangoma tradition of Southern Africa: Background and personal consultation | |
| 7 | literaire teksten / literary texts | |
| 8 | NEW Kazanga: Tatashikanda's Nkoya website (not yet incorporated into the Shikanda portal): http://www.kazanga.bravehost.com | |
| 9 | NEW Reticulum: website of the Intercontinental PhD Network on Intercultural Philosophy (now incorporated into the Shikanda portal) | |
| 10 | NEW Historic Berber culture: Wim van Binsbergen's webpage on Khumiriyya (N.W. Tunisia, North Africa), late 18th - mid-20th century | |
| 11 | NEW |
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.
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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
8. Forums and Message Boards
The Shikanda domain incorporates a number
of previously independent domains that already contained their
own Forum and Message Board:
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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 | |||
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