Index: Welcome to www.shikanda.net, a portal to Wim van Binsbergen's websites on intercultural philosophy, African religion, ethnicity, Afrocentricity, Ancient models of thought, etc.

	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

NEW click the link WHAT IS NEW (item 0 in the list below) for new additions to the Shikanda sites, and for a log of the site owner's intellectual activities --- NEW click the link TOPICALITIES (item 0 in the list below) for new additions to the Shikanda sites, and for a log of the site owner's intellectual activities --- NEW click the link TOPICALITIES (item 0 in the list below) for new additions to the Shikanda sites, and for a log of the site owner's intellectual activities ---

NOW PUBLISHED: Wim van Binsbergen, Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological lessons towards a philosophy of interculturality, Berlin: LIT, 610 pp, for details and order form see below ---- NOW PUBLISHED: Wim van Binsbergen, Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological lessons towards a philosophy of interculturality, Berlin: LIT, 610 pp, for details and order form see below ----NOW PUBLISHED: Wim van Binsbergen, Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological lessons towards a philosophy of interculturality, Berlin: LIT, 610 pp, for details and order form see below ----

'...Prove all things; hold fast that which is good' (1 Thess. 5: 21)
'Mwana wa hakati ka jivumo' ('A child is of the womb's centre' -- Nkoya proverb)

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1. Internal Search Facility
This search facility provides a complete electronic index of all of Wim van Binsbergen's websites in the present domain, and moreover enables you to search the entire Internet quickly and effectively; simply enter the word(s) you require into the blank search box, and press 'Search'

2. Site Map
Having grown out of a number of different websites in over five years, the present Shikanda portal is as extensive, complex and rambling as its owner's intellectual and literary production. There are, in principle, five threads of Ariadne to guide the visitor through this labyrinth:

The short bio-/bibliographical note below provides links to the main fields of the site owner's activity, and the constituent websites devoted to them
Further below, these various websites are also listed serially in a table (where also the old, now obsolete names of the websites are given)
Still further down, an extensive internal search facility allows the visitor to search for any word or name throughout the hundreds of webpages, articles and books incorporated in the present Shikanda portal
Since 2002, a detailed log has been kept of the site owner's projects and publications, with extensive text links and illustrations
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 recently made dramatic progress, but will still take months to complete -- therefore use the internal search facility together with the bibliography: most of Wim van Binsbergen's publications and seminar papers are in fact available on this website

3. Short bio-/bibliographical note linking to the various websites in this domain

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). 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 peere-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 being 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; and 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). Six new books will go to the press shortly: 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; Power and identity in Power and Identity in African State Formation: Comparative Perspectives (with Martin Doornbos); Ethnicity in the Bronze Age Mediterranean (with Fred Woudhuizen); Black Athena Twenty Years After; and Studies in Comparative Mythology (with Eric Venbrux). 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.

Click here for a log of Wim van Binsbergen's current and imminent publications and projects.

(explore the clickable links above; updated 14.5.2009 13:32)

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
(if the site name appears as a hyperlink this means that transfer to the www.shikanda.net domain has been completed)

BASIC
NEW

Important notice: List of publications Wim van Binsbergen

Over the years, the Shikanda portal has grown to such size, and its internal structure has become so complex, that visitors have had increasing difficulty finding their way, even despite the internal search facility which appears on all the index pages of the various constituent websites. Since Wim van Binsbergen's main output consists of texts for publication, an updated list of publications with hyperlinks to all available fulltext digital texts seems the best remedy. Thanks to the good services of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, in the course of current retrodigitalisation of its members published work, many more digital texts have recently come available, so that now the list of publications could be greatly improved and given a more prominent place in the Shikanda portal. This list is now being provided with clickable links to these uploaded publications. Since that time-consuming process has not yet been completed, of many articles listed, fulltext or draft versions are in fact available in the Shikanda portal, even though no links yet appear in the list of publications. Therefore, please also look at the separate webpages within the Shikanda portal, and use the internal search facility (see above).

WHAT IS NEW? News on the Shikanda portal and on Wim van Binsbergen

Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy

African religion

Ethnicity, identity & politics in Africa

Ancient models of thought: In Africa, the Ancient Near East, and Prehistory

Afrocentricity & Black Athena debate

The sangoma tradition of Southern Africa: Background and personal consultation

literaire teksten / literary texts

NEW Kazanga: Tatashikanda's Nkoya website (not yet incorporated into the Shikanda portal): http://www.kazanga.bravehost.com

NEW Reticulum: website of the Intercontinental PhD Network on Intercultural Philosophy (now incorporated into the Shikanda portal)

NEW Historic Berber culture: Wim van Binsbergen's webpage on Khumiriyya (N.W. Tunisia, North Africa), late 18th - mid-20th century

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.

Careful with cross-referring links and electronic reply forms in this domain
The construction of the www.shikanda.net domain is still in progress, and it has not yet been possible to replace all cross-referring links to Wim van Binsbergen's previously scattered sites, by links internal to the present domain. In this transitional period, if you click such a link, you are likely to leave the present domain and to go to one of the earlier websites. From there, you cannot simply return to the present domain by means of the 'Back' button on your browser, but in most cases you will find a link that can take you back -- but not yet in all cases. So be careful with these cross-referring links. We are working on them.

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:

on African Religion (click here:
and on Afrocentricity (click here:
However, originating in the work of one and the same author, the topics of the various websites overlap. It is therefore decided to henceforth channel all Forum discussions as much as possible to one general Shikanda Forum, to be accessed by clicking here:

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

page last modified: 14-05-2009 13:14:04

'...Prove all things; hold fast that which is good' (1 Thess. 5: 21) 'Mwana wa hakati ka jivumo' ('A child is of the womb's centre' -- Nkoya proverb)

get Acrobat Reader

2. Site Map Having grown out of a number of different websites in over five years, the present Shikanda portal is as extensive, complex and rambling as its owner's intellectual and literary production. There are, in principle, five threads of Ariadne to guide the visitor through this labyrinth:

3. Short bio-/bibliographical note linking to the various websites in this domain

'...Prove all things; hold fast that which is good' (1 Thess. 5: 21)
'Mwana wa hakati ka jivumo' ('A child is of the womb's centre' -- Nkoya proverb)

2. Site Map
Having grown out of a number of different websites in over five years, the present Shikanda portal is as extensive, complex and rambling as its owner's intellectual and literary production. There are, in principle, five threads of Ariadne to guide the visitor through this labyrinth: