Of Alien Kings and Perpetual Kin: Contradiction and Ambiguity in Ruwund (Lunda) Symbolic Thought: v. 1 (Anthropology Matters): 0 - Hardcover

Palmeirim, Manuela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0954557271 ISBN 13: 9780954557270

Publisher: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2006

Synopsis

Of Alien Kings and Perpetual Kin presents a detailed understanding and analysis of the ideology of kingship among the Aruwund (Lunda) of southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. In doing so the text is drawn into addressing a range of important regional themes: the debate on the concept of the 'culture hero' in central African traditions of state formation; the system of 'perpetual kinship'; issues of hierarchy; and the symbolic use of space in royal ritual. All these lead to an analysis that stresses the fluidity and ambiguity of symbolic thought. In this, this innovative work questions the heuristic and theoretical validity of the concept of 'opposition' as used in theoretical models applied to the study of symbolism in which terms are self-contained and mutually exclusive.

About this title

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Prologue
This book is about symbolic paradoxes, logical disruptions and mythical conundrums. It is a journey through an ideological and symbolic thought in which mythical heroines are sterile mothers, at once the king’s mothers and his spouses; where the sovereign is proclaimed both a foreigner and a native, the son and the father, a kin and an affine, at once different and identical; where power is seen to have been usurped as well as founded with the connivance of insiders; and where kingship is construed as a system which, generating from within, can only conceive of itself by resorting to an element coming from outside. Such intrinsic contradiction and ambiguity, here claimed as an inextricable constituent of Ruwund symbolism, far from revealing a loose and baffled thought are of a structuring nature and conceal a coherence the tenacity of which cannot be easily tamed to fit models of analysis of a dichotomous and classificatory nature.
Using an idiom of ‘perpetual kinship’, by means of which characters of a mythical nature identify with their predecessors, the Ruwund symbolic thought moves in a universe of blurred identities, where mythical heroes merge into one another and with actual existing title-holders to produce an overwhelming fluidity and suppleness. Such suppleness and ambiguity, which I suspect are intrinsic to all symbolic systems, do not welcome the questioning for authenticity by historians as well as defy neat categorizations and the fixity of the analytical concept of ‘opposition’ as it has been used in theoretical models applied to the study of symbolism. I address two of these models in particular, L. de Heusch’s and L. Dumont’s (both authors having represented, regardless of this, a continuous source of inspiration to me) and in so doing my work can be viewed to share a similar spirit of other studies which call our attention to the circularity, ambiguity and reversibility of symbolic thought and question the heuristic and theoretical validity of a concept of opposition where terms are self-contained and mutually exclusive (such as Barnes 1985, Gomes da Silva 1989a, 1989b, 1993, 1994 and Ramos 1997, in particular).
This text hopes to demonstrate that symbolic looseness and ambiguity, skilful at playing meaning against itself, constitute the only logical instruments able to both create and convey the intricacy and endless array of significant subtleties that may be said to constitute a ‘system of thought’ (for meaning is indeed in-terminable).1 But in addition to this, I believe that the ethnographic case presented shows how on the grounds of this pliability systems of thought allow room for different claims and interpretations, for some negotiation. In this sense, symbolic systems are of a dynamic nature and, as it is affirmed for hierarchy (see Chapter 4), constantly in the making.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sean Kingston Publishing
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0954557271
• ISBN 13: 9780954557270
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192