Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan - Softcover

Simonse, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9970258974 ISBN 13: 9789970258970

Publisher: Fountain Publishers, 2017

Synopsis

This is the long awaited, revised and illustrated edition of Kings of Disaster, the study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan that is in many ways a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victim role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster thus proposes an uninvolved solution to the vexed problem of regicide.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Simonse (1943) studied in Leiden and Paris. Kings of Disaster was his doctoral thesis which he defended at the Free University of Amsterdam in 1990. He taught anthropology in D.R. Congo, Uganda, the Netherlands, South Sudan and Indonesia. Since 1993 he has been working as a conflict transformation expert in the Horn and the Great Lakes of Africa.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fountain Publishers
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9970258974
• ISBN 13: 9789970258970
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 556