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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,
the Netherlands) is Emeritus 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 more
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 genetics, long-range
linguistics, comparative mythology,
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 ramifying 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, the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Mediterranean
(ethnicity and artisanal cults;
the Presocratics and their world-wide
antecedents). In the last few
years he has travelled extensively in South, South East
and South Asia in order to document Asian-African continuities -- leading to a 2012
International Conference at the Leiden African Studies
Centre whose proceedings were published
in 2019. He held professorial
chairs at Leiden, Manchester, Berlin, Amsterdam, and
Durban-Westville, and directed Africanist research at the
African Studies Centre Leiden from 1980 to 2002, joining
that institution in 2017 and retiring from it in 2012. He
was President of the Netherlands Association for African
Studies (1990-1993), and has been founding member and one
of the directors of the International Association for
Comparative Mythology since 2006. He is the author of numerous
scholarly articles, most of
them also available from the present website . 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; expanded and updated reprint as Black
Athena Comes of Age, 2011)
on Martin Bernal's 'Black Athena' thesis concerning 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); van
Binsbergen's 2003 magnum opus entitled Intercultural
Encounters: African and Anthropological Lessons towards a
Philosophy of Interculturality; moreover The Dynamics
of Power and the Rule of Law
(2003, 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, 2004), on the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Commodification:
Things, agency and identities: The Social life of
Things revisited
(2005, with 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 Venbrux). In 2011 appeared: Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory (with
Woudhuizen, British Archaeological Reports International
Series No. 2256). The year 2012
saw the publication of Spiritualiteit, heelmaking en
transcendentie: Een intercultureel-filosofisch onderzoek
bij Plato, in Afrika, en in het hedendaags
Noordatlantisch gebied, vertrekkend vanuit Otto Duintjers
boek Onuitputtelijk is de Waarheid, and of Before the Presocratics: Cyclicity,
transformation, and element cosmology: The case of
transcontinental pre- or protohistoric cosmological
substrates linking Africa, Eurasia and North America. On the occasion of Zambia's 50 years of
independence Wim van Binsbergen finalised and published a
detailed study of kinship and marriage in a Noya village,
originally drafted in Dutch (Het dorp Mabombola: Vestiging, verwantschap
en huwelijk in de sociale organisatie van de Zambiaanse
Nkoya, 2014) and now being
translated into English of inclusion in his imminent
magnum opus on the Nkoya people: Our drums are always
in my mind: Nkoya culture and history, Zambia. In
the most recent years, two massive collections of Wim van
Binsbergen's scholarly output have been published as part
of his academic testament: Vicarious reflections: African explorations
in empirically-grounded intercultural philosophy (2015, 702 pp.); followed by Religion as a social construct: African,
Asian, comparative and theoretical explorations -- A
testament in the social science of religion (2016, 712 pp.) Finally imminent is the
publication (originally scheduled for 2012!) of: Researching
Power and Identity in African State Formation:
Comparative Perspectives (with Doornbos, UNISA
Press). In 2018
appeared Confronting the sacred: Durkheim vindicated
through philosophical analysis, ethnography, archaeology,
long-range linguistics, and comparative mythology;
and in 2019 the collective volume Rethinking Africa's
transcontinental continuities.
Another work now undergoing final editing for publication
is: Islam and society in north-western Tunisia
1800-1968, I: Kinship, spatiality, and segmentation, II:
Cults of the land in the context of Islam. Also the
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 complementary to Before the Presocratics. 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 in
Dutch (anthologised in the authoritative Komrij /
Pfeiffer canon); his recent books of poetry include Vanuit een nieuw lichaam van verlichting
(2010), Dendrogram
(2012), Dodendans
(2014), Verspreide gedichten (2015), and De Eikando tempel (2019).
Since 1990 Wim van Binsbergen has been a certified and
practising (also
e-based) sangoma
diviner-healer-priest in the
Southern African tradition.
(explore the clickable links above; updated 15/02/2020) |
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 always
lags behind and the site visitor is advised to check the Topicalities
pages for up-to-date bibliographic
information (including clickable links) for Wmi van Binsbergen's
production of the last few years
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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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