1 Current topicalities (2015 - )
  news on the Shikanda portal : Wim van Binsbergen's recent publications and work in progress

1. Intro

This series (established February 2002; on this page only current topicalities from the year 2008- are included; click here for the years 2002 and 2003; and here for the years 2004-2005; and here for the years 2006-2007; and here for the years 2008-2009; and here for the years 2010-2011; and here for the years 2012-2014 ) is to alert the visitor of new additions and changes in the Shikanda portal, and to report on recent and forthcoming developments in Wim van Binsbergen's professional activities in the fields of African Studies, Intercultural Philosophy, Long-Range Cultural Analysis, and Poetry. Hyperlinks give access to the texts in question, and photographs accompany the entries. The information appears in tabulated form. The closer to the top of this page, the more recent an event is. Some events have a page of their own, accessible via a hyperlink; others are merely summarised below, and may then have a simple illustration to mark them.

2. Other sites in the Shakanda portal

 if you are through with the topical information below, proceed to the Shikanda portal in order to access all other websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural philosophy, African Studies); ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation; literary work

contact information Wim van Binsbergen
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3. Internal Search Facility for the entire Shikanda portal

This search facility provides a complete electronic index of the present website on ethnicity, and of all of Wim van Binsbergen's other 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'

 
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4. Topicalities: Wim van Binsbergen's recent publications and work in progress

on this page only current topicalities from the year 2010- are included; the series was initiated in 2002; click here for the years 2002 and 2003; and here for the years 2004-2005; and here for the years 2006-2007; and here for the years 2008-2009; and here for the years 2010-2011; and here for the years 2012-2014

NB: the default language in this webpage is English; however, the site owner lives and works in the Netherlands, and writes poetry in Dutch; entries reflecting an entirely national Dutch context will be in Dutch, and will be marked by an orange background ; major entries will be separated by a light green beam: ; abstracts and blurbs appear against a light blue background.

   
   
Februari-June 2023
Shikanda Publishing House has now hired the experienced editor Harmen Rietveen as a resident director in order to deal with current business. Click here for details and contact
 
Due to very severe illness of Patricia van Binsbergen-Saegerman, Wim's wife, since September 2022, Wim's writing and publishing activities have temporarily come to an halt. There has been a very slow recovery. Your loving attentions, postcards, prayers, are much appreciated
January 2023
Een recent boek bevat een korte beschrijving van Wim van Binsbergen in zijn hoedanigheid van Sangoma (waarzegger-genezer-priester) in de Zuidelijk-Afrikaanse traditie, met bijzondere nadruk op de band tussen mens en dier:

Feikema, Liesbeth, 2022, 'Ga naar de mieren en word wijs!: Wim, medicijnman in Afrika', in: Feikemaq, Liesbeth, Eefting, Wieke, & van Heel, Margreet, Dierbaar dubbelzinnig, Utrecht: Uitgeverij Helium, pp.42-43 (click for PDF)

 
     

Lucas van Leyden: Lot and his daughters (Netherlands, 16th c.)

Through his wider family history preoccupied with sexual child abuse, and having written several studies of sexuality and Female Puberty Rites among the Nkoya people of Zambia (which also offers links to the author's other relevant studies), Wim van Binsbergen in 2017-2018 undertook an exploratory study of sexual child abuse worldwide. Dissatistied with its unconclusive nature and lack of bibliographic accomplishment, and involved in the completion of a number of major books, he allowed the study to remain shelved. However, it has now gained new relevance in the context of his other current work on medical anthropology. After extensive revision it is here uploaded for the first time, albeit still in provisional forms, with some minor parts of the analysis remaining to be written out, and the bibliography still to be compiled:

New available:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2023, 'Father-daughter rape and other forms of sexual child abuse: A global distributional exploration with special attention to the Pelasgian Hypothesis, to Sarker’s data, and to Stoltenborgh et al.’s meta-analysis, click here for access to the PowerPoint presentation (60+ slides, largely textual)

From the presentation: continental patterns of child abuse based on data from Stoltenborgh et al.

     
  Faced with the task of compiling an uptodate bibliography of my writings in the field of medical anthropology (in the context of the reprint of my text The Infancy of Edward Shelonga), I found that many of my older texts have not been available on the Internet yet -- medical anthropological, and other. I have sought to remedy this situation with an auxiliary webpage NOW UPLOADED (click here) or here .  
  the year 2023 begins above this blue beam
December 2022

remains of the temple of Artemis Brauronia Brauron,
Eastern Attica, Greece, 2010 CE -- probably a centre of
female puberty rites in Greek Antiquity, where the novice
girls took the identity of bear cubs attended to by Artemis
as the Bear Mother

In the context of finalising my recent synthetic account of Africa Intercultural (2022) I became aware of the fact that over the decades I have extensively discussed Female Puberty Rites (FPRs) among the Nkoya people of Zambia, and their striking parallels in North American ethnography (especially among the Apache and related peoples) – but have so far never stopped to consider the wider global distribution of this highly significant and intriguing ceremonial complex. While containing many revealing and hitherto unpublished details and discussions on female puberty rites among the Nkoya, and a large number of relevant photographs (as well as a very extensive bibliography of FPRs worldwide), the aim of the present presentation is primarily to provisionally fill this gap.

However, my trouble with PowerPoint Presentations is: one is always tempted to add more text and more pictures, whereas the process of revising an uploaded PowerPoint is too tedious to repeat all the time. So for the time being we stay with the present version, which in the course of a few weeks already went through several revisions. Apart from adding a few salient points (such as Nkoya women's belief that male semen is indispensible for women's health; or the amazing fact that 10-year old girls from the neighbouring Kaonde group have been reported in the older literature (Melland, Witchbound Africa) to go sexual man-hunting far from home and far from parental control!), what I would have liked to do is: enter into a fuller discussion of the Nkoya official ideology surrounding male sexual advances. It is true that, among the Nkoya, every intercourse legally requires the female partner's explicit consent for this specific occasion. But it is also true that women feel they can hardly refuse a man's initiative unless on a good pretext (such as the polluting and lethal effect of menstrual blood...), which adds to female submissiveness and reinforces the appearances of Female Puberty Rites as, after all, an instrument of male domination. I have the impression that the contradiction between the two principles reveals a historic phase difference: the legal dimension presents a traditional pre-modern perspective with implicit female dominance -- reflecting a time (mythical, but I believe also historical, see my1992 book Tears of Rain) when women were clan leaders, even kings; the almost automatic yielding to male advances reflects a recent, modern power shift between the genders, But much more reflection and argument remain needed on this point

Now available:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2022, Female puberty rites: Global distribution and historical reconstruction – a first attempt starting from the Nkoya people of Zambia (click for PDF)

and
click here for the attending extensive bibliography

In the process I have also returned to my first poem on Nkoya purberty rites, as published in my first official book of poetry, LEEFTOCHT (1977); click here for the pdf of that poem

Wim van Binsbergen's earlier (2011) attempt to deal with Nkoya female
puberty rites in a long-range perspective
(click for PDF)

September-November 2022
Earlier it was reported in this website that Wim van Binsbergen had been asked to contribute to a collective volume on interculturality, to be edited by Michael Steppat, of Bayreuth University, Germany. Meanwhile that paper has been written and that book has gone to the press. Considering, however, Michael's enthusiasm for Wim's text (he called it 'a stunning achievement'-- perhaps mainly because he had had to wait for it for so long...), Wim decided to revamp the (already exceptionally long) text of that paper with more bibliography, a very personal introduction, and a photo essay, and publish it as a book in its own right -- for some years now he has felt the need for a smallish book that would not deter potential readers in the same way as the several tomes of 500+ pages he has published over the past decade. Moreover the present argument in several ways takes decisive steps forward in the approach to interculturality, and proposes solutions for some of the aporias in this field, as compared to Wim's earlier major texts on the topic: Intercultural Encounters (2003), and Vicarious Reflections (2015).

Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2022, Africa intercultural: Theory, methodology, description, Hoofddorp: Shikanda, Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies, No. 37, ISBN / EAN 978-90-78382-54-6, 165 pp [ cleck for PDF ]

 
     

Wim van Binsbergen's latest contribution to comparative mythology (2022), amply illustrating his (eclective) use of structuralst methods of myth analysis (click on image for access to the book's PDF)
In 1975-1977 Wim van Binsbergen acted in the Leiden chair of Sociology and Cultural Studies in Africa -- previously occupied by John Beattie, and soon to be occupied by Adam Kuper. Prior to this episode he had had hardly any contact with Leiden, neither with the Department of Anthropology there, nor with the (then still inter-university, national) African Studies Centre there. His main Leiden contact had been the anthropologist Hans van den Breemer; Wim and Hans had both served on the board of the Netherlands Association of Studies in Cultural Anthropology (KULA), 1966-68. Just returned from three years of teaching and fieldwork in Zambia, still in the clutches of the extremely traumatic medical experiences he and his family, and especially the host population had to go through during rural fieldwork among the Nkoya people, and enjoying a writing-up stipend at his old anthropology department at Amsterdam University (a hot-bed of anti-structuralist prejudice), in September 1974 Wim was invited to attend a secluded seminar of Leiden structuralists. The next day he composed, in Dutch, a passionate long letter to Hans, strongly denouncing -- true to his Amsterdam training -- structuralism as well as (and this was also an Amsterdam hobby-horse) cultural relativism.

The letter is still interesting for a number of reasons. Admirably, Hans took it in his stride, and he and Wim remained friends, co-operating closely and productively, for instance, on the board of the Netherlands Association for African Studies, 1990-1993. But as was to be expected: soon Wim, with his life-long fascination for myth, had to admit that structuralism constituted an indispensable part of the anthropological theoretical and methodological toolkit, and came to rely more and more on lévistraussian structures in his own analysis of myth in North Africa, Zambia, and worldwide. And as it turned out in retrospect, all the major themes which rather unexpectedly were to emerge in Wim's work are already preluded upon in this letter -- including Marxism, intercultural philosophy, the emphasis on the fundamental unity of humankind, the effort criterium for the construction of valid intercultural knowledge, the distinction (very much at the heart of classic anthropology) between emic and etic -- and the insistence on transcending that distinction by incorporating transcultural elements in the researcher's personal life and by unconditionally accepting local roles against local conditions. Wim kept this seminal but immature text totally obscure for half a century, and only now brings it out, thoroughly annotated, and with very extensive bibliography.

now made available:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2022, 'Structuralisme en cultuurrelativisme: Naar een antropologie van het hart (een ingrijpend geannoteerde en van literatuurverwijzingen voorziene uitgave van een concept uit 1974)' [ click for PDF ]

 
     
 
the cover photograph depicts one of the minor protagonists in the extended case (my adoptive sister's daughter, who often played on my lap as a baby), nearly four decades later (2011), with her latest child -- in front of the Rural Health Centre that arose as a positive result of the health tribulations recounted in the extended case history
In view of the overwhelming presence of the medical field in the current lives of Patricia and Wim van Binsbergen, Wim decided to reprint as a book his seminal 1979 long article on 'The infancy of Edward Shelonga' (called 'a classic of medical anthropology' by Sjaak van der Geest (1996), the central figure in medical anthropology in the Netherlands 1975-2015). For this occasion, the book was extensively revised and expanded, and has been given a long new Preface, in which the surprisingly decisive catalytic role van Sjaak van der Geest in Wim van Binsbergen's anthropological career is highlighted, Wim's seminal relationship with several other colleagues is likewise discussed in some detail, and (especially in long new footnotes) the relevance of much of Wim's subsequent research 1979-2023 for this book's argument is highlighted. Also a long list is appended of Wim's titles in the field of medical anthropology and closely related fields.

Throughout this new edition, in the text as well as in the illustrations, the considerable extent is highlighted to which Wim, in the course of nearly half a century, has traded his original identity as an inhabitant of the North Atlantic region, for that of a Zambian Nkoya with extensive kin relations among that ethnic group, a social and political actor close to the throne of the traditional leader Mwene Kahare, and a certified and practicing African traditional healer; these perspectives have greatly informed his more recent work in globalisation, comparative mythology, intercultural philosophy, and the History of Ideas.

The original, 1979 version of this long case study was dedicated to the late lamented biophysicist Henny van Binsbergen-van Rijn (1936-2019), Wim's first wife and his loyal and resourceful companion in the traumatic 1973-1974 rural fieldwork among the Nkoya of Zambia (during which she faced very severe medical challenges herself); the 2023 reprint is dedicated to Henny's memory, but also to the nursing, medical, and housekeeping staff of the Spaarne Gasthuis hospital (location Haarlem South, who, at this institution's intensive case unit, have been fighting for months, and with increasing success, in order to restore and preserve the health of Patricia van Binsbergen-Saegerman, Wim's wife since 1984, and his loyal and resourceful companion in fieldwork and analysis in many parts of Africa, during the last decade also in Asia, Oceania and North America

Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2023, The Infancy of Edward Shelonga: An extended case highlighting the interplay of traditional and modern health care among the Nkoya people, Zambia, 1970s, Hoofddorp: Shikanda, Papers in Intercultural Philosophy / Transcontinental Comparative Studies PIP-TraCS, No.27, ISBN / EAN 978-90-78382-55-3, 213 pp, with 3 maps, a genealogy, 21 photographs, extensive bibliographies, and a full index of proper names (click for PDF); distribution of the new print version via Amazon.com

Forty years after the inception of their close relationship, this picture shows Muchati [7] and Tatashikanda (the author, left, in one of his more athletic poses) waiting for an audience with Mwene Mutondo, one of the three other royal Nkoya chiefs besides Mwene Kahare, in the temporary royal court erected for the occasion of the Kazanga Cultural Festival, Kaoma District, Zambia, 2011.

     
  Among the fieldwork which Wim van Binsbergen conducted during his first period in Zambia, 1971-1974, was a sociological survey of religious organisations Zambia's capital, Lusaka. This research was funded by the Universdirty of Zambia, which paid for the purchase of a motercycle (the Lusaka area including informal settlements was already huge and there was very little public transport), and the payment of a research assistent in the person of Wim's student Pat Mutesi, who later became a sociologist in his own right. Only a few published texts specifically originated in this specific survey, but in familiarising Wim with the cntemporary religious scene in Zambia, and the resources available for its study, it was one of the bases for Wim's seminal book Religious Change in Zambia (1981). click here for a preliminary field report

after going through the trouble of preparing a new PDF for this 50-years old report, I found to my dismay that I had already uploaded it here earlier, as:
http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/publications/lusaka_churches_1972.pdf

Headman Lubumba, a witchfinder and ecological prophet among the present-day Nkoya (Njonjolo, Kaoma district, 1973)
May-August 2022
Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2022, Pandora's Box Prised Open: Studies in Comparative Mythology, Hoofddorp: PIP-TraCS, No. 26, numerous illustrations and tables, bibliography, indexes, 700 pp. -- ISBN / EAN 978-90-78382-51-5

click here for access to the PDF

about this book (blurb):

This book brings together 21 of the author’s contributions (some of them published here for the first time) to the field of the New Comparative Mythology since the early years 2000, when this discipline (long considered obsolete and ideolog ically com prom ised through its association with such arch-conservative scholars as Frazer, de Vries, Eliade, Dumézil, Jung, etc.) was successfully and convincingly revived by the renowned Sanskrit scholar, German-born Michael Witzel (Harvard Mass., USA, formerly of Leiden, the Nether lands). Having been preoccupied with the study of myth throughout his intellectual life, Wim van Binsbergen (*1947, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) initially concentrated on the literary uses of myth by such novelists as the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, and the Belgian novelist Hugo Claus; later he extended his analyses to the socio-political use of myth in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, as as aspect of his ethno-historical and ethnographic fieldwork data collected in these regions since the late 1960s. In mid-career his focus shifted from Africanist to globalist, and from ethnography to long-range cultural history and inter cultural philosophy. This book testifies to the rich insights to be gathered at the intersection of these cross-fertilising fields of research and reflection.

Fig 19.8. Proposed selective reconstruction of the
history of ecstatic religion from the Upper
Palaeolithic onward

     
During this period, Vol. I of Wim van Binsbergen's 2-volume study of popular Islam and social organisation in the highlands of N.W. Tunisia finally appeared; Volume II is to follow within a few months

Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2022, Religion and social organisation in north-western Tunisia, Volume I: Kinship, spatiality, and segmentation, Volume II: Cults of the land, and Islam, Papers on Intercultural Philosophy / Transcontinental Comparative Studies, Hoofddorp: Shikanda, numerous figures and tables, bibliography; ISBN 9789078382522 (click for PDF)

The venerable Amer bin Mabruk, a man of great traditional influence and knowledge, posing with his grandson, in the village of Hamraya, KHumiriyya, 1968 (which is when the bulk of the data for this book were collected)
     

Koenraad Stroeken

Ever since his work on Religious Change in Zambia (1981; also as Google Book), since his work as founder / head of the Department of History and Political Developments (African Studies Centre, Leiden, Netherlands, 1980-1990), and his various state-centred books and edited collections including Tears of Rain (1992) right through to his recent book co-authored with Martin Doornbos (Researching Power and Identity in African State Formation, UNISA Press, Pretoria, South Africa, 2017), Wim van Binsbergen has taken a close interest in the state in Africa. One of Wim van Binsbergen's close academic contact over the decades, Koenraad Stroeken (one of the last PhD students of the late lamented Renaat Devisch of Louvain University, Belgium), now Professor of Anthropology at Gendt University, Belgium, has initiated one of the extended discussions for which the journal Current Anthropology has been famous. Wim was invited to submit a comment, entitled 'Endogenous state formation in Central Africa?'; click here for a preview, which posits a number of apparent requirements for state formation, but the scope was too limited to enter into a discussion of violence, the monopoly over which to many (cf. Max Weber, 1919, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft) has been the defining hallmark of the state
King Mwene Kahare Kabambi, posing in state in his palace, Njonjolo, Kaoma, Zambia, 1977; he holds a rolled-up reed mat, which is considered to be the emblem of the Mashasha section of the Nkoya people (which he is heading). Probably the reed mat is in commemoration of royal mat burials (another trait which the Nkoya have in common with the Ancient Egyptians -- the latter's royal title 'She of the Reed and the Bee' also returns in Nkoya traditions of kingship); according to oral traditions, when the Nkoya were expelled from the Zambezi Flood Plain (by the closely related Luyi people now known as Lozi), they carried their royal remains with them in reed mats
April 2022
     
     
In the last few months, Wim van Binsbergen has combined work on his books on Tunisia with the preparation of a collection of his papers on Comparative Mythology, and a Netherlands-language book on his anthropological work during the first half of his career. In the process, it turned out that, in his 2010 paper (Harvard / 4th Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology) on the heroes in Flood myths, the detailed report on statistical associations of heroes in his global database on Flood myths (essentially compiled by Mark Isaak, 2006) was still insufficiently belaboured to deserve a place in the projected book on Comparative Mythology, and was removed from the manuscript. This yielded, as an intermediate product:

Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2022, 'A selection of statistically significant associations found when, in a data base on Flood myths world-wide, each hero-related variableis cross-tabulated against all non-hero-related variables', 94 pp; click here for PDF

March 2022  
January / February 2022
     
     

The centre of the village of Sidi Mhammad, with the characteristic domed shrine sacred to the local saint Sidi Mhammad Jr, 1968

In 1968 Wim van Binsbergen conducted his first ethnographic and ethnohistorical fieldwork, in the highlands of North-western Tunisia. His writings on that basis are mainly collected in the webpage Historic Berber Culture, included in the present Shikanda website. Even after more than half a century, he has not come round to finalising his 2-volume monograph entitled: Religion and social organisation in north-western Tunisia, Volume I: Kinship, spatiality, and segmentation, Volume II: Cults of the land, and Islam. Meanwhile there has been a constant trickle of shorter texts coming out of this project, most recently:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2022, 'The participants’s perception of their genealogy over time: Genealogical knowledge and manipulation in the highlands of North-western Tunisia, with special reference to Murphy & Kasdan’s theory of agnatic genealogies', 67 pp, with numerous diagrams and tables (click here for PDF)

an analytical diagram derived from the text launched here

  2022 begints above this line
November 2021
In 2000 nam Wim van Binsbergen in Brussel, Belgie, deel aan een conferentie over inclusieve wetenschapsbeoefening georganiseerd door het Leo Apostel instituut (organisatrice Nicole Note). De handelingen werden spoedig gebundeld in een collectieve uitgave van Monografieën over interculturaliteit, Berchem/ Mechelen: EPO/ CIMIC (Centrum voor Intercultureel Management en Interculturele Communicatie). Omdat de huidige website pas in 2002 werd ingericht, is Wims tekst tot nog toe niet op het web beschikbaar geweest. Bij dezen dan:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2000, ‘Naar een inclusieve wetenschapsbeoefening in de sociaal-wetenschappelijke studie van Afrika’, in: Decouter, S., Devisch, R., Maso, I., Oldemans, R., zzz& van Binsbergen, W., 2000, Hoe anders is ‘anders’: Over wereldbeelden en Afrikaanse kennissystemen, Monografieën over interculturaliteit no. 6, Berchem/ Mechelen: EPO / CIMIC (Centrum voor Intercultureel Management en Interculturele Communicatie), pp. 55-69 (klik voor PDF)

>> Exponent of an African knowledge system: The Ila prophet Mupumani, a leper who ca. 1915 started an ecological prophetic movement with considerable if short-lived impact throughout Western Northern Rhodesia and surrounding countries (see: van Binsbergen, Religious Change in Zambia, 1981 -- click for access as Google Book)

     

Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2021, 'A Century of Dialogue around Durkheim as a Founding Father of the Social Sciences', Culture and Dialogue, 9: 167–200 (click for PDF)

Please note: due to overanxious (but ignorant) copy-editing on the part of the journal, and the author's inability to oversee the final proof-reading because of recent major heart surgery, the printed text contains a blatant error: the suggestion that Durkheim (who never set foot in Australia, but eagerly followed the then current ethnographic literature on Aboriginal life, and in the decade and a half prior to the publication of Les Formes Elémentaires (1912) published several pathbreaking syntheses on this field) actually and personally did fieldwork on Australian totemism. Alas, such an error is undeservedly detrimental to whatever scholarly authority the rest of my text might lay claim to.

This article is largely based on Wim van Binsbergen's recent (2018) book: Confronting the sacred: Durkheim vindicated through philosophical analysis, ethnography, archaeology, long-range linguistics, and comparative mythology, Hoofddorp: Shikanda Press, 567 pp., ISBN 978-90-78382-33-1, also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/naar%20website%208-2018/Table_of_contents.htm

     
Nu gepubliceerd:

Binsbergen, Wim M.J. van, 2021, Van vorstenhof tot internet: Fragmenten van een culturele antropologie van Afrika, Hoofddorp: Shikanda, PIP-TraCS – Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies – No. 18, 700 pp., ISBN 928-90-78382-50-8, EUR 80.00; klik hier voor vrije toegang tot een ruwe versie van de PDF (er is kennelijk nog wat werk aan de bibliografie)

Wim van Binsbergen concipieerde dit Nederlandstalige wetenschappelijke boek (het meeste van zijn omvangrijke wetenschappelijke oeuvre is in het Engels) in eerste instantie in het midden van de jaren 1990, en voegde er vervolgens grote hoofdstukken aan toe die zijn overgang van antropologie naar interculturele filosofie markeren. In de inleiding legt hij uit waarom publicatie zo lang op zich heeft laten wachten (klik hier; tevens een overzicht van Wims voornaamste onderzoeksresultaten in de laatste kwart eeuw ), naast de vanzelfsprekende reden dat een hedendaags antropoloog geen enkele eer inlegt met een Nederlandstalige publicatie en daar geen voorrang aan kan verlenen zolang hij in loondienst is.

de afbeelding rechts analyseert de invloed van buurrelaties op
veldwerkcontacten in een volksbuurt in Francistown, Botswana --
een van Wim van Binsbergens veldwerklocaties

     

Wim van Binsbergen als baby, met zijn vader,
Amsterdam, 1948

In het voorjaar van 2021 legde Wim van Binsbergen in zijn nieuwe dichtbundel Kinkerbuurt 1947-1960 getuigenis af van zijn pijnlijke kinderjaren. In het voorjaar van 1991 stierf zijn vader. Die werd begraven te Didam, Gelderland, waar hij voor zijn pensionering enige jaren werkzaam was geweest. Op de begrafenis sprak de zoon een grafrede uit, die nu beschikbaar gemaakt wordt (klik voor PDF). Recente kleine toevoegingen in de tekst verschijnen in cursief.

Het beruchte Fort van Sjako ('Jacob', Fr.), aan de Elandsgracht, Jordaan, Amsterdam, -- een Dreigroschenoper-achtig roversnest waar (volgens de familietraditie althans) Wim's grootmoeder van vaderskant eind van de 19e eeuw werd geboren op een per uur gehuurd bed; door de Spaanse Griep van 1918 werd zij weduwe, en zij sloofde zich af als garnalenpelster en werkster, maar al haar vijf zonen kregen een voltooide beroepsopleiding, terwijl de Jordaan vooral ongeschoolde arbeiders voor de haven leverde

     
Professor Michael Steppat at Bayreuth University, Germany, is now preparing a major volume on intercultural research, with over 20 international contributors. Wim van Binsbergen has been commissioned to contribute a chapter on interculturality in Africa, as well as the book's Preface.
     
The spectacular invisibility of the social sciences including anthropology in the pressing societal issues of today (COVID-19, public violence, climate change, energy crisis, the rapidly declining legitimacy of the state in the eyes of citizens, ethnic conflict, the falling apart of the texture of civil society, the increased power of organised crime, etc.) is a reason of mounting concern for Wim van Binsbergen. In 1987, he presented a paper at the Centre for African Studies, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK: 'Reflections on the future of anthropology in Africa'. Although reprinted in his 2003 book Intercultural Encounters, the text was so far not readily available on this website; click here for PDF of the 2003 revised text including a postscript 2002. Revisiting that paper after 35 years, he is now drafting an essay addressing this situation.
     
In November 2021 is het dertig jaar geleden dat Matthijs Schoffeleers, gepensioneerd na vele vruchtbare jaren als hoogleraar aan de Vrije Universiteit VU te Amsterdam, te Utrecht de bijzondere leerstoel godsdienstantropologie aanvaardde. Bij die gelegenheid sprak zijn voormalige eerste promovendus Wim van Binsbergen (destijds inmiddels hoogleraar aan de VU) een rede uit die hierbij beschikbaar gesteld wordt.
     

From my draft of Global Bee Flight: Black Africans trempled underfoot by Egyptians on a funerary item of Tut-ankh-Amun -- not exactly what one would expect from an Afrocentrist position

GLOBAL BEE FLIGHT. In the two entries immediately below, I present two unpublished book drafts which were largely rendered obsolete by my later research and publications, but which still so much influenced the orientation of my research in later years that I find it difficult to discard these drafts altogether. The same applies a fortiori to my first attempt at long-range transcontinental analysis, my book draft Global Bee Flight -- originally written as an attempt to mitigate the vicarious Afrocentrism which Martin Bernal -- on second thoughts -- had brought to his Black Athena thesis. My Global Bee Flight was repeatedly announced from the late 1990s on, but never materialised.
In preparation for this book I familiarised myself with the Ancient Egyptian language and (hieroglyphic) writing system, and absorbed a large part of the extensive Egyptological literature. All of this was indispensible as preparation towards my work on Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory (2011, yielding a major archaeological publication co-authored together with the late lamented Fred Woudhuizen): the main contemporary documents on the Sea Peoples of the Late Bronze Age derive from Egyption inscriptions. In the more than twenty years since Global Bee Flight was drafted, I have cannibalised part of the book's argument for my book Before the Presocratics (whose starting point is the Zambian Nkoya clan system, hinging on a catalytic, Chinese? version of the cosmology of cyclical element transformation). But whenever I returned to the 1998 draft, I found that the book's Egyptology leaves too much to be desired (my attempted translation of the famous 1st dynasty Abydos Label turns out to be amateurish, even untenable, in the light of rival attempts available in the literature); that the subsequent growth of my insight into the Black Athena problematic necessitates a lot of rewriting; that my treatment of human somatic difference as one possible basis for social classification ('Blackness') does not take enough distance from the obsolete genetics of race in the context of the Black Athena debate and after, well into the third millennium; and that my emerging long-range methodology of transcontinental research has been improved so much in nearly a quarter of a century as to render my attempts in Global Bee Flight no longer worthy of publication -- not even as an obscure web page. Even so, the draft contains an intriguing, sustained argument on the emergence of the Early Dynastic state (inspired by the models of state formation I have explored in sub-Saharan Africa, in part with Martin Doornbos), on diffusion, on the Black Athena debate, on bee symbolism (including the puzzling Ancient Egyptian royal title 'She of the Reed and the Bee'-- nswt-bit. , and on Eurasia as a cultural region.
These are still highly interesting topics. Yet, with a plethora of other, more promising projects on my hands, and serieus health issues, I doubt whether I will ever come around to a proper publishable revision of the Global Bee Flight draft.

From my draft of Global Bee Flight: reconstruction of Kerma, the capital of Meroë, meeting-point of Eguyptian and sub-Saharan African themes

     
FROM AN AFRICAN BESTIARY TO GLOBAL SCIENCE? The entry immediately below presents an unpublished book draft now finally resurrected from the computer / hard disk grave. Another such research project on transcontinental comparison led to a short book draft:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., From an African bestiary to universal science? Cluster analysis opens up a world-wide historical perspective on animal symbolism in divine attributes, divination sets, and in the naming of clans, constellations, zodiacs, and lunar mansions, book draft 2001-2002-2004 (click for PDF)

An earlier version of this text was already made available, in a clumsy format, as a web page in the present website, at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/ancient_models/animal.htm . Since the early 2000s, I have entertained ambitions to add some new data to the data set and to slightly improve the mathematical quality of the cluster analysis. This never materialised since I was successively absorbed in the writing of other books, duly reflected in this website; inevitably, however, these books built, in part, on the earlier results of these unpublished book drafts. What particularly discouraged me to publish a final version of the present draft as a book, was the following consideration: I gradually became aware of a major ideological flaw in the 2001-2004 argument. As also attested by my publications at the time (including my contributions to the Black Athena debate (see under: August 2011); to a Paris, France, EHESS conference on Afrocentrism (click on the link and proceed to p. 175); and my critical analysis of the work of Valentin Mudimbe), around the year 2000 I was so enamoured with Afrocentrism, that I believed that only by recourse to an Afrocentrist, Africa-origin hypothesis could I begin to explain the transcontinental patterns emerging from my 'African bestiary to modern science' project. In my subsequent transcontinental analyses, however (which benefitted from my research, in the meantime, on Mediterranean protohistory which I had thoroughly explored together with the late lamented Fred Woudhuizen), my perceived focus of early cultural history shifted (a) from sub-Saharan Africa to West Asia ( / Egypt), and (b) to an awareness of a transcontinental maritime network that made for much greater connectivity, and for far mor extensive feedback effects, than could ever be accommodated by the naïve assumption of diffusion from one identified focal origin. Another reason why I am no longer satisfied with this version is that it represents a much earlier phase in my extensive study of comparative mythology during the past decades and thus could not benefit from my synthesis (e.g. 2006a; 2006b; 2010) of the global history of myth which -- inspired especially by Michael Witzel -- has formed the backbone of much of my later work.

Meanwhile, a surprising and most inspiring finding of the African bestiary project was the strong suggestion to the effect that African systems of clan nomenclature, and divination sets (including the South Central African basket oracle as described by Turner and by Rodrigues de Areia; the four-tablet oracle which has played such a great role in my own work over the decades; and the Nkoya clan system in Zambia, which I had studied ever since 1972) had symbolically and conceptually much to do with animal-centred systems of religious symbolism, of astronomy (notably in zodiacs and lunar mansions -- a lunar mansion is a immutable section of heaven where the moon will be situated for any one of the 27-28 days of its near-monthly cycle), and of cosmology, in the rest of the Old World, especially Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Mediterranean (primarily the Aegean), the Ancient Near East, and Ancient China. In such later books as Before the Presocratics (2012) and Sangoma Science (2021) I have worked out these relationships in greater depth and detail. In that connection particularly the amazing similarity came to the fore between the Nkoya clan system and the globally wide-spread cosmology of cyclical element transformation (element A > B > C > A) but in the specific catalytic Chinese version allowing for the catalytic influence of a third element Z upon these transformations. In the 2012 book, I argue that this similarity is best explained by assuming a substantial Chinese cultural intrusion in South Central Africa in the middle of the 2nd mill. CE (more on the transcontinental maritime network and Chinese nautical expansion was considered in my 2021 book and in my critical studie of Menzies's hypothesis of Chinese global exploration in theearly 15th c. CE).

     
DIVINATION AND BOARD-GAMES. In 1994-1995 Wim van Binsbergen stayed at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS, Wassenaar), as a member of the study group on Religion and Magic in the Ancient Near East. Here he focussed on the comparative and historical analysis of geomantic divination within the Southern African sangoma ecstatic cult, which he had studied in Botswana from 1988 on. In this NIAS period Wim was co-opted within the orbit of ludology, the scientific study of games. Because of the superficial parallels with geomantic divinatio

n, he became particularly fascinated by the mankala family of games which the American researcher Culin had called 'the game of Africa'. This kind of games is also known as wari, nsolo, and bao, and besides Africa has in fact an almost global distribution. The game requires at least two rows of shallow cups, along which tokens are raced, and captured, according to intricate rules with amazing mathematical implications. Repeated attempts to design a model of transcontinental cultural history in which the data around geomancy and makala could be systematically interpreted, were to have a decisive impact on all of Wim's subsequent, transcontinentallly-orientated, research. This led to a number of published articles (to be found elsewhere on this website) and several book drafts, among which Before the Presocratics (2012) and Sangoma Science (2021) have been the most accomplished and conspicuous ones. Later he was to cast a fresh look at these earlier analyses, in a revision (click here) which has menwhile been incorporated in various book-length texts. Another draft for a small book was never published but was cannibalised for other publication projects in the course of the years:

van Binsbergen, Wim M,J., 1997-2004, Board-games and divination in global cultural history: A theoretical, comparative and historical perspective on mankala and geomancy in Africa and Asia (click here for PDF)

As a stepping-stone towards the later, longer texts this draft may still be of some interest, which is the reason why even at this late hour it is made available here

     

omslag van de presentatie

In 2013 stierf nabij Dendermonde, België, op 102-jarige leeftijd Mathilde Broodcoorens, de grootmoeder van moederskant van Patricia van Binsbergen-Saegerman. Ondanks de grote afstand (Wim en Patricia wonen in Nederland) namen dezen het voortouw in de laatste jaren van Mathilde's leven, en verzorgden onder meer de viering van Mathilde's 100e verjaardag. Voor die gelegenheid maakte Wim een uitvoerige fotorapportage van leven en persoon van Mathilde, die nu eindelijk beschikbaar gesteld kan worden op het Internet, ten behoeve van Mathilde's vele nazaten en verdere verwanten in België en Nederland: click hier voor de PDF van de PowerPoint presentatie

NB: om doublures te beperken zijn diverse oorspronkelijke foto's uit de selectie verwijderd; daarom wordt de nummering hier en daar onderbroken

boerenvrouwen dansen om een pasgebnoren baby in Geraardsbergen, België, ca. 1900

September-October 2021

hand-copy of recently (2018) discovered Neanderthal rock art
Ever since Wim van Binsbergen's first work on mankala board games and geomancy, in the 1990s, has he pondered on the interpretation of the La Ferrassie (Dordogne, France) Mousterian child burial no. 6. Installments of successive provisional approaches have been posted on this website. A final statement is now ready for publication:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2021, 'A Neanderthal stellar map? The La Ferrassie burial 6 block as a testimony of Neanderthal astronomy and star-orientated religion'

The La Ferrassie cup-marked block interpreted as in the present argument

     
Prompted by the sudden death of his 2011 co-author Fred C. Woudhuizen (see two entries below), Wim van Binsbergen made a thorough revision of the new edition of his 2021 book on Joseph Karst. The Karst book is based on Fred and Wim's 2011 magnum opus Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory. In the process, Wim took the opportunity of dedicating the new edition to Fred's memory

click the following link for the October 2021 revised version:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2021, Joseph Karst: as a pioneer of long-range approaches to Mediterranean Bronze-Age ethnicity: A study in the History of Ideas: New edition, vindicating Karst's four-tiered model for the Bronze-Age Mediterranean, Hoofddorp: Shikanda, Papers in Intercultural Philosophy / Transcontinental Comparative Studies No. 12, with numerous diagrams, tables, and extensive index of proper names (click on this link for free access to this book)

     

the pre-nuraghic devotional site of Monte d'Acoddi, NW
Sardinia, often compared with Ancient Mesopotamian
ziggurats from roughly the same period -- and cited in
evidence of the Near Eastern provenance of some early
inhabitants of the island

For a few weeks September / October 2021, Wim and Patricia van Binsbergen made a short trip to the Isle of Sardinia, Italy; having written on Bronze-Age Sardinia (see entry immediately below), it was mandatory that Wim visited some of the principal local archaeological sites and museums, but he was rather disappointed in his high expectations; click here for further photographs

Su Nuraghu at Barumini, Sardinia, Italy. One of the most sur-
prising features is the paucity of passages / staircases through
what is effectively a gigantic heap of rocks. As meted out broadly
in the older literature, there is a superficial ressemblance
with the massive central tower of the Great Zimbabwe complex,
Zimbabwe, Southern Africa. However, the presence of lingam /
yoni iconography at the latter site, in combination with
ressemblances vis-à-vis the relic-holding towers (cedi) of
South Asian Theravada Buddhist sacred architecture, brought
Wim van Binsbergen to defend an Asian / 'Sunda' interpretation
of Great Zimbabwe in some of his recent publications

     

Fred (standing) and Wim in 2007

While Wim van Binsbergen and his wife Patricia were on a short trip to Sardinia, Italy, Wim's close friend, co-author and former PhD student Fred Woudhuizen died, at the tender age of 62 years. Together they wrote the monumental book Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory (2011, British Archaeology BAR International Series No. 2256, Oxford: Archaeopress). Click here for an extensive obituary:

with special attention to the details of the intensive collaboration between Fred and Wim over the years.

Fred's PhD thesis, 2006

June - August 2021

Emile Durkheim, 1859-1917

Now in the press:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2021, 'A century of dialogue around Durkheim as a founding father of the social sciences', accepted for publication in a special issue on French thought of the journal Culture and Dialogue [ click for access to PDF ]

cover of van Binsbergen, Confronting the Sacred, 2018 (see below under 2018)

     
Mid-July 2021 Wim van Binsbergen underwent major heart surgery in the Leiden University Teaching Hospital. The aorta valve was replaced. Also thanks to the lengthy and careful preparation since late 2020, the operation went smoothly and recovery was swift. We thank all medical and nursing staff, relatives and friends, for their essential support.
   

NOW PUBLISHED:

A few weeks before Wim van Binsbergen is due for major heart surgery, he managed to send the first proofs of his latest book to the printers:

Sangoma Science: From ethnography to intercultural ontology: A poetics of African spiritualities, Papers in Intercultural Philosophy / Transcontinental Comparative Studies, No. 20, Hoofddorp: Shikanda Press, 481 pp., ISBN 978-90-78382-19-5, EUR80.00

the book's final connections have now been completed, and the fulltext is available under this link.

This book's cover features the following pointer:

Black Thought Matters! This is the cult book for the 2020s! Starting out as a poet, the author became an anthropologist of African religion, then an adopted African prince, then a practising African diviner/healer (sangoma), then a professor of intercultural philosophy. The book testifies to the vast knowledge, authority and wisdom thus accumulated. In a passionate and deeply personal way, the author traces his steps over half a century and across most continents, critically discusses theory and method, shows how close the African life world is to the New Physics, and presents an ontology according to which reality constantly oscillates between Being and Non-Being. Thus this book accounts for religion, God, evolution, thought, time, the paranormal, the world-creating nature of science, and the time-warping / event-creating potential of divination. The argument is set against the background of the integrated long-range perspective on global cultural history, which the writer has helped develop over the past decades.

the book's dedication, with the pathos appropriate to this moment:

'To my children (real and adopted) and grandchildren in the Netherlands, among the Nkoya of Zambia, in Botswana, and in Cameroon; I hope this book makes them proud of their background and helps them discover insights which otherwise they might well spend a lifetime searching for in vain'

The book's blurb:

The exploration of ecstatic religion, in North, South Central and Southern Africa, and the attending historical and transcontinental ramifications, have been constants in Wim van Binsbergen’s work for half a century. He has graduated from detached researcher to initiated and certified local practitioner (‘sangoma’), from empirical scientist to intercultural philosopher, and from Africanist to globalist. In the process, he has found that the various forms of ecstatic religion with which he had acquainted himself, constitute knowledge systems endowed with relevance, validity, and truth in their own right, not inferior to the North Atlantic academic knowledge system that is privileged by globalising modern science. However, although repeatedly making such claims, so far he has shunned from making the obvious next step: articulating how (from these heterogeneous and apparently contradictory approaches to the human life world) a pluralistic intercultural ontology might be constructed. This book is a (none too conclusive!) attempt in that direction. Building on the approaches to ecstasy and veridical divination in his books Religious Change in Zambia (1981; also Google Book), Intercultural Encounters (2003, esp. Chs 5–8), Before the Presocratics (2012), and Vicarious Reflections (2015); and continuing the emphasis on spirituality of his recent books Religion as a Social Construct (2017) and Confronting the Sacred: Durkheim Vindicated (2018; also Google Book); the present argument is organised in several parts. Part I dwells on the methodology of research into ecstatic religion through participant observation, with detailed reference to two recent South African studies. Part II takes up Edith Turner’s claims as to ‘the reality of spirit’, against a background of both transcontinental ramifications and theoretical / methodological scrutiny. Part III raises the discussion above the individual level and towards cosmological ontology, contrasting two basic models: evolution or eternal return. To what extent may perspectives from outside the North Atlantic scientific domain (notably the South Asian concept of  kalpa, ‘aeon’, as an alternative to evolution) lead to the desired intercultural ontology? This question is explored with special reference to Cremo & Thompson’s iconoclastic book Forbidden Archaeology, 1993). The final chapter explores the remarkable parallels between Dan Brown’s book Origin (2017), and the thought of Teilhard de Chardin. In conclusion, the kaleidoscopic, capricious, religiously-underpinned relation is affirmed between human thought and the universe – formulating a meta-cosmology and meta-theology in which nothing is what it has been agreed to be, and everything (even reality, the past, Being, the thinking I, and God), constantly oscillates towards its opposite and denial, under conditions whose elucidation is still largely beyond our grasp, but in which ritual turns out to play a pivotal role. The argument is set against the background of the integrated long-range view of global cultural history, which the writer has helped develop over the past two decades.

February-May 2021
While a Fellow (1994-1995) at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), as a full-time member of the Study Group on Religion and Magic in the Ancient Near East (conveners the Assyriologist Tzwi Abusch and the Bible Scholar Karel van der Toorn), Wim van Binsbergen sought to produce a book on his comparative research since 1990 into Islamic geomancy and its ramifications in Africa and worldwide -- one of humanity's principal divination methods with which he had come into intensive contact during fieldwork in Francistown, Botswana, from 1988 onwards. In NIAS's intellectually and bibliographically stimulating new environment, many unexpected steps were taken in the analysis, and fundamental insights gained into transcontinental and intercultural processes which were to spawn a considerable number of articles and book in the subsequent decades -- but the envisaged book itself so far did not materialise. During the NIAS appointment, that institution also made available funds towards a provisional translation (by Mr Rafat Badwy with the assistance of Wim van Binsbergen) of a crucial Arabic medieval MS on Islamic geomancy, Sheikh Muhammad al-Zanati's Kitab al-fas.l al-kabir fi us.ul 'ilm al-raml. Already in 1995, this translation was announced as being in MS, but it was never finalised nor circulated, and Wim van Binsbergen went on to pursue the lessons learned at NIAS in a wide range of other projects and books. In the early Spring of 2021, an investigator of West-African and Caribian varieties of geomancy, Erwan Dianteill, Professor of social anthropology at the Sorbonne (Paris Descartes University), France, contacted Wim in order to ascertain whether the translation was finally available. That was for Wim the sign to return to that project, the fruits of which may be expected in book form within a few months.
Duerer's depiction of the Jewish medieval astrologer Messahalah; while the origin of Islamic geomancy has been a mystery for centuries, the present renewed research and reflection now bring out that its origin may be sought in a North Iranian milieu in the late 1st mill. CE, where heterogeneous scholarly influences met and cross-fertilised one another: Hellenistic magic, Jewish magic, Islamic secret sciences, Zoroastrianism, and the Chinese worldview centred on the trigrams and the 64-fold I Ching hexagrams.
Januari 2021
In 2021, Wim van Binsbergen and Fred Woudhuizen published their major contribution to Bronze-Age Mediterranean studies: Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory (Cambridge: BAR International Series 2256), 519 pp). More than could be expressed in this volume, Wim's contributions to this book leaned heavily on the little-known work of the Alsatian (French / German) comparative linguist, Karvelianist and Strassbourg professor Joseph Karst (1871-1962). Meanwhile Wim drafted and provisionally published a book-length study of Karst, which now reaches its second edition. The main innovation in this new edition is that in its final chapter it addresses, and empirically vindicates, Karst's seminal model of the tiered ethnico-linguistic structure of the Ancient Mediterranean.

now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2021, Joseph Karst: as a pioneer of long-range approaches to Mediterranean Bronze-Age ethnicity: A study in the History of Ideas: New edition, vindicating Karst's four-tiered model for the Bronze-Age Mediterranean, Hoofddorp: Shikanda, Papers in Intercultural Philosophy / Transcontinental Comparative Studies No. 12, with numerous diagrams, tables, and extensive index of proper names (click on this link for free access to this book)

  the year 2021 begins above this bar
November - December 2020

Het ketelhuis van het Wilhelmina
Gasthuis, bij afbraak 1980-1982

Nu gepubliceerd:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2020, Kinkerbuurt 1947-1960: Twaalf autobiografische gedichten, geïllustreerd, ISBN / EAN: 978-90-78382-45-4, Hoofddorp: Shikanda, 138 pp., EUR20 ; klik hier voor PDF

klik hier voor omslag

FLAPTEKST:
‘....Grotendeels onbekend als dichter, ondanks meer dan een dozijn bundels, en opname in de canon-bepalende bloemlezingen van zowel Komrij als Pfeiffer, werd ik in 1947 geboren in de Dichtersbuurt / Kinkerbuurt. Ik woonde er tot 1960. De Kinkerbuurt betekent voor mij een afgesloten archief aan beelden en gebeur­tenissen die mijn kindertijd smartelijk hebben bepaald en die in mijn leven en teksten voortdu­rend opspelen. Ik heb de Kinkerbuurt de laatste tientallen jaren nauwelijks nog bezocht tenzij in tekst. Toen ik laatst een fotoboek oppikte over Amsterdam Oud-West realiseer­de ik me dat onder mijn afkeer en verdriet, een liefde­volle fascinatie ligt voor wat tot mijn 13e toch gewoon mijn wereld is geweest. In deze bundel worden voor mij belangrijke plaatsen en personen benoemd. Ik kan mij nu door aanvullend materiaal ook het landschap voorstellen zoals dat geweest moet zijn voor de verstedelij­king van eind 19e eeuw. Het resultaat is een serie bitterzoete lange gedichten (steeds grimmiger, ten slotte een nachtmerrie) over een bijtijds verloren gegaan Purgatorio.’
   
 
In 2013 werd een nieuwe tweetalige webpagina ingesteld, 'Essays', die eind 2020 sterk uitgebreid en geactualiseerd werd [ page under reconstruction ] In 2013 a new web page was created, 'Essays', which by the end of 2020 was greatly expanded and updated [ page under reconstruction ]
   

De Mensengenezer?

IN MEMORIAM RENAAT DEVISCH (1944-2020). In 2017 publiceerde de Belgische literator Koen Peeters een Nederlandstalige roman De Mensengenezer, die prompt bekroond werd met de AKO-prijs. In het laatste hoofdstuk claimt dit boek de geautoriseerde biografie te zijn van de eerste dertig jaar van het leven van de vooraanstaande Belgische antropoloog / psychiater Renaat Devisch. Deze verschijnt veelvuldig in deze website, als naaste vriend, collega, mede-auteur, en criticus, van Wim van Binsbergen sinds 1979. In de laatste paar jaar van zijn leven vermeed Devisch bijna alle contacten met zijn beroepsmatige collega's onder wie van Binsbergen; pas enige weken na de gebeurtenis hoorde van Binsbergen terloops van het overlijden van zijn vriend, hij kon dus de begrafenis niet bijwonen. Overwegende hoe hij niettemin het leven van zijn vriend kon eren met een In Memoriam, rees de gedachte dat hij dat adequaat kon doen door openbaarheid te verlenen aan de uitvoerige kritische bespreking die hij in 2017 privé had geschreven dadelijk na het uitkomen van De Mensengenezer. Klik op de volgende link voor die tekst, uitgebreid met uitvoerige voetnoten die achtergronden belichten, alsmede Devisch's onmiddellijke reactie, en van Binsbergens slotwoord:

Wim van Binsbergen en Renaat Devisch ALLERBEST.pdf

OBITUARY RENE DEVISCH (1944-2020). In 2017, the Belgian literary writer Koen Peeters published a prize-winning novel in Dutch, De Mensengenezer (The Healer of Men) which, in the last chapter, claimed to be the authorised biography of the first 30 years of the life of the prominent Belgian anthropologist / psychiatrist René Devisch (1944-2020). The latter has featured prominently in this website, as a close friend, colleague, co-author and critic, of Wim van Binsbergen, since 1979. In the last few years of his life, Devisch shunned nearly all contacts with his professional colleagues, including van Binsbergen; it was only a few weeks after the event that van Binsbergen accidentally heard of his friend's demise, so he was absent at the funeral. Contemplating how he could nonetheless honour his friend's life by an obituary, it was found that this could adequately be done by publicising the critical assessment van Binsbergen privately wrote in 2017 immediately after the release of De Mensengenezer. Click on the following link for the text in Dutch, augmented with lavish background footnotes, Devisch's prompt reaction and van Binsbergen's final rejoinder:

Wim van Binsbergen en Renaat Devisch ALLERBEST.pdf

October 2020

Now published:

During most of 2020, when the whole world was in the clutches of the COVID-19 scare, Wim van Binsbergen mainly worked on the completion of his new book, which was effectively published Fall 2020: :

Wim M.J. van Binsbergen, 2020, Sunda Pre- and Proto-Historical Continuity between Asia and Africa: The Oppenheimer–Dick-Read–Tauchmann hypothesis as an heuristic device in comparative mythology and cultural history, with special emphasis on the Nkoya people of Zambia, Africa, Hoofddorp: Shikanda Press, Papers in Intercultural Philosophy / Transcontinental Comparative Studies, 632 pp, 120 illustrations, 45 tables, indexes of authors and of proper names, ISBN 978-90-78382-39-3, retail price EUR 90. (click on this hyperlink for free access to the book's PDF)

FROM THE AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION:

‘...Is this then what this massive, belated book is all about: settling old scores? I hardly think so. It is about redressing a mild injustice I have inflicted upon Stephen Oppenheimer, back in 2007, for dismissing too quickly and on too narrow grounds his surprisingly illuminating idea of Sunda impact on Western Eurasia. It is about the strengths and weaknesses of a network perspective on the world that is truly globalised in the sense that it seeks to be not only world-wide, but also free from the suffocating limitations of hegemonic Eurocentrism and racialism. It is about the aesthetic and existential thrills of developing and applying a coherent world picture that encompasses vast reaches in space and time, and that takes into account humankind’s articulation of the challenges and rewards of existence in recognisable stories that never cease to capture and move us. It is about the glories and fulfilments of (at least my personal ideal of) sustained, painstaking, well-informed, responsible yet imaginative scholarship in our digital age, where disciplinary boundaries dissolve under the onslaught of the digitalisation of libraries, but the dangers of amateurish blunders increase exponentially – as no expert reader of this book can fail to notice.

And it is, finally, an experiment in the application of a terrifying finding that came out of another one of my current writing projects, Sangoma Science: contrary to naïve common belief, the past is not necessarily fixed once for all; it is malleable and in flux, both in the hands of historians and in actual, material fact; so that formulating a new vision of humankind’s transcontinental past, may project itself back into time, and actually, materially, change the past accordingly – change the course of history! This has been, after all, the deepest inspiration of my life-long struggle to make history where before there was none.

Having regrettably spend too large a portion of my dwindling allotted time on pummelling this cursed book into more or less presentable state, I am less sure than ever that Sunda is actually such a good idea [ – but it led to serendipities (especially the idea of a global maritime network emerging since the Bronze Age) that seem a better idea. ] And it will worm itself back in time, and reshape the course of history so as to install, for better or worse, our Phantom Voyagers (Dick-Read) to their proper role as powerful correct­ives of Eurocentric racialist delusions of grandeur.’

 
August 2020
The analysis of global distributions of ethnographic and mythological traits is at the heart of Wim van Binsbergen's approach to the challenges of transcontinental continuities since the Palaeolithic. Not always are the distributions straight-forward and not always are they interpretable with the Sunda Hypothesis of Oppenheimer--Dick-Read--Tauchmann. The following analysis (the PDF of a PowerPoint presentation) looks at Graebner's (1909) global distributional data on the so-called Melanesian Bow, which turns out to be not at all originally Melanesian, but sub-Saharan African, c. 100 ka BP: Due to pressure of time, this draft paper is still in telegram syle and in a mixture of English and Dutch, but the diagrams and the conclusion are accessible to the English-language reader

Now uploaded:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2020, ‘Graebner-based analysis Melanesian bow'; at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/graebner_bow_2020.pdf

 
     

not all more or less ephermeral papers by Wim van Binsbergen made it to inclusion in the present website. Some are only now retrieved and made available. The following link shows that the global history of transcendence was already on the author's mind when on a lecturing tour in Cameroon in 2005:

Now uploaded:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2005, ‘The idea of transcendence as a factor in African agency today’, summary of a public lecture, University of Buea, South-West Region, Cameroon; at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/publications/binsbergen_transcendence_seminar_Buea_2005.pdf

 
     
Finalising his major book on the Sunda Hypothesis in relation to sub-Saharan Africa (now in the press), Wim van Binsbergen has tried to fill several of the outstanding lacunae by writing distributional analyses of globally distributed mythemes that apparently produce East-West parallels possibly amenable to interpretation in terms of Oppenheimer--Dick-Read--Trautmann's Sunda Hypothesis. These detailed analyses proved too lengthy to be accommodated in the Sunda book itself:

1) Now uploaded:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2020, The Cosmic Egg in global cultural history: A revised distributional exercise in comparative mythology, at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/CHAPTER_COSMIC_EGG.pdf

2) Now uploaded:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2020, The leg child in global cultural history: A distributional exercise in comparative mythology, at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/leg_child.pdf

3) Now uploaded:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2020, The ogre in global cultural history: A distributional exercise in comparative mythology, at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/OGRE_CHAPTER.pdf

 
     
In preparation of the final publication of his two-volume monograph on popular Islam in the highlands of North-Western Tunisia, 1750-1979 CE, Wim van Binsbergen found that an essential set of data underlying the qualitative and quantitative analyses in that book, for technical reasons (typographical / phiotographic imperfectons), cannot be accommodated within the pages of that book itself: an exhaustive reconstruction of the genealogies, going back to c. 1750 CE, of all 1968 inhabitants of the research area, ca. 12 km2 and encompassing the valley of Sid Mhammad, as well as parts of the valleys of al-Mazuz, Saydiyya, homdat Atatfa, 'Ain Draham; as ell as a few bordering homdats such as Khadayriyya, and Homran. In ways to be set out in full detail in the forthcoming book, the reconstruction (which involves the redress of many distortions, omissions and the negotiation of delicate local-level politics) is based on several dozens of in-depth formal interviews (conducted in 1968, with the competent and untiring field assistance of Mr Hasnaûwi bin T.ahar), with all living adults concerned, as well as hundreds of more informal scraps of genealogical information volunteered, and collected in passing, during the fieldwork of 1968 and 1970. The full data set was instead photographed and uploaded as follows:

Now uploaded:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1969 / 2020, 'Complete genealogies (reconstructed) for the inhabitants (1968) of the villages of Sidi Mhammad and Mayziya, homdat 'Atatfa, 'Ain Draham, Tunisia', at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/Berber/genealogy_comprim_trim.pdf

 
June-July 2020
     
Seeking to complete his major book on the Sunda Hypothesis in relation to sub-Saharan Africa, Wim van Binsbergen has tried to fill one of the outstanding lacunae by writing an analysis of the vast literature indicative of the emergence of a global maritime network from the Bronze Age onward:

Now uploaded:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2020, Towards a global maritime network from the Bronze Age onward

 
April - May 2020
source: https://beeldbankwo2.nl/nl/beelden/detail/ 9f18f9ae-025a-11e7-904b-d89d6717b464

details given there:

Michiel Dirk Jan van Binsbergen. No. 1586. Geboorteplaats: Amsterdam Geboortedatum: 04-05-1912 Plaats van overlijden: Hamburg Datum van overlijden: 03-05-1945 Beroep: huisschilder Groep: verzet ''Mercatorstraat 139, Amsterdam.'' ''Werkte voor de CPN in het normale politieke illegale werk.''
This month it is 75 years ago that Wim van Binsbergen's father's brother, Chiel (Michiel) van Binsbergen (born 1912,
  • whose father Henk had died a mobilised Netherlands soldier during the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918,
  • who like his siblings grew up in the Amsterdam popular neighbourhood Jordaan,
  • a house-painter by trade -- like Hitler himself! --,
  • and the leader of the Amsterdam Communist anti-Nazi resistance cell 'Mercatorstraat 139',

after four years of imprisonment was killed in Hamburg, Germany, a few days before the end of World War II. It is unclear whether Chiel was deliberately executed when the Third Reich collapsed, or found his death by misadventure when a German ship transporting prisoners was bombed by the Allied Forces in the Hamburg harbour. In honour of his heroic uncle, Wim often identifies as Michiel -- his second given name anyway, which he received at birth one and a half years after his uncle's death. In his scientific work, geared to liberation (especially of Africa in a global context) and intercultural understanding, and with an explicit Marxist orientation, Wim has kept this heroic inspiration alive. This has also enabled him to identify with, and learn essential political lessons from, the freedom fighters and freedom thinkers that crossed his path later in life, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm, Wim Wertheim, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Ray Alexander, Jack Simons, Klaas de Jonge, Jaap van Velsen, Martin Gardiner Bernal, and Valentin Mudimbe. Those who have known Wim will realise how closely his intransigent personality has remained loyal to his family background and its causes.

  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1981, Religious Change in Zambia: Exploratory studies, Londen / Boston: Kegan Paul International; also as Google Book
  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Geschiere, Peter L., 1982, Oude produktiewijzen en binnendringend kapitalisme: Antropologische verkenningen in Afrika, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit.
  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Peter L. Geschiere, 1985, eds, Old Modes of Production and Capitalist Encroachment, London / Boston: Kegan Paul International.
  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1997a ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp: Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, special issue, Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, vols. 28-29, 1996-97; updated and expanded version: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2011, ed., Black Athena comes of age: Towards a constructive re-assessment, Berlin / Boston / Munster: LIT; also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/20102011.htm under ‘August 2011’ and on a special Black Athena website: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/afrocentrism/index.htm
  • Konings, P., van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Hesseling, G.S.C.M., 2000, eds., Trajectoires de libération en Afrique contemporaine, Paris: Karthala; also as Google Book
  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2001b, ‘Ubuntu and the globalisation of Southern African thought and society’, in: Boele van Hensbroek, P., ed., African Renaissance and ubuntu philosophy, special issue of: Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy, 15, 1-2: 53-89; revised reprint in van Binsbergen 2003b: 427-458; also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/ntercultural_encounters/index.htm
  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2003, Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological towards a philosophy of interculturality, Berlin / Boston / Muenster: LIT; also at: http://quest-journal.net/shikanda/intercultural_encounters/index.htm , espec. http://quest-journal.net/shikanda/intercultural_encounters/Intercultural_encounters_FINALDEFDEF9.pdf
  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2004, Postscript: Aristotle in Africa – Towards a Comparative Africanist reading of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in: Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Sanya Osha, Wim van Binsbergen , eds., Truth in Politics, Rhetorical Approaches to Democratic Deliberation in Africa and beyond, special issue: Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy, XVI, pp. 238-272; also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/2002.htm
  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2005, ‘ ‘‘An incomprehensible miracle’’ – Central African clerical intellectualism versus African historic religion: A close reading of Valentin Mudimbe’s Tales of Faith’, in: Kai Kresse, ed., Reading Mudimbe, special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, 17, 1, June 2005: 11-65; also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/publications/ASC-1239806-193.pdf ; reprinted in van Binsbergen 2015: Chapter 12.
  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2012a, ‘Production, class formation, and the penetration of capitalism in the Kaoma rural district, Zambia, 1800-1978’, in: Panella, Cristiana, ed., Lives in motion, indeed. Interdisciplinary perspectives on social change in honour of Danielle de Lame, Series ‘Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities’, 174. Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa, pp. 223-272; also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/class_formation.pdf
  • van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2015, Vicarious reflections: African explorations in empirically-grounded intercultural philosophy, Haarlem: PIP-TraCS - Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies - No. 17, also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/vicarious/vicariou.htm
 
     
Seeking to complete his major book on the Sunda Hypothesis in relation to sub-Saharan Africa, Wim van Binsbergen has tried to fill one of the outstanding lacunae by writing an analysis of spider mythology world-wide:

Now uploaded:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2020, Spider mythology world-wide as a window on possible Sunda effects resulting in East-West parallels

 
     
<< illustration in this article

Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2020, 'Notes on the fundamental unity of humankind', special issue on 'African thought and dialogue' , guest editor Felix Olatunji, Culture and Dialogue, 8, 1: 23-42

 
     

The leading elder 'Amer bin Mabruk at the village of Hamraya, ' Atatfa, Janduba,
Tunisia 1968: a local exponent of wisdom

Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J. 2020, ' Grappling with the ineffable in three African situations: An ethnographic approach' , in: Kao, P.Y., & Alter, J.S., eds, Capturing the ineffable: An anthropology of wisdom, Toronto / Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, pp. 179-242; click here for a prepublication copy

 
     
Now uploaded:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2020, 'The case of kings as Tears of Rain (Nkoya, Zambia) / humankind as Tears of Re' (Ancient Egypt) : A test-case of African / Egyptian continuity in myth, prepublication copy', at:
http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/tears_of_ra _from_2008_ravenstein_paper_BEST_2020.pdf
, 18 pp.

being an extensive, extensively edited, Egyptological excerpt from a paper which Wim van Binsbergen delivered at the 2nd Annuam Meeting of the International Association of Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein, The Netherlands, 2008; without the Egyptological content, the revised paper was subsequently published as: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2010c, 'The continuity of African and Eurasian mythologies: General theoretical models, and detailed comparative discussion of the case of Nkoya mythology from Zambia, South Central Africa', in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Venbrux, Eric , eds. New Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein (the Netherlands), 19-21 August, 2008, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies, pp. 143-225, also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/PIP/New_Perspectives_On_Myth_2010/New_Perspectives_on_Myth_Chapter9.pdf

 
     
Seeking to complete his major book on the Sunda Hypothesis in relation to sub-Saharan Africa, Wim van Binsbergen tried to fill one of the outstanding lacunae by writing a short, lavishly illustrated and referenced piece, based on a distributional analysis of musical instruments worldwide:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2020, 'Identifying possible Sunda influence on selected musical instruments in use among the Nkoya people of Zambia in the 20th c. CE' (click for PDF) . 14 pp.

towards the end of this paper, links are given to sample videos of Nkoya music

 
March 2020
In this period Wim van Binsbergen sought to complete the first printed draft of his new book SANGOMA SCIENCE: From ethnography to intercultural ontology: Towards a poetics of the globalising exploration and representation of local spiritualities
   
In deze periode schreef Wim van Binsbergen een nieuw essay over een van zijn favoriete dichters, onder de omineuze titel 'De goddelijke terreur van Gerrit Achterberg' (19 pp)
January-February 2020
Only in mid-February 2020, nearly two weeks after the event, Wim van Binsbergen (residing in the Netherlands, recently moved to a new address, and frequently travelling to Africa and Asia) received word of the death, on 3rd February 2020, of his friend and colleague Renaat Devisch, founder-leader of the Louvain School of Anthropology in Belgium, main ethnographer of the Yaka (Congo), psychoanalist, and a principal exponent of the anthropology of symbol and symptom (medical anthropology), divination, sorcery, decolonisation, etc. Renaat's and Wim's acquaintance dated from the 1979 Leiden Conference on Theoretical Explorations in African Religion, which was convened, and subsequently published (1985), by Matthew Schoffeleers and Wim van Binsbergen -- and which contained Renaat's splendid overview of African divination. From 1985 Renaat and Wim have closely and frequently collaborated in research (over the years Wim was a frequent speakers at Renaat's research seminars), publishing, teaching (co-examining nearly a dozen PhDs) and academic administration especially in the Belgian context of the Louvain (Leuven) Faculty of Social Sciences, and the National Science Foundation / Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek FWO. Renaat commented on Wim's pathbreaking book Intercultural Encounters and documented Wim's sangoma divinatory practice in the New Encyclopedia of Africa. Wim frequently wrote on the Louvain School and its method (e.g. in the journal Medical Anthropology, 1992), and reflected on Renaat's approach to urban churches in Kinshasa, Congo, as a case of virtuality (e.g, 2015: 136 f.). Wim was also one of the contributors to the 2011 book edited by Renaat and Francis Nyamnjoh,  The postcolonial turn: Re-imagining anthropology and Africa, which was triggered by Renaat's receiving a honoroary doctorate from the University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo -- Renaat's life-long fieldwork context. Also when unbearable illness and personal misfortune weighed heavily down on Renaat, Wim intensively assisted him in the publication of his last few books, one of which was prefaced by Wim. In Renaat Devisch, Europe has lost one of the most significant, sophisticated, profound and innovative anthropologists of our time. Regrettably having been unable to publicly pay his respects in the context of Renaat's funeral, Wim is now drafting a personal obituary of his friend, to be added to this website shortly.  
     
  At the request of the journal Culture and Dialogue, Wim van Binsbergen (member of the advisory editorial board of that journal) wrote a piece

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press (2020), 'Notes on the fundamental unity of humankind', special issue on African Philosophy, Culture and Dialogue, 7, 2.

which is to by published shortly; click for a preview (PDF)

 
     
  After his extensive work on wisdom in 2007-2009, Wim van Binsbergen's innovative revisiting of the topic of wisdom

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., ‘Grappling with the ineffable in three African situations: An ethnographic approach’, ter perse in: J. Alter and P. Kao, The ineffable captured: Wisdom, Toronto: Toronto University Press, prepublication copy at:

http://quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/wisdom paper wim rewritten 2017 defdef.pdf

is to be published this 2020 Spring.

 
     
During most of January 2020 Wim and Patricia van Binsbergen travelled in and around the city of Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand.

Click the following link for an extensive pictorial and analytical account of salient observations and experiences, especially in the field of Theravada Buddhism and its local expressions: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/thaiproef/thai_hyperlink.htm

The image to the left depicts a splendid Buddha from the collection of the Wat Prah That Hariphunchai temple in the town of Lamphun, near Chiang Mai

 
2020 begins above this beam
August-December 2019
Late December 2019 saw the final publication of:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2019, ed., Rethinking Africa's transcontinental continuities: Proceedings of the Leiden 2012 International Conference, special issue, Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, vols 26-28, 460 pp.

 
     
The Fall of 2019 saw the provisional publication of the first final version of

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press, Joseph Karst: As pioneer of long-range approaches to Mediterranean Bronze Age ethnicity (Sea Peoples and Table of Nations), Hoofddorp: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies.

Being an updated by-product of the enormous work Wim van Binsbergen and the Ancient Historian / Luwologist Fred Woudhuizen put into their 2011 magnum opus: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Woudhuizen, Fred, C., 2011, Ethnicity in Mediterranean Protohistory, British Archaeological Reports (BAR) International Series No. 2256, Oxford: Archaeopress, also at: http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/topicalities/Ethnicity_MeditProto_ENDVERSION%20def%20LOW%20DPI.pdf , Wim van Binsbergen was particularly fortunate in enlisting the critical feedback from Fred Woudhuizen for this provisional version of the Karst book -- resulting in many major and minor improvements which will greatly enhance the relevance of the final version; the latter is to be expected in the first half of 2020

 
     
  At the request of the Department of Philosophy, Groningen University (Dr Pieter Boele van Hensbroek), Wim van Binsbergen undertook to organise and supervise an internship in intercultural philosophy by the advanced BA student Ms Femke Vulto. The focus was agreed to be on the so-called Ontological Turn in Anthropology (scarcely a confidence-inspiring term -- after the Linguistic, the Metaphysical, Postcolonial, etc. 'turns' of the second half of the 20th c., and the -- no longer so -- fashionable sell-out of the social sciences to ill-digested French post-structuralism, cf. Wim van Binsbergen's devastating criticism in his Vicarious Reflections (2015), pp. 44 f.). Ms Vulto concentrated on the work of the South American anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who is a proclaimed adept of the Ontological-Turn movement. In the course of her internship, under the intensive and radical feedback from Wim van Binsbergen, her assessment of Vivieros' work became increasingly critical, and her understanding of interculturality grew commensurately. Unfortunately, we are not at liberty to offer access here to the splendid final essay she wrote in collaboration with her supervisor.  
July 2019
Barely returned from Japan, Patricia and Wim van Binsbergen performed at the 60th birthday of Antje de Wit, prominent choir director and singing pedagogue. Rising to the occasion, Wim had written three haikus (on TIME, SPRING and MUSIC) which Patricia interpreted inimitably both vocally and on an improvising instrument, the lip drum. [ click here for the haikus, in Dutch ]  
     
While copy-editorial work continues on the proceedings (460 pp) of the 2012 valedictory conference which the African Studies Centre, Leiden, offered to Wim van Binsbergen on the occasion of his formal retirement, he vacillates between several other projects hopefully to be completed this year:
  • a long-standing book project entitled The leopard's unchanging spots (on leopard-skin / granulation / speckledness symbolism worldwide and, across the ages, even all the way back to the Middle Palaeolithic);
  • Our drums are always on my mind: Nkoya history, culture and society;
  • Testing the Sunda hypothesis: Provisional report on the proto-historical transcontinental connections of the Bamileke people of Cameroon; and
  • Aspects of Africa's Sunda connections.
     
Shikanda Press (http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/PRESS ) started out on a small, informal scale in 2004 as a context for the publication of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Fphilosophie, whose Editor-in-Chief Wim van Binsbergen has been since 2002 -- taking over from Pieter Boele van Hensbroek (the founding editor together with Ron Bwalya). Gradually also the management of the huge Quest website (http://www.quest-journal.net), and the publication of some of Wim's books of poetry, were to be accommodated under the Shikanda Press umbrella. Apart from Quest, the first major book publication was New Perspectives on Myth, -- the proceedings (edited by Wim van Binsbergen and Eric Venrbux, the conference conveners) of the2008 Second Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology. Meanwhile the seminal series PIP-TraCS (Papers in Intercultural Philosophy / Transcontinental Comparative Studies) was launched, in which already several dozen titles have appeared, associated with the names of such scholars as Vincent Shen, Sanya Osha, Fred Woudhuizen, Pius Mosima, and Wim van Binsbergen. The next obvious step is the formalisation and standardisation of the distribution of the books, by launching, as per 1st August 2019, Uitgeverij Shikanda Press as a fully-fledged registered company, and having its books distributed by the leading Netherlands book-distribution agency Centraal Boekhuis (Culemborg), which ensures their availability in bookshops both throughout the Netherlands and worldwide.  
January-June 2019
Now published:

Wim M. J. van Binsbergen, 2019, De Eikan-do tempel: Fotografische en poetische reisimpressie rond een minder bekende tempel in Kyoto, Japan, Hoofddorp: Shikanda: ISBN 978-90-78382-43-0, 93 pp. [ with 10 new poems and dozens of full-colour photographs ], EUR30.00. [ click here for free access to the fullcolour PDF and to the fullcolour cover ] :

     
WEDDING AND ANNUAL FESTIVAL. The last weekend of June 2019 saw the wedding of Hannah (at age 25 already a celebrated poet, and the youngest daughter of Patricia and Wim van Binsbergen) with the Italian-born political philosopher Enzo Rossi. At the same time, Kazanga, the annual festival of the Nkoya people, was celebrated in Kaoma district, Zambia, on which Wim has published at length over the decades. Unable to attend this year, Wim had to make a firm promise to participate next year. Many other important items could be added to the chronicle here, involving all members of our family -- but this must wait till I have approached them out for formal permission to do so.
     

A Shinto shrine

TRIP TO JAPAN. From mid-April till mid-May Patricia and Wim van Binsbergen made and extensived trip to Japan. Due to the couple's medical tribulations over the past years, an important purpose of this trip was to find out whether such intercontinental travel was still within their reach. The results were immensely gratifying, thanks to the elaborate preparations but also thanks to the charms and excellent infrastructure of present-day Japan. The round trip took them to Kagoshima (the southernmost city of the isle of Kyushu), Yoron (a subtropical island far south into the Chinese Sea), Kumamoto, Nagasaki, Kyoto and Nara. A selection of photographs will be uploaded soon. On the basis of interest kindled during Wim's earlier visits to Japan (2005, 2009), a large number of temples, shrines, formal gardens, and museums was visited and photographed during this recent trip. In Kyoto and Nara the coupled stayed in their own rented city apartments, exploring the city on foot and by public transport. In Kyoto Wim renewed his acquaintance with the University's Graduate School of African Regional Studies. Here he gave a well-attended seminar on 'The African State: retrospect and prospect' (click for abstract), and -- as guest this time of Prof. Akira Tanaka, San specialist) revived the intellectual contacts he had established in 2005 around the School's impressive research on South Central and Southern Africa. Occuring at a time when Wim's interest in religious and philosophical studies had yielded several major books within a few years (Vicarious reflections, 2015; Religion as a social construct, 2017; Confronting the Sacred: Durkheim vindicated, 2018), new projects have been inspired by this trip -- including one on minor road-side shrines in the present-day Japanese urban environment, and one (already completed, see above) on the magnificent Eikan-do temple in East Kyoto.

spring in Kyoto, with Patricia van Binsbergen

2019 begins above this beam
November-December 2018
SARAH VAN BINSBERGEN obtained a BA in anthropology from Amsterdam University (like her father before her) and an MA in anthropology and cultural politics from Goldsmith College, London, UK. She is the editor-in-chief of the online art journal HardHoofd, and editor with the Valiz publishing house specialising in modern art, and its criticism / philosophy. With her essay 'Een camouflagepak van kippengaas' (chickenwire as a camouflage combat dress) she was runner-up in the category ESSAYS in the 6th biannual national Prize for Young Art Criticism, 2018. Included in the Dutch-language competition book of the same title, her prize-winning essay will be translated into English and published on the competition website

photo (c) 2018 Aad Hoogendoorn
     
In 2012 Wim van Binsbergen retired from the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL). On this occasion an international valedictory conference was organised under the title RETHINKING AFRICA'S TRANSCONTINENTAL CONTINUITIES IN PRE- AND PROTOHISTORY. Despite setbacks in the publication process largely due to Wim van Binsbergen's (the convenor's and editor's) ill health, the editing was finally completed and the final manuscript (18 chapters, 450 pp) submitted to the publisher's. In the title of the edited version of this collection, the words 'pre- and protohistory' have been omitted: history, anthropology, and philosophy rather than archaeology dominate its contents. All contributors (a truly transcontinental lot), conference organisers and the ASCL as main initiator and funding agency, are warmly thanked for their patience and continuing support of this path-breaking undertaking, which may considerably change the accepted perception of Africa and Africans.
September-October 2018 Now published: the Festschrift for the 70th birthday of Wim van Binsbergen,
On the occasion of Wim van Binsbergen 70th birthday (25-2-2017), a number of friends, colleagues and former students prepared a Festschrift entitled:

Mosima, Pius, 2018, ed., A transcontinental career: Essays in honour of Wim van Binsbergen, Hoofddorp: Shikanda Press, 309 pp, ISBN 978-90-78382-35-5 (to be distributed by Amazon.com and by Centraal Boekhuis, Nederland), EUR 39.00

click on the hyperlink above, or on the cover, for free access to the book's table of contents (also list of contributors), and fulltext PDFs of the chapters

The cover photograph shows Wim van Binsbergen / Tatashikanda (left) with his adoptive cousin Dr Stanford Mayowe (right), kneeling and clapping the royal salute in the setting sun, so as to gain entry to the royal capital of King Mwene Kahare (the former's adoptive father / the latter's uncle) of the Mashasha Nkoya people, Western Zambia, 1992. Note the pointed poles supporting the reed fence -- a jealously guarded royal privilege in this part of the world, and one in which Sunda influences resonate.

the book's frontispiece: Wim van Binsbergen in his study, 2017 (photo Sarah van Binsbergen)

 
March-August 2018
A hundred years after his greatgrandmother Mia, Noah Vincent Mathilde is born as the first to open a new generation -- already prepared by his foster cousin and by numerous adoptive and spiritual cousins in Africa. No amount of publishing productivity can match the sense of fulfilment felt when contemplating one's grandchild.  
     
Op 19-5-2018 was het honderd jaar geleden dat de moeder van Wim van Binsbergen werd geboren te Amsterdam. Voor deze geledenheid schreef Wim een gedenkboek, dat thans verder bewerkt wordt voor uiteindelijke publicatie:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2018, 'Is dit mijn kamer?' -- Het leven van mijn moeder Maria Theodora Treuen (Mia), 1918-1984, Hoofddorp: Shikanda, 80 pp.

 
     
Throughout their long careers, there has been an intensive and fertile collaboration between Wim van Binsbergen and the leading Belgian anthropologist / psychoanalyse René Devisch. Over the years, much of this collaboration has been documented in the present website. A new instalment is Wim van Binsbergen's Preface to Devisch's latest book:

Now published:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2018, 'Préface', in: Devisch, R., 2018, Corps et affects dans la rencontre interculturelle, Louvain-la-Neuve: Académia / L'Harmattan, pp. 17-25

 
     
As a second-year student in 1965, Wim van Binsbergen was introduced to Durkheim's seminal religion theory -- one of the most influential approaches to religion in the social sciences. Wim's first ethnographic fieldwork, on popular Islam in the highlands of NW Tunisia, 1968, was largely conceived in terms of this theory. More than half a century later, he has finally come round to pay his debt to Durkheim in the form of a massive book whose writing and editing has kept him totally occupied from February to August 2018

Now published: Wim van Binsbergen, 2018, CONFRONTING THE SACRED: DURKHEIM VINDICATED, Hoofddorp: Shikanda Press, 567 pp., ISBN 978-90-78382-33-1, EUR90 (to be distributed by Amazon.com)

click here for access to the full text via the book's Table of Contents

click her for the book's cover texts

click here for a full though comprehensive summary of the book, as is to be found in the concluding chapter 10

January-February 2018
With effective new medication, and resuming his physical exercises which had been discontinued in 2016 due to surgery, Wim gradually gets back upon his feet, and begins to face the backlog of academic contacts and publishing projects interrupted by the removal to Hoofddorp. With apologies to all colleagues and friends who may have been inconvenienced by these developments.
     
Meanwhile, as pastimes, and in order to reconstruct and test the logistic and digital facilities once at his disposal in remote pre-removal times, he wrote, for his sub-domain ESSAYS, a long and appreciative critical piece on Dan Brown's recent thriller Origin (Bantam, 2017):


Dan Brown

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2018, 'An unexpected science-fiction masterpiece: Dan Brown’s Origin considered in the light of Teilhard de Chardin’s work', 29 pp. (click for PDF)


Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
     
also Wim van Binsbergen completed most of the research and writing for a further instalment of his work on the Pelasgian Hypothesis so warmly welcomed in Osha's piece:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2018, 'Father-daughter rape and other forms of sexual child abuse: A global distributional exploration with special attention to the Pelasgian Hypothesis and to Stoltenborgh's et al.'s meta-analysis',

Lot and his daughters in Lucas van Leiden's
1530 depiction -- , a Biblical case of father-
daughter incest, although somewhat mitigated
by the Flood-myth parallels in the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah (i.e: when the entire population is destroyed, incest may be the
only way to repopulate the world...)
soon to be posted here when finalised.
     
  2018 begins upward from here
November-December 2017 After returning from a 2-months trip to Italy, and struggling with alarmingly declining health, the remainder of the year was entirely taken up with settling in the new home. It urned out that not without punishment can one dismantle and rebuild the entire complex infrastructure which for years had enabled Wim (unwisely and with predictable punishment) to publish two books a year, for over a decade. New Year's Eve ended in near-disaster, when an ambulance had to rush Wim to a distant hospital, where heart rhythm disorders were diagnosed for the first time -- the symptoms had been familiar enough for a few years, but had so far not been picked up by the various specialists regularly consulted. This hectic year could well have ended less hectically, but as fireworks cascaded over the city in front of the hospital ward's window, it became clear that the night would not end tragically and that the unsettling events were even a blessing in disguise: leading to diagnosis and remedy.
The African Review of Books (a CODESRIA periodical published by CODESRIA, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, Dakar, Senegal) filled the cover of its September 2017 issue with a flattering portrait of Wim van Binsbergen in celebration of his 70th birthday, opening the issue with Sanya Osha's piece 'Transcontinentality versus Afrocentrism' (click here for PDF): an enthusiastic though incisive review of one of Wim's recent books

Sanya Osha

     
While launching herself on a significant literary career as one of the most prominent young poets of the Dutch language region, Hannah van Binsbergen had continued her philosophy studies, which in Autumn 2017 found a first culmination in her being awarded a BA in Philosophy from Amsterdam University.
September-October 2017
[ van de omslag ]

WIM VAN BINSBERGEN (*1947) heeft zich literair tot dusver vooral als dichter gemani­festeerd; zijn poëzie is opgenomen in de canons van Komrij en Pfeijffer. Behalve een recent kritisch pamflet over W.F. Hermans (2014) verschenen zijn eerdere literaire prozawerken bij In de Knipscheer (Haarlem) in de jaren 1980. Biënnale 2023 is zijn eerste verhalend proza in dertig jaar. Hij heeft voorts een wetenschappelijk oeuvre op zijn naam staan als antropoloog, proto-historicus, filosoof, en vergelijkend mytholoog. De meeste van zijn teksten zijn niet alleen in druk beschik­baar maar ook op:
http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda

De foto toont Wim van Binsbergen aan het werk aan dit boek, te Villammare / Sapri, Zuid-Italië, september 2017

Nu gepubliceerd:

Nadat bijna anderhalf jaar de BIG MOVE alle tijd en aandacht heeft opgeëist, is het in Italie dat Wim van Binsbergen eindelijk tijd vindt om zijn schrijfwerk weer op te nemen. Dat heeft al dadelijk geleid tot een nieuw litrerair prozaboek:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2017, Biënnale 2023 -- Scheppingsverhalen, Haarlem: Shikanda, 128 pp, ISBN / EAN 978-90-78382-37-9; distributed on the Internet by Amazon.com (klik hier voor gratis toegang to de PDF van BIËNNALE 2023)

FLAPTEKST. Dit is onmiskenbaar het boek van een schrijver die zich al meer dan een halve eeuw, als dichter, antropoloog van de religie, en intercultureel filosoof, bezighoudt – maar zonder enige vorderingen, vooralsnog - met de diepste problemen van de menselijke existentie. De ontologieën die de figuren in dit boek in de mond gelegd worden, geven een getrouw beeld van de aanzetten tot een wereldbeeld waarmee de auteur zelf worstelt – vgl. de duistere leerdichten van Parmenides en Empedocles. Alle details zijn uiteraard gebaseerd op eigen veldwerk: Noordafrikaanse volksislam, Zambiaanse genezingsculten, trekarbeid vanuit Guinee-Bissau, liefdesperikelen van de Pakistaanse elite, genderoorlog in het West-Azië, rechtspleging in het land Nod, waarheidsclaims op de Saturnus-satelliet Callisto, voortplantingsrelaties op het ver geëvolueerde Eiermand en de wereld beschreven in het verhaal ‘Buitenaardse Liefde’. De godsbeelden zijn gebaseerd op uitvoerige interviews met de Betrokkene, via divinatie en mystiek. Ook de biografie van de plastisch chirurg Sabatiël Eberhardt (in ‘Gietnaden’) berust op de meest authentieke bronnen.
     


the last (somewhat selective) family photograph taken in front of our old home
THE BIG MOVE. The budding Africanist (and Africa-born) Patricia Saegerman and Wim met in Senegal in 1982. Together they did fieldwork in Guiné-Bissau in 1983, and later that year, in preparation of their marriage, they bought the house in Haarlem (the provincial capital 15 kms West of Amsterdam) where they would have and raise four children, and would entertain numerous friends, colleagues and students from Africa, Europe, and all over the world. Over the years, most of Wim's literary and academic writing was done in this house. It also accommodated Patricia's career shift towards activities in classical European and Indian music, and in breathing therapy. The children grew up, completed their studies, and went to live in Wim's native Amsterdam. Time to finally effect the much-needed home improvements which so far had always failed to impose themselves as priorities, and to trade this spacious, nearly 140 years old officer's mansion for a light, modern alternative in a much younger town. The children, including Nezjma (Wim's daughter from a previous marriage) and her husband, and numerous friends and professionals, have greatly assisted us in disentangling us from what, after 34 years, had become a second skin -- redecorating, repairing and tidying, sorting out and moving the 9,000 books, the 15,000 offprints, the carloads of fieldnotes, the musical instruments, computers, art objects, and the memorabilia of decades of transcontinental travelling; and greatest problem of all, finding a temporary solution for our two very dear cats -- which will be just as homeless as we, in August and September, but cannot be taken with us to Sicily. We thank everybody for indispensible help. Having shed this -- in retrospect, admittedly somewhat restrictive-- skin (more than five years after Wim was formally retired but, despite medical problems, had continued to produce books and doctorates at an alarming rate), we hope to continue our, supposed, growth in freedom, health, art, happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. The old home was sold on 31-8, the new home will not be available before 1-11, so we left for a hopefully sunny and exciting very long holiday in Southern Italy -- only to find South East Sicily so devastatingly rainy that by comparison our tempestuous Holland would seem to be situated in an arid zone...

click here for a generous first selection of photographs, and for a second selection or a third one; the photographs are arranged by location, but the locations are not presented in the same order in which they were travelled.

August 2017
In the Spring of 2015, Wim van Binsbergen participated in a workshop on the ineffable (that which cannot be expressed in language) in anthropology, convened by Joe Alter and Phil Kao, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh PN, USA. The conference proceedings are now being prepared for publication by the University of Toronto Press, and in this connection Wim van Binsbergen has greatly revised and expanded his original conference paper:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2017, Grappling with the ineffable in three African situations: An ethnographic approach

click here for a PDF of this final version.

   
     
When Wim van Binsbergen, after earlier fieldwork in North Africa and South Central Africa, at the instigation of his long-standing Manchester-based colleague Richard Werbner, embarked on urban fieldwork in Francistown, Botswana, in 1988, this turned out to constitute a watershed in his career: from detached, distancing anthropology of religion to active participation in local churches and cults, in the short term leading on to his 'becoming a sangoma' (the title of his seminal 1991 paper in the Journal of Religion in Africa), and in the long term to his exchanging empirical social science for intercultural philosophy, in the Rotterdam chair of that designation. In the most recent years, working on reprinting of some of his papers in these fields, it turns out that in this tumultuous process much of potentially lasting value was initally cast by the wayside. The recent collection Vicarious Reflections (2015) revived a small book on virtually as a key to understand especially urban situations in Africa; while the collection Religion as a Social Construct (2017) salvages a number of obscure or unpublished religious-anthropological studies. Much precious and extensive survey material both on Lusaka churches and social control, and on Francistown, remains to be worked into a final publication, which will be one of the tasks for the next few years. Meanwhile intremediate installments become available, such as the following two provisional overviews of a quantitative analysis of marriage, churches and urban social control in Lusaka in the early 1970s:

Van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1987, a, ‘Urbanization, church and social control: A survey of Lusaka, Zambia, 1973: Summary of quantitative results — Part 1. USOCO results book II’, Leiden: African Studies Centre, 95 pp

Van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 1987b, ‘Urbanization, church and social control: A survey of Lusaka, Zambia, 1973: Summary of quantitative results — Part 2. USOCO results book I’, Leiden: African Studies Centre, 48 pp

These interesting provisional reports may now be read in their original form (click the links for PDFs). However, due to peculiarities of the scanning process used, the original, numbered pages appear in reversed and even rotated order.

July 2017

A page (p. 401) from Religion as a Social Construct, arguing Asian/African continuities in the field of ecstatic cults

despite considerable medical setbacks in the first months of 2017, Wim van Binsbergen hoped to renew his participation in Richard Werbner's (ex-)Satterthwaite (UK) Colloquium on African Religion and Ritual, with the following paper:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2017, 'Voices from afar: The African moral imagination in transcontinental perspective', Satterthwaite (UK) Colloquium on African Religion and Ritual 

The paper was to reflect on Wim's recent books, Before the Presocratics (2012), Vicarious Reflections (2015), and especially ch. 10 of Religion as a Social Construct (2017); a paper abstract is in preparation

Alas, by the time the paper had to be prepared Wim's health went through a difficult patch, and participation will have to be postponed till some later year

June 2017
ECAS at Basel, Switserland: book presentations

In the last week of June, 2017, the annual ECAS (European Commission for African Studies) conference will take place in Basel, Switzerland. Wim van Binsbergen has been a member of the Organising Committee with special attention to the the panels for the Philosophy section. His participation in the actual conference is rendered financially possible by the joint efforts of the African Studies Centre Leiden and the organising Basel department of African Studies. He will participate in the conference, and there deliver a book launch (Friday 30 June, 12:15, location KH116; complete with drinks and snacks) of his recent book Vicarious Reflexctions: African explorations in empirically-grounded intercultural philosophy. (click for a sneak preview of the entire book)

In view of the specifics of the locality where the book launch was to take place (a large room with poor acoustics) a PowerPoint presentation was prepared beforehand, so that the spoken word was visually supported in a large screen; click here for this PowerPoint presentation

Also during the conference, on 29 June, the prominent Africanist publishing house LIT Verlag (Munster / Berlin etc.) held a book launch of some of its recent books, and in that connection Wim van Binsbergen was asked, without preparation, to launch the book co-authored by Martin Doornbos and himself, which had come off the press a few weeks earlier: Researching Power and Identity in African State Formation (Pretoria: UNISA Press, see below).

Participating in this conference was a most pleasant experience, renewing contact with dozens of old friends and colleagues, meeting dozens of new ones, and initiating or reinforcing various book projects and other forms of collaboration. A particular boon was the intellectual exchange with the Nigerian and Mozambican scholars in the one surviving philosophical panel, which promises to lead to stimulating further results in the near future.

   
On the occasion of Wim van Binsbergen's 65th birthday, and his official retirement from the African Studies Centre, Leiden (ASCL), a splendid valedictory international conference was organised by him in conjunction with Marieke van Winden, largely on ASCL funding:

Rethinking Africa's transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory.

The participants were drawn from four continents and even more disciplines, and included (among many others) Sanya Osha, Cathérine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Oum Ndigi, Michael Rowlands, Dierk Lange, Wouter van Beek, Li Anshan, Cyril Hromnik, Simon Simonse, Ndu Life Njoku, Robert Thornton, Alain Anselin, Vaclav Blazek (in the book Zuzana Malashkova will appear as co-author), Robert Dick-Read, Yuri Berezkin, Christopher Ehret, and Pieter Boele van Hensbroek. Preparation of the proceedings under the editorship of Wim van Binsbergen was delayed by the state of retirement (which the conference was to celebrate in the first place), several spells of very serious illness, the need to give priority to other projects, and lack of all institutional editorial / secretarial support for this publication project. Yet meanwhile a draft manuscript has been prepared and provisionally formatted and edited; this is to go to the publisher (designated from the beginning as Brill, Leiden) this Summer, and after some copy-edited to be finally published before the end of this year. After a short Preface the book (ca. 480 pp.) will comprise the following Parts:

  1. General theoretical perspectives
  2. Case studies
  3. Focus on language
  4. Focus on technology

Of the three papers which Wim van Binsbergen originally contributed to the 2012 conference, two are to be included in the book:

  • one on the Oppenheimer--Dick-Read--Tauchmann hypothesis concerning massive South East Asian ('Sunda' -- with an extension to South and East|Asia) influence on Western Eurasia and Africa in pre- and protohistory; and the other
  • his general theoretical key note, especially exposing (now by way of introduction) the implicit hegemonic Eurocentrism, localism and presentism that have been paradigmatic in anthropology and African Studies ever since the mid-20th century CE.

His very extensive third conference paper (on the significance of Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism for Asia-Africa continuities in protohistory) has meanwhile already been published as an oversized chapter in his recent book Religion as a Social Construct (2016-2017).

May 2017 On 26 May 2017, in the northern university town of Groningen, Wim van Binsbergen was the key note speaker at the Annual Conference of the African Students Community (ASC) in the Netherlands, with an address 'Africa: Periphery or Centre of the World', which was met with great enthousiasm by the conveners and the audience
April 2017
On the occasion of Wim van Binsbergen 70th birthday (25-2-2017), a number of friends, colleagues and former students prepared a Festschrift entitled:

A transcontinental career: Essays in honour of Wim van Binsbergen

under the editorship of Pius M. Mosima from Cameroon. The book is now undergoing final copy-editing, and is to appear later this year.

The cover photograph shows Wim van Binsbergen / Tatashikanda (left) with his adoptive cousin Dr Stanford Mayowe (right), kneeling and clapping the royal salute in the setting sun, so as to gain entry to the royal capital of King Mwene Kahare (the former's adoptive father / the latter's uncle) of the Mashasha Nkoya people, Western Zambia, 1992. Note the pointed poles supporting the reed fence -- a jealously guarded royal privilege in this part of the world, and one in which Sunda influences resonate.

 
March 2017
Now published (mid-March 2017, at long last ):

Doornbos, M.R., & van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., 2017, Researching Power and Identity in African State Formation: Comparative Perspectives, Pretoria: UNISA [ University of South Africa ] Press, 541 pp.

this extensive co-authored work, eagerly awaited since its corrected final proofs were submitted by the authors in Spring 2012 (!!), critically overlooks forty years of the two authors' complementary and contrastive research on African states.

click here for a fulltext PDF of the proofs

February 2017
While spending six weeks travelling to and hibernating in Southern Europe (click for pictorial impressions of Sevilla, Cordoba, Cornelis Zitman'sculpture exhibition at Cadiz, the ancient fortress of Carcassone, and Carcassone cathedral).

(whenever you have opened these picture pages, hit the Back button (top left of your browser) to return to the present page)

We had visited France numerous times before, and Spain less frequently but still nearly a dozen times. This time, travelling the entire distance by car (2600 km one way) and making substantial stops at selected major cities on the way, reinforced our awareness of Europe as a viable Jewish-Christian-Islamic project sustained over two millennia. In Spain Nerja was our base again, and our extensive explorations were confined to Andalusia -- the ancient Vandals' land. In Cordoba Jewry had already been silenced or expelled for three quarters of a millennium, so even while our visits to the famous Mesquita cathedral led us daily through the labyrinth of streets of the former Jewish quarter, we found that part of the city unimpressive. The triumphalist but destructive Christian revamping of the splendid Islamic architecture of the Cordoba Mesquita cathedral proved an instructive failure. When we shared our dismay with an another tourist, a Muslim from London, his spirited but optimist response was 'They should turn this place into a university where the convergence of the three faiths would constitute the central curriculum'. Amen to that. But the cosmopolitan atmosphere of downtown, modern Cordoba offered much comfort. In Sevilla's cathedral (also visibly built on mosque remains) the triumph of the Christian Reconquista had reached a more advanced stage, and the result proved less hybrid, less of a compromise, more appallingly Baroque and complacently Christian. The commercial Jewish museum in the former Jewish quarter had only a small and unimpressive collection, but reinforced our focus on the implied Jewish understream of Western Europe -- already all but annihilated by the Christian Inquisition half a millennium before Hitler. In refreshingly open, bright and Atlantic Cadiz, these ancient streams often remained totally submerged (although also there the oldest churches turned out to be converted mosques), and instead the present-day testimonies commemorating celebrated flamenco singers, guitarists and dancers dominated the inner city. We meant to continue and conclude our pilgrimage to Europe's undercurrents of the three faiths with the Cathars' Land, in the Pays d' Oc, southernmost France -- but although the fortified ancient city of Carcassonne (completely and scandalously rebuilt in the late 19th c.) proved a fairy-tale both by night and by day, the Cathars turned out to be not only exterminated by the Inquisition but even, recently, reduced to a touristic selling slogan -- which left us totally unprepared for the smashing beauty of the small Gothic cathedral inside the ancient city.

Wim van Binsbergen reached his 70th birthday on 25-2-2017. This was celebrated in private in Spain, and with a massive function (organised by Wim's wife and children and the latter's partners) in his Haarlem home on 25-3-2017 (click here for a photo impression); see above, for a Festschrift to commemorate this occasion is currently being prepared by Wim van Binsbergen's colleagues and former students, under the editorship of Dr Pius Mosima (Cameroon).

the picture shows Pius Mosima (facing, right)
and Wim van Binsbergen (standing left, seen at the back)
during the seminar on Placide Tempels they jointly delivered
at Nijmegen University, Institute for Mission Studies, the day
after Dr Mosima obtained his PhD from Tilburg University
(supervisors: Wim van Binsbergen & Wouter van Beek)

January 2017
following in her father's footsteps as a poet, but (despite her tender age) with rather more concentrated focus (despite her reading philosophy at Amsterdam University) and much more success, Wim van Binsbergen's youngest daughter Hannah (*1993) published her first collection of poems entitled Kwaad Gesternte ('Born under Evil Stars') and immediately won the major poetry prize ('VSB') in the Netherlands, and the national debut prize in Belgium.
2017 begins here  
December 2016
Now published:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2017, Religion as a social construct: African, Asian, comparative and theoretical excursions -- a testament in the social science of religion, Haarlem: Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transceontinental Comparative Studies, No. 22, 712 pp, 50 illustrations, 40 tables, cumulative bibliography, Index of Authors, General Index

this book will soon be distributed by Amazon.com. Meanwhile, for ordering this book from Lulu as distributor, use either of the following two buttons:

book_blue2.gif   book_blue2.gif

or go to the website of Shikanda Publishing House, where book distributors and institutions seeking a discount may order directly from the publisher

for Table of Contents and Indexes, and free online access to the fulltext PDF, click here

   
nu gepubliceerd maar gezien het persoonlijk karakter voorlopig onder totaal embargo, afhankelijk van de formele toestemming van degeen aan wie het boek is opgedragen:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2016, Henny: Essay en gedichten ter gelegenheid van de tachtigste verjaardag van Henny E. van Rijn, Haarlem: Shikanda, 90 pp.

HENNY VAN RIJN, begaafd amateurmusicus, was bijna afgestudeerd in de natuurkunde, en Wim van Binsbergen (beginnend dichter) had juist zijn 2e studiejaar antropologie afgesloten, toen zij elkaar in 1966 ontmoetten. Spoedig begonnen zij een relatie, die in 1969 leidde tot een huwelijk. In 1971 werd hun dochter geboren. Het toverwoord ‘Afrika’ had hen samengebracht, en zij zouden 3 jaar onder moeilijke omstandigheden in Zambia werken (1971-1974). Maar terwijl HvR aldus de basis hielp leggen voor WvBs internationale carrière als o.m. antropoloog, ging haar eigen veelbelovende carrière als onderzoeker ten gronde aan het Afrikaanse avontuur. De 2 levens begonnen uit elkaar te lopen, onverwerkt kinderleed eiste zijn tol, en jarenlange liefde en zorg van weerskanten verkeerde in het tegendeel. Dit boekje kan daar helaas niets meer aan goedmaken. Niettemin grijpt de auteur de gelegenheid om een van de belangrijkste en meest indrukwekkende mensen in zijn leven te vierenin dankbaarheid en liefde

June-November 2016
In the second half of 2016, Wim van Binsbergen continued his work on various books announced earlier, and underwent surgery. Two new book projects presented themselves: Religion as a Social Construct ( bringing together 16 of his papers, 1980-2012, on the social science of religion), and (as a by-product of the former) The Reality of Religion: Durkheim revisited, a newly authored book which is to appear in the Spring of 2017.

Wim van Binsbergen served as co-organiser of the philosophical section of the EASA Annual Conference on African Studies ni Europe, this time in Basel, Switzerland, mid-2017, and intends to present a paper there

The PhD thesis defended by Wim van Binsbergen's last PhD student Pius Mosima earlier in 2016, was published by the African Studies Centre, Leiden, later in 2016; the Cameroonian photographs that embellish the cover were explicitly attributed to Dr Mosima but were in fact taken and supplied by his supervisor

Meanwhile Wim and Patricia van Binsbergen's youngest daughter, Hannah, published her first book of poetry Kwaad Gesternte, which made a tremendous impact on the Dutch and Belgian literary scene, and had Hannah nominated for two of the major literary prizes in the Dutch language region.

   
Wim van Binsbergen was reeds vertegenwoordigd (met het gedicht FRIESLAND) in Gerrit Komrij's bekende anthologie, de canon van de Nederlandse poëzie.Tegen het eind van 2016, verscheen een opvolger van Komrij's bloemlezing: De Nederlandse poëzie van de twintigste en de eenentwintigste eeuw in 1000 en enige gedichten, onder redactie van Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. Weer is een lang gedicht van Wim van Binsbergen opgenomen, PIANOVERVOER. Maar wat nog meer reden tot vreugde is: deze keer zijn vader en dochter in dezelfde bloemlezing opgenomen -- Hannah zelfs met drie gedichten!
April-May 2016
Wim van Binsbergen was a founding member of the International Association for Comparative Mythology (IACM) in 2006 (Beijing, China), and has nominally been one of the Directors of this body ever since -- although his participation has been at a low eb since 2011. In 2016, the 10th Annual Meeting will be held at Brno, Czech Republic, 26-28 May. Its topic will be: Time and Myth: The Temporal and the Eternal. Here Wim van Binsbergen proposes to present, from notes, a paper entitled:

'Fortunately he had stepped aside just in time':
Mythical time, historical time and transcontinental echoes in the mythology of the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central Africa

click for paper proposal

In 2016, the Annual Conference took place at the Masaryk University of Brno and was efficiently and hospitably hosted by internationally renowned historical linguist Vaclav Blazek with the assistance of his PhD students. Brno is famous as the place where genetics was founded by Fr. Mendel in the mid-19th c. CE, but unfortunately no opportyunity was found to visit the famous convent's botanical garden. Deliberations by the IACM Board of Directors led to the decision to have the 2017 Annual Meeting, once again, in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

 
March 2016
Au numéro inaugural de "Patrimoines & Cultures", le magazine panafricain bilingue de vulgarisation scientifique du CERDOTOLA (Yaounde, Cameroun), Wim van Binsbergen viens de contribuer un artice en anglais intitulé: 'African traditions of peace-making'. click here for a preview

A Bamileke king with ceremonial cane (note the orientalising face carved on it), beaded cap, and libation horn

     
Wim van Binsbergen wrote an extensive French preface for Rene Devisch's new book L'extime dans la rencontre transculturelle, now in the press
     
Wim van Binsbergen accepts the honorary position of Patron of the Cameroonian NGO 'African Centre for Research, Innovation and Development (ACRID)', Limbe / Buea, Cameroon
     
Now that, after almost a year of writing and editing, the book Vicarious Reflections has found its definitive form and is out of the way, Wim van Binsbergen can finally return to other ongoing writing and editing projects. The 2012 Leiden conference Rethinking Africa's Transcontinental continuities in Pre-and Protohistory on the occasion of his retirement, has reached a decisive stage now that all relevant papers have been submitted and the manuscript is abnout to be submitted to the African Studies Centdre Leiden editorial board for one of its series with Brill publishing house. The 2015 fieldwork on the transcontinental continuities among present-day Bamileke of the Cameroonian Grassfields has meanwhile led to a two-volume draft report Testing tdhe Sunda Hypothesis which is now being submitted to expert readers in Cameroon and worldwide for finalisation. And after the successful special issue (volume XXV) on Masolo, final touches are being made to the volumes XXVI-XXVII, which are to conclude the existence of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie as a subscription journal -- henceforth distribution will be in the form of separate annual volumes through the Internet, and through the international channels of the book trade
Januari-Februari 2016

read here the conference announcement with all practical details

17 Februari 2016: Wim van Binsbergen and Pius Mosima will be the principal speakers at a Symposium organised by the Centre for Mission Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on the Franciscan father, the missionary Frans (clerical name Placied) Tempels (Berlaar near Lier, Belgium, 1906 - Hasselt, Belgium, 1977), whose seminal book Bantoe-filosofie / Bantu Philosophy / La philosophie bantoue, appeared in Brussels 70 years ago. The book has been recognised (though also bitterly -- if anachronistically -- attacked) as the major catalytic influence upon the emergence of African Philosophy as an academic endeavour.

     

Pius Mosima and Wim van Binsbergen at their first meeting, Cameroon, 2005

16 Februari 2016: public defense, before Tilburg University, the Netherlands (supervisors: Profs Wim van Binsbergen & Wouter van Beek) of the PhD thesis of Wim van Binsbergen's last remaining PhD student, Pius Mosima; entitled: Philosophic Sagacity and Intercultural Philosophy: Beyond Henry Odera Oruka

click here for Wim van Binsbergen's laudatory address ('laudatio') pronounced at the end of the public defense

Pius Mosima and Wim van Binsbergen during final supervision, in Idenau, a fishing village at the Cameroonian-Nigerian border, April 2015

2016 2016 begins here
December, 2015
Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.

Now published:

van Binsbergen, Wim.M.J., 2015, Vicarious Reflections: African explorations in empirically-grounded intercultural philosophy, Haarlem: Shikanda Press, Papers in Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies, No. 17, 700 pp., numerous illustrations, bibliography, index of authors, general index (click for extensive webpage giving free access to the text of this book; and details for ordering a printed copy of this book)

   
During this month the hosting company that had accommmodated the http://www.shikanda.net portal suddenly went out of business and as a result, the website was unavailable for some weeks. Meanwhile a temporary solution has been created at http://www.quest-journal.net/shikanda/ , which is also owned and maintained by Shikanda Press, notably for the purpose of Quest: A Journal of African Philosophie / Revue Africaine de Philosophie, and for Pip-TraCS. Time and resources have been lacking to correct all the external links within the temporary site, but many links are relative and internal and these are still working correctly. It is hoped that the original shikanda.net site will soon be revived under the original URL.  
September / November 2015 during these months work was continued on the Vicarious Reflections book
August, 2015
  participation in a Symposium at Rostock University, Fed. Rep. Germany:
"Chaos in the Contact Zone. Unpredictability, Improvisation and the Struggle for Control“
August 31 - 2 September 2015

Wim van Binsbergen, 'Identity as the performative product of, rather than as the input into, intercultural encounters' (click here for abstract, PDF)

click the cover(right) to gain access to the webpage for Wim van Binsbergen 2003 book Intercultural Encounters, where also a link to the PDF of the entire book may be found

This was a very useful conference, not only because of its pleasant and sociable atmosphere (an applecart that was somewhat upset by my own numerous and hypercritical interventions), the river boat ride to the nearby Baltic Sea, the Baltic beach and the splendid Rostock Zoo, but especially in the sense that it drove home to me, clearer than ever before, what is wrong with the kind of quasi-postmodern, amateur do-it-yourself attempts at social analysis (often by people from the humanities, history, literature science, philosophy -- some of whom call themselves 'performing scholars') without acquaintance with, let alone application of, the accumulated mainstream theories and methods of the social sciences, even when dealing with patently social-science topics such as class formation, ethnicity, urban situations. That lesson helped me greatly to lend extra punch to the introductory chapter of my new book Vicarious Reflections, which was being finalised at the time of the conference.

click here for a few Rostock 2015 photographs

June / July, 2015
In these months Wim van Binsbergen wrote a two-volume first draft of his report on the Cameroonian field-work:

van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., in press, Testing the Sunda hypothesis: Provisional report on the proto-historical transcontinental connections of the Bamileke people of Cameroon: In two volumes, I. Data and theory; II. Photo essay, Haarlem: Shikanda Press, Papers in Intercultural Philosophy / Transcontinental Comparative Studies (PIP-TraCS) No. 20, ISBN / EAN: 978-90-78382-30-0 (Vol. I), 978-90-78382-31-7 (Vol. II).

Meanwhile, put off by the tedious editorial chores attending the finalisation of his magnum opus on forty years of Nkoya research in Zambia, 'Our Drums Are Always On My Mind', and realising that the felicitous outcome of the new Cameroonian field-work necessitated a thorough revision (see entry April 2015, below) of the models of Africa's transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory which had greatly informed the final, excessively long chapter of that book, he decided to let work on the various current book projects rest for a while, and to create a break by starting on the editing of a long-planned collection of his papers on Intercultural Philosophy, under the title Vicarious Reflections: African explorations in empirically-grounded Intercultural Philosophy -- which despite its excessive length and complexity was completed and appeared in December 2015

May, 2015
[ in May 2015 Wim and Patricia van Binsbergen made a tour of Portugal, which however was thwarted by very severe medical problems. Nonetheless, the megalithic scenes around the city of Evora, the city of Mertola as a glorious monument of Portugal's Islamic past, the enchanting beaches of Algarve, and selected aspects of the capital city of Lisboa, compensated somewhat for a most depressive adventure click here for selected miniature pictures Portugal 2015
   
Dennis van Binsbergen, who as youngest son accompanied Wim van Binsbergen on his recent Cameroonian fieldwork taking many of the crucial photographs documenting East-, South- and South-East Asian influences upon sub-Saharan Africa, and who has been an important force in the practical survival of Shikanda Press (publisher of PIP-TraCS and Quest, and of a literary series), took his BA in Business and Languages at HVA Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in May 2015
April, 2015
TRANSCONTINENTAL ASPECTS OF THE BAMILEKE PLATEAU, WESTERN GRASSFIELDS, CAMEROON. Fieldwork on postulated pre- and protohistoric Sunda / South East Asian influences on the Western Grassfields, Cameroon, during the entire month of April 2015 (this trip was originally planned for the Autumn of 2014, see there, below -- but had to be postponed because of the ebola aepidemic hitting West Africa in 2014-2015). The final week of April was spent in Buea, Anglophone Western Cameroon, where the final supervision of the PhD thesis of Pius Mosima was combined with comparative explorations on the save trade at Bimbia, and work at the rich Archives of Western Cameroon. The trip was subsidised in part by the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands, where Wim van Binsbergen is a life Honorary Fellow, and was moreover greatly facilitated by the loyal and multifarious assistance from Dr Pascal Touoyem (Wim van Binsbergen's 2014 PhD), his wife Mrs Jacqueline Touoyem née Nkouetso, Mrs Elisabeth Kungni (the latter's sister), and Dennis van Binsbergen, especially as assistant and photographer. Thanks to these contributions, an immense amount of work could be done in a very short time, and a real break-through could be reached in regard of models of transcontinental continuitiy informing sub-Saharan African's pre- and protohistory. The intuitive model hitherto employed had an apparently solid basis in the following points of view:
  • my ongoing ethnographic and ethnohistorical research among the Nkoya of Zambia sinds 1972
  • my ethnographic and ethnohistorical increasingly long-range research into the Botswana sangoma cult since 1988,
  • long-range linguistic and comparative mythological research especially in the line of Starostin & Starostin's Tower of Babel and the Harvard-centred revival of comparative mythology instigated especially by the Sanskritist Michael Witzel
  • genetic research, both the obsolescent type highlighting classic genetic markers (of which the Italian/American geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has been the iconic exponent) and, since the mid-1990s, the far more detailed and conclusive in terms of molecular biology
  • the Oppenheimer-Tauchmann-Dick-Read 'Sunda' hypothesis of extensive South East Asian impact on sub-Saharan Africa, as set out by me already in 2007a (presented at Bandung, Indonesia), and 2008 (the Edinburgh paper as published), and as formulated more fundamentally in 2012; South East Asian elements have been suggested (often wrongly so, on second thoughts) for such sub-Saharan African traits as mankala, geomantic divination, the cult of the land, the kingship, musical instruments, burial customs, the skull complex including headhunting,
  • extensive research into the impact of Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Near East upon sub-Saharan Africa, especially as emanating from a close-reading of Nkoya mythology, Zambia recorded in historical times (cf. my articles on Nkoya comparative mythology 2010 and on Egypt and Africa, contra Howe, 2011)
  • the Back-into-Africa Hypothesis, one of the most illuminating outcomes of the new molecular biology approach to population genetics, formulated by Coia, Hammer, Cruciani, Underhill and others from the late 1990s on
  • the Pelasgian Hypothesis, which I formulated as an explanatory model to account for certain aporias in the study of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean but which since proved to be capable of generalisation into Central, South, East and South East Asia, Oceania, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting the incomparable scope and global impact of cultural innovation in West Asia from the Neolithic onward, and suggesting (as an ultimate blow to the modern essentialisation of Africanness and of language macrophyla now exclusively spoken in the African continent, e.g. Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan) that significant aspects of proto-African culture and proto-Bantu had circulated in Neolithic and Bronze Ages in Wesst Asia and the Mediterranean, and in the Late Bronze Age may have invaded sub-Saharan Africa as a vacant cultural niche rather than (as Strong Afrocentrism and mainstream Bantu linguistics would have it) emanating from there

As a result, I had (more or less implicitly) postulated:

  1. a straightforward Westbound influence from South and South East Asia from the beginning of the Common Era onward, starting from the Indian Ocean coast and going directly West into the interior;
  2. a rather coherent, single-stranded influence essentially consisting of one cultural package and one source
  3. the implied absence of any significant Eastbouind influence emanating from sub-Saharan Africa and impacrting upon South, South-Easts and East Asia.

The new Cameroon field-work opened up a few more or less unexpected perspectives on all this, which I shall summarise here as provisional result of this field-work:

  1. public awareness: The field-work suggested (although the duration and the degrees of language and cultural competence were far too restricted to be able to speak with any authority!) that, in the face of all the apparent reminiscences (in sculptural styles, royal architecture, other aspoects of the material culture and iconography, the cult of the land, burial customs, the basic world-view) of transcontinental Asian continuities, not the slightest awareness of such is part of the publicly circulating culture of present-day Bamileke people (which does not preclude conservation of such awareness at a deeper level of secrecy, cults, secret societies etc. -- but such secrets can only be accessed after years of field-work); the possible reasons for such amnesia I have explored elsewhere (key note 2012 conference, expanded, p. 34 f.)
  2. the multifarious strands of many different Asian influences, from all sorts of directions, periods, as well as cultural, linguistic and religious provenances, upon sub-Saharan Africa since the onset of the Holocene (10 ka Before Present) -- already discussed in the paper just mentioned (in terms of a multicentred, multidirectional, transcontinental maritime network emerging from the Early Bronze Age), but so far scarcely adopted yet by me as a leading principle in interpreting the apparent or genuine Sunda elements in Nkoya culture
  3. the role of East Asia / specifically Taoist China in sub-Saharan African cultural pre- and proto-history -- again already discussed in the paper just mentioned, and painstakingly analysed in relation to the cosmology of the transformative cycle of elements in Wim van Binsbergen's book Before the Presocratics (where a late 1st or early 2nd Chinese cultural transmission to South Central Africa apeared as the only solution to the interpretative problems the Nkoya material is posing); yet such a conspicuous Chinese presence in Africa at such an early date remains a surprising outcome that was totally unforeseen in the Oppenheimer-Tauchmann-Dick-Read 'Sunda' hypothesis -- but also among the Bamileke, vital core concepts of the ancient cosmology turn out to be classical Chinese, both semantically and even lexically!
  4. the relatively submerged role of Buddhism -- in the wake of earlier writers such as Hornell and, again, Dick-Read, I had recognised Buddhism (along with Hindusim, Taoism, Islam, and Christianity) as an important aspect of Africa's transcontinental continuities, and had accordingly analysed the case of the Nkoya / South Central Africa; Buddhist traits were predictably also surfacing in the Cameroonian case, but to a lesser extent than was my initial impression
  5. detour in the transmission of many Asian traits from the Indian Ocean: not directly via the East African coast but via Cape of Good Hope -- this mechanism was already spotted by Jeffreys on maize and other foodcrops, and more recently by Dick-Read; contrary to what I thought for a long time, the Bamileke case suggests that many or most apparent (and / or genuine!) Nkoya Sunda traits, such as musical instruments and the kingship complex, reached the interior of South Central Africa (Zambia, Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe) not in a direct Westbound movement from the Indian Ocean, but in a detour from West Africa / the Bight of Benin; this implies that the identification of the mythical land of Kola from which South Central African royal dynasties trace their origin, although perhaps ultimately linked to Kola(r) as placename and ethnonym in the Gulf of Bengal wider region, in the first place may refer to the Bight of Benin / West Africa
  6. the reformulation / localising transformation of Asian traits during Westbound overland transmission across the African continent -- despite this detour, there are (as set out in my 2012 paper on the Oppenheimer-Tauchmann-Dick-Read 'Sunda' hypothesis) genetic and also linguistic indications of an overland transmission from the Indian Ocean coast, and this may be one additional factor why Bamileke today do not perceive the implied transcontinental elements in their culture; another reason is that the Bamileke, as an expanding trading, intrepreneurial and residential minority, are already substantially marginalised in modern Cameroon as it is ('the Jews of Cameroon'!), and cannot afford to add to this condition the stigma of an alien, non-African origin

These are merely provisional formulations, which are now being threshed out for the provisional report on the Cameroonian field-work, but which remain utterly shaky in view of the short duration and limited linguistic and cultural knowledge underlying the field-work.

click here for a selection of photographs from Cameroon 2015


the slave trade was an important mechanism for the transmission of African cultural material over Asia and the Americas; view of the ancient slave port Bimbia near Limbe, Fako division, Western Cameroon -- on which the Archives at Buea unexpectedly offered rich materials, while the site itself is now being prepared as a UNESCO heritage site


an important source for transcontinental cultural affinities (or their apparent absence) turned out to be the Musée la Blackitude (sic) at Yaounde, Cameroon - consisting of the private collection of one West Cameroonian Queen Agnes, who is also a vocal member of the National Museums Commission


predictably, the mankala board-game, the xylophone and the royal bells (here all three from the Musée la Blackitude) constitute imptorant clues to transcontinental continuities


from the same museum, this piece also described by Dick-Read, reminiscent of the famous Benin bronzes, but recognised by him to suggest a South East Asian iconography


among the conspicuous South Asian reminiscences among the Bamileke we may count the bidental and tridental ornaments (originally sacred to Siva, Kali etc.?) topping the more or less pyramidal royal architecture -- the latter may ultimately derive from Buddhist stupas, but closer in space and time are the miniature pyramids of Nubia / Meroe, Northern Sudan, of the Late period


a royal ancestor depicted while apparently making the Buddhist peace mudra; fly switches made of animal tails; royal ornaments in the form of a pair of elephant tusks for sale at garden decoration centres... -- South Asian parallels abound in the royal symbolism of the Bamileke plateau

March, 2015
participation in a workshop at the Department of Anthropology, Pittsburgh University Pennsylvania USA, 20-21 March 2015: 'Capturing the ineffable: Wisdom in perspective'

Wim van Binsbergen, 'The topicality of wisdom today and its intercultural challenges' (click for PDF)

click on the blue cover to the right to read Wim van Binsbergen's seminal text on African wisdom as published by the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences in 2009; his other texts on wisdom may be found elsewhere in the present webpage; use the internal search facility

the text for the Pittsburgh 2015 conference is now being revised for inclusion in the conference proceedings

 
                                                            Wim van Binsbergen (crouching, left) during his final initiation to sangoma, 1991
     
Now restored

For nearly a decade Tatashikanda's website on Nkoya society and culture was a beacon in the cultural life of the Nkoya people of Western Zambia. In 2012 the original, free Bravenet hosting expired, and the Shikanda portal lacked the disk space to accommodate the Nkoya pages. This has been remedied now, and the Nkoya pages are again available under the present link. However, so far the time has lacked to update the pages since 2012, although in the meantime many more new Nkoya-related projects and publications have come available. Please check Wim van Binsbergen's / Tatashikanda's current and older topicalities pages for details

January-February, 2015 keeping up the family tradition...
 
      installation at Tate Modern   earliest spring in London seen from Tate Modern
In February 2015, Patricia and Wim van Binsbergen visited London, United Kingdom, to attend the graduation ceremony of their middle daughter Sarah van Binsbergen, who obtained (with distinction / cum laude) a Master's Degree in Anthropology (specialisation: Cultural Politics) from Goldsmiths College, University of London

One of Sarah's given names is Shikanda, which effectively makes her a Nkoya princess of the Kahare dynasty, Kaoma district, Zambia; King Mwene Kahare Kabambi (1921-1993), the adoptive father of Sarah's father Tatashikanda, bestowed the name of his great-grandmother Queen Shikanda upon the newborn girl (chiming the royal bells for the latter in an ancestral salute), and left her an estate at his death. One of Queen Shikanda's praise-names claims that she gave the neighbouring Kaonde people a hard time (by forcefully submitting them to Mukanda i.e. male puberty rites including circumcision); ultimately however her name seems to derive (like so many other Nkoya royal names!) from South Asia -- in this case from that of the South Asian war deity Skanda (Kartikeya, Subrahmanya, Murugan, Kumara, etc.; son of Siva and brother to Ganesha / Ganypati, hatched by Ganga / the Ganges (too hot for any other mode of birth; cf. the Japanese and the Finnish fire gods Kagutsuchi), nurtured by the Pleiades, saviour of the \world by deating the demon Taraka, and in some respects a mythical transformation of Alexander the Great) thus testifying to extensive transcontinental influence in South Central Africa during the late 1st and early 2nd mill. CE. It is even thinkable that the very name Mukanda derives from Skanda (which in South Central African, Bantu-speaking mouths would be pronounced shi-kanda anyway), associated with some so far unidentified South Asian phallic cult which happened to tune in with the widespread custom of circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa, cf. the cult of Siva's lingam which left unmistakable traces in South Central Africa.

Sarah is not the only one of Wim van Binsbergen's children to bear an African name reminiscent of close personal association in field-work; how could it be otherwise, when four of them have an African-born mother, Patricia, who over the decades, like Nezjma's mother before her, has loyally shared in her husband's African fieldwork and in the logistic and emotional turmoil it has tended to bring about.

Nezjma, Wim's eldest daughter (left, here shown with her youngest sister Hannah), was already early in life fascinanated by drama, wrote and directed dozens of children's plays, and took a diplome in event organisation. As an infant she would play on the knees of the same Mwene Kabambi, in his palace, and she still cherishes a small royal bell he gave her in 1973. Her Arabic name however ('star') derives from her father's North African field-work, where the original bearer, at age 24 a married mother of four, was among his principal informants on shrines and social organisation; as a result she features prominently in the field-work novel Een Buik Openen ('Opening Up a Belly') which Wim van Binsbergen wrote at his daughter Nezjma's request. Nezjma's parents visited the Khumiri field-work site in 1970 together; on that occasion the origina Nezjma explained her name to the pregnant mother and consented that it should be given to her friend's unborn child. Like Sarah, Nezjma has her own special claims to being 'a child of the land': North African saints are venerated in their graves, which are also the central foci from which their blessing (baraka) is being dispensed. Many young women, especially in the first years of their marriage when childbirth is often stagnated, are taken by their mothers and mothers-in-law to a major shrine, where before the tomb they unloosen the belt that ties their upper garment (málakhfa) around the waist; thus opening up, symbolically at least, to the saint's baraka and allowing it to enter their womb, they conceive of a child (occasionally, but not in this case, aided by the shrine's living warden) that in all respects is counted as the saint's offspring. Nezjma's pregnant mother was persuaded to submit to the same rite, and thus the child rightfully became 'bint as-sîdî Mhammad'. To commemorate this special link with the saint, our family has every since, for nearly half a century now, observed the semi-annual festival (zerda) of Sidi Mhammad, by dedicating a Khumiri meal of kuskus and hallal meat to his name.

 

  Wim's eldest son Vincent ('Victorious') lacks a field-work name, his last given name however derives from Matthew Schoffeleers (his father's long-standing colleague, PhD supervisor and officiant in his parent's wedding ), and his main name recalls his parents' victory over their variously troubled childhood; after taking a BSc in physical education Vincent became an operational sales manager and a great sportsman, in which capacity he has a most stimulating influence on his father (see picture) Wim's youngest son Dennis appears on some of the other entries for 2015. While ultimately named after the Ancient Greek god of intoxication and ecstasy Dionysos who (reputed to lead an army into India) in many respects is the counterpart of Skanda, he was specifically named after his father's adoptive elder brother and research assistant over the decades, Dennis Shiyowe, of the Nkoya people, Zambia; Mr Shiyowe, who is now a headman and a church leader, is shown here at the Kazanga Festival, 2011. Wim's youngest daughter is Hannah; she is reading philosophy, did a BA thesis on Derrida and dreams, nd is a prominent young poetess. Her given African name is Sebuka -- not a person, but the name the Kalanga / Ndebele diviners of Southern Africa have given to the penultimate one of the 16 combinations in the Hakata four-tablet oracle, meaning 'it is a group, completeness' (of the sibling group). The name is all the more fitting since also the Hakata tablets are modelled after a kinship idiom: the nucleus of (from left to right) Senior Woman, Senior Man, Junior Woman, Junior Man.
   
Throughout 2014 and in the early months of 2015 Wim van Binsbergen has worked on a number of writing projects, of which the final results are to be expected in 2015. Some of these have already been announced in this webpage amd are now in the press, e.g. 
  • Our drums are always on my mind: Nkoya history, culture and society (here also the recent, Dutch-language study on Mabombola Village will appeared in an English version; 
  • Sangoma Science: From ethnography to intercultural ontology: Towards a poetics of the globalising exploration into local spiritualities
  • Shimmerings of the Rainbow Serpent: Towards the interpretation of crosshatching motifs in Palaeolithic art: Comparative mythological and archaeoastronomical explorations inspired by the incised Blombos red ochre block, South Africa, 70 ka BP, and Nkoya female puberty rites, 20th c. CE.’, 
  • Rethinking Africa's transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory (a collective volume based on the valedictory conference offered to Wim van Binsbergen on the occcasion of his retirement from the African Studies Centre, Leiden, 2012);
  • Joseph Karst: As pioneer of long-range approaches to Mediterranean Bronze-Age ethnicity -- with a special chapters on the global distribution and reconstructed global history of headhunting
  • Sun cults in Africa and beyond: Aspects of the hypothetical Pelasgian heritage? Grafton Elliot Smith's 'Heliolithic Culture' revisted after a hundred years
  • Towards The Pelasgian Hypothesis: An integrative perspective on ethnic, cultural, linguistic and genetic affinities proposed to encompass Africa, Asia and Europe from the Neolithic onwards

These books are now in the press, their editing is being finalised, they have been issued with ISBNs, and they are expected to by published within the next two years

 
In this period the publishing activities of Shikanda Press were further rationalised and the marketing gradually improved due to the efforts of Dennis van Binsbergen, who after completing his BA in  Marketing and Languages has now temporarily joined Shikanda Press on an internship as Marketing Director.
 
Nu gepubliceerd:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2015, Een lekker sodemietertje: Een kind op weg naar de poëzie (autobiografie 1947-1963), Haarlem: Shikanda, 168 pp.,

VOORLOPIG ONDER TOTAAL EMBARGO VANWEGE DE PIJNLIJKE FAMILIE- GEHEIMEN DIE ERIN AAN DE ORDE GESTELD WORDEN

 
Nu gepubliceerd:

Wim van Binsbergen, 2015, Verspreide gedichten 1961-2015: Door aantekeningen samengebonden, Haarlem: Shikanda, 209 pp.

gebruik de volgende button om te bestellen bij de distributeurs (Lulu) / use this link to order with the distributors (Lulu):

EUR20,90 / US$ 23

Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.   Support independent publishing: Buy this book on Lulu.

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in January 2015, Wim and Patricia van Binsbergen made another visit to the Cape Verde Islands (like in early 2014), where editorial work was undertaken, and where they refreshed their command of the Creole / Kriulu language, which they first learned during their fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau, 1983    click here for a page of pictures showing this utterly barren volcanic island
2015 begins above this line

on this page only current topicalities from the year 2010- are included; the series was initiated in 2002; click here for the years 2002 and 2003; and here for the years 2004-2005; and here for the years 2006-2007; and here for the years 2008-2009; and here for the years 2010-2011; and here for the years 2012-2014

proceed to the Shikanda portal in order to access all other websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural philosophy, African Studies); ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation; literary work
 

 

page last modified: 01-06-2023 12:30:20