Ritual Futures & Options: Amma Birago

with the help of the international community - opening up intellectual space in Africa, so that Africans themselves can come
up with
replacements for failed states. Jeffrey Herbst, Reexamining Sovereign States in Africa. A Review by E. J. Keller

Data on the labor history of the Sakalava of Madagascar suggests that what French colonists in Madagascar saw as "development," Sakalava saw
as "death", both literally and metaphorically. Issues in divine kingship. Gillian Feeley-Harnik

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ritual futures
& options
on ritual advantage, surplus production
and hybridization. the return of
the ritual ambassadors.

curated by
amma birago

making the case for
ritual economy, economic hybridity,
ethnic nationalism &
pan Africanism

Life itself, wrote van Gennep, means to separate and to reunite, to change form
and condition, to die and to be reborn. These changes can occur smoothly and meaningfully
as part of a larger, embracing, and reassuring pattern only by means of
their orchestration as rites of passage.
Catherine Bell, Ritual Perspectives

Hardt and Negri argue that, under globalization, national sovereignty is no longer the locus of power; power is
situated in an amorphous web of economic and political relations outside of any state what they call Empire.
Thus, in a perverse way, the logic of globalization does not so much distinguish between First and Third World
sovereignty, but subsumes and debilitates both of them, though perhaps not equally, in the service of a new world
economic order.
Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law.
Antony Anghie, Reviewed by Mark Kleyna.
with the help of the international community - opening up intellectual space in Africa, so that Africans themselves can come up with


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Turner was aware that the poor, the lower class, the subaltern had a different
and closer relationship to the chaotic potentialities of ritual action, but in his imagination their goals
were alternately the "leveling" of communitas, and social mobility: "the structurally inferior
aspire to symbolic structural superiority in ritual" (256:203).
History, Structure, and Ritual,
John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan

Religion and ritual in the western provinces
Louise Revell
The search for a more powerful entity to provide some form of order to the chaotic nature of human existence is a
phenomenon that can be seen throughout much of human history. For a Roman, the gods were everywhere, as
powerful forces with an interest in all aspects of daily life. Religion formed part of the broad-based homogeneity of
the western provinces following the process of cultural transformation after conquest. Inscriptions, sculpture, and
temple architecture all point to a similar material culture, and, although there is an apparent continuity in the names
of the deities being worshipped from the pre-Roman to the Roman periods, their association with the traditional
gods of Rome through syncretism negates the idea of direct continuity. However, religious changes are often
overlooked in accounts of the Romanization of the western provinces, and we are left with the rather uncritical
concept of 'Romano-Celtic' religion as a hybrid phenomenon. There is a danger of using the archaeological evidence
of temples and inscriptions as diagnostic of change, rather than undertaking a more rigorous analysis in order to
understand how religion and ritual formed part of this broad-based homogeneity, and the way in which the people of
the provinces made sense of how to act and behave within a new social and political world. Furthermore, through
creating the hybrid of Romano-Celtic, there is the temptation to concentrate on the identification of the Celtic (or
pre-Roman) and Roman elements, and then to think about them in isolation, downplaying the dynamic way in which
the people of the provinces negotiated their way through the new imperial context.

Though the framework of ritual economy incorporates the practise of rituals in a theory of economics, it does not
make them interchangeable. It does not pretend to explain every aspect of economics in terms of rituals, but merely
indicates that economic models can no longer stay blind to the social reality of communal behaviour. There where
rituals and economics do overlap however, we speak of an economic ritual, and it is precisely at such points of
intersection where we see a window of opportunity for change.
Rituals for economic change: Towards a new perspective of economic behaviour
Caroline van Leenders et al

Louise Revell
In this paper, I propose to explore how part of these cultural changes involved learning different ways of
communicating with the gods: new ways of interacting with, and placating, a higher force. I want to move beyond
seeing the material culture from religious sites as being representative of cultural identity, and instead think about
how it was part and parcel of certain ways of acting. Through these actions, the people of these communities joined
in a much wider ideology of religion and religious practice.
I would suggest that there is a third approach that can be used to understand the role of religion in the process of
cultural change: reconstructing ritual practice through a detailed, contextual interpretation of the material culture
evidence. This approach moves away from seeing material culture as a passive reflection of cultural identity, and
instead sees it as playing an active role in the ways in which people make sense of the world around them. Our sense
of who we are and how we fit into a society is, in part, mediated through repeated, daily routines, and, within these


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routines, we use material such as what we wear, what we carry, and the decoration of the space around us as a way
to both project something about ourselves, and to internalize that self-image. The routines of religious worship
operate on a number of different levels: defining boundaries between mortal and divine, and also creating shared
social identities firmly located within the earthly realm. Ancient historians have seen ritual as fundamental to the
relationship between Romans and the divine, and John Scheid goes so far as to characterize Roman religion as being
centred round correct practice (orthopraxis) rather than belief in specific deities. Thus, the repeated performance of
specific rites such as sacrifice, vows, and festivals has been seen as forming a core part in the formulation of
religious authority and a shared Roman identity.

Similar approaches to Medieval ritual have been criticized as producing a normative picture which is then reimposed
onto the local context, and the same can be argued for the Roman period. This has the result of downplaying the
local variability evident in the archaeological record. Through a detailed investigation of the archaeological evidence
of temple sites, we can reconstruct the rituals carried out by the people who used these sites: how they moved
through these spaces, which areas they could access, what they could see, and the scale of the actions. The
associated material, such as inscriptions and votive offerings, enables us to flesh this out, and give some idea of the
stated motivation. These repeated actions formed the basis of how these provincial societies understood the divine:
they encountered their religious truths in part through their knowledge of how to act in specific situations and
through the performance of those actions. It is tempting to downplay this knowledge, as we lack the evidence that
these communities were aware of the traditions and the reasons for these rituals, but this is to overlook distinctions
between different forms of knowledge. Roman writers dealing with ritual were entering into a debate which
rested upon their discursive knowledge of the origins of a particular ritual, for example, but those enacting the rituals
were taking part in an equally powerful dialogue about the correct way of interacting with the gods through their
commitment to that ritual as a way to influence the will of the gods.
Louise Revell

Why coin the term economic hybridity? The notion of hybridity (Young 1995)
expresses this mutuality in that an organic hybrid will always bear the physical traces of the heterogeneous
elements of which it consists, thus presenting a distinctively different form from its progenitors.
Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place. Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure
Mayfair Mei-hui Yang

Rituals for economic change towards a new perspective of economic behavior
Ritual economy views economic behaviour as constituted by such social practices as rituals. It is the process of
provisioning and consuming that materializes and substantiates worldview for managing meaning and shaping
interpretation. By applying the jargon of rituals to the field of economics, we gain a refreshing tool to explore and
explain economic situations and practices. Through the glasses of ritual economy we look at overconsumption and
inspect the communicative dimension of transactions. What we see is that the type of consumption leading to
overconsumption constitutes a symbolic and communicative act (i.e. ritual). By respecting the ritual but changing its
form (i.e. to more conscious consumption) we change economic behaviour whilst acknowledging its underlying
motivation.
Most people looking for change structure the (economic) world we live in terms of the old and the new. Herein
the old economy refers to the currently dominant set of practices that make up the economic system. The new
economy, on the other hand, is a normative construct and refers to a new set of practices that are to be realized.
Although this mental distinction between old and new can seem helpful, building a completely new economic


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system from its foundations is impossible and oversimplifies the task ahead. Our role is to channel change into
the right direction. If one considers the economic system to be the outcome of certain paradigms it becomes
important to understand how these paradigms evolve and eventually get replaced.


Theorizing the Hybrid
Deborah A. Kapchan and Pauline Turner Strong
"Theorizing the Hybrid" is a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore that critically engages the metaphor
of hybridity as it is currently employed in the analysis of narratives and discourses, genres and identities, material
forms and performances. Authors in the fields of folklore, cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, literary
history, ethnomusicology, and comparative literature reflect on the nature, value, limitations, and dangers of
hybridity as both an analytic model and a social practice. Articles consider topics ranging from the premodern to the
cybernetic, the biological to the political, the highly localized to the transnational.
Theorizing the Hybrid. Hybridity Past and Present
In 1982, Victor Turner noted that "what was once considered 'contaminated,' 'promiscuous,' 'impure' [was] becoming
the focus of postmodern analytical attention" (1982:77). These words sound patent today, but they may serve as a
marker. To what extent does hybridity become a sign for the impure mixings propagated by the dissolution of
political, geographic, ethnic, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries?

in the five centuries before modern European global domination, a commercial globalization was already
underway in long-distance and maritime trade among Arab, Persian, Chinese, South, and Southeast Asian
merchants. The Europeans were latecomers who merely appropriated and expanded an already-existing lucrative
global trade network that stretched from the Middle East, around India, and through Southeast Asia, to China, an
empire that was from at least the eleventh through seventeenth centuries, a global maritime power whose handicraft
industry exports (silk, laquerware, porcelain) were much in demand. Although subsequent centuries saw the decline
and increasing impoverishment of China, and the take-off of European industrial, military, and commercial might,
the seeds and cultural habitus of Chinese entrepreneurial and commercial culture were not destroyed.

Ritual Economy and
Rural Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

In rural Wenzhou, the local culture exerts pressure on capitalism to conform with the outlines of an ancient ritual
economy, where rituals must be financed and performed, the gods must receive offerings, and wealth must be
diverted from this temporary world to other more powerful and lasting realms of the cosmos.


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Each time I returned to Wenzhou, I found new deity temples and lineage ancestor halls built or restored and the local
people emboldened further to expand their religious rituals, festivals, and ritual processions. Each village had more
than one deity temple dedicated to one or more of the multitude of gods and goddesses in the popular Chinese
pantheon. Temples gathered together local worshippers on the birthdays of their tutelary gods and other festivals to
hold rituals and share a collective banquet.

Explaining Religion without Explaining It Away:
Trust, Truth, and the Evolution of Cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport's
The Obvious Aspects of Ritual" John Watanabe and Barbara Smuts
Consequently," It is plausible to suggest . . . that ritual, in the very structure of which authority and acquiescence are
implicit, was the primordial means by which men, divested of genetically determined order, established the
conventions by which they order themselves" (1979b: 197).
He argued that, far from an arbitrary trapping incidental to its behavioral or symbolic content, the ritual
form itself constituted a conventionally given context within which individuals acted out their cooperative
intentions toward each other through mutually coordinated social action. While clearly recognizing the distinction
between "ritual" a s formalized behavior and "rituals" as culturally constituted events (1979b:176), Rappaport
perceived in both a simple but extremely powerful formalism capable of transforming individual behavior into
meaningful social action in the Weberian sense of reciprocal interactions imbued by actors with intention and
significance.
The profound changes in the nature of sovereignty
both aggravated decline in Africa and institutionalized it.

What the journalist in the New York Times called capitalism in rural Wenzhou is actually a series of hybridizations
of different economic forms - indigenous (ritual, tributary state, and household/market economies), state socialist,
and overseas capitalist elements - which combine and recombine in novel and contradictory ways.

Here a consumer economy has been incorporated into ritual exuberance and generosity but in a way which
undercuts the private accumulation of capitalist consumerism with the ethics of a relational kinship order
of reciprocity and obligation linking different communities together across space. In this meshing of ritual and
consumer economies, the question arises whether this is an example of the latters colonizing and penetrating
the former. Since this is still a Third World society not fully extricated from the economic privations and emphasis
on asceticism, discipline, and production that were the hallmarks of a modernist state socialism, more features of
modernist capitalist culture are found alongside consumer culture in Wenzhou than in the modern West today.

In this situation, a more likely scenario than consumer capitalisms hijacking ritual consumption is the revived ritual
economys taking advantage of the opening introduced by postmodernist consumer capitalism to make inroads
against the combined modernist forces of state socialist and early capitalist productivism and desacralization. Here
the postmodern consumer economy, which requires the free flow of commerce, is enlisted as an ally by the ritual
economy in its eluding of state control. This is a parallel movement to Arturo Escobars (1999:14) suggestion that
the organic regime of nature (small-scale preindustrial cultivation which avoids a nature/culture opposition) can
join forces with the postmodern capitalist technonature regime (whose stance toward nature is one of conservation
and promotion of biodiversity) in an alliance to counter the ravages of a modernist capitalism which treats nature as
a commodified object and resource.


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In this consumer-ritual economy hybrid, the ritual economy continues to present the danger of breaking out
fully and realizing its deep destructive force, of which the burning of real money and paper replicas of consumer
goods at funerals provides just a hint. Should the state further relax its vigilance over ritual and productive
accumulation reach a certain point of saturation, an outbreak of ritual expenditure and material waste and destruction
such as a bonfire of real consumer appliances at an extravagant funeral is not inconceivable. Once unleashed, the
internal principles of rural Wenzhous economy of kinship and expenditure could challenge and subvert the
principles of rational productivism and private accumulation of global capitalism.
As capital and capitalist practices expand across the globe, our theoretical tools seem inadequate to capture the full
complexity of these processes, especially for rural areas. Rather than assuming that capitalism immediately
transforms and converts everything it encounters, it is necessary to consider the different modes and logics
that it must incorporate and the fissures and tensions between them. A notion of economic hybridity is conducive
to the genealogical task of tracing the historical process of cross-fertilization and fusion that has brought different
economic practices and logics together into a multiplex form. We must not presume that capitalism is everywhere so
impregnable that it is not altered in its forays around the world.

It is true that capitalism has its own mechanisms of periodic self-destruction of its accumulation, a sort of clearing
of inventory such as the militarys expenditure of its stockpiles of weapons in warfare and the stock market crashes
which wipe out accumulated wealth in a matter of seconds. Batailles point is that there are better ways of
consuming wealth so as to restrain the insane expansion of the system and live more lightly on the earthgiving
out rather than raking in. What principles of ritual expenditure can do at the local level is to redistribute
wealth between families through an ethic of competition in generosity, build up the cohesiveness of local
communities and give them more autonomy against the centralized state and transnational capitalism, and prevent
the reduction of existence to a utilitarian definition. At the global level, a ritual economic logic may help deflect
capitalist accumulation into a rivalry between transnational corporations and states over which of them dares
to sacrifice a greater proportion of its annual profits or GNP by giving it away to causes that do not feed back
into production.

The economic principles behind sacrifice
In a discussion of Bataille on sacrifice, Baudrillard pointed out that Bataille misread Mauss: for Mauss there was no
unilateral gift which did not ask for response. Just as for the Aztecs human sacrifice of blood to the god was the
nourishing of the sun in order that it shine, there is no pure principle of expenditure governing the cosmic field of
life forces but only an interrelated process of challenge and response (Baudrillard 1998:193). Similarly, destruction
and expenditure are always the inverse figure of production, so that, in order to destroy, it is first necessary to
have produced (p. 195). Far from preventing production as modernization theory would have it, a ritual economy
can actually spur production. rural Wenzhou peoples yearning to reconnect with powerful realms of the sacred
through ritual excess and transgression has actually fueled the drive to produce and acquire wealth. In both these
historical experiences, we have witnessed a process of the hybridization of economies in which what appears on the
surface to be a concession to or imposition of capitalist development is actually the reverse penetration of capitalism
by alien principles of ritual economies.

These are instances in which a market economy has unleashed or reactivated the principle of exuberant community
ritual display and consumption and the revived ritual economy has helped to launch economic production while also
inflecting the process toward its own ends. To grasp this historical process in all its complexity, we must deconstruct
the monolithic notion of a cohesive capitalism and move toward a notion of capitalism as an open-ended, mutating
process made up of disparate and conflicting elements, some of which harbor the potential to derail its forces and
harness them in new directions. The notion of economic hybridity here does not presuppose a single preordained
direction for the economy, but it does suggest that theoretical reflection and discursive practice may yet be a factor
in the historical direction that an assembly of economies may take.
Rural Wenzhou is [in] a new phase . . . in which an interrupted native tradition of household and market economy
and the introduction of overseas capitalism have released the forces of a ritual economy which had been curtailed
and almost abolished in the Maoist era. This tells us what happened, but now the question would appear to be how
to understand it.


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Yang identifies what she calls hybridity here insofar as the milieu
combines aspects of modernity with traditionalism.

There is indeed a sector of nonmarket ritual transactions that has survived, even been invigorated, in the Chinese
countryside since the introduction of economic reform, private enterprise, and marketing, and the potlatch analogy is
the right one here for trying to understand it. But the discussion of nonproductive expenditure makes no sense to this
observer of contemporary modernism.

Revived religious practice and the extravagant celebration of life-course events, ritual expenditure on spectacular
performances of sacrifice and destruction - these are not activities usually associated with rapid regional economic
development. And yet, in rural Wenzhou, a place heralded by the state as an economic miracle, a model of
private commercial growth, there has been an upsurge of these practices. Yangs fascinating discussion of the
parallel growth of a nonprofit ritual economy alongside privatization and entrepreneurialism in Wenzhou offers
enticing theoretical insights into how to think through such a surprising juxtaposition and in the process forces us to
reflect upon the sparse conceptual resources at hand to capture [their] full complexity.

J . K. Gibson-Graham
Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Yang employs a concept of economic hybridity. She argues that this notion allows for the interaction in an
undetermined way of multiple and competing logics (emanating from, for example, the peasant ritual economy, the
market economy, or various production economies) and the creation of a system in which fragmentation and
dissonance function alongside

Richard Perry & Bill Maurer
Department of Criminology, Law, and Society,
UC Irvine.
Yang crafts such a theoretical language, using tools derived from Bataille, Baudrillard, and Bakhtin and through an
insightful and nuanced analysis of apparently irrational ritual expenditures in Wenzhou, a region often touted in
the press as a success story of capitalism and free markets in the new China. Specifically, Yang develops two
models. One is a model of ritual expenditure that attends to the sacralization of the putatively economic.
First, we question whether Batailles vision of capitalism is not itself caught in capitalisms self-mythologization
as a desacralized and productivist space. Interestingly, Yang draws most directly from Bataille rather than from
Mauss, from whom Bataille derived his analysis. We quibble with the suggestion that postmodern consumerism is
still in the service of production and productive accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of
leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home decor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather
than leading to the finality and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure. As Mauss argued, one who engages in the
ritual consumption and even destruction of objects of economic value, rather than serving the interests of
production, is in fact purchasing prestige in the eyes of a community of other consumers.

Lisa Rofel
Department of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz
Yangs Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place provides a bold, provocative argument about local cultural
autonomy, subversions of global capitalism, and the complexities of socioeconomic and cultural transformations
in contemporary China. Yang proposes an original concept, economic hybridity, that we might use to critique
assumptions about a uniform capitalism, and, in the spirit of Sahlins, she stresses the capacity of local culture to
resist and rework the incursions of what she interchangeably calls Western or global capitalism.



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Wenzhou, as Yangs rich ethnography allows us to see, is a welter of cross-spatial, cross-cultural activity. Yangs
creative study of ritual expenditure might fruitfully be recast if we thought of local and global not as transparent
spatial arrangements but as analytic categories given meaning through specific representational practices.
Locating activity, rather than local activity, might also help us to position the global - and analyze its emergence
- in determinate cultural practices rather than treating it as a deterritorialized phenomenon or wholly a penetration
from the West. We would then have to recast the term culture to refer not to a set of shared meanings in a bounded
space but to the links between cultural meaning, social inequality, and power. We would need to ask whether lavish
ritual expenditure might not be a cultural practice that engages capitalism rather than subverts it and that is
imbricated in other socioeconomic activity across spatial boundaries (such as overseas Chinese investment). Yang
makes an extremely insightful and important point when she argues that ritual expenditure might be what fuels
capitalist activity and the desire to create wealth rather than the reverse. Precisely these kinds of specificities offer an
original analysis of the heterogeneous and uneven practices that create what, only after we have traced their
motivated interconnections, we might call global capitalism.

More pointedly, Yang argues against the analytical utility of Marxian notions of articulation of modes of
production as a means of addressing the complexity of present-day local social formations. Instead, she favors a
view (derived from the writings of Bataille and Baudrillard) of precapitalist ritual economies as radically different
and essentially unassimilable archaic elements harbored within capitalism - forming what she terms hybrid
social formations. Whereas ritual destruction (or consumption) is productive of social capital, she argues, capitalist
consumption is productive only of further commodity production.

The point is less that consumption is subordinate to production than that consumption is production in
one of its valences or manifestations and must be understood with reference to social production as a whole.
Thus, ritual destruction, insofar as it is constitutive of local forms of social authority and an important element
in the wider process of social reproduction in ritual economies, is also, clearly, productive.
In this regard, I detect in Yangs analysis a tension between its worthy attempt to show how different institutional
contexts - families, communities, the state, markets - exist in relations that are simultaneously competitive and
mutually reinforcing, on the one hand, and her insistence that this sort of complexity is usefully viewed as hybrid,
on the other. The problem with this notion of hybridity is that all social formations are hybrid insofar as
individual, familial, communal, and higher-level arenas of social production inevitably exhibit some measure of
such complexity. As Yang herself notes, both tension and complicity among these levels have characterized Chinese
civilization since long before the advent of either capitalism or the socialist state. By the same token, as feminist
critics of Marx and Engels point out, even their analysis of capitalism was incomplete in that it insufficiently
developed the complexities linking family and gender as productive arenas, on the one hand, and capitalist
production, on the other. In other words, capitalism is itself, even in its most ideal typical form, a hybrid social
formation in Yangs terms.
Lisa Rofel
Department of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz

mingming wang
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago.
Yang here pushes her study of the state political economy and the popular gift economy (Yang 1994a) in a new
direction. Drawing upon her field materials from rural Wenzhou and her extensive reading in social theory, Yang
replaces monolithic global capitalism with economic hybridity. Her article highlights instances in which a
market economy has unleashed or reactivated the principle of exuberant community ritual display and consumption
and the revived ritual economy has helped to launch economic production while also inflecting the process toward
its own ends. She describes how unconquered remnants- so-called premodern social and ritual forms - have been
revived as alternative rationalities of capitalism. In her focused depiction, the popular ritual economy in Wenzhou
has facilitated the accumulation of wealth and interactions among various socioeconomic forces - the developmental
state, global capitalism, the overseas Chinese, small enterprises, common household economies, and so on. Ritual
has also exerted one other important effect on the regional economy: as something resembling the potlatch, ritual in
Wenzhou enacts and reenacts an equalizing mechanism in which economic wealth is reciprocated with social


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recognition. Having pointed out the dual function of ritual, Yang urges us to move toward a notion of capitalism as
an open-ended, mutating process made up of disparate and conflicting elements, some of which harbor the potential
to derail its forces and harness them in new directions.

Yangs economic-cultural analysis of ritual has shed new light on this issue. By positioning popular ritual in her
economic hybridity, she argues that the popular ritual economy (superstitious practices, as they are called by
officialdom) is not at all wasteful and irrational; instead it is part and parcel of the other possibilities of
capitalism. The place where Yang seeks to situate global capitalism has evolved into a model because of the
conjuncture of these two different ways of domesticating the capitalist spirit.
mingming wang
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago.

Ritual Economy and
Rural Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

Rural Wenzhou temples and rituals:
The circulation of money between rural industry And cosmic-divine worlds
When one speaks of privatization (siyouhua) in Chinas economic reform era of the past two decades, the
Wenzhou Model (wenzhou moshi) of rural development, based on small household industries, joint-stock firms,
and restless entrepreneurial expansion across the whole area of China looms large. Even before the official
promulgation of the economic reforms of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress in 1978, many parts of
rural Wenzhou had already quietly and secretly de-collectivized agriculture. In the space of two decades, with
virtually no state, foreign, or overseas Chinese investment, the Wenzhou area transformed itself from a
geographically isolated and impoverished area where electricity was only brought to rural areas in the 1960s and
bicycles in the 1970s, to an economically dynamic, prosperous, and rapidly industrializing and urbanizing region.

Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place.
Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure

Alternative capitalisms, the power of historical traditions and practices,
and the religious and ritual dimensions of economy

In discussions of globalization, global capitalism, and Americanization, three issues are often absent from the
conversation: the question of alternative capitalisms, the power of historical traditions and practices, and the
religious and ritual dimensions of economy.

and overseas capitalist elements - which combine and recombine in novel and contradictory ways. A hybrid product
not examined here because of its relative weakness in rural Wenzhou is the conjoining of the modernist state
socialist economy with those of transnational capitalism, especially overseas Chinese. In the emerging hybrid of
modernist developmental-state capitalism, the socialist state increasingly reconciles itself with capital by actively
seeking investment from abroad, promoting local capital accumulation, courting and monitoring local entrepreneurs,
and helping to regulate and manage the labor force.



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Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

an intriguing linkage between the current rural economic development of Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, on the
southeastern coast of China, with Chinese popular religiosity. what has been taking place in this area of coastal
China is not merely another penetration of capitalism, but the hybrid reconstruction of a ritual economy whose
genealogy can be traced back to the late imperial Chinese commercial culture of the common people. This ritual
economy involves not only the profit motive and material production based on the household unit, but also heavy
investment in the cosmic ledger of merits, the sacred world of the gods and ancestors, and the Underworld of ghosts,
demons, and the dreaded courts and officials of Hell.

religious and ritual dimensions of economy.


A Review by Edmond J. Keller
Reexamining Sovereign States in Africa.
States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control
Jeffrey Herbst
To achieve this outcome, Herbst calls for - with the help of the international community - opening up intellectual
space in Africa, so that Africans themselves can come up with replacements for failed states. Furthermore, he calls
upon the United States to take a lead in the international community in developing a mechanism to decertify rogue
states in Africa. A logical next step from decertification, Herbst argues, would be to consider the possibility of
accepting into the world community of states newly created states that claim sovereignty. Apart from his argument,
Herbst sets out in States and Power in Africa to chart new territory in the scholarly discourse on African politics.

There was nothing exotic about the precolonial African state system. Where Europe and Africa diverge is in the
speed in which they moved from one system to another. The European evolution from the old system of states where
territory was not well defined and sovereignty was shared was very slow, taking centuries. While the slow
transformation from one system to another made it difficult for states to deal with crises, there were advantages to a
state in not being called upon to exercise all aspects of modern sovereignty at once: for

Understanding what was lost when the Europeans imposed the territorial nation-state is a first step toward
investigating what might be appropriate for Africa today. This is not to engage in misty - eyed nostalgia that
somehow political formations developed hundreds of years ago can be replicated today. As Davidson notes, "the
precolonial past is not recoverable." However, understanding what the colonialists destroyed little more than a
century ago should be helpful to the development of a more indigenous alternative to the nation-state as theorized,
designed, and imposed by the Europeans. Precolonial sovereignty had two features radically different from
sovereignty exercised in modern Africa.
First, in large parts of precolonial Africa, control tended to be exercised over people rather than land. Land
was plentiful and populations thin on the ground. Indeed, many precolonial polities were "surrounded by


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large tracts of land that were open politically or physically or both." As land was not seen as the constraining
resource, exercising political power primarily meant control over individuals.
Precolonial African practices were thus not that different from feudal Europe, where hard territorial boundaries were
a rather late development. However, the precolonial practices were radically different from the later European and
post-independence African view that "states are territorial entities." The second notable aspect of precolonial
political practices was that sovereignty tended to be shared. It was not unusual for a community to have nominal
obligations and allegiances to more than one political center. As power was not strictly defined spatially, there was
much greater confusion over what it meant to control a particular community at any one time. At the same time,
communications and technology were so poorly developed that few political centers could hope to wield
unquestioned authority, even over the areas that they were thought to control.
Ivor Wilks, in writing about the Ashanti theory of sovereignty, noted that "rights of sovereignty were regarded as
distinguishable from the exercise of authority." Thus, it was not an uncommon practice in Ashanti law for the land
to belong to one authority (e.g., the southern provinces to the Asantehene) but for the people to owe allegiance to
another (in the case of the south, to the Fante or the British Governor). Indeed, such were the limits of territorial
authority that the central government was often not concerned about what outlying areas did as long as tribute was
paid. In this respect, precolonial Africa was similar to medieval Europe, where shared sovereignty e.g., between the
Church and various political units - was not uncommon. However, again, this differs markedly from the modern
notion of statehood, where sovereign control over each piece of territory is unambiguous: "there is never any doubt
about where one stands, and that one always stands on the domain of a single sovereign state.
There was nothing exotic about the precolonial African state system. Where Europe and Africa diverge is in the
speed in which they moved from one system to another. The European evolution from the old system of states where
territory was not well defined and sovereignty was shared was very slow, taking centuries. While the slow
transformation from one system to another made it difficult for states to deal with crises, there were advantages to a
state in not being called upon to exercise all aspects of modern sovereignty at once: for instance, in many European
countries, local notables were still responsible for arresting criminals and providing social services long after the
modern state was created, because the state did not have the capacity to carry out these functions. Thus, in Europe
there was time for relatively viable states to develop.
In Africa, however, there was an abrupt discontinuity between the old political order and the new one that
essentially began with the Berlin West African Conference in 1885. In the space of a few decades, the facade of the
new state system was formed, shortly thereafter, the states were given independence. The hard-earned structures of
political control and authority that allowed for the exercise of political power in the precolonial period were abruptly
cast aside, and there were almost no efforts to resurrect them. Indeed, the demarcation of Africa into colonies
differed even from imperial practices in other areas of the world in the speed at which it was done, due to the
multitude of countries seeking to rule the same area, and the reliance on force to the exclusion of developing
loyalties among the subject population.

Rather than calling for the possibility of radically redrawing the map of Africa and rejecting the concept of the
sovereign state as the only way that large numbers of people can organize themselves, it seems reasonable to suggest
that it behooves African states to find ways of preparing themselves to compete in the global arena and to have a
voice in developing the contours of the relationships that emerge. Herbst calls upon the international community and
African leadership to consider alternatives to sovereign states. Yet neither of these communities seems to think that
this is the most pressing problem facing Africa today. An over-arching problem is the low levels of state capacity
and good governance on the continent. Moreover, it is obvious that the ideologization of ethnoregionalism and
religion are much more pressing problems for the leaders of African states, not to mention such issues as poverty,
inequality, environmental degradation, and various forms of insecurity.



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Jeffrey Herbst

The Implications of the New Sovereignty
Indeed, the great powers often went beyond acquiescence to actively providing
arms and expertise for the crushing of secessionist movements, so that even obviously
dysfunctional states could maintain their territorial integrity.
Thus, the bias toward urban dwellers and the neglect of the majority of Africans in the rural areas can be traced,
in part, to a state system that encouraged elites to cultivate their urban constituencies. Second, part of the failure to
accommodate ethnic diversity in some states comes from the international community's acquiescence in the freezing
of boundaries. If secession had been a viable threat, as it had been during the precolonial period, African politicians
would have had a profound incentive to reach accommodation with disaffected populations, especially those that
were spatially defined, lest they threaten to leave the nation-state. However, the international community's view that
the boundaries were inviolable and that, therefore, the use of force was justified against potential secessionists,
removed incentives for ethnic accommodation. Indeed, the great powers often went beyond acquiescence to actively
providing arms and expertise for the crushing of secessionist movements, so that even obviously dysfunctional states
could maintain their territorial integrity. Perhaps more important, the current static state system in Africa has
institutionalized weakness and decline, irrespective of the sources of failure.

The Organization of African Unity and the United Nations bestowed recognition
on governments that controlled their capitals, irrespective of whether those states had much
of a physical presence in the rural areas.

The international community thus faces the choice between ignoring successful secessionist movements and thereby
forcing them to remain semi-criminal affairs, or trying to help create new state institutions. The fact that some
African states will dissolve will be the reality no matter which policy stance is adopted.

Jeffrey Herbst

First, the natural bias of African leaders to serve the urban population, who could threaten to riot and physically
challenge leaders, was encouraged because the new theory of sovereignty provided few incentives for leaders to
develop networks of support in the rural areas. The Organization of African Unity and the United Nations bestowed
recognition on governments that controlled their capitals, irrespective of whether those states had much of a physical
presence in the rural areas. When there were attempts at revolt in the rural areas, the international community both
implicitly and explicitly gave its approval to the use of force to quash the revolts, demonstrating that a state's
treatment of its rural population would have little bearing on its international position. Thus, the bias toward urban


Page | 13
dwellers and the neglect of the majority of Africans in the rural areas can be traced, in part, to a state system that
encouraged elites to cultivate their urban constituencies.
Second, part of the failure to accommodate ethnic diversity in some states comes from the international community's
acquiescence in the freezing of boundaries. If secession had been a viable threat, as it had been during the
precolonial period, African politicians would have had a profound incentive to reach accommodation with
disaffected populations, especially those that were spatially defined, lest they threaten to leave the nation-state.
However, the international community's view that the boundaries were inviolable and that, therefore, the use of
force was justified against potential secessionists, removed incentives for ethnic accommodation. Indeed, the great
powers often went beyond acquiescence to actively providing arms and expertise for the crushing of secessionist
movements, so that even obviously dysfunctional states could maintain their territorial integrity. Perhaps more
important, the current static state system in Africa has institutionalized weakness and decline, irrespective of the
sources of failure.
The current complete disassociation between a country's economic and political performance and its sovereign status
means that, no matter how poorly a country performs, the international community continues to give it legitimacy,
pretends that it is a functioning state, and supports efforts to preserve its integrity. the price of boundary stability
has been that even dysfunctional states have claims on the international system. There are thus repeated efforts by
the United States, the UN, or African neighbors to put back together Somalia, Liberia, and other countries even
though there is little evidence that they ever worked well. It is thus hardly a surprise that the African development
experience has been peculiarly bad. Patrick Conway and Joshua Greene concluded that for "the macroeconomic
performance and policies of African countries differed significantly from those of non-African developing countries
in many respects.... African countries had lower investment and inflation rates. In addition, they exhibited lower
rates of real economic growth even after adjustment for external and developmental factors."
Unfortunately, the evidence of poor performance is taken either as the best that could be done under the
circumstances by advocates of current policies, or as an indication that the current policies are incorrect by
those who want some other set of policies adopted. Few have asked the more important question of whether
the policies, even if correctly designed, are not working because the nation-states themselves are profoundly
flawed.

Jeffrey Herbst

Recognizing new nation-states
After thirty years of assuming that the boundaries of even the most dysfunctional African state are inviolable,
another important initiative for the international community would be to consider the possibility of allowing for the
creation of new sovereign states. Opening the possibility for new states to be created would challenge the basic
assumption held by African leaders and the international community that boundaries drawn haphazardly during the
scramble for Africa a century ago with little regard to the social, political, economic, or ethnic realities on the
ground should continue to be universally respected. At the same time, allowing for more dynamism in the creation
of African states would help recapture the element of the precolonial perspective on sovereignty that insisted that
political control had to be won, not instituted by administrative fiat. A criterion for recognition appropriate to the
particular circumstances of Africa's failing states could be: does the break-away area provide more political order on
its own over a significant period of time (say, five years) than is provided by the central government? By order, I
mean functioning military, police, and judicial systems, which are the fundamental prerequisites for political and
economic progress. These public goods are precisely what Africa's failing states do not provide. Such a standard
would rule out many attempts at secession that were not of the utmost seriousness, and also return, to a degree, to
older understandings of sovereignty that are resonant with the African past. The long-term aim would be to provide


Page | 14
international recognition to the governmental units that are actually providing order to their citizens as opposed to
relying on the fictions of the past.
The primary objection to recognizing new states in Africa has been the basis for selection. Given that there
are very few "natural" boundaries in Africa which would allow for the rational demarcation of land on the
basis of ethnic, geographic, or economic criteria, the worry is that recognizing new African states will lead to
a splintering process that would promote the creation of ever-smaller units, with seemingly endless political
chaos. Thus, Gidon Gottlieb argues against the creation of new states because he fears "anarchy and disorder
on a planetary scale."
It was not the case, for instance, that Africa experienced a sudden splintering of states after Eritrea achieved its
independence, At some point, the reality of disintegrating, dysfunctional African states stands in such contrast to
the legal fiction of sovereign states that experimentation with regards to new states is in order.
This is not to say that granting the right to secession to at least some groups which were able to establish order
within their own areas would be without its dangers. Clearly, any signal from the international community that its
commitment to the territorial integrity of African states is being reduced could result in considerable instability and
uncertainty, and would be met by vehement opposition on the part of many African states which have grown
dependent on the post-World War II understanding of sovereignty. However, the reality on the ground in some
African countries is that sovereign control is not being exercised by the central state in outlying areas, and sub-
national groups are already exerting authority in certain regions. By recognizing and legitimating those groups, the
international community has the opportunity to ask that they respect international norms regarding human rights and
also has a chance to bring them into the international economy.
Jeffrey Herbst

Ritual polity and economy:
the transactional network of an imperial temple in
medieval South India
James Heitzman
The paradigm of the "ritual polity" suggests that cultural meaning may explain the formation of the early state, the
legitimation of its authority, and the spatial configurations of its political units. Several formulations of the ritual
polity indicate that administration and control over territory were not the bases of early political structures in South
and Southeast Asia. Instead, kings at a central core who manifested the qualities of a universal overlord linked
together "galactic polities," constellations of small political and economic units'). The position of the kings devolved
from the operation of cosmic forces or from the will of the gods, who supported royal protectors of righteousness
(dharma) in the material world. In these "theatre states," rulers at the center went through a daily and annual round
of sacrifices and military campaigns that displayed their support of religious institutions and their power to suppress
the forces of chaos that threatened a righteous order).
Incorporation within large political units involved a gradation from administrative and fiscal control near the center
to an increasingly ritual and theatrical allegiance at the geographic peripheries. This paper builds on the idea of the
ritual polity to show that a pattern of ritual integration is a key to empirical study of political and economic


Page | 15
development. The logic of the argument is as follows: Rulers in the ritual polity had to maintain institutions and
participate in events that continually renewed their legitimacy as the upholders of cosmic order.
I have attempted to describe an early South Indian version of the ritual polity as an ideological system that explained
the purpose of kingship and provided both a symbolic structure and avenues practical expression of political
legitimacy. This ideological system rationalized the class rule of the king and lower echelons of courtiers and local
notables, and provided an avenue for political affiliation within extended political orders. The ritual polity
necessitated the support of specialized institutions staffed by intellectuals schooled in ritual arts. The support of the
intellectual elite offered salvation to donors and to their subjects, but also, with an elegant circularity, led to visible
well-being in this world: capital accumulation, local economic development, political integration under the aegis of
donors. Devotional religion thus fit into a web of cultural meaning and physical confirmation, supported by the
leaders of the early state. There is every reason to think, then, that leaders of the medieval state as well as their more
unsophisticated subjects believed deeply in the validity of the ideological constructs that so evidently explained their
reality. Their patterns of belief were their patterns of power.
Ritual polity and economy:
the transactional network of an imperial temple in
medieval South India
James Heitzman


an intriguing linkage between the current rural economic development of Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, on the
southeastern coast of China, with Chinese popular religiosity. what has been taking place in this area of coastal
China is not merely another penetration of capitalism, but the hybrid reconstruction of a ritual economy whose
genealogy can be traced back to the late imperial Chinese commercial culture of the common people. This ritual
economy involves not only the profit motive and material production based on the household unit, but also
heavy investment in the cosmic ledger of merits, the sacred world of the gods and ancestors, and the
Underworld of ghosts, demons, and the dreaded courts and officials of Hell.

religious and ritual dimensions of economy. Let me first expand briefly on each of these three themes, for they will
inform my discussion of post-Mao rural economic development and religious revival in Wenzhou.

First, on the question of alternative capitalisms, the critical political economists J.K. Gibson-Graham (two authors
with one name) have pointed out the problems inherent in simplistic and uniform models of Western capitalist
penetration of the globe, and have called for greater attention to the diversity of cultural and institutional
constructions of capitalism around the world.

Thus, we may have entered into an era of global capitalism, but not into a single model of capitalism. In other
words, capitalism does not simply plow down whatever was there before, but creatively combines with older forms
and produces new configurations of capitalism, and even mobilizes older cultural resources as new forms of counter-
capitalist practice. After all, in The Grundisse, Marx himself recognized that modern capitalism had absorbed older
pre-capitalist modes of production and economy into its body, although he did not go on to assign much agency to
these older modes, nor did he elaborate on structural tensions between older and newer economic forms.

What I seek to highlight here is that, beneath the much-publicized multi-billion-dollar contracts between Chinese
state corporations and foreign firms, there is another less visible, but more indigenous sector of the dynamic Chinese


Page | 16
economy, as seen in the rapid rural economic development in parts of Chinas southeastern coast, where production
and commerce are embedded in a ritual economy.

Second, the importance of a longer historical perspective in thinking about globalization are underscored by path-
breaking revisionist economic historians such as Janet Abu-Lughod, Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz and
R. Bin Wong, who have shown us that in the five centuries before modern European global domination, a
commercial globalization was already underway in long-distance and maritime trade among Arab, Persian, Chinese,
South, and Southeast Asian merchants. The Europeans were latecomers who merely appropriated and expanded an
already-existing lucrative global trade network that stretched from the Middle East, around India, and through
Southeast Asia, to China, an empire that was from at least the eleventh through seventeenth centuries, a global
maritime power whose handicraft industry exports (silk, laquerware, porcelain) were much in demand. Although
subsequent centuries saw the decline and increasing impoverishment of China, and the take-off of European
industrial, military, and commercial might, the seeds and cultural habitus of Chinese entrepreneurial and commercial
culture were not destroyed. The astounding explosive growth in Chinese economic production and trade since the
1980s, especially in southeastern Chinese coastal cultures, attests to the enduring potency of these seeds of the
Chinese historical and cultural habitus of commercial and maritime culture.

Rural Wenzhou temples and rituals:
The circulation of money between rural industry And cosmic-divine worlds
When one speaks of privatization (siyouhua) in Chinas economic reform era of the past two decades, the
Wenzhou Model (wenzhou moshi) of rural development, based on small household industries, joint-stock firms,
and restless entrepreneurial expansion across the whole area of China looms large. Even before the official
promulgation of the economic reforms of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress in 1978, many parts of
rural Wenzhou had already quietly and secretly de-collectivized agriculture. In the space of two decades, with
virtually no state, foreign, or overseas Chinese investment, the Wenzhou area transformed itself from a
geographically isolated and impoverished area where electricity was only brought to rural areas in the 1960s and
bicycles in the 1970s, to an economically dynamic, prosperous, and rapidly industrializing and urbanizing region.

When I first visited rural Wenzhou in 1991, rice paddies and water buffalos stretched to the horizon, and chickens
and pigs ran underfoot in villages and towns. Although most families no longer pursued agriculture, but had moved
on to running their small factories, they were still embedded in traditional peasant culture, celebrating only lunar
calendar festivals and engaging in exchanges of bridewealth and dowry for marriages. The frenetic, purposive, and
cheerful way that the local people went about their various businesses, and the fast-paced rural-to-urban transition
occurring all around, reminded me of my childhood in Taiwan in the early 1960s. On each of my trips to Wenzhou
in the 1990s, I was presented with new signs of economic development. By 2001, not only the water buffalos had
been replaced by iron buffalos or tractors, but many of the rice paddies and old water transport canals had been
buried under concrete pavements and new roads. Villagers and townspeople made urgent business calls across the
country on their mobile phones and had switched from VCD to fully digitized DVD players. To my further shock,
some wealthy rural families had purchased not just motorcycles, but new cars, others had just returned from family
trips to Southeast Asia, and many families kept bank accounts in U.S. or other foreign currencies.

Not all the economic developments were salutary, however, since air and water pollution were becoming more
serious, due to the factory exhaust and refuse, and official corruption was on peoples minds. What really intrigued
me about this area was the distinctive revival of traditional culture and popular religion alongside the economic
development, a fact rarely examined or even mentioned by Chinese scholarship on the Wenzhou model of
development. Despite official restrictions on the expansion of popular religion, and a long, still-ongoing twentieth-
century history of radical state secularism, this religious revival in Wenzhou not only kept pace with economic
growth and prosperity, but often seemed to drive it.

Each time I returned to Wenzhou, I found new deity temples and lineage ancestor halls built or restored and the local
people emboldened further to expand their religious rituals, festivals, and ritual processions. Each village had more
than one deity temple dedicated to one or more of the multitude of gods and goddesses in the popular Chinese
pantheon. Temples gathered together local worshippers on the birthdays of their tutelary gods and other festivals to


Page | 17
hold rituals and share a collective banquet. Most townships or county seats had reclaimed their City God temple,
which had been appropriated by the state and turned into offices or storehouses in the Maoist era. A new Buddhist
temple in Jinshan County was being built in 2004, with a huge five-story-high wooden statue of Guanyin, the most
important Chinese Buddhist deity, going up inside. I talked with the village leader, who told me of his efforts in
scouring the Buddhist centers of the country for models upon which to base his villages temple, and for a reputable
Buddhist priest to head the temple, and of his ambitious plans to rebuild the Buddhist monastery and seminary that
once flourished there in the Song Dynasty. Lineages had resumed their ritual sacrifices to ancestors and competed
with each other to collect the most elaborate genealogies, build the biggest and costliest ancestor hall, or put on the
most impressive sacrificial ritual.

All of these religious resurgences of course require money, which comes from the willing, sometimes eager
donations of ordinary people, especially the wealthy, who have stronger obligations to give. Besides building and
restoring their religious sites, and paying for ritual expenditures, temple associations, lineage organizations, and
churches all serve as conduits for charitable donations and social welfare: they gather money from the rich and
distribute it to the poor and needy (widows, orphans, disaster victims) in local communities, and finance efforts for
the public good, such as building schools, roads, and bridges. Religious sites all make public their annual lists of
donors or special fund-raising event records, and the amounts that they donated are written on paper and plastered
on temple walls or carved into permanent stone steles reminiscent of imperial times. These public records further
spur on the will to be generous. Thus, a significant proportion of the wealth generated from industrial production
and commerce is diverted into non-productive uses, such as community welfare and construction that increase ones
merit accumulation, or investments in the divine world.

It is not clear when the practice of burning paper spirit money for the gods and ancestors started, but certainly
Chinese popular religion underwent expansion and innovation in the commercial revolution of the Song Dynasty
(9601279 ce), which witnessed the invention of both paper money used in trade, and wood-block printing. Today
in Chinese popular religious practice, spirit money is one important medium of communication and exchange
between the temporal and divine worlds. In rural Wenzhou, important occasions for burning spirit money are such
rituals as funerals, ancestor sacrifices, birthday festivals for deities, and the Ghost Festival (Zhongyuan pudu) in the
seventh lunar month. These money offerings to gods, ghosts, and ancestors ensure their blessings on the living. In
funerals, the most important life-cycle ritual, money is burned for the use of the deceased in the Underworld, where
the soul is taken after death to stand judgement before each court of the Ten Kings of Hell. Although the burning
of spirit money produces only a symbolic loss of wealth, the idea is significant: wealth can be made by
families, but not all of it should be consumed or kept in material form. One must invest or divert part of ones
wealth to other divine worlds for ones future good fortune, ones family and descendants, and ones larger
community.

It is evident to me that if the Chinese state, whether the central government or Party, or the local Wenzhou
municipal or county officials did not restrict the expansion of popular religion so much, due to their internalization
of nineteenth century Western and Christian condemnations of backward superstitions, religious and ritual
development in rural Wenzhou would be even stronger and more able to exert beneficial social transformations.
Religious revival is engaged in rebuilding an ethical system damaged by decades of class struggle, in which
individuals, families, and groups were pitted against and betrayed each other in loyalty to the state, and by
increasing popular cynicism towards Communist Party ideals and homilies. The homage to deities and ancestors in
community rituals also bolster an important element, prominent in late imperial China, but virtually eroded in the
course of twentieth-century nationalism: local identities.

The gods, goddesses, and ancestors are icons of local identity, autonomy, local initiative and self-organization,
building blocks of an indigenous rural Chinese civil society, while the rituals and festivals put on for them gather
and celebrate local communities, thus counter-balancing the hegemonic and monolithic nationalism
disseminated by public schools and the state media.

Finally, Chinese popular religion and its aforementioned signs of revival can be seen as an indigenous response to
the perennial problem of capitalism: the unbridled and socially destructive profit-motive. Given Chinas long history
of commercialization, capitalism is not entirely new.


Page | 18

As China today joins the world of global capitalism, some of its rural coastal regional cultures, such as rural
Wenzhou, have drawn upon imperial Chinas petty entrepreneurial and commercial cultural legacy, where the
market economy was embedded in and also checked by cultural institutions such as the family, lineage
organizations, temple associations, Daoist and Buddhist institutions, and community ethics. Unlike the urban areas,
they have not embraced the (Western) version of capitalism that is much more disembedded from the traditional
encumbrances of kinship and family obligations and religious commitments to the divine world.

In the indigenous capitalism that we find in places like Wenzhou, the capitalist drive for accumulation of wealth is
tempered by the religious and kinship ethics of generosity and social rivalries of giving away wealth. The
significance of the Wenzhou Model of economic development lies not in its economic success, but in its ability to
show Chinese state policy makers that - just as the West modernized without having to wipe out superstitious
Christianity, which also has an ethos of generosity and charity - economic development in China, especially in rural
cultures, cannot do without religious inspiration. Whereas in many other places in China, a century of radical state
secularization swept away the religious impulses that could both drive the money-making ethos of capitalism as well
as counter its destruction of the social fabric, rural Wenzhous capitalism has managed to preserve or reinvent a
distinctive anti-capitalist component. Here, the emphasis is not just on material investment, but also on investments
into the non-productive realms of community welfare, ritual consumption, and conversion of material wealth into
the currency of transcendent divine worlds. In rural Wenzhou, the local culture exerts pressure on capitalism to
conform with the outlines of an ancient ritual economy, where rituals must be financed and performed, the gods
must receive offerings, and wealth must be diverted from this temporary world to other more powerful and lasting
realms of the cosmos.


ritual futures
& options

making the case for
pan Africanism



Page | 19
Trust, Truth, and the Evolution of Cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport's
Indeed, Rappaport suggested in passing that ritual may have played a crucial evolutionary role in intensifying the
complex, reciprocal relationships of mutual trust that symbolic communication and social action presuppose.
Having recently read Rappaport's essays on "The Obvious Aspects of Ritual" (1979b) and "Sanctity and Lies in
Evolution" (1979c), Watanabe suggested that Rappaport' s approach might shed light on how, and perhaps even
why, formalized gestural greetings could serve to coordinate and establish trust between the males engaging in them.
He argued that, far from an arbitrary trapping incidental to its behavioral or symbolic content, the ritual form itself
constituted a conventionally given context within which individuals acted out their cooperative intentions toward
each other through mutually coordinated social action. While clearly recognizing the distinction between "ritual" a s
formalized behavior and "rituals" as culturally constituted events (1979b:176), Rappaport perceived in both a simple
but extremely powerful formalism capable of transforming individual behavior into meaningful social action in the
Weberian sense of reciprocal interactions imbued by actors with intention and significance.
Unable to insure absolute trustworthiness, ritual can still establish grounds for moral indignation and righteous
retribution should presumed promises prove false. For Rappaport, it is the behavioral simplicity, not the symbolic
elaboration, of ritual that lies at its core and enables otherwise autonomous individuals to communicate their
willingness to cooperate with each other even in the absence of language. Ritual formalism and performance in and
of themselves can accord "mere" individual behavior the potential of conveying intent and implication essential to
true social action. Consequently," It is plausible to suggest . . . that ritual, in the very structure of which authority
and acquiescence are implicit, was the primordial means by which men, divested of genetically determined order,
established the conventions by which they order themselves" (1979b: 197).
Ritual elegantly establishes a context in which to build cooperative relations: its formalism simplifies and
disambiguates interactions; its invariance provides a model for reliability and trust - and ultimately truthfulness and
its self-referential nature poses minimal risks but makes possible further commitment with each successful
repetition. Closer consideration of the specific gestures involved in the greetings further suggests their role in
facilitating cooperation.

Symbols in African Ritual. Victor W. Turner
No one who has lived for long in rural sub-Saharan Africa can fail to be struck by the importance of ritual in the
lives of villagers and homesteaders and by the fact that rituals are com-posed of symbols. A ritual is a stereotyped
sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to
influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests. Rituals may be seasonal,
hallowing a culturally defined moment of change in the climatic cycle or the inauguration of an activity Other
classes of rituals include divinatory rituals; ceremonies performed by political authorities to en-sure the health and
fertility of human beings, animals, and crops in their territories; initiation into priesthoods devoted to certain deities,
into religious-associations, or into secret societies; and those accompanying the daily offering of food and libations
to deities or ancestral spirits or both. Africa is rich indeed in ritual genres, and cach involves many specific
performances. Each rural African society (which is often, though not always coterminous with a linguistic
community) possesses a finite number of distributable rituals that may include all or some of the types listed above.



Page | 20

Louise Revell
powerful forces with an interest in all aspects of daily life. Religion formed part of the broad-based homogeneity of
the western provinces following the process of cultural transformation after conquest. Inscriptions, sculpture, and
temple architecture all point to a similar material culture, and, although there is an apparent continuity in the names
of the deities being worshipped from the pre-Roman to the Roman periods, their association with the traditional
gods of Rome through syncretism negates the idea of direct continuity. However, religious changes are often
overlooked in accounts of the Romanization of the western provinces, and we are left with the rather uncritical
concept of 'Romano-Celtic' religion as a hybrid phenomenon. There is a danger of using the archaeological evidence
of temples and inscriptions as diagnostic of change, rather than undertaking a more rigorous analysis in order to
understand how religion and ritual formed part of this broad-based homogeneity, and the way in which the people of
the provinces made sense of how to act and behave within a new social and political world. Furthermore, through
creating the hybrid of Romano-Celtic, there is the temptation to concentrate on the identification of the Celtic (or
pre-Roman) and Roman elements, and then to think about them in isolation, downplaying the dynamic way in which
the people of the provinces negotiated their way through the new imperial context.
In this paper, I propose to explore how part of these cultural changes involved learning different ways of
communicating with the gods: new ways of interacting with, and placating, a higher force. I want to move beyond
seeing the material culture from religious sites as being representative of cultural identity, and instead think about
how it was part and parcel of certain ways of acting. Through these actions, the people of these communities joined
in a much wider ideology of religion and religious practice.
Louise Revell
I would suggest that there is a third approach that can be used to understand the role of religion in the process of
cultural change: reconstructing ritual practice through a detailed, contextual interpretation of the material culture
evidence. This approach moves away from seeing material culture as a passive reflection of cultural identity, and
instead sees it as playing an active role in the ways in which people make sense of the world around them. Our sense
of who we are and how we fit into a society is, in part, mediated through repeated, daily routines, and, within these
routines, we use material such as what we wear, what we carry, and the decoration of the space around us as a way
to both project something about ourselves, and to internalize that self-image. The routines of religious worship
operate on a number of different levels: defining boundaries between mortal and divine, and also creating shared
social identities firmly located within the earthly realm. Ancient historians have seen ritual as fundamental to the
relationship between Romans and the divine, and John Scheid goes so far as to characterize Roman religion as being
centred round correct practice (orthopraxis) rather than belief in specific deities. Thus, the repeated performance of
specific rites such as sacrifice, vows, and festivals has been seen as forming a core part in the formulation of
religious authority and a shared Roman identity. This has run in tandem with the work of post-processual
archaeologists, who have explored how ritual informed the ways through which people understood their relationship
with the gods, during both prehistoric and historic periods.



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Economic Development and Anthropology
Harold K. Schneider
Epstein's distinction is not purely technical, involving the intrusion of a value judgment. By contrast, Schneider
differentiates development and change on purely technical grounds, development being defined as increase in
productivity and wealth in general by whatever measure a people use, in contrast to change which is the shifting of
ideas of what constitutes wealth and the structure of the economy to new forms, as when that economy moves from
a focus on cattle and becomes integrated into a Western cash market system.

Rituals for economic change towards a new perspective of economic behavior
Ritual economy views economic behaviour as constituted by such social practices as rituals. It is the process of
provisioning and consuming that materializes and substantiates worldview for managing meaning and shaping
interpretation. By applying the jargon of rituals to the field of economics, we gain a refreshing tool to explore and
explain economic situations and practices. Through the glasses of ritual economy we look at overconsumption and
inspect the communicative dimension of transactions. What we see is that the type of consumption leading to
overconsumption constitutes a symbolic and communicative act (i.e. ritual). By respecting the ritual but changing its
form (i.e. to more conscious consumption) we change economic behaviour whilst acknowledging its underlying
motivation.
Most people looking for change structure the (economic) world we live in terms of the old and the new. Herein
the old economy refers to the currently dominant set of practices that make up the economic system. The new
economy, on the other hand, is a normative construct and refers to a new set of practices that are to be realized.
Although this mental distinction between old and new can seem helpful, building a completely new economic
system from its foundations is impossible and oversimplifies the task ahead. Our role is to channel change into


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the right direction. If one considers the economic system to be the outcome of certain paradigms it becomes
important to understand how these paradigms evolve and eventually get replaced.

The theoretical framework of ritual economy is a unique one in that it not only uncovers the underlying motivations
of economic behaviour but also provides an insight as to where new patterns of behaviour might be at their most
effective. According to our vision, such a holistic approach requires a deviation from a view of economics as a
science akin to mathematics towards an anthropological, social economics. As a theoretical framework, ritual
economy is ideally suited to this purpose because it bridges the dichotomy between economic and social behaviour.
Rituals are an important form of social behaviour in that they establish connections and secure the socio-economic
reproduction of communities and groups. In short, rituals create, reinforce and maintain a certain social order. By
applying the jargon of rituals to the field of economics, we gain a refreshing tool to explore and explain economic
situations and practises, in terms of a ritual economy.

Ritual economy therefore views economic behaviour as constituted by such social practises as rituals. It is the
process of provisioning and consuming that materializes and substantiates worldview for managing meaning and
shaping interpretation. Seen through the lens of ritual economy, the marketplace of rational agents becomes a scene
of complex social processes of human interaction and belief formation. Though the framework of ritual economy
incorporates the practise of rituals in a theory of economics, it does not make them interchangeable. It does not
pretend to explain every aspect of economics in terms of rituals, but merely indicates that economic models can no
longer stay blind to the social reality of communal behaviour. There where rituals and economics do overlap
however, we speak of an economic ritual, and it is precisely at such points of intersection where we see a window of
opportunity for change.

Alan P. L. Liu, Wenzhou and Chinese Modernization
The "Wenzhou model" of development and china's modernization
community autonomy is based on a distinct culture that encompasses modes of production and exchange. The
economic development of Wenzhou after 1980 showed that a community's ability to maintain a high degree of
autonomy is critical to its capability to produce surpluses.
In the final analysis, the significance of Wenzhou's way of development extended beyond its territory. A
considerable number of Chinese scholars held the view that the "Wenzhou model" was more applicable to Chinese
rural development than the alternate "southern Jiangsu model" (sunan), which consisted of government-owned local
enterprises, use of more advanced technology, and reliance on subcontracting from state firms in urban areas.
These scholars pointed out that Wenzhou shared with the vast majority of Chinese rural communities the following
characteristics: long distance from major industrial cities, low level of savings, rudimentary skills in nonfarm
production, and reliance on family-owned and managed crafts.
The history of Wenzhou's economic change since 1949 has demonstrated the relation of national power to
surplus and community autonomy. In a complex nation such as China, the state must exercise power in order to
transfer a part of the surpluses from producing communities to people other than the producers. By so doing, the
state inevitably encroaches upon community autonomy. But community autonomy is based on a distinct culture that
encompasses modes of production and exchange. The economic development of Wenzhou after 1980 showed that a
community's ability to maintain a high degree of autonomy is critical to its capability to produce surpluses. When
autonomy is denied in an extreme way as Wenzhou was under Mao, then surplus production becomes problematic.


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That Wenzhou produced much more surplus after 1980 than before was also due to a change in the type of authority
that Beijing applied.
Alan P. L. Liu, Wenzhou and Chinese Modernization
The "Wenzhou model" of development and china's modernization

Jeffrey Herbst
It will primarily be up to the Africans to come up with alternatives to the nation-state.
However, the international community can play an important role in signaling that the atmosphere
has changed and that there is at least the possibility that alternatives to the sovereign state could be
accepted. Indeed, alternatives to the nation-state are being developed now.

Recognizing new nation-states
After thirty years of assuming that the boundaries of even the most dysfunctional African state are inviolable,
another important initiative for the international community would be to consider the possibility of allowing for the
creation of new sovereign states. Opening the possibility for new states to be created would challenge the basic
assumption held by African leaders and the international community that boundaries drawn haphazardly during the
scramble for Africa a century ago with little regard to the social, political, economic, or ethnic realities on the
ground should continue to be universally respected. At the same time, allowing for more dynamism in the creation
of African states would help recapture the element of the precolonial perspective on sovereignty that insisted that
political control had to be won, not instituted by administrative fiat. A criterion for recognition appropriate to the
particular circumstances of Africa's failing states could be: does the break-away area provide more political order on
its own over a significant period of time (say, five years) than is provided by the central government? By order, I
mean functioning military, police, and judicial systems, which are the fundamental prerequisites for political and
economic progress. These public goods are precisely what Africa's failing states do not provide. Such a standard
would rule out many attempts at secession that were not of the utmost seriousness, and also return, to a degree, to
older understandings of sovereignty that are resonant with the African past. The long-term aim would be to provide
international recognition to the governmental units that are actually providing order to their citizens as opposed to
relying on the fictions of the past.
The primary objection to recognizing new states in Africa has been the basis for selection. Given that there are very
few "natural" boundaries in Africa which would allow for the rational demarcation of land on the basis of ethnic,
geographic, or economic criteria, the worry is that recognizing new African states will lead to a splintering process
that would promote the creation of ever-smaller units, with seemingly endless political chaos. Thus, Gidon Gottlieb
argues against the creation of new states because he fears "anarchy and disorder on a planetary scale."
It was not the case, for instance, that Africa experienced a sudden splintering of states after Eritrea achieved its
independence, At some point, the reality of disintegrating, dysfunctional African states stands in such contrast to
the legal fiction of sovereign states that experimentation with regards to new states is in order.
This is not to say that granting the right to secession to at least some groups which were able to establish order
within their own areas would be without its dangers. Clearly, any signal from the international community that its
commitment to the territorial integrity of African states is being reduced could result in considerable instability and
uncertainty, and would be met by vehement opposition on the part of many African states which have grown
dependent on the post-World War II understanding of sovereignty. However, the reality on the ground in some
African countries is that sovereign control is not being exercised by the central state in outlying areas, and sub-


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national groups are already exerting authority in certain regions. By recognizing and legitimating those groups, the
international community has the opportunity to ask that they respect international norms regarding human rights and
also has a chance to bring them into the international economy.

Alternatives to the Sovereign State
A far more revolutionary approach would be for at least parts of Africa to be reordered around some organization
other than the sovereign state. While such reforms would be a dramatic change for international society, their
adoption would be an important acknowledgment of what is actually happening in parts of Africa where many states
do not exercise sovereign authority over their territories. Indeed, in a world where capital knows no boundaries and
where force projection over distance is increasingly easy, it is peculiar that political power continues to be firmly
demarcated according to territory. Developing alternatives to the current understanding of sovereignty would be
consistent with older African practices where sovereignty was sometimes shared and where there were many
different arrangements regarding the exercise of political authority depending on local circumstances. It will
primarily be up to the Africans to come up with alternatives to the nation-state. However, the international
community can play an important role in signaling that the atmosphere has changed and that there is at least the
possibility that alternatives to the sovereign state could be accepted. Indeed, alternatives to the nation-state are being
developed now.
Jeffrey Herbst

Ideology, Materialization, and Power Strategies
Elizabeth DeMarrais, Luis Jaime Castillo and Timothy Earle
Because of their immediacy, rituals and events are especially powerful means for negotiating power relationships at
all levels, from the status competitions of local chiefs to the enculturation of newly conquered populations within an
empire. In many societies, ceremonies are repetitive, precisely timed to mark agricultural or ritual cycles. They
may be organized around a mythical narrative that is reproduced and made real again during each performance.

Jeffrey Herbst
To achieve this outcome, Herbst calls for-with the help of the inter-national community-opening up intellectual
space in Africa, so that Africans themselves can come up with replacements for failed states. Furthermore, he calls
upon the United States to take a lead in the international community in developing a mechanism to decertify rogue
states in Africa. A logical next step from decertification, Herbst argues, would be to consider the possibility of
accepting into the world community of states newly created states that claim sovereignty. Apart from his argument,
Herbst sets out in States and Power in Africa to chart new territory in the scholarly discourse on African politics.
Taking a structuralist approach, said to be most informed by the work of Charles Tilly, Herbst employs a


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combination of historical sociology and political geography in crafting what he suggests is a new paradigm for
African politics.

Rather than calling for the possibility of radically redrawing the map of Africa and rejecting the concept of
the sovereign state as the only way that large numbers of people can organize themselves, it seems reasonable to
suggest that it behooves African states to find ways of preparing themselves to compete in the global arena and to
have a voice in developing the contours of the relationships that emerge. Herbst calls upon the international
community and African leadership to consider alternatives to sovereign states. Yet neither of these communities
seems to think that this is the most pressing problem facing Africa today. An over-arching problem is the low levels
of state capacity and good governance on the continent. Moreover, it is obvious that the ideologization of
ethnoregionalism and religion are much more pressing problems for the leaders of African states, not to mention
such issues as poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, and various forms of insecurity.

Popular Legitimacy in African Multi-Ethnic States
Robert H. Jackson & Carl G. Rosberg
the convention of international legitimation that has predominated since 1945 is based on the combined and
paradoxical principles of majority rule, which rejects the legitimacy of colonialism, and territorial integrity, which
nevertheless accepts territorial divisions established under colonialism. We define internal legitimacy as the
recognition of a state and its government as rightful by its population, which during the modern era has increasingly
meant a popular recognition democratically expressed. Indeed, for the sake of political stability it is fortunate
that most transactions are of an interest-group nature, where legitimacy is not an issue.

ritual futures
& options

making the case for
pan Africanism
Popular legitimacy and African states
The political and moral issue of popular legitimacy in African state-ethnic relations.
The ideology of popular legitimacy emerged later in Africa than in most other parts of the world. But when it did
arrive, during the decade and a half following World War II, it made colonialism - rule by an alien European elite -
not only unpopular but also illegitimate. Henceforth, only rule by the African people was legitimate, and the


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principle of popular legitimacy became the basic and increasingly irresistible moral claim of African nationalists
across the continent.
During the twilight of the colonial period, when this transformation of political legitimacy was occurring, the phrase
'the people' meant 'the African people', as distinguished primarily from European aliens. It was an unambiguous and
very effective political tool for promoting African independence. Today it continues to be influential in discrediting
the apartheid regime in South Africa.
This is not the case with the concept of 'the African people'. Africa is essentially a geographical term: it has almost
no distinctive linguistic, political, traditional, institutional, or other cultural references. Are 'the African people'...
non-Europeans living in Africa?... the indigenous people of Africa?... black Africans? According to Ali Mazrui, the
concept 'we are all Africans' is essentially an idea of' racial sovereignty. But how are the racial markers defined?
Does the African race include Moroccans and Egyptians? Today the notion has a degree of political substance, as
expressed in the Organisation of African Unity, which reinforces geographical more than racial identity. The
legitimation and enforcement of existing ex-colonial international boundaries in Africa is undoubtedly the supreme
purpose of the O.A.U., but very few of those boundaries have substantial indigenous African referents, so we cannot
conclude that the O.A.U. is maintaining traditional African national identities. In fact, it is denying them: the
indigenous peoples of Africa are not recognised by that organisation, as the Somalis have found out in their fruitless
attempt to make their borders coincide with the geographical distribution of the Somali people, large sections of
whom reside in neighbouring Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti. For purposes of national accounting, 'the people' in
every state in Africa, as elsewhere, can be considered to be all those who live there. However, the inhabitants of a
state do not necessarily constitute a people. In France they do, but in most African countries the population in fact
consists of several and usually many peoples. Only Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, and Somalia might be included
in the category of 'nation-states '. Almost every state in sub-Saharan Africa is multi-ethnic in social composition.
They are arbitrary political units in geographical shape and size, population membership, political identity, and
socio-economic reality. Their boundaries were drawn by European empire-builders, who paid little regard to the
borders of traditional societies. Most African states are composed of many different peoples who are ethnically
distinct in terms of race, colour, language, religion, customs, geographical residence, and so forth - or some
combination of these factors. Thus Uganda, for example, is composed of Baganda, Acholi, Lango, Banyoro, and
other distinctive ethnic groups that are far more substantial than 'the Ugandan people'. Hence it is very difficult for
the national government to secure popular legitimacy by appealing to references which are distinctively Ugandan,
since these are few and not highly valued by the general population. There are almost no national characteristics of'
Uganda' that correspond with the linguistic, political, traditional, institutional, and other cultural references of'
France'. The same difficulty confronts most other African governments in varying degrees. Consequently, they must
usually base their internal legitimacy on some alternative to 'the people'.

Procedural legitimacy in multi-ethnic states
Popular political legitimacy can be acquired by means other than national culture and tradition. Were this not the
case, only a relatively small minority of the world's states would have any real prospect of achieving internal
legitimacy, and virtually none in sub-Saharan Africa. Fortunately, alternative procedures and practices exist which
are not tied to the particulars of any country but are part of the general stock of available tools which modern
governments can employ to legitimate their rule, notably various methods of constitutional engineering. Among
these the following have been proposed as applicable to Africa: (1) majority rule, (2) constitutional
acknowledgement of minorities, and (3) consociational democracy. One procedural definition of 'the people' that
was used both by European officials and by many African politicians at the end of the colonial period was 'the
majority'. The people were the majority, the majority were Africans, and popular legitimacy was derived from
procedures that included general elections. As we have indicated, majoritarianism was adequate to give legitimacy
to African nationalism and to end colonialism.
However, majority rule is inadequate for legitimating African multi-ethnic states once colonialism or European alien
rule has been terminated (and it would be inadequate to legitimate a multi-racial, democratic South Africa - which is
why consociational democracy has been recommended, should such a development occur). These states cannot be


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divided politically into a majority and a minority on the assumption that society is composed essentially of
individuals, and that such a bisection can be registered and legitimated periodically in national elections. A multi-
ethnic society is not an aggregation of individuals living in one homogeneous social system; rather, it is an
assemblage of culturally distinctive groups that form a segmented or 'plural society '. In such circumstances, the rule
of the majority can result only in the minority being tyrannised. Majority rule is undesirable and even unjust in such
a state if, as frequently happens, it constitutes the permanent domination of smaller groups by those that are more
populous. Majority rule in multi-ethnic states in effect denies the reality and legitimacy of plurality.
Every multi-ethnic state in Africa without exception enjoys inter-national legitimacy by virtue of its political
independence, recognition by other states, membership in international bodies, and the general protection of
international law. No independent African government is in any danger of losing international legitimacy as long as
it remains a good citizen of the world community. Citizenship demands little except respect for the independence of
other states and forbearance from interfering in their internal affairs. To date no African government has been
deprived of citizenship, and there is little likelihood that any will be in the foreseeable future.
According to existing international practice, the only conceivable type of African regime that probably would be
denied international legitimacy is either one that attempted to alter existing ex-colonial boundaries without the
consent of the other countries involved, or one that was composed of non-African aliens. International legitimacy
has therefore made it easier for African regimes to engage in abusive internal practices if they are disposed and
possess the means to do so. Under present international rules they pay no significant price for such conduct.
International legitimacy can undermine the politics of ethnic accommodation by not requiring civil standards of
conduct in the relations between an independent government and the ethnic formations within its territorial
jurisdiction. On the other hand, it has helped to prevent the breakup of some African states by civil war - for
example, Zaire, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, and especially Chad. It has obstructed the radical restructuring of the
African states-system along more ethnically congruent lines which in the short and medium run could only involve
enormous violence and instability. However, in the longer term it discourages the formation of more culturally
rational states in the region.
Internationally legitimate African governments may be indifferent to the question of whether or not their ethnic
policies generate internal legitimacy. They may believe that such support is not important, and it may not be in a
segmented society composed of quiescent or submissive ethnic groups. But if a government desires to gain popular
legitimacy from its relations with ethnic groups - which is increasingly necessary in modernising societies - it must
employ means that give some consideration to the identity, dignity, needs, and natural rights of the particular groups
involved, and avoid actions that do them injustice and harm. In other words, it must be a regime of civility although
not necessarily a constitutional government, and much less a democracy, as already pointed out. However, for
internationally legitimate governments which preside over arbitrary territorial jurisdictions that contain several,
frequently antagonistic, ethnic groups, the political temptation to resort to abusive methods of governance is
sometimes greater than the determination and ability of leaders to exercise the restraint and civility required by
political accommodation. Nevertheless, the majority of African governments have resisted this temptation probably
in the awareness that it is easier to rule a segmented society with the co-operation (or at least the acquiescence) of
ethnic groups than in confrontation with them.

State-ethnic discord
African ethnic politics have not always been accommodative and civil, although this is the prevailing pattern. Some
governments have been arbitrary and abusive in their treatment of ethnic groups; and a number of groups have been
unwilling to acknowledge the authority of regimes. Actions such as these have sometimes provoked crises of
internal legitimacy in a minority of countries. We can discern two tendencies in state-ethnic discord in African
politics. First, there have been concerted efforts by some ethnic groups to oppress others in order to establish or to
maintain their hegemony. Secondly, there have been attempts - usually by large ethno-regions - to escape from the
jurisdiction of the existing state, and either form their own new ethno-state or amalgamate with ethnic kinsmen in a
neighbouring state, by altering international boundaries by force. Colonialism involved the nearly universal


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establishment of racial hegemonies in Africa based on European domination. Racial supremacy and control was by
no means an official goal of colonial policy, but was rather the almost inevitable consequence of widely held and
primarily unreflective European ethno-centric assumptions about Africa's inherent lack of civilisation. Nineteenth-
century international law was a mirror of these assumptions in which Africa was seen to constitute res nullias and
not res publica: a jurisdictional vacuum outside the control of any sovereign - i.e. European - state, which not only
warranted but demanded European partition and domination on the grounds of the obligation to spread civilisation.1
African independence involved, among other things, the rejection of this ideology by the international community.
Only in South Africa have these assumptions been retained, reinforced, and transformed into a highly elaborate
system of racial supremacy, namely apartheid. However, the general practice of ethnic hegemony was not
introduced into Africa by Europeans. In Zanzibar, and at other locations along the East African coast, caste
structures of privileged Arabs and sub-ordinated Africans existed before the advent of European colonialism in the
late nineteenth century.
In Liberia and Sierra Leone, political structures were established by black immigrant communities which enjoyed
power and privileges that were denied to indigenous peoples. Even many traditional African governments were
based on the practice, as in parts of East Africa where, according to Lucy Mair, one whole section of the population
- the section believed to be descended from the [conquering] immigrant cattle people - is regarded as superior to the
rest, the descendants of the [conquered] cultivators.2 The termination of colonial rule in Africa always ended
European racial domination, but not always ethnic hegemony.
In Sierra Leone, the advent of independence and the emergence of indigenous African politics also ended the
dominant political status of the immigrant Creole community. But in neighbouring Liberia, which was never a
European colony, the Americo-Liberian aristocracy attempted to maintain its hegemony until it was overthrown in
1980 by a violent military coup inspired, in part, by western-educated intellectuals and their doctrines of equality.

However, most ethnic groups are either accommodated politically or can be neglected because they lack the capacity
to confront central governments with a real threat of instability. Only a comparatively small number of groups are
sufficiently strategic in size, location, resources, cohesion, and political awareness to present such a threat. Many of
them are propitiated because of their significance, and in some cases they have enjoyed a predominant place in the
state: for example, the Hausa-Fulani in Nigeria, the Shona in Zimbabwe, and the Kikuyu in Kenya. However, in a
small number of usually large states, civil strife has frequently marked the relations between central governments
and some formidable ethno-regional opponents who have demanded autonomy or independence. In its first few
years of independence, Zaire was severely strained by the Katangan secession, and it was only with substantial
United Nations assistance that the threat was ended is 1963. Other ethno-regional challenges have occurred since
then, and as recently as the late 1970s armed militancy in Shaba Province twice threatened Mobutu Sese Seko's
regime and was only contained by external intervention in his support. Nigeria experienced some two-and-a-half
years of civil war in the late Ig6os between its Federal Military Government and the Ibo-dominated separatist regime
of Biafra.1 Following independence in 1956, Southern Sudan was subjected to protracted civil strife between a
dominant Arabised and Islamic North in control of the new state, and some political groups in a subordinated
African South who desired autonomy or independence. It was not until 1972 that a settlement was reached which
granted the South increased autonomy and identity, and civil peace has remained precarious ever since.
Neighbouring Ethiopia has faced militant secession movements on several fronts - most notably, Eritrean separatism
and Somali irredentism - which derive historically in part from the formation of the country by Amharic conquests
of these regions in the nineteenth century. Soviet and Cuban arms have bolstered the central government in these
conflicts. In Angola, the same powers have aided the regime of Jose dos Santos against the ethno-regional-based
Uniao Nacional de Independencia Total de Angola, led by Jonas Savimbi, which has grown in territorial control and
armed effectiveness as a result of South African support. Undoubtedly the greatest degree of persistent civil strife
based on ethno-regionalism and factionalism has occurred in Chad where it has shattered the empirical foundations
of the state. In Chad, Angola, Ethiopia, and the Sudan it persists in varying degrees.
The collaboration of existing African states, with the support of the world community, has been successful in
upholding the international legitimacy of inherited colonial frontiers rather than the traditional political boundaries


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which marked indigenous ethnic groups. Self-determination in Africa has entailed the independence of colonies but
has prevented the independence of ethno-nations. Moreover, there is very little prospect for the latter to alter the
existing borders of Africa, either by separatism or by irredentism, without the prior consent of the sovereign
governments of the countries involved. African statesmen must always be concerned about securing internal
legitimacy from ethnic groups, but they need not worry that failure to do so risks a loss of jurisdiction and territory,
as well as the material resources that go with it.
The map of Africa has remained virtually unchanged since the end of colonialism, and every state has enjoyed, and
has been upheld by, international legitimacy. Most African governments cannot be as confident about their internal
legitimacy, which is not usually institutionalised. Several regimes have opted for a one-party democracy, which has
the advantage of being able to accommodate participation without incurring a risk of internal discord stemming from
organised political competition. This system of government may become more commonplace in the future as other
rulers come to recognise that political participation need not threaten their paramount position, and that this can
legitimate their authority without provoking ethno-regional instability. But most regimes will continue to rely
primarily on 'virtual representation' to secure popular legitimacy. Of course, if such practices as nominated single
lists and other forms of patronage are to achieve legitimacy, the rulers will have to exercise their discretion fairly. It
is always possible for 'virtual representation' to deteriorate into a 'spoils system' which can easily squander general
goodwill in a multi-ethnic state if, as usually happens, the spoils are confined only to privileged groups. In
uninstitutionalised multi-ethnic states only the rulers can provide the equity that is necessary to secure popular
legitimacy.

The Out of Africa Hypothesis,
Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development.
Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor

Moreover, the level of genetic diversity in each country today (as determined
by the genetic diversities and genetic distances among its ancestral populations) has a
non-monotonic effect on income per capita in the modern world.

While the low degree of diversity among Native American populations and the high degree of diversity among
African populations have been detrimental forces in the development of these regions, the intermediate levels of
genetic diversity prevalent among European and Asian populations have been conducive for development.

in the course of the prehistoric exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance to various
settlements across the globe affected genetic diversity and has had a persistent hump-shaped effect on comparative
economic development, reflecting the trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on
productivity. While the low diversity of Native American populations and the high diversity of African populations
have been detrimental for the development of these regions, the intermediate levels of diversity associated with
European and Asian populations have been conducive for development.

Prevailing hypotheses of comparative economic development highlight various determinants of the remarkable
inequality in income per capita across the globe. The significance of geographical, institutional, and cultural factors,
human capital, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, colonialism, and globalization has been at the heart of a debate
concerning the genesis of the astounding transformation in the pattern of comparative development over the past few
centuries. While early research focused on the proximate forces that contributed to the divergence in living standards
in the post-Industrial Revolution era, attention has shifted gradually toward some ultimate, deep-rooted, prehistoric
factors that may have affected the course of comparative development since the emergence of human civilization.
This research argues that deep-rooted factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, have had a significant
effect on the process of economic development from the dawn of humankind to the contemporary era. It advances


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the hypothesis that, in the course of the exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance from
the cradle of humankind in East Africa to various settlements across the globe affected genetic diversity and has had
a long-lasting hump-shaped effect on the pattern of comparative economic development that is not captured by
geographical, institutional, and cultural factors.

This research thus highlights one of the deepest channels in comparative development,
pertaining not to factors associated with the onset of complex agricultural societies as in the influential
hypothesis of Diamond (1997), but to conditions innately related to the very dawn of humankind itself.

The hypothesis rests upon two fundamental building blocks. First, migratory distance from the cradle of humankind
in East Africa had an adverse effect on the degree of genetic diversity within ancient indigenous settlements across
the globe.

Following the prevailing hypothesis, commonly known as the serial founder effect, it is postulated that, in the course
of human expansion over planet Earth, as subgroups of the populations of parental colonies left to establish new
settlements further away, they carried with them only a subset of the overall genetic diversity of their parental
colonies.

Higher diversity therefore enhances societys capability to integrate advanced and more efficient production
methods, expanding the economys production possibility frontier and conferring the benefits of improved
productivity.

This research is the first to argue that the variation in prehistoric migratory distance from the cradle of humankind to
various settlements across the globe has had a persistent effect on the process of development and on the
contemporary variation in income per capita across the globe. The paper is also unique in its attempt to establish the
role of genetic (rather than ethnic) diversity within a society as a significant determinant of its development path and
thus its comparative economic performance across space and time.

deep-rooted factors, determined tens of thousands of years ago, had a significant effect on the course of economic
development from the dawn of human civilization to the contemporary era. It advances and empirically establishes
the hypothesis that, in the course of the exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance from
the cradle of humankind to various settlements across the globe affected genetic diversity and has had a long-lasting
effect on the pattern of comparative economic development that is not captured by geographical,
institutional, and cultural factors.

The level of genetic diversity within a society is found to have a hump-shaped effect on development outcomes in
the precolonial era, reflecting the trade-off between the beneficial and the detrimental effects of diversity on
productivity. Moreover, the level of genetic diversity in each country today (as determined by the genetic diversities
and genetic distances among its ancestral populations) has a non-monotonic effect on income per capita in the
modern world. While the low degree of diversity among Native American populations and the high degree of
diversity among African populations have been detrimental forces in the development of these regions, the
intermediate levels of genetic diversity prevalent among European and Asian populations have been conducive for
development.

Finally, this research contributes to the understanding of the role of European colonialism in reshaping comparative
development across countries over the last 500 years. Specifically, the results suggest that the cross-country
migrations that occurred during the course of European colonization significantly altered the genetic diversity and,
hence, the composition of human capital in colonized countries. In particular, the level of diversity that existed in
these locations during the precolonial era changed substantially, toward the optimal level for development,
in the post-1500 time period. Moreover, consistent with documented patterns of European colonization, the change
in diversity was larger in those locations where initial population density was lower. Thus, reversals of fortune in
comparative development over the last 500 years can be traced to a larger change in the genetic diversity of
countries that were less developed during the preindustrial era.


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The Out of Africa Hypothesis,
Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development.
Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor

Catherine Bell.
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.
Ritual can be a strategic way to traditionalize, that is, to construct a type of tradition, but in doing so it can
also challenge and renegotiate the very basis of tradition to the point of upending much of what had been seen as
fixed previously or by other groups. [] As with the invented traditions described by Hobsbawn and Ranger,
various attempts in American society in the last two decades to create new rituals deemed more appropriately
symbolic and representative involve renegotiating a repertoire of acknowledged ways of acting ritually. Such
innovations may be subtle or dramatic; they may radically reappropriate traditional elements or give a very different
significance to standard activities; they may overturn meanings completely through invented practices. The
continuity, innovation, and oppositional contrasts established in each case are strategies that arise from the sense of
ritual played out under particular conditions - not in a fixed ritual structure, a closed grammar, or an embalmed
historical model.
It is important to emphasize a conclusion implicit in the many examples cited so far: ritual systems do not function
to regulate or control the systems of social relations, they are the system, and an expedient rather than perfectly
ordered one at that. In other words, the more or less practical organization of ritual activities neither acts upon nor
reflects the social system; rather, these loosely coordinated activities are constantly differentiating and integrating,
establishing and subverting the field of social relations. Hence, such expedient systems of ritualized relations are not
primarily concerned with social integration alone, in the Durkheimian sense. Insofar as they establish hierarchical
social relations, they are also concerned with distinguishing local identities, ordering social differences, and
controlling the contention and negotiation involved in the appropriation of symbols.
I have not proposed a new theory of ritual because I believe that a new theory of ritual, by definition, would do
little to solve the real conundrums that the study of ritual has come up against. Instead, I have proposed a new
framework within which to reconsider traditional questions about ritual. In this framework, ritual activities are
restored to their rightful context, the multitude of ways of acting in a particular culture. When put in the context of
purposive activity with all the characteristics of human practice (strategy, specificity, misrecognition, and
redemptive hegemony), a focus on ritual yields to a focus on ritualization. Ritualization, the production of ritualized
acts, can be described, in part, as that way of acting that sets itself off from other ways of acting by virtue of the way
in which it does what it does. Even more circularity, it can be described as the strategic production of expedient
schemes that structure an environment in such a way that the environment appears to be the source of the schemes
and their values.
Ritualization endows these agents with some degree of ritual mastery. This mastery is an internalization of schemes
with which they are capable of reinterpreting reality in such a way as to afford perceptions and experiences of a
redemptive hegemonic order. Ritualization always aligns one within a series of relationship linked to the ultimate
sources of power. Whether ritual empowers or disempowers one in some practical sense, it always suggests the
ultimate coherence of a cosmos in which one takes a particular place. This cosmos is experienced as a chain of states
or an order of existence that places one securely in a field of action and in alignment with the ultimate goals of all
action. Ritualization is probably an effective way of acting only under certain cultural circumstances.

The last thesis, the one that Bell thinks is best but still problematic, is the definition of reality thesis of Geertz, T.
Turner, Douglas, and Lukes. Instead of ritual acting to control, it models society: [P]roponents of the definition of
reality thesis seek to find in ritual a single central mechanism for the communication of culture, the internalization of
values, and the individuals cognitive perception of a universe that generally fits these valies. Bell appreciates the


Page | 32
more subtle understanding of social control but critiques that it treats rite as a nearly magical mechanism of
social alchemy by which the irksomeness of human experience is transformed into the desirable, the unmentionable,
or the really real. While this theory does recognize that there are not such clear cut differences between primitive
and modern societies, she emphasizes that context is essential, and not all groups rituals can be described by the
same theories, which the theory does not deal with adequately.
Ritualization entails the acting out of power relations, whose limits are defined by context. Bell explains two
dimensions of ritualization. The first is the dynamics of the social body, its projection and embodiment of a
structured environment that happens below the level of discourse and which goes on without agents recognizing
their participation. The second is a level at which those who appear to be disempowered are actually empowered by
ritualization through consent, resistance, and negotiated appropriation.

Ritual is a form of nonverbal communication, but, like linguistic communication, its signs and symbols have
meaning only by virtue of their place in systems of relationships with other symbols. Although ritual conveys
information about the most basic conceptual categories and ordering systems of the social group, it is used primarily
to transform one category into another while maintaining the integrity of the categories and the system as a whole.
In other words, only ritual can transform a boy or girl into an adult, an animal into a gift to the gods, and the realm
of the gods into a presence responsive to human needs while still maintaining all the boundaries that enable these
categories to organize reality.

In most societies, rituals are multiple and redundant. They do not have just one message or purpose. They have
many, and frequently some of these messages and purposes can modify or even contradict each other. Nonetheless,
ritual practices seek to formulate a sense of the interrelated nature of things and to reinforce values that assume
coherent interrelations, and they do so by virtue of their symbols, activities, organization, timing, and relationships
to other activities. Yet rituals seem to be invoked more in some situations than others. What might these situations
have in common?
It appears that ritual is used in those situations in which certain values and ideas are more powerfully binding on
people if they are deemed to derive from sources of power outside the immediate community.

Catherine Bell.
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.


A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered


Page | 33
place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests. Rituals
may be seasonal, hallowing a culturally defined moment of change in the climatic cycle or the inauguration of an
activity Other classes of rituals include divinatory rituals; ceremonies performed by political authorities to en-
sure the health and fertility of human beings, animals, and crops in their territories; initiation into priesthoods
devoted to certain deities, into religious-associations, or into secret societies; and those accompanying the daily
offering of food and libations to deities or ancestral spirits or both. Africa is rich indeed in ritual genres, and cach
involves many specific performances.

Politics of Ritual.
LJ Lucero

When rulers sponsor public events (e.g., feasts and ceremonies), they touch emotions (Rappaport 1999:49, 226),
but these events are temporary and soon forgotten. Political actors need strategies that result in long-term benefits.
Therefore they typically associate themselves with rituals that revolve around vital elements of life (e.g.,
rain, agricultural fertility, and ancestor veneration) conducted according to set schedules in special places (Cohen
1974:135). Their association with traditional or social conventions leads to the sanctification or uncritical
acceptance of their special powers (Rappaport 1971; 1999:281; see also Geertz 1980:12931; Webster 1976)
because subjects believe that the holders of exclusive knowledge and skill are closer to the supernatural realm
(Friedman and Rowlands 1978). In time they become directly involved in the continuity of natural forces (e.g.,
Helms 1993:7879). Participation in public rites does not mean that people are being hoodwinked: acceptance is
not belief. . . . Acceptance . . . is not a private state, but a public act (Rappaport 1999:11920). Public ceremony
thus promotes solidarity, not to mention political agendas.
domestic rituals never leave the home. Rulers replicate and expand them but do not replace or restrict
them. While all members participate in the larger-scale ceremonies, everyone still performs the domestic rituals
from which former ceremonies derived. Royal rites are superimposed on traditional ones (e.g., Godelier 1977:
188). The fact that everyone, high and low, performs the same rites promotes solidarity and a sense of belonging
(e.g., Kertzer 1988:19).

Identifying Ancient Ritual
The most promising prehistoric evidence of the relationship between ritual and politics is the social variability
resulting from the dynamic relationship between structure and practice and the way in which political aspirants
expanded upon that variability (Walker and Lucero 2000).

Politics of Ritual.
LJ Lucero

Relevance of African Traditional Institutions of Governance
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa [UNECA]

1. Diversity and transformation of African traditional institutions

1.3. Traditional institutions in the post-colonial era
The hereditary nature of chieftaincy renders it incompatible with democratic governance, which requires
competitive elections as one of its cornerstones (Ntsebeza, 2005).
A popular view asserts that traditional institutions are indispensable for political transformation in Africa, as they
represent a major part of the continents history, culture, and political and governance systems. This view attributes
the ineffectiveness of the African State in bringing about sustained socio-economic development to its neglect of


Page | 34
traditional institutions and its failure to restore Africas own history (Basil Davidson, 1992). As Dore (n.d.) notes,
when policy neglects history, culture, and social context, huge amounts of effort and resources can be wasted on
poorly conceived initiatives. However, the indigenousness of institutions, by itself, is not a sufficient condition to
enable traditional institutions to facilitate the transformation of social systems. History teaches us that, depending on
their nature, traditional institutions may hinder or facilitate development and democratic transformation and that
these institutions are not static, as they undergo constant change. It is likely, however, that political and economic
development would be more successful when rooted upon widely shared institutions and cultural values (Fallers,
1955).

A third and more balanced view acknowledges the limitations of traditional institutions, that the colonial State
largely transformed chieftaincy into its intermediate administrative institution, and that the post-colonial State often
co-opted chiefs to facilitate the extension of despotic control over its citizens. This view nonetheless recognizes the
fact that traditional institutions constitute crucial resources that have the potential to promote democratic governance
and to facilitate access of rural communities to public services. Among the arguments advanced by this view are
that: Chieftaincy can provide the bedrock upon which to construct new mixed governance structures since chiefs
serve as custodians of and advocates for the interests of local communities within the broader political structure
(Sklar, 1994; Skalnik, 2004); The conception of traditional institutions that the source and raison detre of power is
the collective good of all members of society, provides a strong philosophical basis for establishing accountable
governance, (Osaghae, 1987).
Relevance of African Traditional Institutions of Governance
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa [UNECA]

Politics of Ritual.
LJ Lucero

I have no doubt that rulers created new rites for their exclusive use; however, I think that they invented the most
exclusive rites after they had achieved power. To acquire power, they used traditional ones. I agree with LeCount
that the two-room structures on temple tops provided rulers the opportunity to perform secret rituals unseen by the
audience below. The audience was quite aware that rulers were conducting rites that highlighted their special ties to
the gods. Afterwards, the king emerged and inaugurated ceremonies and celebrations. It is important to keep in
mind, though, that most of the monumental architecture at major Maya centers was for public uses and served
multiple purposes - festivals, feasts, ceremonies, performances, social gatherings, alliance building, exchange, ball
games, and the reenactment of the Maya origin myth (e.g., Fox 1996).

... Peoples movements in Africa have always lacked their own, i.e. African ideology...[and they] have generally
taken the form of passive resistance, frequently lacked aggressive power. From that perspective it may well be
that nowhere is there more talk about change than in Africa. Yet, within Africa, few can really trigger change.
Herein lies the great agony of Africa's popular sentiments.... To describe people's movements in Africa it is
necessary to recognise their under-lying attitude, which is one of active waiting and active hope.... To outlive the
repression, in its various forms, is to gain victory.
Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa
Terence O. Ranger

Review of African Political Economy.
Bringing Political Struggle Back in: African Politics, Power & Resistance
Graham Harrison

Looking beyond national borders, young people appropriate new technologies (digital and audiovisual) in such a
way as to recreate the dynamics of the oral and the spectacular, along with the literary and iconographic


Page | 35
imagination. The signs that result have the capacity to erase distance and to create a ritual community whose
imagined geography is so powerful that it challenges the geography of borders. It delocalizes memories and suggests
a historicity of a cosmopolitan nature (Cohen 1969:141).
In many ways, young Africans can be seen as searching for a narrative that provides a territory for the free play of
their imagination. As J. D. Y. Peel observes, "Narrative empowers because it enables its possessor to integrate his
memories, experiences and aspirations in a schema" (1995:587). Yet this narrative, constantly preoccupied with
erasing ethnic, nation-al, and continental borderlines, is necessarily fragmented because of the multiplicity of the
sources that produced it. The world that, paradoxically, is both inhabited by young Africans and escapes them is one
of opportunity and abundance, in which they are perpetually on the margins and the borderlines of the increasingly
xenophobic West (Carter 1997).

V.G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man,
and White Man in an Age of Empire.
A Review by Graham W. Irwin
Western Europeans of the century and a half before the First World War were "lords of human kind," at least in their
own eyes. Most of the world they conquered and absorbed into their empires; over much of the rest they won
economic control. As their rule expanded, they gained impressions and formed opinions about the diverse peoples
with whom they came in contact and adopted particular attitudes and modes of behavior toward them. It is the nature
and development of these attitudes and this behavior-of what might be called Europe's intellectual posture vis-a-vis
non-Europe-that is the subject of this unusual and stimulating book.

How Chiefs Come to Power:
The Political Economy in Prehistory
Timothy Earle
A number of studies have affirmed the resiliency, legitimacy and relevance of African traditional institutions in the
socio-cultural, economic and political lives of Africans, particularly in the rural areas. Juxtaposed with this is the
sometimes parallel "modern State", vested with enormous authority in rule making, application, adjudication and
enforcement. As Africa seeks to build and strengthen capable States, there is the need to recognize and address this
"duality" fully. This is principally borne out by a growing recognition that capable democratic States must be
grounded on indigenous social values and contexts, while adapting to changing realities. This will require among
other actions, aligning and harmonizing traditional governance institutions with the modern State.
African countries are characterized by fragmentation of various aspects of their political economy, including their
institutions of governance. Large segments of the rural populations, the overwhelming majority in most African
countries, continue to adhere principally to traditional institutions. The post-colonial State, on the other hand,
essentially emulates western institutions of governance, which are often at odds with traditional African cultural
values and the regions contemporary socio-economic realities. Fragmentation of the institutions of governance,
along with economic and social fragmentation, has contributed to Africas crisis of state-building, governance, and
economic development.
Despite modest progress in some countries, the post-colonial State has been unable to establish rights-based political
and economic systems of governance that would facilitate consolidation of state-building and promote economic
development. To a large extent, this has been due to its detachment from the institutional and cultural values of its
constituency. The prevailing state of poverty on the continent, the persistence of widespread ethnic and civil
conflicts, and frequent electoral and post-electoral strife are some manifestations of the failure of the State. The
persistence of traditional institutions as a parallel system of governance, which provides some level of refuge for the
rural population, often alienated by the State, is also another indication of the failure of the post-colonial State.


Page | 36

Ritual Perspectives and Dimensions
Catherine Bell

Designing a rite, according to Lane, involved activities analogous to the scripting and production of a new play on
the one hand and the introduction of new political legislation on the other. A particular collective would rehearse the
script, invite critical comments from the creators and the performers, and revise it until it felt right. Then a
commission would advertise and disseminate the rite on a regional scale. The first public performances were usually
covered in the media, and gradually photographs and brochures were made available to interested parties. After the
rite was established, there was a monitoring process that could introduce further changes as necessary and periodic
seminars disseminated advice to the local officials.

Of course, this process of development was not one of complete creation ex nihilo.
Various familiar symbols and traditions were readily appropriated in bits and pieces to fashion something that was
evocative while still espousing sentiments in keeping with official directives. Likewise, once the system was in
place, specific parts of the new rites, such as the songs, could be put into the school curriculum to teach students a
type of ritual competence and prepare them with associations that they could bring to their future participation in
the ritual system.

As an elite corps of ritual specialists emerged within the government, they defended their work by arguing that even
Christian ritual was once new and had originated by means of conscious efforts on the part of the church leadership.
Yet the Socialist ritual elite also set up various other levels of ritual experts. People were recruited on the local level
and trained to act as officiants, usually a part-time job.

Called ritual elders in the Ukraine and leaders in Russia, these officiants often requested more formal training
for their demanding jobs; one local leader went so far as to compare their periodic seminars with the training of a
priest. While the most active enthusiasm for the ritual system was probably concentrated in the party and its youth
organizations, there was general cooperation from many sectors of the population with the notable exception of the
intellectuals and artists.
Ritual Perspectives and Dimensions
Catherine Bell


ritual futures
& options


Page | 37

making the case for
pan Africanism

How Chiefs Come to Power:
The Political Economy in Prehistory
Timothy Earle
A number of studies have affirmed the resiliency, legitimacy and relevance of African traditional institutions in the
socio-cultural, economic and political lives of Africans, particularly in the rural areas. Juxtaposed with this is the
sometimes parallel "modern State", vested with enormous authority in rule making, application, adjudication and
enforcement. As Africa seeks to build and strengthen capable States, there is the need to recognize and address this
"duality" fully. This is principally borne out by a growing recognition that capable democratic States must be
grounded on indigenous social values and contexts, while adapting to changing realities. This will require among
other actions, aligning and harmonizing traditional governance institutions with the modern State.
African countries are characterized by fragmentation of various aspects of their political economy, including their
institutions of governance. Large segments of the rural populations, the overwhelming majority in most African
countries, continue to adhere principally to traditional institutions. The post-colonial State, on the other hand,
essentially emulates western institutions of governance, which are often at odds with traditional African cultural
values and the regions contemporary socio-economic realities. Fragmentation of the institutions of governance,
along with economic and social fragmentation, has contributed to Africas crisis of state-building, governance, and
economic development.
Despite modest progress in some countries, the post-colonial State has been unable to establish rights-based political
and economic systems of governance that would facilitate consolidation of state-building and promote economic
development. To a large extent, this has been due to its detachment from the institutional and cultural values of its
constituency. The prevailing state of poverty on the continent, the persistence of widespread ethnic and civil
conflicts, and frequent electoral and post-electoral strife are some manifestations of the failure of the State. The
persistence of traditional institutions as a parallel system of governance, which provides some level of refuge for the
rural population, often alienated by the State, is also another indication of the failure of the post-colonial State.



Page | 38
and overseas capitalist elements - which combine and recombine in novel and contradictory ways.

Here a consumer economy has been incorporated into ritual exuberance and generosity but in a way which
undercuts the private accumulation of capitalist consumerism with the ethics of a relational kinship order
of reciprocity and obligation linking different communities together across space. In this meshing of ritual and
consumer economies, the question arises whether this is an example of the latters colonizing and penetrating
the former. Since this is still a Third World society not fully extricated from the economic privations and emphasis
on asceticism, discipline, and production that were the hallmarks of a modernist state socialism, more features of
modernist capitalist culture are found alongside consumer culture in Wenzhou than in the modern West today.

In this situation, a more likely scenario than consumer capitalisms hijacking ritual consumption is the revived ritual
economys taking advantage of the opening introduced by postmodernist consumer capitalism to make inroads
against the combined modernist forces of state socialist and early capitalist productivism and desacralization. Here
the postmodern consumer economy, which requires the free flow of commerce, is enlisted as an ally by the ritual
economy in its eluding of state control. This is a parallel movement to Arturo Escobars (1999:14) suggestion that
the organic regime of nature (small-scale preindustrial cultivation which avoids a nature/culture opposition) can
join forces with the postmodern capitalist technonature regime (whose stance toward nature is one of conservation
and promotion of biodiversity) in an alliance to counter the ravages of a modernist capitalism which treats nature as
a commodified object and resource.

In this consumer-ritual economy hybrid, the ritual economy continues to present the danger of breaking out
fully and realizing its deep destructive force, of which the burning of real money and paper replicas of consumer
goods at funerals provides just a hint. Should the state further relax its vigilance over ritual and productive
accumulation reach a certain point of saturation, an outbreak of ritual expenditure and material waste and destruction
such as a bonfire of real consumer appliances at an extravagant funeral is not inconceivable. Once unleashed, the
internal principles of rural Wenzhous economy of kinship and expenditure could challenge and subvert the
principles of rational productivism and private accumulation of global capitalism.
As capital and capitalist practices expand across the globe, our theoretical tools seem inadequate to capture the full
complexity of these processes, especially for rural areas. Rather than assuming that capitalism immediately
transforms and converts everything it encounters, it is necessary to consider the different modes and logics
that it must incorporate and the fissures and tensions between them. A notion of economic hybridity is conducive
to the genealogical task of tracing the historical process of cross-fertilization and fusion that has brought different
economic practices and logics together into a multiplex form. We must not presume that capitalism is everywhere so
impregnable that it is not altered in its forays around the world.

It is true that capitalism has its own mechanisms of periodic self-destruction of its accumulation, a sort of clearing
of inventory such as the militarys expenditure of its stockpiles of weapons in warfare and the stock market crashes
which wipe out accumulated wealth in a matter of seconds. Batailles point is that there are better ways of
consuming wealth so as to restrain the insane expansion of the system and live more lightly on the earthgiving
out rather than raking in. What principles of ritual expenditure can do at the local level is to redistribute
wealth between families through an ethic of competition in generosity, build up the cohesiveness of local
communities and give them more autonomy against the centralized state and transnational capitalism, and prevent
the reduction of existence to a utilitarian definition. At the global level, a ritual economic logic may help deflect
capitalist accumulation into a rivalry between transnational corporations and states over which of them dares
to sacrifice a greater proportion of its annual profits or GNP by giving it away to causes that do not feed back
into production.

The economic principles behind sacrifice.
In a discussion of Bataille on sacrifice, Baudrillard pointed out that Bataille misread Mauss: for Mauss there was no
unilateral gift which did not ask for response. Just as for the Aztecs human sacrifice of blood to the god was the
nourishing of the sun in order that it shine, there is no pure principle of expenditure governing the cosmic field of
life forces but only an interrelated process of challenge and response (Baudrillard 1998:193). Similarly, destruction


Page | 39
and expenditure are always the inverse figure of production, so that, in order to destroy, it is first necessary to
have produced (p. 195). Far from preventing production as modernization theory would have it, a ritual economy
can actually spur production. rural Wenzhou peoples yearning to reconnect with powerful realms of the sacred
through ritual excess and transgression has actually fueled the drive to produce and acquire wealth. In both these
historical experiences, we have witnessed a process of the hybridization of economies in which what appears on the
surface to be a concession to or imposition of capitalist development is actually the reverse penetration of capitalism
by alien principles of ritual economies.

These are instances in which a market economy has unleashed or reactivated the principle of exuberant community
ritual display and consumption and the revived ritual economy has helped to launch economic production while also
inflecting the process toward its own ends. To grasp this historical process in all its complexity, we must deconstruct
the monolithic notion of a cohesive capitalism and move toward a notion of capitalism as an open-ended, mutating
process made up of disparate and conflicting elements, some of which harbor the potential to derail its forces and
harness them in new directions. The notion of economic hybridity here does not presuppose a single preordained
direction for the economy, but it does suggest that theoretical reflection and discursive practice may yet be a factor
in the historical direction that an assembly of economies may take.

Comment. Gene Cooper, Anthropology, University of Southern California
Rural Wenzhou is [in] a new phase . . . in which an interrupted native tradition of household and market economy
and the introduction of overseas capitalism have released the forces of a ritual economy which had been curtailed
and almost abolished in the Maoist era. This tells us what happened, but now the question would appear to be how
to understand it.
Yang identifies what she calls hybridity here insofar as the milieu combines aspects of modernity with
traditionalism.

There is indeed a sector of nonmarket ritual transactions that has survived, even been invigorated, in the Chinese
countryside since the introduction of economic reform, private enterprise, and marketing, and the potlatch analogy is
the right one here for trying to understand it. But the discussion of nonproductive expenditure makes no sense to this
observer of contemporary modernism.

J . K. Gibson-Graham
Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Revived religious practice and the extravagant celebration of life-course events, ritual expenditure on spectacular
performances of sacrifice and destruction - these are not activities usually associated with rapid regional economic
development. And yet, in rural Wenzhou, a place heralded by the state as an economic miracle, a model of
private commercial growth, there has been an upsurge of these practices. Yangs fascinating discussion of the
parallel growth of a nonprofit ritual economy alongside privatization and entrepreneurialism in Wenzhou offers
enticing theoretical insights into how to think through such a surprising juxtaposition and in the process forces us to
reflect upon the sparse conceptual resources at hand to capture [their] full complexity.

Yang employs a concept of economic hybridity. She argues that this notion allows for the interaction in an
undetermined way of multiple and competing logics (emanating from, for example, the peasant ritual economy, the
market economy, or various production economies) and the creation of a system in which fragmentation and
dissonance function alongside

Richard Perry & Bill Maurer
Department of Criminology, Law, and Society,
UC Irvine.


Page | 40
Yang crafts such a theoretical language, using tools derived from Bataille, Baudrillard, and Bakhtin and through an
insightful and nuanced analysis of apparently irrational ritual expenditures in Wenzhou, a region often touted in
the press as a success story of capitalism and free markets in the new China. Specifically, Yang develops two
models. One is a model of ritual expenditure that attends to the sacralization of the putatively economic.
First, we question whether Batailles vision of capitalism is not itself caught in capitalisms self-mythologization
as a desacralized and productivist space. Interestingly, Yang draws most directly from Bataille rather than from
Mauss, from whom Bataille derived his analysis. We quibble with the suggestion that postmodern consumerism is
still in the service of production and productive accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of
leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home decor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather
than leading to the finality and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure. As Mauss argued, one who engages in the
ritual consumption and even destruction of objects of economic value, rather than serving the interests of
production, is in fact purchasing prestige in the eyes of a community of other consumers.

the distinctive feature of the economy that Yang identifies in rural Wenzhou that works toward the reconstitution
of local kinship relations and structures. This sacred and exuberant quality of consumption, inscribed into
American literature by Fitzgerald in the 1920s, troubles the periodization implicit in Bataille and in Yangs
extrapolation of his argument of there being distinct precapitalist, capitalist, and postmodern capitalist formations
following one another in time and tied to varying degrees of desacralization. Gatsby, we suggest, both foretells and
disrupts the forward and backward temporal narratives of modernization theory.

Yangs Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place provides a bold, provocative argument about local cultural
autonomy, subversions of global capitalism, and the complexities of socioeconomic and cultural transformations
in contemporary China. Yang proposes an original concept, economic hybridity, that we might use to critique
assumptions about a uniform capitalism, and, in the spirit of Sahlins, she stresses the capacity of local culture to
resist and rework the incursions of what she interchangeably calls Western or global capitalism.

Designing a rite, according to Lane, involved activities analogous to the scripting and production of a new play on
the one hand and the introduction of new political legislation on the other. A particular collective would rehearse the
script, invite critical comments from the creators and the performers, and revise it until it felt right. Then a
commission would advertise and disseminate the rite on a regional scale. The first public performances were usually
covered in the media, and gradually photographs and brochures were made available to interested parties. After the
rite was established, there was a monitoring process that could introduce further changes as necessary and periodic
seminars disseminated advice to the local officials.

Of course, this process of development was not one of complete creation ex nihilo.
Various familiar symbols and traditions were readily appropriated in bits and pieces to fashion something that was
evocative while still espousing sentiments in keeping with official directives. Likewise, once the system was in
place, specific parts of the new rites, such as the songs, could be put into the school curriculum to teach students a
type of ritual competence and prepare them with associations that they could bring to their future participation in
the ritual system.

As an elite corps of ritual specialists emerged within the government, they defended their work by arguing that even
Christian ritual was once new and had originated by means of conscious efforts on the part of the church leadership.
Yet the Socialist ritual elite also set up various other levels of ritual experts. People were recruited on the local level
and trained to act as officiants, usually a part-time job.

Called ritual elders in the Ukraine and leaders in Russia, these officiants often requested more formal training
for their demanding jobs; one local leader went so far as to compare their periodic seminars with the training of a
priest. While the most active enthusiasm for the ritual system was probably concentrated in the party and its youth


Page | 41
organizations, there was general cooperation from many sectors of the population with the notable exception of the
intellectuals and artists.


Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure
Author(s): Mayfair Meihui Yang

Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure by Mayfair Mei-hui Yang
This article takes up J. K. Gibson-Grahams call for a theoretical move away from a model of monolithic global
capitalism and notions of one-way penetration of capitalism. The notion of economic hybridity (derived from
Bakhtins writing on linguistic hybridity) is proposed as an alternative to the Marxist concept of articulation of
modes of production to account for the coming together of economic logics and practices from different epochs and
cultural histories. The ethnography that sustains this discussion addresses the significance of popular religious
revival
in rural Wenzhou, on the southeast coast of China, and its role in the postsocialist market economy. Borrowing from
Georges Batailles notion of ritual expenditure and from early Baudrillard on symbolic economies, the case study
shows that rural Wenzhous ritual economy harbors an archaic economic logic which is subversive of capitalist,
state socialist, and developmental-state principles. The older strains of an alternative economic logic in this hybrid
are shown not as complementing, adapting to, or serving capitalisms expansion but as contesting it and
rechanneling its movement toward other ends.

Karl Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)
At the dawn of the 21st century, in the rural areas and small towns of Wenzhou, in coastal southeastern China,
people are experiencing the interweaving of a centralized state socialist economy, transnational capitalism, a
revitalized
premodern market economy based on household production, and a ritual economy. In describing
their situation here, I hope to move the analysis of capitalism in a new theoretical directionrecognizing what
Marx himself detected, that unconquered remnants of earlier social formations are carried along within a
seemingly capitalist structure and have developed explicit significance within it (1973:105). At issue is not
simply that ethnographic writing on the economy must be reflexive (Clifford and Marcus 1986), take into account
the cultural dimensions, and recognize a local economys embeddedness in larger global systems (Marcus and
Fischer1986:77110; Blim 1996). Rather, we must also strive to describe the hybridity of economies, a seldom
explored strategy in the critique of modern hegemonic forces such as capitalism and state economies. The analysis
here concurs with J. K. Gibson-Grahams (1996) assertion that economic formations around the world today,
including the West, are composed of both capitalist and noncapitalist forms, and the task before us is to retrieve
from the margins the conceptual architectures
which will make the latter more visible. The suggestion is that indigenous economies are not always plowed under
with the introduction of capitalism but may even experience renewal and pose a challenge to capitalist principles,
stimulating us to rethink existing critiques of capitalism.




Page | 42

In the 1980s and 90s in Wenzhou, both Chinese and Western scholars have paid attention
only to Wenzhous flourishing market economy, ignoring the return of a nonprofit ritual economy which will be
the focus of our inquiry here.

The opposition between ritual and religion, on the one hand, and economic development, on the other, does not hold
in rural Wenzhou. The genealogy of this opposition, so pervasive in both Chinese official and popular discourse
today, can be traced to the introduction of theWestern Enlightenment into China at the end of the 19th century,7
although Talal Asad (1993) has attributed the ontological distinction between religion and domains such as
politics and economy to Christian cosmology itself. This binary conceptual structure, predicated on each
categorys mutual exclusiveness, cannot account for the veritable explosion of religious, kinship, and ritual activity
and organizations (hitherto labeled feudal [fengjian]) that has accompanied economic development in the 1980s
and 90s (Yang 1994b, 2000). Local funds from the market economy have enabled lineages to reassemble their
memberships, restore or build ancestor halls, revive ancient ancestor sacrificial ceremonies, and redraft their
genealogies. Deity temples to countless gods and goddesses dot the countryside and enliven community life with
their temple festivals and operas, while Daoist and Buddhist temples and monasteries vie with each other for ritual
authority, donations, and membership.

Thus, a native noncapitalist logic of ritual economy made use of capitalist forms for self-renewal. The theoretical
significance of this astonishing history, so impressively documented by Helen Codere (1950), seems thus far to have
eluded most anthropologists, although Marshall Sahlins (1994) uses it to illustrate the natives point of view in
capitalism. No anthropologist to my knowledge has seen in it a principle in opposition to capitalism.

Western Critiques of Political Economy
The dominant tendency of Western critiques of capitalist economy in the past three decades has been to focus on
a sobering picture of the consolidation of Western capitalism, its penetration to the farthest corners of the
globe, and its destruction and conversion of local economies. In the world-systems theory of the 1970s and 80s,
capitalism is portrayed as quickly and effectively integrating regional and imperial economies into the capitalist
world system, and Marxist class analysis is applied to whole nation-states in a scenario of global class struggle
between core and semiperiphery and against the exploited periphery (Wallerstein 1979).11 For others, the second
half of the 20th century is marked by the rise of multinational corporations which break out of the limitations of the
nation-state and directly induct foreign labor forces ranging across the globe (Miyoshi 1993). The thesis of flexible
accumulation argues that capitalism has entered a new historical stage since the 1960s, one marked by its deeper
penetration in the world and the greater intensification and global integration of production as new technologies of
communication and transport produce time-space compression (Harvey 1989). In this new capitalist regime, the


Page | 43
global economy achieves a new competitive edge by abandoning hierarchical, capital-intensive bureaucratic
enterprises for flexible smaller subcontracting firms.

In all this thinking there is a Eurocentric assumption that the Midas touch of capitalism immediately destroys local
indigenous economies and cultures or transforms them into a standardized form involving private accumulation,
rational-legal principles, individual maximization, and Western cultural domination. Older forms are seen to present
no challenge to the all-encompassing and overriding logic of capitalism, whose development is predetermined.
Rather than assume that capitalist forces arrive everywhere like conquering victorious armies,
I will suggest here that capitalism can be altered, subverted, or appropriated by, made to accommodate to, and even
itself absorb preexisting socioeconomic forms.

For Baudrillard, this failure to achieve a radical break from capitalist epistemology means that Marxism liberates
workers from the bourgeoisie but not from the view that the basic value of their being lies in their labor and
productivity. Historical materialism is thus unable to grasp the profound difference between societies based on
symbolic circulation and societies based on ownership and exchange of labor and commodities. Notions of labor and
production do violence to these societies, where the point of life and the structural order are predicated not on
production but on symbolic exchange with humans, spirits, and ancestors.

Baudrillards emphasis on consumption and the radical difference of precapitalist formations owes much to the
earlier work of Georges Bataille. Bataille produced a very different kind of critique of capitalism, one focused not
on production but on consumption. He found that in archaic economies production was subordinated to
nonproductive destruction (1989a:90). The great motive force of these societies was not the compulsion to produce
(which unleashes a process of objectification whereby all forms of life, including humans, become things) but a
desire to escape the order of things and to live for the present moment through exuberant consumption in the form of
excesses of generosity, display, and sacrifice.

Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into the furthering of military- industrial
production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer culture today challenge the basic economic logic
of rational private accumulation as a self-depleting archaic sacrificial economy does. Furthermore, capitalist
consumption is very much an individual consumption rather than one involving the whole community or social
order.

Writing Economic Hybridity
Baudrillard had a similar idea: [The capitalist system] cannot make consumption a true consummation, a festival, a
waste. To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost. . .
Even when coffee stocks burn, when enormous wealth is squandered in war, the system cannot stop having this lead
to a widening reproduction. It is caught in the necessity of producing, accumulating, making a profit. Its assistance
to developing countries is returned in multiple profits (1975:144).

How are we to make sense of rural Wenzhous rapid economic growth and privatization? Is it yet another example
of a successful capitalist modernization which has liberated Wenzhou from the state command economy and helped
realize neoliberalism as Fukuyamas end of history? This would seem to be the conclusion reached by an
American journalist in the New York Times (Rosenthal 1999):

Ever since Deng Xiaoping opened Chinas markets twenty years ago, people in this and other rural towns around the
city of Wenzhou have been transforming themselves from the poorest of farmers into the countrys ultimate
capitalists, with a strong libertarian bent. Renowned for their entrepreneurial skills, Wenzhou business people . . .
have spent the last five years plowing money not only into their private factories and homes but also into roads,
bridges. . . . In the worlds largest Communist country, they have created a free-market paradise.



Page | 44
Liu Yia-ling (1996) argues that the key to Wenzhous economic and social autonomy in defiance of the centralized
state, which has given it the distinctive features of a highly commercial society, lies in the fact that the Wenzhou
area was liberated not by Communist forces from other parts of China but by the local leadership. Local
cadres have played an important role in shielding Wenzhous dynamic grassroots entrepreneurialism from the
ideological rigidities of the central state.

The historical shift from agriculture to rural industrialization has resulted not in a single modal set of capitalist
relations of production but in a diversity of relations of production, ownership forms, and consumption practices: a
kinship and a ritual economy have emerged out of a household market economy, and these have not totally displaced
the state and collective redistributive economy. What is taking shape in Wenzhou today cannot be reduced to either
the triumph or the penetration of capitalism.

Yet, as Sahlins points out, the book does not show how these natives understood the capitalist process in their
own cultural terms and how they integrated or adapted capitalist practices into their own existing structures
(1994:413). Wolfs project of giving them agency in the capitalist process is undermined by the fact that a
major argument of [his] book [is] that most of the societies studied by anthropologists are an outgrowth of the
expansion of Europe and not the pristine precipitates of past evolutionary stages (Wolf 1982:76) and by his
contention that the global processes set in motion by European expansion constitute their history as well (p.
385). Instead of showing how other histories have dealt with and incorporated capitalism, the book focuses on
how other histories have been integrated into capitalist history. In a roundabout way, European history again
becomes the history of other peoples.

In organic hybridization the crossing of two breeds, strains, or varieties of animal or plant species or of two different
species or even genera results in the diversification of organic forms. Hybrids embody certain traits of both parents,
enhancing some and erasing others.
Since hybridization gets at the mutual incorporation of difference internally, it can be a useful metaphor for
understanding certain processes of economic encounters. However, organic hybridization presupposes a smooth
and unproblematic blending of traits and does not encapsulate the contested and agonistic features of the process of
combination.

Perhaps more directly relevant for an anthropology of economic imbrication is Mikhail Bakhtins notion of
linguistic hybridity (1981:358, my emphasis): What is hybridization? It is a mixture of two social languages within
the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic
consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor.
Analyzing 19th-century English comic novels, he shows that the novel is a complex hybrid language composed
of different voices, styles, and tones of speech and forms of utterance (e.g., pompous ceremonial speech, everyday
dialogues, the authorial voice) which express different social and ideological standpoints. This shifting from one
voice or standpoint to another, often within a single sentence, illustrates languages fundamental ability to be
simultaneously the same but different (Young 1995:20).

Life itself, wrote van Gennep, means to separate and to reunite, to change form
and condition, to die and to be reborn. These changes can occur smoothly and meaningfully
as part of a larger, embracing, and reassuring pattern only by means of
their orchestration as rites of passage.
Catherine Bell, Ritual Perspectives

Hardt and Negri argue that, under globalization, national sovereignty is no longer the locus of power; power
is situated in an amorphous web of economic and political relations outside of any state - what they call Empire.


Page | 45
Thus, in a perverse way, the logic of globalization does not so much distinguish between First and Third World
sovereignty, but subsumes and debilitates both of them, though perhaps not equally, in the service of a new world
economic order.
Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law.
Antony Anghie, Reviewed by Mark Kleyna.


Louise Revell
powerful forces with an interest in all aspects of daily life.


ritual futures
& options
making the case for
pan Africanism

Ritual Futures & Options: Amma Birago

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with the help of the international community - opening up intellectual space in Africa, so that Africans themselves can come

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