Koen Stroeken
Biographic Data
| ID | 517270 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Koen Stroeken |
| GIVEN NAMES | Koen |
| FAMILY NAME | Stroeken |
| SIGNATURE | STROEKEN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ghent University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3409-444X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
A Tale of Two Tutors: Swahili-Speaking Robot Tutoring After Classroom Math Lessons in Tanzanian Primary Schools
This study explores the potential and integration of a Swahili-speaking social robot as a mathematics tutor in Tanzanian primary schools. Leveraging the GPT-3.5 Large Language Model (LLM) and a NAO social robot, the research investigates the feasibility and effectiveness of using state-of-the-art technologies to support mathematics education in a low-resource setting. Because classroom lessons in such contexts often provide limited opportunities …
A questionable account of ethnographic validity: Sukuma dandies in Katavi, Tanzania
Purpose This study develops a more inclusive and reflective approach to ethnographic analysis, challenging conventional practices that often disregard “failed” experiments and partial insights. By doing so, it aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of ethnographic methodology beyond traditional linear analytic stories. Design/methodology/approach We focus on fieldwork conducted in Katavi, Tanzania. By deliberately embracing uncertaint…
Explaining Support for Democracy in Guyana
Support for democracy is essential for democracy consolidation and to prevent backsliding into autocracy. This paper employs survey data from Guyana to study explanations of support for democracy. It utilizes seven measures, four of which target decidedly diffuse support with two measuring support for non-democratic principles. It finds that although principled support for democracy based on democracy affirming measures is high and tolerance for …
Explaining political cynicism in a non-Western context: The case of Guyana
Rwandan Kingship as a Religious Disciplining Process: A Method for Narrative Historical Proof
What is the historical value of Gakaniisha's collection of twenty tales that cover four centuries of dynastic wars in Rwanda? A method is proposed to reveal a cultural structure in the narration of successive epochs. A unique political model comes to the fore detailing the components of early Rwandan kingship that comprise changes in spirit reciprocity, divination, ritual, autocracy, ethnicity, and nation building. By combining the structuralist …
Chapter Ten: Entropology
This summary of the theory prepares for the final, considerably shorter chapters. It lays down the pieces of the puzzle in an entropology of human connectedness, impact and trust. Cultural, epochal specializations in distrust, futility and disconnection point to three types of entropy and six (structural and cognitive) subtypes. The theory substantiates a longue durée explanation of post-knowledge in relation to the preceding transitions of the N…
Antecedents of Corruption Perception in Guyana
Regardless of its utility as a measure of actual corruption, perceived corruption is related to many political attitudes and other variables which makes it an important phenomenon to understand. This paper explores demographic variables, ideological orientations, socioeconomic status, interpersonal trust, political attitudes and feelings of resentment as explanations for corruption perception with response styles controlled within a structural eq…
A Cultural Tensor: Reply to van Dokkum
Simplex Society: How to Humanize
This open access book provides a framework to understand the current historical moment, long-term trends that led here, and prospects for a humane future
Medicine and Kingship: Endogenous Centralization in East and Central Africa
Despite a vast and recently reinvigorated body of research, a glaring lacuna remains in the literature on African chief- and kingship. Exogenous sociostructural explanations (Vansina) and the universalist concept of sacred kingship (de Heusch) disregard the endogenous regional process of political centralization. This article proposes a corrected structuralism as a method to detect in cultural processes their endogenous basis, or "tensor": a synt…
Introduction: War-Technology Anthropology
Chapter 7. Tio Shrines of the Forest Master
Non-situational functions of demonstrative noun phrases in Lingala (Bantu)
This paper examines the non-situational (i.e., non-exophoric) pragmatic functions of the three adnominal demonstratives, óyo , wâná , and yangó in the Bantu language Lingala. An examination of natural language corpora reveals that, although native-speaker intuitions sanction the use of óyo as an anaphor in demonstrative NPs, this demonstrative is hardly ever used in that role. It also reveals that wâná , which has both situational and discourse-r…
War, Technology, Anthropology
Technologies of the allied warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as remote-controlled drones and night vision goggles, allow the user to “virtualize” human targets. This coincides with increased civilian casualties and a perpetuation of the very insecurity these technologies are meant to combat. This concise volume of research and reflections from different regions across Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, observes how anthropology…
Medicinal Rule
As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings – and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administ…
Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa
As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings - and found them. The resulting misunderstandings last until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine - and not the colonizer's despotic administrator, …
Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa
Ccessible Development: An introduction
This special issue brings together a selection of peer-reviewed studies, some of which were presented in a two-day conference in August 2017 entitled @ccessible development. The conference took place in the rural setting of Mzumbe University at the foot of Tanzania's Uluguru mountains. Over the course of a week the external contributors, including a number of invited international speakers, engaged in academic exchange with a group of young Tanza…
Fine-tuning the usability of a crowdsourced indoor navigation system
This paper describes the development of a crowdsourced indoor navigation system named SoleWay. Because the input of volunteers is crucial, special attention was paid to the usability of the system at different stages throughout its development. Besides a user-friendly system, this has resulted in a number of important insights that can facilitate the development of future systems: the importance social motivation of potential users, integration o…
When a rash has two names: Pesesorcery andkisigospirits at Lake Tanganyika
This explorative and qualitative study, based on 27 interviews during two months of fieldwork, describes pese, an affliction of the skin that has conspicuously stayed under the radar of medico-anthropological research in Kigoma, a rural city in the northwest Tanzania. The condition reminds of a locally better known condition labeled kisigo, raising the question why two concepts of the same affliction exist side by side. It seems indicative that t…
Witchcraft Simplex: Experiences of Globalized Pentecostalism in Central and Northwestern Tanzania
Gluckman’s distinction between simplex and multiplex relationships is applied here to ethnographic data in two locations of Tanzania and one in Congo, spanning a research period of 20 years. The study links the rising success of Pentecostalism in rural areas not only to a globalizing and neoliberal society establishing the sense of bewitchment conducive to such spirituality but also to ongoing struggles over cultural reproduction in the community…
Bestaat het Afrikaanse denken? Bestaat Afrika? Schets voor een publieke discussie
Discussion essayBestaat het Afrikaanse denken?Bestaat Afrika?Schets voor een publieke discussie 1 Thirty years after Said's critique of orientalism, which was closely followed by Mudimbe's deconstruction of Africa as a colonial invention, Africanists have yet to solve their identity problem.Do they form a discipline?Or does each Africanist primarily belong to one discipline (history, anthropology, linguistics, literature and political sciences, a…
Bestaat het Afrikaanse denken? Bestaat Afrika? Schets voor een publieke discussie
Thirty years after Said’s critique of orientalism, which was closely followed by Mudimbe’s deconstruction of Africa as a colonial invention, Africanists have yet to solve their identity problem. Do they form a discipline? Or does each Africanist primarily belong to one discipline (history, anthropology, linguistics, literature and political sciences, and so on) each with its own method and object, each making the scientific claim to universality,…
Measuring Institutional Trust: Evidence from Guyana
Institutional trust is often measured by several items that are analyzed individually or as sum-scores. However, it is difficult to summarize the results of individual-items analyses, whereas sum-scores may be meaningless if the dimensions that the items are assumed to measure are not verified. Although these limitations are circumvented by using factor analysis, response styles may still bias research results. We use data from Guyana to show tha…
The impact of education and globalization on sexual and reproductive health: Retrospective evidence from eastern and southern Africa
The objective of this study is to qualify the relationship between sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and educational attainment in eastern and southern Africa (ESA). We hypothesize that the regional level of globalization is a moderating factor in the relationship between SRH and educational attainment. Using retrospective data from Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, the associations between SRH (eight indicators), educational attainment, an…
Immunizing Strategies: Hip-Hop and Critique in Tanzania
Tanzania has in the last decade seen a vibrant form of hip-hop emerge that is gaining wide public exposure thanks to its political tenor. First, this article illustrates how rap lyrics reflect Tanzanian political history and in part determine it. Bongo Flava, as the local hip-hop genre is called, has gained credibility by reinterpreting Nyerere's normative legacy and by expanding freedom of expression in the country, while unhampered by factors t…
Sensory Shifts and 'Synaesthetics' in Sukuma Healing
Sensorial anthropologies come, broadly speaking, in two forms. The first, multi-sensory approach depicts cultures as specializing in a sensory mode such as tactility (Howes) or kinaesthesia (Geurts) and associates individual cultures with one dominant mode. The second, cross-sensory approach rejects this sensorial essentialization (Ingold) and suggests that cultures differ in their 'perspectives' or, as I suggest, in sensory 'codes'. However, the…
Measuring Institutional Trust: Evidence from Guyana
Institutional trust is often measured by several items that are analyzed individually or as sum-scores. However, it is difficult to summarize the results of individual-items analyses, whereas sum-scores may be meaningless if the dimensions that the items are assumed to measure are not verified. Although these limitations are circumvented by using factor analysis, response styles may still bias research results. We use data from Guyana to show tha…
Nodding syndrome or disease? On the conceptualization of an illness-in-the-making
By only looking at the biomedical significance of this new syndrome, we will miss important aspects of how this illness is being experienced and understood. In our future dealings with NS, we will have to consider and re-conceive the relation between culture and neurobiology
Stalking the stalker: A Chwezi initiation into spirit possession and experiential structure
Among Sukuma (Tanzania) the Chwezi spirit society operates in the shadow of, and in tension with, the lineage cults domesticating the dead. As this ethnography describes, Chwezi candidates are initiated into spirit possession by 'stalking the stalker', that is, by seeking synchrony with intrusion. Recognition of the healing and of the power/resistance in spirit performances once resuscitated anthropology from its crisis of representation, but now…
Simplex Society: How to Humanize
This open access book provides a framework to understand the current historical moment, long-term trends that led here, and prospects for a humane future
Fine-tuning the usability of a crowdsourced indoor navigation system
This paper describes the development of a crowdsourced indoor navigation system named SoleWay. Because the input of volunteers is crucial, special attention was paid to the usability of the system at different stages throughout its development. Besides a user-friendly system, this has resulted in a number of important insights that can facilitate the development of future systems: the importance social motivation of potential users, integration o…
Why 'the world' loves watching football (and 'the Americans' don't)
Medicine and Kingship: Endogenous Centralization in East and Central Africa
Despite a vast and recently reinvigorated body of research, a glaring lacuna remains in the literature on African chief- and kingship. Exogenous sociostructural explanations (Vansina) and the universalist concept of sacred kingship (de Heusch) disregard the endogenous regional process of political centralization. This article proposes a corrected structuralism as a method to detect in cultural processes their endogenous basis, or "tensor": a synt…
Questioning cognitive and interpretive takes on ritual
Is 'nature' the only basis we have for explaining universal patterns in culture, such as religious practices? Cognitive and interpretive approaches seem to agree so in surprisingly Cartesian fashion. This paper proposes cosmologies as a second, 'cultural' type of universality. For an ethnographer affected by the field, culture is not something out there to either 'explain' (Sperber, Lévi-Strauss) or 'interpret' (Geertz, Weber). Culture is to be c…
Antecedents of Corruption Perception in Guyana
Regardless of its utility as a measure of actual corruption, perceived corruption is related to many political attitudes and other variables which makes it an important phenomenon to understand. This paper explores demographic variables, ideological orientations, socioeconomic status, interpersonal trust, political attitudes and feelings of resentment as explanations for corruption perception with response styles controlled within a structural eq…
War, Technology, Anthropology
Technologies of the allied warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as remote-controlled drones and night vision goggles, allow the user to “virtualize” human targets. This coincides with increased civilian casualties and a perpetuation of the very insecurity these technologies are meant to combat. This concise volume of research and reflections from different regions across Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, observes how anthropology…
Health care decisions by Sukuma 'peasant intellectuals: A Case of Radical Empiricism
Health care decisions in Sukuma-speaking rural communities in Tanzania reproduce a practical epistemology that could be described as radically empiricist, rather than just pluralist; their point of reference is the deeper 'relation' between events, which collective traditions articulate and subjects may experience, but which escapes the atomistic perception privileged by biomedicine. This analysis relies on a diverse portfolio of ethnographic dat…
Defying the Gaze: Exodelics for the Bewitched in Sukumaland and Beyond
Why 'the world' loves watching football (and 'the Americans' don't)
Immunizing Strategies: Hip-Hop and Critique in Tanzania
Tanzania has in the last decade seen a vibrant form of hip-hop emerge that is gaining wide public exposure thanks to its political tenor. First, this article illustrates how rap lyrics reflect Tanzanian political history and in part determine it. Bongo Flava, as the local hip-hop genre is called, has gained credibility by reinterpreting Nyerere's normative legacy and by expanding freedom of expression in the country, while unhampered by factors t…
Stalking the stalker: A Chwezi initiation into spirit possession and experiential structure
Among Sukuma (Tanzania) the Chwezi spirit society operates in the shadow of, and in tension with, the lineage cults domesticating the dead. As this ethnography describes, Chwezi candidates are initiated into spirit possession by 'stalking the stalker', that is, by seeking synchrony with intrusion. Recognition of the healing and of the power/resistance in spirit performances once resuscitated anthropology from its crisis of representation, but now…
Believed Belief: Science/Religion versus Sukuma Magic
Typically, magic takes no stance against the socialized beliefs that determine it, in contrast with both science and modern religion, which, in the face of doubt, assert the truth-value of their propositions against such determination. In other words, science and religion engage in 'believed belief'. Their aversion to magical belief is the one thing they can agree on. Believed beliefs produce convictions of truth sufficiently intense to base acti…
Sensory Shifts and 'Synaesthetics' in Sukuma Healing
Sensorial anthropologies come, broadly speaking, in two forms. The first, multi-sensory approach depicts cultures as specializing in a sensory mode such as tactility (Howes) or kinaesthesia (Geurts) and associates individual cultures with one dominant mode. The second, cross-sensory approach rejects this sensorial essentialization (Ingold) and suggests that cultures differ in their 'perspectives' or, as I suggest, in sensory 'codes'. However, the…
Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft
Neither power nor morality but both. Moral power is what Sukuma farmers in Tanzania in times of crisis attribute to an unknown figure they call their witch. A universal process is involved, as much bodily as social, which obstructs the patient’s recovery. Healers turn the table on the witch through rituals showing that the community and the ancestral spirits side with the victim. In contrast to biomedicine, their magic and divination introduce mo…
War, Technology, Anthropology
Technologies of the allied warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as remote-controlled drones and night vision goggles, allow the user to “virtualize” human targets. This coincides with increased civilian casualties and a perpetuation of the very insecurity these technologies are meant to combat. This concise volume of research and reflections from different regions across Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, observes how anthropology…
Analyse structuro-sémantique des parémies zoophytonymiques lubà (L31a)
Analyse structuro-sémantique des parémies zoophytonymiques lubà (L31a)
Questioning cognitive and interpretive takes on ritual
Is 'nature' the only basis we have for explaining universal patterns in culture, such as religious practices? Cognitive and interpretive approaches seem to agree so in surprisingly Cartesian fashion. This paper proposes cosmologies as a second, 'cultural' type of universality. For an ethnographer affected by the field, culture is not something out there to either 'explain' (Sperber, Lévi-Strauss) or 'interpret' (Geertz, Weber). Culture is to be c…
HIV among out-of-school youth in Eastern and Southern Africa: A review
The overall decline of the HIV epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa conceals how the HIV burden has shifted to fall on areas that have been more difficult to reach. This review considers out-of-school youth, a category typically eluding interventions that are school-based. Our review of descriptive studies concentrates on the most affected region, Southern and Eastern Africa, and spans the period between 2000 and 2010. Among the relatively small but in…
Health care decisions by Sukuma 'peasant intellectuals: A Case of Radical Empiricism
Health care decisions in Sukuma-speaking rural communities in Tanzania reproduce a practical epistemology that could be described as radically empiricist, rather than just pluralist; their point of reference is the deeper 'relation' between events, which collective traditions articulate and subjects may experience, but which escapes the atomistic perception privileged by biomedicine. This analysis relies on a diverse portfolio of ethnographic dat…
War at Large: Miner Magic and the Carrion System
Nodding syndrome or disease? On the conceptualization of an illness-in-the-making
By only looking at the biomedical significance of this new syndrome, we will miss important aspects of how this illness is being experienced and understood. In our future dealings with NS, we will have to consider and re-conceive the relation between culture and neurobiology
The impact of education and globalization on sexual and reproductive health: Retrospective evidence from eastern and southern Africa
The objective of this study is to qualify the relationship between sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and educational attainment in eastern and southern Africa (ESA). We hypothesize that the regional level of globalization is a moderating factor in the relationship between SRH and educational attainment. Using retrospective data from Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, the associations between SRH (eight indicators), educational attainment, an…
Bestaat het Afrikaanse denken? Bestaat Afrika? Schets voor een publieke discussie
Discussion essayBestaat het Afrikaanse denken?Bestaat Afrika?Schets voor een publieke discussie 1 Thirty years after Said's critique of orientalism, which was closely followed by Mudimbe's deconstruction of Africa as a colonial invention, Africanists have yet to solve their identity problem.Do they form a discipline?Or does each Africanist primarily belong to one discipline (history, anthropology, linguistics, literature and political sciences, a…
Bestaat het Afrikaanse denken? Bestaat Afrika? Schets voor een publieke discussie
Thirty years after Said’s critique of orientalism, which was closely followed by Mudimbe’s deconstruction of Africa as a colonial invention, Africanists have yet to solve their identity problem. Do they form a discipline? Or does each Africanist primarily belong to one discipline (history, anthropology, linguistics, literature and political sciences, and so on) each with its own method and object, each making the scientific claim to universality,…
Measuring Institutional Trust: Evidence from Guyana
Institutional trust is often measured by several items that are analyzed individually or as sum-scores. However, it is difficult to summarize the results of individual-items analyses, whereas sum-scores may be meaningless if the dimensions that the items are assumed to measure are not verified. Although these limitations are circumvented by using factor analysis, response styles may still bias research results. We use data from Guyana to show tha…
Witchcraft Simplex: Experiences of Globalized Pentecostalism in Central and Northwestern Tanzania
Gluckman’s distinction between simplex and multiplex relationships is applied here to ethnographic data in two locations of Tanzania and one in Congo, spanning a research period of 20 years. The study links the rising success of Pentecostalism in rural areas not only to a globalizing and neoliberal society establishing the sense of bewitchment conducive to such spirituality but also to ongoing struggles over cultural reproduction in the community…
Medicinal Rule
As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings – and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administ…
Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa
As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings - and found them. The resulting misunderstandings last until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine - and not the colonizer's despotic administrator, …
Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa
Ccessible Development: An introduction
This special issue brings together a selection of peer-reviewed studies, some of which were presented in a two-day conference in August 2017 entitled @ccessible development. The conference took place in the rural setting of Mzumbe University at the foot of Tanzania's Uluguru mountains. Over the course of a week the external contributors, including a number of invited international speakers, engaged in academic exchange with a group of young Tanza…
Fine-tuning the usability of a crowdsourced indoor navigation system
This paper describes the development of a crowdsourced indoor navigation system named SoleWay. Because the input of volunteers is crucial, special attention was paid to the usability of the system at different stages throughout its development. Besides a user-friendly system, this has resulted in a number of important insights that can facilitate the development of future systems: the importance social motivation of potential users, integration o…
Sociology (25 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Anthropology (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · History (8 works) · Law (8 works)