Richard Werbner
Biographic Data
| ID | 85673 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Werbner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Werbner |
| SIGNATURE | WERBNER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3493-6742 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 69 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 619 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1964 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Charisma
This chapter gives a critical review of foundational arguments in sociology by Max Weber, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Edward Shils, and Michel Foucault, and in anthropology by Clifford Geertz. This establishes the theoretical basis for a comparative analysis of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cases. It examines charisma in religious movements and ritual practices, cult figures, and processes of ethical renewal and self-fashioning. Charismatic leadership is …
Constitutional Ambiguities and the British Administration of Royal Careers Among the Bemba of Zambia
Anthropology after Gluckman
Adultery Redefined
Adultery judgments in customary courts in Botswana reflect changing everyday practices and normative understandings both with regard to marriage and broader ideas of gender equality. These changed perceptions parallel a worldwide shift in the legal understanding of adultery from being a crime to a civil offense and then, more recently, a non offense. Social change movements and judicial reforms responsive to both regional and international gender…
A case of inheritance
Botswana's customary courts were known in the past for their procedural openness to debate. The presiding judge allowed members of the court, usually in ascending order of seniority, to express their views on the case, before finally reaching a judgement. Most scholars of Tswana society, from Schapera onwards, agree that the chief's final judgement was responsive to public opinion as expressed during a hearing. It was this public debate that argu…
A Case of Insult
Legal anthropologists have been latecomers in the debate surrounding law and emotion, a movement responding to the notion that the law is ‘imbued with emotion’. As in the US and Europe, in Botswana cases of public insults are emotionally charged, and this is particularly so in witchcraft insult hearings. Akin to hate crimes, these insults threaten public peace, kinship amity, and decency. Members of a customary court mobilize an elaborate moral l…
Divorce as Process, Botswana Style
This article aims to unravel the complex negotiations surrounding property settlements and custody in cases of divorce in customary courts in Botswana today in the light of an earlier legacy of penalising divorce initiators. It argues that women’s attempts to get their husbands to initiate divorce proceedings can entangle women in lengthy negotiations and ultimately frustrate the aim of achieving a divorce. Repeated court hearings can last for ye…
Grassroots Ecumenism in Conflict - Introduction
This Special Issue of JSAS explores the little-recognised, shifting importance of grassroots ecumenism in religious experience and public life.1 The cases that we present come from across southern
Botswana's Ecumenical Funerals in the Making
This study of grassroots ecumenism in Botswana focuses on the funerals in which much interdenominational co-operation and religious rapprochement prevails, even against troubling dissent. Because this accomplishment is relatively exceptional not only in southern Africa but in the continent as a whole, its special history, in a post-colonial shift towards religious tolerance, is examined along with its more enduring socio-cultural basis. The accou…
Elizabeth Colson (1917-2016)
The poetics of wisdom divination
This article makes a critical contribution to interpretive anthropology by recovering its interest in the moral imagination, while linking this to the poetics of wisdom divination, primarily among Tswapong of Botswana and more widely across a vast part of Southern Africa. This mode of divination appeals to imaginative moral reflection and ethical deliberation along with practical wisdom in the quest for well-being. The esoteric oral literature in…
Trust and moral passion, poetics and practical criticism
Response to Hau Book Symposium on Werbner, Richard. 2015. Divination's grasp: African encounters with the almost said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Divination's Grasp
Honorable Mention, 2016 Elliott P. Skinner Award
Divination's Grasp
Preface Introduction Part I. Socio-linguistics and poetics 1. Deep Dialogue with Evans-Pritchard 2. In Praise of the Moral Imagination 3. Acrobatic Stylistics, Agonistic Vision Part II. From Tablet Archive to Wisdom Seances 4. Poetics and Archives 5. Family Seances: Rhetoric, Deliberations and Decisions 6. Cosmic and Personal Understandings: Diviners, Headmen, Strangers Part III. From Hooved Archive to Charismatic Seances 7. A Charismatic Diviner…
A Memorial from a Sparring Partner
‘His sparring partner and friend’ – writing this in a fond, evocative, and very insightful memorial for Terence Ranger, the historian John McCracken told a truth about my relationship with Terry. H
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
First published in 1986, Maria Mies’s progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today. Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonization and 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. Mies's theory of capitalist pat…
The opposite of Evans-Pritchard
Relics and Refugees
Culture, rhetoric and the vicissitudes of life – Edited by Michael Carrithers
Holy Hustlers, Schism, and ProphecyApostolic Reformation in Botswana
This book examines the charismatic Christian reformation presently underway in Botswana's time of AIDS and the moral crisis that divides the church between the elders and the young, apostolic faith healers. It focuses on Eloyi, an Apostolic faith-healing church in Botswana's capital. It shows how charismatic “prophets”—holy hustlers—diagnose, hustle, and shock patients during violent and destructive exorcisms. The book also shows how these healer…
The Charismatic Dividual and the Sacred Self
The notion of 'a break with the past' foregrounds the individual as the new person reborn in Christian churches. Against that, across southern Africa Apostolic churches still face moral and metaphysical predicaments of the person being individual and, alternatively, dividual. The dividual is here taken to be someone who is composite or partible and permeated by others' emotions and shared substances, including body dirt or sexual and other fluids…
Human rights and moral knowledge
Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation
The build-up of inter-ethnic trust, partnerships and alliances by minority elites is a remarkable accomplishment, in the face of majoritarian fears of 'the takeover' and 'the hidden agenda' -the popular imagining of an ethnic conspiracy consciously directed by the few against the many. This article examines that inter-ethnic accomplishment and the entrepreneurship of nationally prominent Kalanga elites. Mainly former top civil servants turned ent…
Challenging Minorities, Difference and Tribal Citizenship in Botswana
Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa
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Postcolonial Identities in Africa
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
First published in 1986, Maria Mies’s progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today. Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonization and 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. Mies's theory of capitalist pat…
The Manchester School in South-Central Africa
In the decade after World War II, a major, coordinated project of urban and rural research, perhaps the first of its kind in Africa, was carried out by anthropologists working in what was then British Central Africa, now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi (63, 69). Led by Max Gluckman, the anthropologists broke new ground, empirically and theoretically. Their fresh data were about the observed social practice of specific, recognizable individuals; even…
Holy Hustlers, Schism, and ProphecyApostolic Reformation in Botswana
This book examines the charismatic Christian reformation presently underway in Botswana's time of AIDS and the moral crisis that divides the church between the elders and the young, apostolic faith healers. It focuses on Eloyi, an Apostolic faith-healing church in Botswana's capital. It shows how charismatic “prophets”—holy hustlers—diagnose, hustle, and shock patients during violent and destructive exorcisms. The book also shows how these healer…
Memory and the Postcolony
Anthropological Studies of Religion
In this important, scholarly and wide-ranging text, Brian Morris provides a lucid outline of the nature of the explanations of religious phenomena offered by such great thinkers as Hegel, Marx, and Weber. In doing so he also unravels the many theoretical strategies in the study of religion that have been developed and explored by later anthropologists. Besides discussing the classical authors and the debates surrounding their work, Morris present…
The Superabundance of Understanding
Anthropological studies of divination have given much attention to decision making at seances and the allocation of blame for specific complaints or misfortunes. Less attention has been paid to the various courses of communication which people pursue at distinct kinds of seance. This article analyzes the use which Kalanga of Botswana make of stylized rhetoric in one kind of seance, the domestic seances where all the congregation are kin or neighb…
Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey
The Charismatic Dividual and the Sacred Self
The notion of 'a break with the past' foregrounds the individual as the new person reborn in Christian churches. Against that, across southern Africa Apostolic churches still face moral and metaphysical predicaments of the person being individual and, alternatively, dividual. The dividual is here taken to be someone who is composite or partible and permeated by others' emotions and shared substances, including body dirt or sexual and other fluids…
Challenging Minorities, Difference and Tribal Citizenship in Botswana
Symbols and Sentiments
Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation
The build-up of inter-ethnic trust, partnerships and alliances by minority elites is a remarkable accomplishment, in the face of majoritarian fears of 'the takeover' and 'the hidden agenda' -the popular imagining of an ethnic conspiracy consciously directed by the few against the many. This article examines that inter-ethnic accomplishment and the entrepreneurship of nationally prominent Kalanga elites. Mainly former top civil servants turned ent…
Tears of the Dead
Totemism' in History
The monolithic view of culture is inadequate for understanding the transformations which take place when strangers with heterogeneous sociocultural origins meet. Problems of the plurality of codes, of switching between alternatives, and the recoding of inequality and differentiation require special conceptualisation. Drawing on the careers of a series of personal security cults, including the External Boghar cult with its extension beyond Talelan…
Anthropology after Gluckman
Local Adaptation and the Transformation of an Imperial Concession in North-Eastern Botswana
Opening ParagraphThe main subject of this paper is the way in which patterns of settlement and modes of working and holding land are transformed and adapted to diverse political and economic relations. The changes discussed occurred in adjustment, under British Imperial rule, between a large-scale, commercial landlord-initially a mining and trading company-and local rulers and residents in the area of the landlord's monopoly in north-eastern Bots…
Federal Administration, Rank, and Civil Strife among Bemba Royals and Nobles
Opening ParagraphIn the latter half of the nineteenth century, a change came about in the hereditary régime of the Bemba kingdom during civil strife between members of the kingdom's royal and noble strata. The rulers of the kingdom, who shared in the Central African trade of slaves and ivory for guns and calico, fought to defend their positions and to meet the competition from opponents who could enter into new relations of power. Past conception…
The poetics of wisdom divination
This article makes a critical contribution to interpretive anthropology by recovering its interest in the moral imagination, while linking this to the poetics of wisdom divination, primarily among Tswapong of Botswana and more widely across a vast part of Southern Africa. This mode of divination appeals to imaginative moral reflection and ethical deliberation along with practical wisdom in the quest for well-being. The esoteric oral literature in…
The suffering body
This article raises key questions about ritual as Christian allegory and bodily practice in history. In colonial and postcolonial ritual, around which moments of the Christian drama of self‐sacrifice, cosmic martyrdom, redemption and resurrection have African Christians physically embodied their personal and collective identities, their felt individuality or their intimate sense of self? How has Christian passion met moral sensibility in colonial…
Grassroots Ecumenism in Conflict - Introduction
This Special Issue of JSAS explores the little-recognised, shifting importance of grassroots ecumenism in religious experience and public life.1 The cases that we present come from across southern
Divorce as Process, Botswana Style
This article aims to unravel the complex negotiations surrounding property settlements and custody in cases of divorce in customary courts in Botswana today in the light of an earlier legacy of penalising divorce initiators. It argues that women’s attempts to get their husbands to initiate divorce proceedings can entangle women in lengthy negotiations and ultimately frustrate the aim of achieving a divorce. Repeated court hearings can last for ye…
Botswana's Ecumenical Funerals in the Making
This study of grassroots ecumenism in Botswana focuses on the funerals in which much interdenominational co-operation and religious rapprochement prevails, even against troubling dissent. Because this accomplishment is relatively exceptional not only in southern Africa but in the continent as a whole, its special history, in a post-colonial shift towards religious tolerance, is examined along with its more enduring socio-cultural basis. The accou…
Bwiti in Reflection
In a series of essays culminating in a powerful ethnography of the religion of Bwiti among the Fang of Gabon, James Fernandez has advancd a model of ritual, its sequencing and its tropes (1974; 1977; 1982; 1984; 1986). I want to take up his argument by seeing how it applies to movement and the unfolding of body imagery in the all-night vigil of Bwiti and, particularly, in its ascetic ordeal. The all-night vigil follows three movements or sequence…
World Renewal
The Analysis of Social Change
Atonement Ritual and Guardian-Spirit Possession among Kalanga
Opening ParagraphFor Kalanga of Southern Rhodesia hereditary guardian spirits known as mazenge are a sanction on correct relations among kinsmen and affines. Only women are possessed by these captious guardian spirits; and I shall refer to such spirit-possessed women as mazenge hosts. Kalanga perform a ritual of atonement seasonally and whenever the illness of the host or of any of her kinsfolk, particularly children, is attributed to the afflict…
African Background
Federal Administration, Rank, and Civil Strife among Bemba Royals and Nobles
Opening ParagraphIn the latter half of the nineteenth century, a change came about in the hereditary régime of the Bemba kingdom during civil strife between members of the kingdom's royal and noble strata. The rulers of the kingdom, who shared in the Central African trade of slaves and ivory for guns and calico, fought to defend their positions and to meet the competition from opponents who could enter into new relations of power. Past conception…
The Analysis of Social Change
The Customary Laws of Succession in Central Africa. By Narana Coissoró. [Doctoral thesis, University of London, 1962.] Lisbon
The Customary Laws of Succession in Central Africa. By Narana Coissoró. [Doctoral thesis, University of London, 1962.] Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1966. (Estudos de Ciências Políticas e Sociais, 78.) Pp. li, 412, bibl. 60 escudos. - Volume 41 Issue 2
Symbolic Dialogue and Personal Transactions among the Kalanga and Ndembu
Local Adaptation and the Transformation of an Imperial Concession in North-Eastern Botswana
Opening ParagraphThe main subject of this paper is the way in which patterns of settlement and modes of working and holding land are transformed and adapted to diverse political and economic relations. The changes discussed occurred in adjustment, under British Imperial rule, between a large-scale, commercial landlord-initially a mining and trading company-and local rulers and residents in the area of the landlord's monopoly in north-eastern Bots…
The Superabundance of Understanding
Anthropological studies of divination have given much attention to decision making at seances and the allocation of blame for specific complaints or misfortunes. Less attention has been paid to the various courses of communication which people pursue at distinct kinds of seance. This article analyzes the use which Kalanga of Botswana make of stylized rhetoric in one kind of seance, the domestic seances where all the congregation are kin or neighb…
Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law
There is a familiar stereotype overrunning much of the anthropological literature on political and economic development in new nations. Brokers and big men have captured the stage, and their chains and alliances, their manipulations and calculations, their political games as men in the middle of centre-periphery relations have loomed larger than life in the literature. Indeed, it has come to be almost a matter of faith in certain studies of new A…
The argument in and about oratory
Symbols and Sentiments
Totemism' in History
The monolithic view of culture is inadequate for understanding the transformations which take place when strangers with heterogeneous sociocultural origins meet. Problems of the plurality of codes, of switching between alternatives, and the recoding of inequality and differentiation require special conceptualisation. Drawing on the careers of a series of personal security cults, including the External Boghar cult with its extension beyond Talelan…
The Quasi-Judicial and the Experience of the Absurd
The introduction of a quasi-judicial agency into a new nation in Africa brings with it many of the predicaments, dilemmas and contradictions that keep such agencies busy in Western countries. The power struggles, the encroachment on the rights of citizens, the problems of indeterminacy, apparent arbitrariness and uncertainty, all call to mind Western parallels, or rather, prototypes (cf. Handelman and Leyton 1978; Wraith and Hutcheson 1973; Bell …
The Hidden Hippopotamus
Land Reform in the Making
World Renewal
The Manchester School in South-Central Africa
In the decade after World War II, a major, coordinated project of urban and rural research, perhaps the first of its kind in Africa, was carried out by anthropologists working in what was then British Central Africa, now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi (63, 69). Led by Max Gluckman, the anthropologists broke new ground, empirically and theoretically. Their fresh data were about the observed social practice of specific, recognizable individuals; even…
Bwiti
Settlement in Botswana
Land Reform in the Making
Land Reform in the Making
Sacrifice in Africa
Anthropological Studies of Religion
In this important, scholarly and wide-ranging text, Brian Morris provides a lucid outline of the nature of the explanations of religious phenomena offered by such great thinkers as Hegel, Marx, and Weber. In doing so he also unravels the many theoretical strategies in the study of religion that have been developed and explored by later anthropologists. Besides discussing the classical authors and the debates surrounding their work, Morris present…
Epilogue
Wyatt MacGaffey's paper shows that in looking upon Kongo min'kisi the European gaze turned the subjective phenomena into inert objects, at most of interest in the relations between a subject and the objects. The actual dynamics of min'kisi, the subject to subject relations fundamental for BaKongo themselves, were largely irrelevant for the misrecognition of min 'kisi as art or ethnographic curiosities. It was simply upon the basis of their own mo…
Dual Classification Reconsidered
Sociology (48 works) · Political science (31 works) · History (24 works) · Law (24 works) · African history and culture studies (21 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · History (17 works) · Art (16 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works)