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 moral judgements that some scholars imputed to BaKongo a forced distinction between min 'kisi as 'spirits' and as 'objects'. The logic which Europeans thus applied to their knowledge of min'kisi was an egalitarian commodity logic by which things reproduce things and even persons. By contrast, BaKongo applied a different logic. The reproduction of the self among them was through the invoking of other persons, not things, and importantly, within a spiritual hierarchy of being. Nevertheless, for BaKongo, too, adapting min'kisi to change, especially change in the very nature of personal agency, meant a reduction in the elaborateness of min 'kisi composition and also, to some extent, a reduction in their

Agency (philosophy · Political science · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights

• Shembeism and the Rainbow Nation

  Dallas L Browne•Ufahamu A Journal of African…•2005

  Incluir item

• Dialogical subjectivities for hard times

  Open Access•P Werbner•African Identities•2009

  Incluir item

• Tools for relatedness

  Open Access•Lorenzo Ferrarini•American Anthropologist•2025

  Incluir item

• Interpretive Social Science

  Paul Rabinow, William M Sullivan•Interpretive Social Science•1979

  Incluir item

• The Problem of Historical Consciousness

  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans‐georg Gadamer et al.•Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal•1975

  Incluir item

• Religion and Society

  A R Radcliffe‐brown, A R Radcliffe-Brown•The Journal of the Royal…•1945

  Incluir item