Manjaco Rulers After a Revolution

Bibliographic Data

ID2590422
AuthorsEric Gable (corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume73
Issue1
Pages88-112
Publication date2003-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrica (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9720 • E-ISSN: 1750-0184
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.3366/afr.2003.73.1.88
OpenAlexW2108427191
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited26

This article juxtaposes a series of vignettes that feature the attitudes of the Manjaco of post-revolutionary Guinea-Bissau to traditional rulers with a similar series of vignettes E. E. Evans-Pritchard used to paint a portrait of Azande attitudes towards aristocrats. It poses the question: if what Evans-Prichard wrote about the Azande reflects the desires and preoccupations of a typical colonialist anthropology, what might the way we write about Manjaco reveal about postcolonialist anthropology as it is currently being constructed? Evans-Pritchard drew a sharp distinction between the idealised 'before' and the all too unpleasantly real 'after' of the colonial encounter. In the Azande version of this dichotomy authority is ultimately intact and unquestioned on one side of the historic divide. On the other side authority is about to disappear, with colonialism's impositions being the catalyst of this disappearance. By contrast, Manjaco were more likely to revile than revere their kings, and they tended to treat this as an enduring fact rather than to historicise it. Manjaco were also bad subjects and citizens. Or so it has seemed to colonial administrators and revolutionaries. Are we to frame this pervasive cynicism about authority and order as a kind of degeneration-an extension of colonial-era malaise into the era of the postcolony? Or are we to take Manjaco attitudes at face value? The article suggests that, in posing such questions, an emerging postcolonialist anthropology is inevitably a reflection of our view of the capacity of people like the Manjaco to make society work in the postcolonial era

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Cynicism · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law

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