Bøker utgitt av Langaa RPCID

Yves R. Simon (1903-1961), one of the greatest contemporary philosophers, gives a modern formulation for many classical philosophical concepts such as authority, the common good, and natural law. These topics have received extensive attention from scholars. Simon also discusses the nature of human virtue, moral and intellectual, but this topic has been less studied until now. The idea of virtue, and in our case virtue in political life, runs through Simon's works. Through a close study of Simon's works and the relevant secondary literature, this book explores Simon's definition of virtue in order to highlight its originality, and show how he weaves the need for it into the fabric of three facets of political life, namely, the common good, the virtue of the ruler and the ruled, and the law. These ideas are important for the ruler-ship of any country and especially of developing nations which are populated by sit-tight dictators. Philosophy can be dry and abstract, yet in this case we deal with one of its more practical manifestations.

The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another is a collection of essays on the work of Pamela Reynolds. The essays take cues from Reynolds' decades-long contributions to the field of anthropology in different ways. The authors weave Reynolds' groundbreaking scholarship on the anthropology of childhood--of labour, of family, of resistance, justice, war and suffering--through the terms of their own work, in places and contexts that may at first appear quite distant from the villages of Zimbabwe and townships of South Africa that feature in Reynolds' ethnographies. The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another is about anthropologists stretching in thought and practice toward one another, between generations, toward the people encountered in the field, through worlds entered and past, and how, in turn, these worlds lean into our own. At the core of each essay is a question about how we learn, how we pass lessons on, how we assume the mantle of anthropology for understanding the contemporary world--something that often requires folding intellectual friendships into the tools of our practice. The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another demonstrates how a master anthropologist has come to shape the priorities of others, in terms that are both creative and aware.Contributors: Thomas Cousins, Stefanos Geroulanos, Todd Meyers, Pamela Reynolds, Fiona Ross, and Vaibhav Saria; and a Foreword by Francis B. Nyamnjoh

One of the fundamental challenges in deconstructing, rethinking and remaking the world from a Pan African vantage point is that some captives have tended to delight in the warmth of the [imperial] predator's mouth. In other words, some captives forget that the imperial predator's mouth gets warm because empire is eating and heating up from prey on the continent. (De-)Militarisation, Transnational Land Grabs and Restitution in an Age of the New Scramble for Africa: A Pan African Socio-Legal Perspective is a book that knocks on key aspects relating to land, militarisation, a PostAfrican World Order and a chaotic Post-God World Order, which require critical scholarly and policy attention in the quest to free Africa from centuries-old imperial depredations. The book carefully navigates the imperial entrapments which are designed to focus African attention only on decolonising African minds without also engaging in the [imperially more unsettling] decolonisation of African materialities.

Given the circularity of the witchcraft complex in Africa, given its performative potential, isn't the flood of anthropological publications on the topic counter-productive insofar as it feeds what it pretends to analyse, and even stigmatize? Wouldn't the social scientists be well advised not to emulate the media and the Evangelical preachers and to avoid bestowing on Africa the dubious privilege of being no more than a shadow theatre devoid of substance on the stage of which everything - power, work, production, economy, the family - would actually be played in the occult? In this publication, eight scholars - namely: Jean-Pierre Warnier, Didier Péclard, Julien Bonhomme, Patrice Yengo, Jane Guyer, Joseph Tonda, Francis Nyamnjoh and Peter Geschiere - engage in a lively and contradictory debate on witchcraft/sorcery in Africa in a controversial historical context.

Through poetry and fiction that engage the reader's heart and mind, Loretta Burns explores the beauties, perils, and mysteries of day to day life. With a graceful simplicity of style and an often intimate voice, she represents a range of experiences and observations that include stories and memories of childhood, encounters with nature and music, and poignant reminders of America's racial history. With delicate craftsmanship and an ear attuned to the eloquence of everyday language, she moves from quiet contemplation to youthful exuberance and from love to the pain of loss with sensitivity and understanding. Implicit throughout is a resilient affirmation of the fractured joy of being human.

Perpetual Search is a nerve-numbing piece of poetry that challenges all humans. The odes here want everybody to ask themselves who they think they are. So, too, it explores human nature based on both sides of the coin of the exemplification of human comportment. It is the pursuit aimed at interrogating some human behaviours and practices that are sometimes taken for granted despite having indelible impacts on people's lives. It is about the quest for aptness, communitas, love, happiness, power, wealth, life without questioning how they are attained. It raises questions that seem to be simple but are in fact difficult. The quest for human desire based on the search for a better life and for perfection is at the heart of this collection.

Through multiple points of resistance, The Repressed Expressed underscores how hard it is to build a community in any nation with no beneficial qualities of hope and transparency. This informative collection of essays highlights that wherever stability and order are lacking, the universal appeal is to express that which is suppressed. Also, like a map or guidebook, The Repressed Expressed indicates how people in such geographical prisons strive to transform their agitation into spiritual and political pathways, free of pain and hurt from, and anger towards a dirty and corrupted world. It thus, underpins discord and brings to the fore the authority's penchant for heaping abuse upon those caused to live in fear. In short, The Repressed Expressed is an impressive compilation of literary evidence informing scholarship on opinions and beliefs relating to repression, its expression, and the immeasurable associated cost.

The volume draws from René Devisch’s encounters with groups in southsaharan Africa, primarily. The author had the privilege to immerse himself, around the clock, in the Yakaphones’ activities and thoughts in southwest DR Congo from 1972 to 1974, and intermittently in Kinshasa’s shanty towns, from 1986 to 2003. The author first examines what sparked his choice to come to Congo, and then to pursue research among the Yakaphones in the borderland with Angola. He then invites us to follow the trajectory of his plural anthropological view on today’s multicentric world. It leads us to his praise for honorary doctor Jean-Marc Ela’s work. He then examines the proletarian outbursts of violence that rocked Congo’s major cities in 1991 and 1993. These can be read as a settling of scores with the disillusioning colonial and missionary modernisation, along with president Mobutu’s millenarian Popular Movement of the Revolution. Furthermore, after considering the morose reduction of a major Yaka dancing mask into a mere museum-bound curio in Antwerp, the book unravels the Yakaphones’ perspectives on spirits and sorcery’s threat. It also analyses their commitment to classical Bantu-African healing cults, along with their parallel consulting physicians and healers. By sharing the Yakaphones’ life-world, the analysis highlights their body-group-world weave, interlaced by the principle of co-resonance. A phenomenological and perspectivist look unfolds the local actors’ views, thereby disclosing the Bantu-African genius and setting for a major reversal of perspectives. Indeed, seeing 'here' from 'there' allows the author to uncover some alienating dynamics at work in his native Belgian Flemish-speaking culture. To better grasp the realm of life beyond the speakable and factual reasoning, the approach occasionally turns to the later Lacan’s focus on the unconscious desire, the body and its affects. The book addresses students and researchers in the humanities and, more broadly, all those immersed in the heat of the encounter with the culturally different.

In the village of Fakulum, a very special child is born - Njemucharr - in a time when the white man's grip on Africa hasn't quite loosened. Groomed and nurtured in typical African fashion by the entire village, Njemucharr aspires to bring change. With like-minded friends, he undertakes the task of trying to thwart the sell-outs of the nation and implement his vision of a truly independent country.

In this collection, Doh straddles the Atlantic with voices that doubt, question, and lament the black predicament; voices that evoke the wisdom of Africa's cultural values in a manner reminiscent of the continent's orality. Like the echoing of the talking drums in the forests and the savannahs, these voices acknowledge the challenges and vexing truths of the hour: the plight of a people that have been buffeted repeatedly by waves of invasion, deceit, and betrayals, yet against which onslaught they remain standing, frighteningly tall in dignity and integrity.

This project come out from our need to harness voices in Africa and Latin America, giving these voices an opportunity to converse, argue, synthesize, agree, and share ideas on the craft of writing, on life, on being and on thinking for the benefit of all. It was also an opportunity to create literary friendships and contacts between these two great regions. Generally, Latin America and Africa still have a lot of stories to share among themselves and with the rest of the world. There are still very strong untapped storytelling traditions in these continents. The stories in this volume are selected from an amazing range of entries to a call for contributions to an anthology on experimentation. It is hoped this robust selection will serve a wide variety of tastes in both Spanish and English, and that the book will open dialogue and the sharing of ideas between the two regions and the whole world. This is an invaluable contribution on many fronts.

This book questions the politicisation/depoliticisation of women's and feminists' organisations in the context of globalization, and introduces new directions for feminist epistemology. It explores some African pathways, in particular those of South Africa and Senegal. Extending beyond the notions of neoliberalism and "gender digital divide", the author is searching, through the ICT use of those organisations, the inhibiting factors or the genesis of political action, and particularly the mechanisms of institutionalisation. Palmieri shows that the impact of ICT and gender inequality combine to worsen and accelerate social hierarchies and may paradoxically create spaces where non-dominated gendered knowledge emerges. She dissociates domination and power. Contemporary societies, strongly foot-printed by digital connection, are mixing the coloniality of power and patriarchy, and this dual system of domination can produce epistemic creation.

The Mbos are a large ethnic group in present day Cameroon and were an important and powerful group until the Anglo-French partition. Following the defeat of the colonial power, Germany, in the First World War, the League of Nations in a March 1916 Mandate, partitioned the territory into two unequal halves among the victorious imperial powers of England and France, to be governed in trust as from 1922. As a result of the partition, the Mbos, who happened to find themselves right along the lines of division, were thrust under French and English administrations. Roughly two thirds of the Mbos found themselves in what had then become French (East) Cameroon, while the remaining one third was placed under British (West) Cameroon rule. Today the Mbos, as a whole, occupy parts of the Littoral and Western (Francophone) and Southwest (Anglophone) regions of Cameroon. While the Francophone Mbos have, over the decades, benefited from all aspects of economic, social, political, and agricultural development, the Anglophone Mbos have been isolated and deprived of all the outward and physical - tangible - aspects of socio-economic and political progress. The persistence of such colonial divisions makes for inequality among the Mbos, despite their common ancestry, ethnicity and cultural heritage. This book seeks to update diverse aspects of the study conducted on the British Mbos by J.W.C. Rutherford and others as a first step toward a comprehensive publication on the Anglophone Mbos.