{"title":"Rene Devisch","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"body-and-affect-in-the-intercultural-encounter-book-rene-devisch-9789956764013","title":"Body and Affect in the Intercultural Encounter","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe volume draws from RenE 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51630531215633,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51630532395281,"sku":"NGR9789956764013","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9956764019.jpg?v=1751097142"},{"product_id":"postcolonial-turn-re-imagining-anthropology-and-africa-book-rene-devisch-9789956726653","title":"The Postcolonial Turn. Re-Imagining Anthropology and Africa","description":"This innovative book is a forward-looking reflection on mental decolonisation and the postcolonial turn in Africanist scholarship. As a whole, it provides five decennia-long lucid and empathetic research involvements by seasoned scholars who came to live, in local people's own ways, significant daily events experienced by communities, professional networks and local experts in various African contexts. The book covers materials drawn from Botswana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania. Themes include the Whelan Research Academy, rap musicians, political leaders, wise men and women, healers, Sacred Spirit churches, diviners, bards and weavers who are deemed proficient in the classical African geometrical knowledge. As a tribute to late Archie Mafeje who showed real commitment to decolonise social sciences from western-centred modernist development theories, commentators of his work pinpoint how these theories sought to dismiss the active role played by African people in their quest for self-emancipation. One of the central questions addressed by the book concerns the role of an anthropologist and this issue is debated against the background of the academic lecture delivered by Rene Devisch when receiving an honorary doctoral degree at the University of Kinshasa. The lecture triggered critical but constructive comments from such seasoned experts as Valentin Mudimbe and Wim van Binsbergen. They excoriate anthropological knowledge on account that the anthropologist, notwithstanding his or her social and cognitive empathy and intense communication with the host community, too often fails to also question her own world and intellectual habitus from the standpoint of her hosts. Leading anthropologists carry further into great depth the bifocal anthropological endeavour focussing on local people's re-imagining and re-connecting the local and global. The book is of interest to a wide readership in the humanities, social sciences, philosophy and the history of the African continent and its relation with the North.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52598350348561,"sku":"NLS9789956726653","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52764084437265,"sku":"NIN9789956726653","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9789956726653.jpg?v=1761075933"},{"product_id":"weaving-the-threads-of-life-book-rene-devisch-9780226143620","title":"Weaving the Threads of Life","description":"For the Yaka of Southwestem Zaire, infertility is a tear in the fabric of life, and the Khita fertility ritual is a trusted way of re-weaving the damaged strands. Here, Devisch offers an extended analysis of the Khita cult and an account of the workings of ritual healing.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52765809475857,"sku":"NGR9780226143620","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53117488267537,"sku":"CIN0226143627G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780226143620.jpg?v=1770544519"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-rene-devisch.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}