The book's blurb:

VICARIOUS REFLECTIONS
African explorations in empirically-grounded intercultural philosophy

‘VICARIOUS REFLECTIONS – representations that cannot stand on their own but that are in them-selves the secondary representations of the primary referent; or the thoughts that are not thought on one’s own account, but on behalf of somebody else, or at the latter’s instigation. This book, with its tautological and Nabokov-, Magritte- or Escher-like circular title, is about the tangle of reference and appropriation linking African knowledges, the representation of such knowl-edges by non-Africans, the adoption of North Atlantic knowledges by Africans, and the ways in which all such representations can be more or less faithful to the original, can claim greater or lesser integrity and authenticity, and truth, and can become dominated by, or liberated from, the power games that have informed global South-North interactions for the past half millennium. It is a book no anthropologist and no philosopher would ever conceive on the strength of their respective disciplinary competences. It could only have emerged from the no-man’s-land, the uninhabitable ‘inter’, which is where interculturality now roams instead of the buffalo, and where an anthropologist turned would-be philosopher finds himself to be exiled to, especially if at heart he has remained a poet and mystic at least as much as he has become a scientist.’ (Introduction)

The indispensable, exciting and lavishly illustrated sequel to the author’s Intercultural Encoun-ters: African and anthropological lessons towards a philosophy of interculturality (2003). This book leans on dozens of short empirical essays from comparative ethnography, comparative mythology, and long-range linguistics; on many field-work photos and distribution maps; and a bibliography of over 2000 titles. It brings together discussions of virtuality, globalisation, reli-gious anthropology, spirituality, hegemony (illustrated from the study of evil, divination, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, and Islamic terrorism), Afrocentricity, African Christian intellectuals, African knowledge systems, and wisdom. It restores empirical methods (especially anthropological field-work) and social-science theory to the heart of intercultural knowledge production. If offers incisive analyses of the work of Mudimbe, Sandra Harding, Derrida, Guattari, Hebga, Kearney, Devisch, Geschiere, Schoffeleers, Van der Geest – and Aristotle. Van Binsbergen’s vicarious, counter-hegemonic approach challenges the usual North-Atlantic thinking down upon Africa. His is a passionate plea to restore an empirical, empathic and dialogical orientation to the heart of intercontinental studies. In transcultural encounter, nothing has proved so pernicious as the shift, away from time-honoured anthropol-ogy (sophisticated theory, method, prolonged field-work, humble linguistic and cultural learning, seeking criticism from both locals and peers), and towards facile and complacent reliance on introspection, North Atlantic common-sense categories, linguae francae, furtive data collection, and the Internet. Ironically, such a shift has often been justified in the name of post-modernism, yet the qualified celebration of major postmodern philosophers is the backbone of this book.


WIM VAN BINSBERGEN (*1947 ) was a leading anthropologist of African religion when in 1998 he acceded to the chair of Founda-tions of Intercultural Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He has shown himself a prolific and innovative writer (and editor, e.g. of Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy, since 2002) on South-North knowledge formation, its pitfalls and potentials. He has continued his fieldwork, writing and teaching on, and in, Africa, while increasingly diversifying towards Africa’s transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory, Asia, comparative mythology, and the Mediterranean Bronze Age. He formally retired in 2012; this book is his philosophical and Africanist testament. Married to a secular sangoma diviner-healer turned voice- and breathing therapist, and father of five, he is a published poet, a qualified and practising sangoma himself, and a life Honor-ary Fellow of the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands

the book's Envoy (p. 648)
for references, see the book's cumulative bibliography

When in the Spring of 2015 I started on the editing of this book, it was out of dissatisfaction. The definitive book on my life-long Nkoya research (‘Our Drums Are Always On My Mind’, in press (a)) only required some tedious updating for which I lacked the inspiration, and my ongoing ‘Sunda’ empirical research on ‘Rethinking Africa’s transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory’, recently enriched by a spell of field-work on the Bamileke Plateau, Cameroon, had reached a break-through. The models of transcontinental interaction which I had hitherto applied, had turned out to need more rethinking than I had bargained for, and the prospects of bringing out the Nkoya or the Sunda book by the end of the year were thwarted. I thought to remedy this unpleasant situation by quickly compiling a book of my many articles on intercultural philosophy. Most of these had already been published and therefore could be expected to be in an accomplished state of textual editing. But I had totally misjudged, both the amount of work involved (given my current standards of perfection), and the centrality this new project was to occupy within the entire scope of my intellectual production. Only gradually did I come to realise what I was really doing: writing my philosophical and Africanist testament, by bringing to bear, upon the original arguments conceived for a philosophical audience, the full extent of my comparative empirical research over the last two decades. In this way, what emerged was increasingly a coherent statement on empirically-grounded intercultural philosophy, greatly inspired and intellectually equipped by my philosophical adventure around the Rotterdam chair of Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy, yet revisiting and reviving the methods and theories of my original training, research and teaching as an anthropologist. The book has thus become a passionate if vicarious dialogue with African and European philosophers and anthropologists on the possibility and the requirements of valid transcontinental intercultural knowledge. It brings out my life-long conviction that anthropological participant observation, humbly, receptively and patiently living the life of the host community, learning its language and culture, remains the most effective and convincing method for such knowledge construction.

Both anthropology and philosophy are in the first place text production. Writing constitutes the decisive act of research (van Binsbergen 2014c: 62). It amounts to the invention of a language, whose concepts and syntactically underpinned relationships are at the heart of the scholarly endeavour. Of the unexpectedly excessive amount of time gone into the production of this book, two months full-time were spent on compiling (with all editorial implications) the two indexes with which it is now to conclude. They sum up, more comprehensively and conspicuously than the 650 preceding pages, the language that I have developed and wish to share at the end of my career. These indexes constitute the ultimate empirical grounding of the many things I have to say. Dozens of short descriptive essays (‘text blocks’), and a very full bibliography, provide new and convincing underpinning of the flow of philosophical, theoretical and ethnographic argument as rendered in detail in the indexes. Although occasionally I could not help touching on the piquant institutional and personal details of my intellectual adventures since 1995, this book is not about the settling of old accounts, but about the emergence of a truly comprehensive, interdisciplinary, global and counter-hegemonic vision of the world – as viewed from its historical heart and origin, Africa.

Text blocks with mainly empirical essays

A distinctive feature of my Intercultural Philosophy has always been that it is to be empirically grounded in accordance with intersubjective methods of social and natural science. In fact, after my initial enthusiasm for Intercultural Philosophy in the mid-1990s, over the past decade I have increasingly allowed myself to be drawn, at the expense of the immediate production of more Intercultural Philosophy, into further empirical investigation of Africa's transcontinental continuities in pre- and protohistory, and of the truth claims of African knowledge systems. Bringing together, in the present book, a substantial part of my philosophical work over the decades, I needed to be able to draw directly on this empirical grounding. Numerous text blocks offer this opportunity. They are incorporated in the book's chapters, and will be encountered when scrolling through the pdfs with the hyperlinks listed in the column to the right. Meanwhile they may deserve to be made avaiiable in their own right, and for that purpose the list below is copied from the book's Table of Contents, and furnished with hyperlinks directly to the text block in question (per pdf opened by hyperlink, scroll on if under that hyperlink multiple titles are subsumed ).

please note: as a background to all these text blocks, below, you will need to refer to the book's cumulative bibliography

whereas the continuous chapter texts as uploaded onto this website are identical to the book text as printed (only the watermark has been added to the web version in order to put a stop to pirate printing), so far time has lacked to fully update the excerpts of which the text blocks below consist; when in doubt the reader is referred to the continuous chapter pdfs themselves

A. THE FUNDAMENTAL UNITY OF HUMANKIND ....8

B. THE THEONYM NYAMBI ....18

BB. A GLOBAL ETYMOLOGY: THE COMPLEX ‘EARTH / BOTTOM / HUMAN’ ....25

C. MAKING ETHNOGRAPHIC CLAIMS THE EASY WAY – BUT SPURIOUSLY ....38

D. CHURCHES IN FRANCISTOWN, BOTSWANA ....101

E. GEOMANTIC DIVINATION AS A WELL-DEFINED FORMAL SYSTEM, WITH A VERY WIDE DISTRIBUTION IN SPACE AND TIME ....107

F. SPONTANEOUS ORDER AND INSTANT JUSTICE AROUND A LUSAKA BUS STATION, ZAMBIA ....140

G. THE POST-COLONIAL WITCHFINDER TETANGIMBO IN WESTERN ZAMBIA ....148

H. RIJK VAN DIJK ON YOUNG MALAWIAN PURITANS ....157

I. WHY SHOULD NKOYA MUSICAL EXPRESSIONS BE DOMINANT IN WESTERN ZAMBIA? ....159

J. THE NKOYA KAZANGA FESTIVAL: CULTURAL DISPLAY IMPLIES VIRTUALISATION ....165

J.J. LOVE THY INFORMANTS ....176

J.J.J. THE MYTHICAL BEING GRBAN IN THE LIGHT OF COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY ....195

K. SPIRITUALITY AMONG THE ZAMBIAN NKOYA ....277

KK. CULTURAL IMPACT OF 18-19TH-C. CE SWAHILI TRADERS AMONG THE NKOYA ....277

L. MODERN ASTROLOGY AS DETERRITORIALISED IN GUATTARI’S SENSE? ....327

M. EGYPTOCENTRIC AFROCENTRISM AS PROBLEM AND AS SOLUTION ....372

N. FROM PARTICIPANT OBSERVER TO PARTICIPANT TOUT COURT: A EUROPEAN’S PATH THROUGH AFRICAN RELIGION ....428

O. GLIMPSES OF LE COMBAT SPIRITUEL IN PRESENT-DAY CONGO (AFTER JULIE NDAYA) ....433

P. COMBAT IN COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY: NOTE TO THE FOLLOWING TABLE ....456

Q. THE COELACANTH: KNOWN TO AFRICANS, UNKNOWN TO NORTH ATLANTIC SCIENCE ....523

R. THE IMMENSELY ALIENATING MYTH OF THE HUMAN BODY AS BASICALLY AN INDUSTRIAL PRODUCT ....535

S. THE MYTH OF THE FUNDAMENTAL CLOSEDNESS OF THE HUMAN PERSON ....535

T. THE MYTH (…) OF THE EXCLUDED THIRD AND OF LOGICAL CONSISTENCY ....536

U. THE MYTH OF ‘MYTH’ AS UNTRUTH ....536

V. THE HUMAN BODY IN AFRICAN TRADITIONAL WISDOM ....548

W. CONFLICT REGULATION IN AFRICAN TRADITIONAL WISDOM ....549

W.W. THE AFRICAN SENSE OF COMMUNITY: SELF-EVIDENT INPUT OR PRECARIOUS PRODUCT? ....550

X. THE ACCESSIBLE INDIVIDUAL MIND IN AFRICAN TRADITIONAL WISDOM ....551

Y. MYTHOLOGY IN AFRICAN TRADITIONAL WISDOM ....555

Z. WHY MYTHEMES MAY PERSIST OVER MANY MILLENNIA ....555