Kings of Disaster, livre ebook

This is the long awaited, revised and illustrated edition of Kings of Disaster, the study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan that is in many ways a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victim role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster thus proposes an uninvolved solution to the vexed problem of regicide.

PART I: The Problem and the Setting

PART II: Dualism: Generating Consensus from the Suspense of War

PART III: Centralism: The King as Aggressor of the People

PART IV: The Scapegoat King: The People as Aggressor of their King