Suchergebnisse

Book reviewed in this article:Development and Change: Africana Collecta: Beiträge zum Studium von Politik, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft afrikanischer Länder. (Studies on Politics, Social Institutions, and Economics of African Countries.) DIETER OBERNDÖRFER, edDevelopment and Change: Einheimische Genossenschaften in Afrika: Formen wirtschaftlicher Zusammenarbeit bei westafrikanischen Stämmen. (Indigenous Cooperatives in Africa: Types of Economic Cooperation among West African Tribes.) DIETER H. SEIBEL and MICHAEL KOLL

Book reviewed in this article: La vie quotidienne au royaume de Kongo du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle. Georges Balandier. L'Ombre des fétiches: société el culture Yombe. Albert Doutreloux.

This record contains an introduction to the Laman KiKongo Collection, and supplemental materials. ; This collection is an archival treasure of about 10,000 handwritten pages that records the life of people in the Lower Congo early in the 20th century. Congolese teachers wrote the notebooks in response to questions prepared by Karl Laman, missionary ethnographer linguist with the Swedish Covenant Church from 1898 until 1917. The notebooks cover the history of the region where the teachers worked (see map) and its peoples; their livelihoods, food preparation and domestic housing; social organization, political structures, religious beliefs and prominent rituals; language arts, music, dance, visual and material culture. Some of the authors depart from the questions to offer creative independent narratives on topics of their interest. Throughout the decade in which he developed his lexicon for the dictionary, Laman corresponded with scholars about his work and extended his questionnaire with the teachers and discussed with them the nature of their findings. The collection represents a veritable encyclopedia on Kongo culture in the Kikongo language by Kongo authors.

This study examines the legitimation of power and knowledge in the struggle of public health and health care agencies in the Lower Congo region of the Democratic Republic of Congo to vanquish chronic tropical diseases. Of particular interest is the creation of alternative institutions following the collapse of state sponsored structures and supply lines in the 1980s and 1990s, and the process by which such alternative structures are legitimized. A review of legitimation theory suggests that new paradigms are required to assess the nature and efficacy of diverse non-state institutions within a fluid global neo-liberal context. The paper argues that these new or newly adapted post-state institutional arrangements, born in the crisis of state failure, may be effective in the lessening of the disease burden that weighs on the region to the extent that they are able to muster the legitimacy of the populace, the professions, the national society, and the wider international community. I thus hope to shed light on the paradox of persistent tropical diseases - e. g., malaria, sleeping sickness, and schistosomiasis, as well as seasonal grippe, typhoid fever, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS - as endemic or seasonal scourges, despite their being understood by local specialists, with known treatments and public health measures to control them.