Divination's Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said

Richard Werbner takes readers on a journey though contemporary charismatic wisdom divination in southern Africa. Beginning with the silent language of the divinatory lots, Werbner deciphers the everyday, metaphorical, and poetic language that is used to reveal their meaning. Through Werbner's skillful interpretations of the language of divination, a picture of Tswapong moral imagination is revealed. Concerns about dignity and personal illumination, witchcraft, pollution, the anger of dead ancestors, as well as the nature of life, truth, cosmic harmony, being, and becoming emerge in this charged African setting.

History

Werbner, Richard

Africa

Indiana University Press

Richard Werbner takes readers on a journey though contemporary charismatic wisdom divination in southern Africa. Beginning with the silent language of the divinatory lots, Werbner deciphers the everyday, metaphorical, and poetic language that is used to reveal their meaning. Through Werbner's skillful interpretations of the language of divination, a picture of Tswapong moral imagination is revealed. Concerns about dignity and personal illumination, witchcraft, pollution, the anger of dead ancestors, as well as the nature of life, truth, cosmic harmony, being, and becoming emerge in this charged African setting.

Are self-interested elites the curse of liberal democracy in Africa? Is there hope against the politics of the belly, kleptocracies, vampire states, failed states, and Afro-pessimism? In Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana, Richard Werbner examines a rare breed of powerful political elites who are not tyrants, torturers, or thieves. Werbner’s focus is on the Kalanga, a minority ethnic group that has served Botswana in business and government since independence. Kalanga elites have expanded public services, advocated causes for the public good, founded organizations to build the public sphere and civil society, and forged partnerships and alliances with other ethnic groups in Botswana. Gathering evidence from presidential commissions, land tribunals, landmark court cases, and his lifetime relationship with key Kalanga elites, Werbner shows how a critical press, cosmopolitanism, entrepreneurship, accountability, and the values of patriarchy and elderhood make for an open society with strong, capable government. Werbner’s work provides a refreshing alternative to those who envision no future for Africa beyond persistent agony and lack of development.

Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana: The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites (African Systems of Thought)

This book examines the charismatic Christian reformation presently underway in Botswana’s time of AIDS and the moral crisis that divides the church between the elders and the young, apostolic faith healers. Richard Werbner focuses on Eloyi, an Apostolic faith-healing church in Botswana’s capital. Werbner shows how charismatic prophets”holy hustlersdiagnose, hustle, and shock patients during violent and destructive exorcisms. He also shows how these healers enter into prayer and meditation and take on their patients’ pain and how their ecstatic devotions create an aesthetic in which beauty beckons God. Werbner challenges theoretical assumptions about mimesis and empathy, the power of the word, and personhood. With its accompanying DVD, Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy integrates textual and filmed ethnography and provides a fresh perspective on ritual performance and the cinematic.

Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana (The Anthropology of Christianity)

Religion & Spirituality

University of California Press

This book examines the charismatic Christian reformation presently underway in Botswana’s time of AIDS and the moral crisis that divides the church between the elders and the young, apostolic faith healers. Richard Werbner focuses on Eloyi, an Apostolic faith-healing church in Botswana’s capital. Werbner shows how charismatic “prophets”―holy hustlers―diagnose, hustle, and shock patients during violent and destructive exorcisms. He also shows how these healers enter into prayer and meditation and take on their patients’ pain and how their ecstatic devotions create an aesthetic in which beauty beckons God. Werbner challenges theoretical assumptions about mimesis and empathy, the power of the word, and personhood. With its accompanying DVD, Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy integrates textual and filmed ethnography and provides a fresh perspective on ritual performance and the cinematic.

Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana (Volume 11) (The Anthropology of Christianity)

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family (International African Library)

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Edinburgh U.P

African Customary Justice (Cultural Diversity and Law)

This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. 
Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state’s present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. 
The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision making.

Werbner, Pnina

Routledge

Placing the Manchester School at the vanguard of modern social anthropology, this book reveals the cosmopolitan distinctiveness of the intimate circle around Max Gluckman. Such distinctiveness, Richard Werbner argues, was driven by creative difference, travelling theories and innovative, interdisciplinary approaches. The expansion of social anthropology as a dynamic, open discipline became the hallmark of the Manchester School.The remarkable careers and legacies of the Manchester School anthropologists are shown for the first time through inter-linked social biography and intellectual history, to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Werbner reveals that members of the circle engaged in deep dialogue, enduring friendships, and creative collaboration. The re-discovery of the complexity of their engagement and their lasting impact illuminates the exploration of the frontiers between ethnography, the sociology of knowledge, and the anthropology of colonial to postcolonial change.

Anthropology after Gluckman: The Manchester School, colonial and postcolonial transformations

Manchester University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Werbner, Richard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Werbner, Richard

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Werbner, Richard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Divination's Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said

Divination's Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said

Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana: The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites (African Systems of Thought)

Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana: The Public Anthropology of Kalanga Elites (African Systems of Thought)

Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana (The Anthropology of Christianity)

Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana (Volume 11) (The Anthropology of Christianity)

Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family (International African Library)

African Customary Justice (Cultural Diversity and Law)

African Customary Justice (Cultural Diversity and Law)

Anthropology after Gluckman: The Manchester School, colonial and postcolonial transformations