by Simon Simonse, Foreword by Mark Anspach
The long-awaited, revised, and illustrated edition of Simon Simonse’s study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan marks 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 the enemy. Kings of Disasterproposes an elegant and powerful solution to the vexed problem of regicide.
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