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89 devotes the next chapter. Shorter chapters on rites of reconciliation (bindokila) and the limitations of human action constitute the real conclusion of the work, although there is another short (and unsatisfactory) chapter on totems and a final poem on the nationalist theme, "Africa my country, awake, turn again to our ancestors." The rich detail in Fukiau's accounts of rituals undoubtedly make this the most valuable contribution to our knowledge of Kongo religion since Van Wing's Etudes Bakongo : Religion et Magie ( 1938) . In addition, the book provides a key to a general understanding of the religion such as ethnographers have never been able to find, their resolute empiricism having concealed from them the formal system of abstractions that Fukiau reveals. This is nevertheless a difficult book to use. The author is not at all scrupulous about confounding personal interpretations with traditional wisdom; at the beginning of the book, in particular, the reader is asked to accept a mixture of fanciful etymology and dubious history ambiguously derived from published and unpublished versions of tradition. Fukiau has read much of the existing ethnography in French, and occasionally reveals his debt to the anthropologist John M. Janzen, who
Journal of Asian and African Studies (in 2002 continued as African and Asian Studies) – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1973
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