REVIEWER MEETS REVIEWED

SEMINAR SERIES AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM’S CENTRE FOR ANTHROPOLOGY

The Pot-King

When: Thursday, February 11th 2010 at 10am (tea and coffee from 9:30)

Where: Centre for Anthropology, British Museum

The British Museum’s Centre for Anthropology, in collaboration with the Royal Anthropological Institute, will be continuing its series of encounters between authors and their reviewers with a seminar discussion between Prof Jean-Pierre Warnier, author of The Pot-King: The Body and Technologies of Power, and Prof Richard Fardon, who reviewed the work for JRAI.

The King of Mankon, in the western highlands of Cameroon, is an agricultural engineer by training, a businessman, and a prominent politician on the national stage. He partakes in the “return of the kings” in the forefront of an African public space.

This book analyses the principles of the sacred kingship which lie at the core of the king’s different roles. While showing that the king’s body acts as a container of bodily substances transformed into unifying ancestral life-essence by appropriate means, and bestowed upon its subjects, it develops an innovative approach to bodily and material cultures as an essential component of the technologies of power. In doing so, it departs significantly from previous approaches to sacred kingship.

This is a free event.

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