Description:

Abstract
In the aftermath of the colonial conquests of the late nineteenth century, European intellectuals developed social scientific concepts that compared political and religious institutions across time and place. “Divine kingship,” one such concept, signified a premodern political institution that unified religious and secular power in the body of a man who ensured the productivity of land and the welfare of people. This lecture employs the genealogy of the divine kingship concept, in particular as applied to one such “divine king,” the Chitimukulu of Northern Zambia, as a way to explore African struggles over sovereignty and western intellectual engagements with them. The use of the concept of divine kingship by historians and anthropologists of southern and central Africa – including Godfrey and Monica Wilson, Audrey Richards, Luc de Heusch, and Jan Vansina, among others – helped to construct spatial and temporal models of sovereignty in the context of struggles over the nature of sovereignty itself. The lecture shows how the concept of divine kingship has ordered understandings of southern and central African political and religious history. Its deconstruction allows for a radical revision of this history, even as divine kings continue to be reconstructed through present-day traditional ceremonies.

Short Bio
David M Gordon, Associate Professor, Bowdoin College, received his B.A. from the University of Cape Town, South Africa and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His research reflects wide-ranging interests in the last two centuries of southern and central African history, including Atlantic and Indian Ocean trading networks, British and Belgian colonialism, environmental cultures, contested sovereignties, the historical imagination, and spiritual agency. His most recent book is a history of how spiritual beliefs have influenced human agency, entitled Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History (Ohio University Press, 2012). He has also edited a collection with Shepard Krech entitled Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America (Ohio University Press, 2012). His first book, a history of changing tenure rules and forms of wealth from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial periods in the borderlands of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nachituti’s Gift: Economy, Society and Environment in Central Africa, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and was a finalist for the Herskovits Award for the best book in all disciplines of African Studies. He has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, including the Journal for African History, Journal of Southern African Studies, William and Mary Quarterly, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.