1,721,038 research outputs found
The polysemy of visual representations : the Mangbetu of the Congo between colonialism and ethnography
No full textThe author looks at the images - drawings, movements and still images - made by the Mangbetu people (Democratic Republic of Congo) during the colonial period. The question is: what can be done with these images if their creators were so compromised by the colonial oppression of African peoples? Can these images still say something about Mangbetu? The author criticizes many postmodern deconstructionists who have rejected the value of photographs and film reels on the basis of the racist and colonialist mood of their creators, proposing a univocal interpretation. Images of the Mangbetu are polysemic and are received differently according to different contexts, from the offices of colonial administrators to contemporary anthropologists
Culture e congiunture : saggi di etnografia e storia mangbetu
No full textConquerors, fine artists and ferocious cannibals from the skull artificially deformed. This is the image of the Mangbetu of northeastern Congo that emerges from accounts of travelers and explorers ventured into the center of Africa between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ethno-anthropological and historical research of recent decades have helped to raise awareness of the Mangbetu groups beyond the imaginations of them popular in Europe and the United States. In this volume, the author gives some results of his ethnographic research conducted in the region, without neglecting the interest in the construction and reconstruction of imaginary scenarios in the colonial period between the two world wars
Pigmei, europei e altri selvaggi
No full textExamples of exoticism and symbols of primitive men for many, the Pigmies came into contact with Europeans in the nineteenth century. They were observed and ‘measured’ by scientists, exhibited in theatres and zoos together with apes. During the twentieth century, however, anthropologists began to study their world against Western prejudices: certain elements of the aesthetic reflection of the Pigmies, for example, is no less refined than that of Michelangelo, and their art of the division of prey excels in complexity. For Stefano Allovio, reflecting on the marginality of the Pigmies also meant reflecting on the marginality of anthropologists within intellectual communities where resistance to the many different possible approaches to ‘scientific activity’ remains strong. Just as the Pigmies deserve better recognition, anthropologists too – much more like the Pigmies than one would imagine – are entitled to request greater acknowledgment by the academies and halls of learning. Acting on the frontiers, peripheries and in the margins between cultures, the natural habitat of anthropology, does not mean being condemned to insignificance and marginality: culture feeds off interdependence and, far from being the inheritance of a few, is much more universally distributed and divided than one might think
Etnografie e patrimoni che scombinano
No full textOne of the most important tasks of anthropology is to destabilize. Many concepts ascertained in our culture change and become less stable after passing through very different ethnographic contexts. The article shows how anthropologists, who are called upon to investigate the cultural heritage thought as such by specific institutions, can continue to destabilize the conceptual universes. In this context, it is important to take a critical look, reflect on the different conceptualizations of "heritage" and ultimately reflect on the destabilizing force of some applications for the international recognition of new "World Heritage"
Le performance culturali e la storia : trasformazioni delle feste delle primizie nell'Africa sub-sahariana
No full textRifugiati congolesi in Sudafrica: fra mutuo aiuto e rivendicazioni identitarie
Full text linkAt the end of the last century, post-apartheid South Africa opens up to the world and international
law on political asylum. At the same time, Mobutu’s Zaire collapses. This historical conjuncture
is at the origin of a major migration flow of Congolese to southern Africa that has
marked the last decades. The essay focuses on the community of Congolese in Cape Town
showing their great creativity in establishing mutual aid associations. Some of these associations
are geared toward imagining and achieving, at least in the diaspora, that unity of the
Congo that remains a utopia in the homeland
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