Catastrophe And Creation: The Transformation Of An African Culture (studies In Anthropology And History)

First Published in 1992. This is a study of what happened to Kongo society and culture at the turn of the 20th century, when the area was penetrated, brutally violated and colonized by Europeans. This book is the outcome of a project called Society and Culture in Crisis whereby the author found that evolution was a continuous, more or less unbroken process only at the global system level, whereas repeated rises and falls took place at the local level. This study closely looks at the declining development process in the Lower Congo and calls to the effects of colonization on society and culture.

The discussion combines a structural analysis of social and cultural logic that stretches from the self to the global system in order to grasp, as precisely as possible, the nature of social transformation. It is demonstrated that much of what is today considered to be "traditional" Congolese culture is a historical product of global relations. Phenomena that have usually been accepted as fixed cultural structuresthe kinship system, sacrificial sacred kingship, fetishism, witchcraft and cannibalismare shown instead to be historical products of a turbulent transition.
This powerful study examines the transition from the precolonial to the colonial order in the Lower Congo region in the Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

An historical anthropological study of Congolese society in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It focuses on the transition from a pre-colonial to a colonial order. The approach is "global" and seeks to understand social and cultural transformations as historical products of global relations.