A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

Gorgeous example of bwami bwa kifebwe art - male elder mask with a powerful sorcerer's crest and pre-carnivalization coloring. Studied by Hersek "in the field" near Kikomo, now owned by a private collecting fuck from Venice Beach You don't have to be very familiar with the Northern Italian roots of microhistory (in the work of Ginzburg, Levi, Poni, Grendi, et al.) as a methodological approach to be aware of its products - classics like The Cheese and the Worms , The Return of Martin Guerre , and The Great Cat Massacre are still v popular both in and out of the classroom - or understand its dissatisfaction with Annales school longue durée analysis + grand narrative (Muir's " gigantification of historical scale ")...but it does help with blog posts! Channeling Marcia’s Freudposting on this one. Zooming In The microhistorical approach raises questions about selectivity and significance. By what criteria are names to be picked out and how representative of ...

  The young king Kwet aPe of the Kuba, seen here with ANTI-GOD CHARMS fashioned for him by a travelling Nsappa Sap (Songye) sorcerer to break the GOD DOOM CURSE on his dynasty.  From Vansina's Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in the Rural Congo, 1880-1960 Interested parties (my brother and my roommate) have informed me that the passing reference to Africanist philosopher Thaddeus Metz in the previous part of this readalong was " out of place " and delivered with " a shockingly pretentious off-handedness ." This was fantastic news for my future as a loser with an rpg blog, so I've decided to follow up the win by employing the most annoying method possible to explain what I meant by relational personhood and the Basongye - an extended book excerpt :  "There are two ways to be part of or party to a communal relationship, either as a subject or an object. Being a subject involves identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them oneself. A ...

I sometimes hang around worldbuilder spaces (I know, I know) focused specifically on magic and a thing that I've seen come up a fair amount is the question of classification. You're probably pretty familiar with the sort of topics discussed if you're looking at this, but an interesting variation that I stumbled across recently was a good-natured debate concerning the dominance of what we could annoyingly call something like ~neo-western paradigms~ when folks try to set up more structured magical systems. There's definitely merit to at least broadened forms of this point, so I thought that providing a guided tour through an ""out there"" example of a real-world system for classifying magical practice might make for some good clean edifying fun. I apologize in advance for the bad photos, I typically prefer to use PDF screenshots but this book hasn't been digitized yet and hunching over a desk with an old phone creates utilitarian results at best.  ...