scholarly journals De Traditionele Hofhouding Bij de bin Kanyok van Zaire

Afrika Focus ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 21-63
Author(s):  
Patrick Wymeersch

The Traditional Royal Court Among the bin Kanyok of Zaire This description represents what was more or less an ideal conception of political organization and kingship before the colonial period. If the traditional systems of ruling still remain, the material symbolism of kingship disappeared mostly in the scene of daily life in the king’s large capital. Looking at the political organization, two seemingly contradictory features emerge. On the one hand, there are the politically quasi-independent lineages living in the villages. The chief or eldest of a lineage is at the same time chief of the whole village. On the other hand, there is the formal political organization, build on a hierarchical model and imposed from the top. This political system is notable for its very high degree of centralization, and especially for the strong authority and power of the divine king. For the purpose of government, the kingdom is divided into sub-districts, containing several villages of an area, districts and provinces. They all depend, in hierarchy,from the capital. The capital accommodates most of the members of the royal family, numerous wives and children from the king and the ministers. The king’s compound, standing in the middle of the capital, is surrounded by a fence. This compound is divided into four specific parts and contains several houses and the palace of the king. On both sides of the royal compound, there is a main street where the ministers and their families live. The king’s person is surrounded by a number of taboos. No one could see him eat in his private kitchen. The principal problem in the political organization is that of the administering the rest of the Kanyok empire, of keeping as a political unit a population divided into autonomous lineages. The model that is followed is, in general, typical of the kingdoms of the southern savanna belt of Zaire. Therefore the structure is pyramidal: the king at the apex delegates his power and authority to the governors. Their position duplicates that of the king, but on a smaller scale. The king is assisted by his ministers to whom he assigned highly specific functions. The king still remains the main focus for all the Bin Kanyok.

Afrika Focus ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Wymeersch

This description represents what was more or less an ideal conception of political organization and kingship before the colonial period. If the traditional systems of ruling still remain, the material symbolism of kingship disappeared mostly in the scene of daily life in the king's large capital. cLooking at the political organization, two seemingly contradictory features emerge. On the one hand, there are the politically quasi-independent lineages living in the villages. The chief or eldest of a lineage is at the same time chief of the whole village. On the other hand, there is the formal political organization, build on a hierarchical model and imposed from the top. This political system is notable for its very high degree of centralization, and especially for the strong authority and power of the divine king. For the purpose of government, the kingdom is divided into sub-districts, containing several villages of an area, districts and provinces. They all depend, in hierarchy,from the capital. The capital accommodates most of the members of the royal family, numerous wives and children from the king and the ministers. The king's compound, standing in the middle of the capital, is surrounded by afence. This compound is divided into four specific parts and contains several houses and the palace of the king. On both sides of the royal compound, there is a main street where the ministers and theirfamilies live.The king's person is surrounded by a number of taboos. No one could see him eat in his private kitchen.The principal problem in the political organization is that of the administering the rest of the Kanyok empire, of keeping as a political unit a population divided into autonomous lineages. The model that is followed is, in general, typical of the kingdoms of the southern savanna belt of Zaire. Therefore the structure is pyramidal: the king at the apex delegates his power and authority to the governors. Their position duplicates that of the king, but on a smaller scale. The king is assisted by his ministers to whom he assigned highly specific functions. The king still remains the main focus for all the Bin Kanyok.KEYWORDS : Bin Kanyok, royal court, traditional political systems, Zaire. 


1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 480-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gose

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to.be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political structure barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult.1I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically ashuacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that transcended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical reproduction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre-Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.


ALQALAM ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 171
Author(s):  
Muhammad Iqbal

The Sunni doctrine plays an important role in the government. Its accommodative characteristic is something important that makes Sunni doctrine to be a device of the legitimation of the authority. The Muslim thinkers of classical Sunni such as al-Mawardi (975-1058 M), al-Ghazali (1058-1111 M) and lbn Taimiyah(1263-1329 M) have a great role in formulating the political doctrine of Sunni. In spite of the different nuance, all of these three classical Sunni thinkers develop the moderate political doctrine of Sunni. On the one hand, it is, of course, significant in situating the harmonious relation between the ruler and community. Therefore, the social and political stabilities will be well-maintained On the other hand, such a thought for a certain extent evokes stagnancy. Because there is no radical thought which is critical and opposite against the authority, the Sunni idea is frequently made use for the instantaneous interests of power. On evenlttally, the mutual interrelationship between the Sunni ulama and the ruler often happens. While ulama feel obtaining the patronage from the authority, the ruler gains religious justification from ulama. In this context, Indonesia as the country with the majority of Sunni Muslims, as a matter of fact, applies the political doctrine of Sunni. It is because Sunni has had a long and establishei root since. the period of Islamic kingdoms in the archipelago, before Dutch-Colonial period. The archipelago ulama also formulated the harmonious relation between Islam and authority as formulated by the ulama of classical Sunni. The polotical tradition of Sunni was becoming stronger in line with the great influence of ulama in the archipelago kingdoms. This article tries to elaborate the relation between the Sunni ulama with the power of the kings in the archipelago and the patronage of the archipelago rulers toward them.


2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (02) ◽  
pp. 179-185
Author(s):  
Nicolas Barreyre ◽  
Geneviève Verdo

Over the course of the last twenty years, two historiographical movements have challenged the notion of sovereignty, particularly that of the “natural” anchoring of an absolute, statal form of sovereignty in a uniform territory as its perfected model. On the one hand, the experience of globalization that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall—and which fed talk of the “end of nation-states”—led to a new examination of the political organization of the contemporary world, which in part “deterritorialized” the issue of political control. On the other hand, the extraordinary rise in studies of colonial empires has established that sovereignty, far from being the homogeneous block of the jurist’s refined concept, could be exercised in varying degrees and even be conceived as multiple and “layered.”


Res Publica ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-573
Author(s):  
Bart Maddens ◽  
Jan Tommissen ◽  
Dieter Vanhee ◽  
Wouter Van Mierloo ◽  
Karolien Weekers

A survey amongst 602 Flemish secondary school pupils, aged 17-18, shows that a distinction can be made between two different, albeit closely related, dimensions of royalism : the emotional attachment to the king as a person and to the royal family on the one hand, and the political support for the monarchy on the other. Respondents are predominantly indifferent or negative about the monarchy, particularly on the emotional dimension. A multivariate analysis shows that male and non-churchgoing pupils are more negative on both dimensions. Pupils from migrant families are more positive on the emotional dimension. The scores on both dimensions are higher amongst pupils who identify with Belgium rather than with Flanders, who have strong patriotic feelings and who tend towards an authoritarian attitude. The scores are lower amongst pupils with apreference for a regionalist party. The hypothesis that intense royalist feelings coincide with a general attitude of trust in the political authorities was only confirmed with regard to the emotional dimension, while the political support for the monarchy appears to be detached from the trust in the political authorities.


1866 ◽  
Vol 156 ◽  
pp. 113-183 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

T he present paper is intended to be the first of a series on the Anatomy of the Vertebrate Skull; and I have chosen the cranium and face of the Ostriches as a startingpoint, principally because of the mid position of these birds in the vertebrate subkingdom, and, in some degree also, because of their generalized character. Indeed, to any one familiar, on the one hand, with the structure of the skull in the higher mammalian types, and on the other with that of the osseous fishes, the skull of an Ostrich is interesting and important in a very high degree; serving, at it does, as a key to open up the meaning of parts so extremely unlike as the true homologues in the Fish and in the Mammal often are. And further, whilst aiding the anatomist in revealing the true morphological counterparts in the highest, as compared with the lowest types, the skull of an ostrich does also form a link of the utmost value for connecting together that of a cold-blooded and that of a warm-blooded creature.


2021 ◽  
Vol 148 (4) ◽  
pp. 673-686
Author(s):  
Dominik Kadzik

This article is about the career and political positions of Gáspár Bekes and Ferenc Wesselényi in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during Stephen Báthory’s reign. It explains how they both achieved their positions and why they were important for the monarch. It should be emphasised that both of them are a good example of how the elected Polish king could help foreigners in their career in 16th century Poland. On the one hand, Gáspár Bekes achieved his position by serving in the army before and during Báthory’s wars, on the other hand Ferenc Wesselényi played an important role as a holder of a high office at the Polish royal court.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 391-398
Author(s):  
Kirill A. Solovyov

The article is devoted to the political views of F.D. Samarin, his conception of the political system in Russia before 1905, constitutional reforms of 1905–1906 and Stolypin’s reforms. The author demonstrates how Samarin tried to adopt the Slavophile doctrine to the situation of the beginning of the 20th century. At that he had to carry on polemics both with the opponents of the Slavophilism and its supporters. On the one hand, this fact stresses Slavophilism diversity and its inner heterogeneity. On the other hand, it shows the nature of the Slavophile doctrine itself that resembled more the historiographic approach to researching the past than a well-structured political conception. Giving meaningful political content to Slavophile ideas depended fully on every single representative of the Slavophile intellectual heritage.


1973 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-101
Author(s):  
Mauricio Solaun ◽  
Fernando Cepeda

The Colombian political system has been characterized by a duality. On the one hand, there are recurrent fears-and these perceptions are held even by outsiders—that the political system is on the verge of total collapse and disruption. On the other hand, when measured in terms of the continuity and survival of the traditional civilian elite and the actual challenge posed by counter-elites, the Colombia system has been relatively stable. In effect, since the turn of the century, Colombia's ruling group has been renovated by the cooptation of new elements by the ruling elite. The bulk of these new members has been young individuals fairly well integrated within the values and norms of the establishment. Although some social change has occurred and there has been some upward mobility (for the best general treatment of Colombian twentieth-century politics, see Dix, 1967), the resilience of the Colombian upper class can be illustrated with two cases.


Author(s):  
Muntasser Majeed Hameed

The objective of the investigation was to analyze the structure and administration of the political system in Iraq (post-ISIS). After 2003, the Iraqi political system suffered the fundamental problem of its failure to achieve the political and social inclusion that characterizes democratic systems, to guarantee the establishment of a "state for all", while respecting differences. Political representation has moved from the system of sectarian ethnic components, under the title of consensual democracy, to the representation of leaders and the realization of their interests and the interests of their parties at the expense of the groups that claim to represent them, which complicates the problem. In this sense, the new political system could not represent social pluralism, on the one hand, and could not satisfy the demands of the same components on the other. Methodologically, it is a political investigation in the framework of the analysis of the political system. It was concluded that the search for new balances is a pending issue. While these emerging balances and arrangements are still fragile and immature to the extent required, they represent a clear entry point to reshape the regime's political structure in one form or another.


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