Resumen de Medicine and Kingship: Endogenous Centralization in East and Central Africa
Despite a vast and recently reinvigorated body of research, a glaring lacuna remains in the literature on African chief- andkingship. Exogenous sociostructural explanations (Vansina) and the universalist concept of sacred kingship (de Heusch) disregardthe endogenous regional process of political centralization. This article proposes a corrected structuralism as a method to detect incultural processes their endogenous basis, or“tensor”: a syntagm paradigmatically“stretched”in time and space. Ethnographicfieldwork in east and central Africa reveals that both chieftaincy and status acquisition revolve around medicine, not governance.The tensor of medicine combines two sacrificial practices, divination and initiation, and two gift-oriented practices, magic andassociation. In terms of this tensor, kingship is a freak development, violating the democratic principle of medicine. Ethnographiccomparison confirms that kings split the tensor by privileging the binding logic of gifts at the expense of divination and initiation,which control the chief’s power. In contrast, the colonial impact on centralization is a collapsed tensor, banning the mixed political-religious practices of magic and divination in favor of a religiously legitimated political hierarchy. Tensor dynamics bring out pivots ofmeaning that shake the European default model of the polity.
