Böcker av Timo Kallinen

Dwelling in Political Landscapes contributes to the anthropology of landscape and the field of political ecology. Environments change at speeds never before experienced. Massive species loss is just one transformation affecting life forms and their interactions, climate change another, and there are many more rapid and sometimes profound material and social changes that anthropologists working around the world attend to and document. By exploring how the material and conceptual are entangled in and as landscapes, this book takes up the invitation posed by such emerging novel situations to explore the potentialities of anthropology and related fields, to understand life when 'things are not what they used to be'. The complex entanglements of seemingly disconnected processes and the recent sense of crisis concerning environment, movements of people, climate change and other planetary transformations, raise the question over the role of anthropology and proper methodologies for studying these developments.

In present-day Africa chiefs interact fluently with modern states, international organizations, and business corporations, and traditional chieftaincy is perceived essentially as a secular institution. Consequently, social scientists have started paying serious attention to the role of traditional authorities in contemporary political landscapes. Yet it was only a few decades ago that classic ethnographers were characterizing chiefs as priests, magicians, diviners, rainmakers, and the like. What happened to the divinity of African chiefs and kings?Drawing on his research on the Asante people of Ghana, West Africa, Timo Kallinen explores how the colonial and postcolonial states have attempted to secularize the sacred institutions of chiefship and kingship, a process which is by no means complete. Furthermore, it has frequently proved a problematic undertaking with regards to a number of burning issues in contemporary Ghanaian society, such as Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, nationalism, international development aid, civil society participation, coup d'états, and witchcraft.