Of Biases and Queens: The Shi Past Through an Androgynous Looking Glass
Of Biases and Queens: The Shi Past Through an Androgynous Looking Glass
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偏见与女王：透过雌雄同体的镜子看过去的史
DOI：
10.2307/3171747
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发表时间：
1979
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Elinor Sosne
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Elinor Sosne
社会科学家最近更加意识到西方学术中普遍存在的男性偏见，这种偏见牢牢植根于欧洲文化及其分支。从这种偏见中衍生出来的理论，通过假设一个以男性为中心的宇宙，培养了一代又一代男性学者，他们很少质疑这些理论的充分性。尽管我们开始理解和纠正西方的男权中心主义，但我们还没有研究非洲社会，特别是父系社会，如何在他们的口头传统中延续他们自己的以男性为中心的世界观。因此，我们还没有开始研究当非洲和西方的偏见重合并相互加强时，扭曲的历史会如何导致，因为以男性为中心的研究人员收集并分析了以男性为中心的非洲人认为是“历史”的材料。本文通过对扎伊尔东部恩格维什什邦的数据进行分析，探讨了非洲和西方偏见之间的关联问题。它认为，与施正荣关于政治的概念相反，施正荣认为政治是一系列正在进行的竞争和皇室男性之间的正式结构关系，这是我在实地工作时分享的观点--如果不承认非皇室女性在塑造历史进程中所发挥的作用，人们就无法开始理解施氏的过去。更具体地说，仔细阅读这些数据就会发现，尽管文化上强调父系血统，并坚持在位的国王必须是其前任的亲生儿子，但许多继承Ngweshe王位的人并不是前几任君主的儿子；即使是这样，国王的选择也同样取决于他的母亲是谁，以及他的父亲可能是谁。
Social scientists have recently become more aware of the pervasive male bias in western scholarship, a bias firmly rooted in European cultures and their offshoots. Deriving from this bias are theories which, by assuming a male-centered universe, nurtured generations of male scholars who rarely questioned their sufficiency. Although we are beginning to understand and correct for western androcentrism, we have not yet studied how African societies, especially patrilineal ones, perpetuate their own male-centered worldview in their oral traditions. Thus we have not begun to examine how distorted histories can result when African and western biases coincide and reinforce each other as androcentric researchers collect and then analyze materials which androcentric Africans consider “historical.” By analyzing data from the Shi kingdom of Ngweshe in eastern Zaire, this paper addresses the linked problems of African and western bias. It argues that -- contrary to the Shi conception of politics as a series of on-going contests and formal structural relationships between royal men, a view I shared while in the field -- one cannot begin to understand the Shi past without acknowledging the role played by non-royal women in shaping its course. More specifically, a careful reading of the data suggests that despite the cultural emphasis on patrilineal descent and the insistence that a reigning king be the biological son of his predecessor, many men who succeeded to the Ngweshe kingship were not the sons of previous monarchs; and even when they were, the selection of a king depended as much on who his mother was as on who his father might have been.