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Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. By Neil Kodesh. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Pp. xi, 264; maps, figures, tables, glossary, bibliography, index. $45.00.
Beyond the Royal Gaze is a counter-hegemonic rendering of Buganda' s political history from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. By working against the scholarly grain and focusing his attention on Ganda clan histories instead of traditional dynastic narratives, Neil Kodesh masterfully shifts the gaze from center to margins. This analytical move is important because it opens up "a new territory for discourse" beyond the arena of royal politics- one that includes the world of spirit mediums, public healers, and other local authority figures (p. 5). The result is an intriguing investigation that disrupts existing knowledge about Buganda' s early political development.
Kodesh' s study is based on more than eighteen months of fieldwork and includes evidence painstakingly culled from oral traditions, historical linguistics, archaeology, and comparative ethnography. In the first chapter, he discusses his methodological choices in greater detail, focusing on some of the challenges associated with conducting research on precolonial Africa. He also discusses the concept...