Spirit.: Chiefly Authority, Soil, and Medium

This vision of sovereign power hovering above the relations between natural and human elements is relevant beyond genealogical analyses of biopower, pastoral power, and govenmentality. If we go beyond Foucault’s near exclusive context and subject of enquiry, Europe, these relations move to the forefront of social and political life. In Honde, crucial interconnections between polities of chiefly rule and traditional authority, cosmologies of land and the well-being of its inhabitants, and soil are present in a number of contexts. We have seen indications of this previously through Renamo’s appropriation of the traditional field, in Ngungunyane’s problematic relations with rainmaking capacities,

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv8bt1ff.14