Wim van Binsbergen

Short Biography

Wim M.J. van Binsbergen (*1947, Amsterdam) read anthropology, sociology, religious studies and linguistics at Amsterdam University (Municipal), and holds a PhD from the Free University, Amsterdam (cum laude). He is currently Senior Researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands, and Professor of the Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy, Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Previously he held professorial chairs at Manchester, Berlin, Amsterdam and Durban, and directed Africanist research at the Leiden centre throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His research interests include: religion in Africa (with emphasis on divination, ecstatic cults and healing, (cosmogonic) myth, animal symbolism, shamanism, and long-range comparison, across continents and across millennia, searching for deep structures that go back to the Upper Palaeolithic and further); intercultural philosophy especially epistemology; African and Mediterranean history; state formation, globalisation, commodification, virtuality and mediatisation. He has pursued these interests during extensive fieldwork in Tunisia, Zambia, Guinea Bissau and Botswana, besides historical projects on South Central Africa, the Ancient Near East, and the world history of geomantic divination and shamanism. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles. His books include: Religious Change in Zambia (1981), Theoretical Explorations in African Religion (with Schoffeleers, 1985), Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and History in Western Central Zambia (1992), Black Athena Ten Years After (1997; currently being reprinted); Intercultural Encounters: African and Anthropological Lessons Towards a Philosophy of Interculturality (2003); and Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities: The Social Life of Things Revisited (2005, with Geschiere). Wim van Binsbergen is a published poet/novelist and a practising (also e-based) sangoma diviner-healer in the Southern African tradition.