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                <text>Dissertations on Namibia</text>
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            <name>Description</name>
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                <text>This collection holds full length dissertations written on and/or from Namibia. Unless the dissertations are particularly dated, or the author has passed, I have obtained permission before uploading the files. There are both M.A. and PhD Dissertations uploaded.</text>
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    <description>A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.</description>
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        <element elementId="50">
          <name>Title</name>
          <description>A name given to the resource</description>
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              <text>How Kings are Made, How Kingship Changes: A Study of Ritual and Ritual Change in Pre-Colonial Owamboland, Namibia</text>
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          <name>Description</name>
          <description>An account of the resource</description>
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              <text>Published PhD Dissertation - This study discusses the legitimacy basis of political power and its changes in historical African societies. It starts from Luc de Heusch's tenet that political power required a legitimacy basis of a spiritual kind, often formulated as sacred kingship. In ancient and pre-literate societies such kings were held to be responsible for the fertility of man, land and cattle. The king was a paradoxical figure, symbolising society, but standing above it, while simultaneously being its victim by being ritually killed at old age. This was also how Owambo sacred kings were conceived. De Heusch suggested that African kings derived their power over fertility from having been made 'sacred monsters' in the rituals of installation. With the example of Owambo kingship, this study argues that the transgressive and monstrous aspect is only one of several dimension of a king's sacredness and brings out the nurturing and symbolically female aspect, identified but not analysed further by de Heusch. In the Owambo kingly installation a king-elect was made sacred, and part of it was that a link was ritually created to the early owners of the land. Their consent made it possible for the king to promote fertility and to appropriate power emblems needed for ruling. In the kingdom of Ondonga the early owners of the land were the spirits of early Bushman inhabitants and those of an early kingly clan, both neglected in public memory. The sacred dimension of kingship was further augmented when kings manipulated and appropriated rain rituals and initiation rituals, both of which were related to fertility. The study argues that even though there were aspects of the 'sacred monster' in Owambo kingship, its manifestation was, in part, a distortion of the reciprocal aspect of kingship that was expressed in the homage paid to various ancestor spirits. A change in succession practices from ritual regicide to political assassination took place concomitant with the introduction of firearms, and this broke the sacrificial aspect of sacred kingship paving the way for a more predatory form of kingship while the sacred status of the king was retained.</text>
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          <name>Creator</name>
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              <text>Märta Salokoski</text>
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          <name>Publisher</name>
          <description>An entity responsible for making the resource available</description>
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              <text>University of Helsinki</text>
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          <name>Format</name>
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              <text>PDF</text>
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          <name>Date</name>
          <description>A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource</description>
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              <text>2006</text>
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        <element elementId="44">
          <name>Language</name>
          <description>A language of the resource</description>
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            <elementText elementTextId="2402">
              <text>English</text>
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          <name>Source</name>
          <description>A related resource from which the described resource is derived</description>
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            <elementText elementTextId="2403">
              <text>http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/val/sosio/vk/salokoski/abstract.html</text>
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    <tag tagId="200">
      <name>Evangelical Lutheran Church</name>
    </tag>
    <tag tagId="252">
      <name>Finland</name>
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    <tag tagId="318">
      <name>Harri Siiskonen</name>
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    <tag tagId="253">
      <name>Helsinki</name>
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    <tag tagId="911">
      <name>Kings</name>
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    <tag tagId="870">
      <name>Kinship</name>
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    <tag tagId="380">
      <name>Märta Salokoski</name>
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    <tag tagId="825">
      <name>Ondonga</name>
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    <tag tagId="137">
      <name>Ovamboland</name>
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