Feasts in Motion: Archaeological Views of Parades, Ancestral Pageants, and Socio-Political Process in the Hueda Kingdom, 1650-1727 AD

Author： Norman Neil

Publisher： Springer Publishing Company

ISSN： 0892-7537

Source： Journal of World Prehistory, Vol.23, Iss.4, 2010-12, pp. : 239-254

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Abstract

This paper examines the socio-political processes surrounding spectacular religious parades and more private acts of veneration and supplication within the Hueda Kingdom (c. 1650-1727 AD) in the Republic of Bénin, West Africa. The first goal of this paper is to posit the role that such public and private ceremonies played in framing negotiations of political and moral authority. It argues that ceremonial hosts and assembled audience members worked to channel toward their own interests the social, political, and economic outpouring that resulted from ritually sanctioned performances of wealth. The second goal of the paper is to illustrate material and spatial dimensions of such ceremonial spaces. These themes, drawn from a historically well-known polity, work together to aid in comparative theory building on feasting and the politics of spectacle in the deeper archaeological past.