ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we address the question of contact as entanglement (to use Thomas’s felicitous phrase, Thomas 1991) in the transformation of ideas of sacred power in WestCentral Africa. Using a currently extremely unfashionable culture area concept we shall argue that a basic substratum of core ideas about sacred power has been modified but not eradicated during the period from precolonial European contact to postcolonial administrative rule in West-Central Africa.
