This chapter explores how academics and textbook authors created Ghana’s foundation story from the heavily politicised narratives of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and his Convention Peoples Party. It argues that empathy for successful political parties exhibited by first generation Africanists bequeathed to the present a grand narrative fraught with teleology because of its emphasis on anti-colonialism as a recurrent and unchanging problematic. The scholars failed to see a calculated engagement with global ideas and a simultaneous choice made by numerous Gold Coast thinkers to chart intellectual and political projects within the context of the possibilities and constraints of their time. The intellectuals are presented in a hierarchy from proto, cultural, conservative, to radical anti-colonial nationalists, thereby affirming the preeminence of tmuch-vaunted radicals. Recalled this way, the intellectuals’ projects remain distorted and misrepresented. Fortunately, a consideration of the intellectuals’ transnational dialogic encounters within a cosmopolitan prism presents a fuller picture.

Grand narratives have proven remarkably persistent in the archaeology of the Near East despite the success of postmodern paradigms in archaeology. After presenting various examples of such grand narratives, this chapter will focus on the “grand connection” postulated in recent years between Çatalhöyük East and Köşk Höyük. Köşk Höyük, with its rich imagery and plastered skulls, has often been presented as the cultural descendant of Çatalhöyük East, continuing the same symbolic worlds that dominated in the Neolithic. In this chapter, this view will be problematized. Apart from the obvious problem that the Çatalhöyük East sequence is now known to continue with that of Çatalhöyuk West, which has assemblages that are completely different from those of Köşk Höyük/Tepecik, there are very clear differences between the Çatalhöyük East images and burial traditions and those of Köşk Höyük. Some of the marked differences that set these sites apart will be highlighted and these may help us to make sense of what happened in Asia Minor at the transition from the 7th to the 6th millennium cal BC.

translation across different natural languages and conceptual systems. While there is no totally neutral vocabulary in which this can be effected, this does not mean that mutual understanding is quite beyond reach, although that will depend on allowing for the revisability of some of the initial preconceptions in play. Comparing divergent schemata is indeed an important means of expanding the horizons of the history of science.

Based on the inductive analysis of the previous chapters of the book, the conclusion provides closing remarks on the historical, political, social, religious and symbolic meanings of the practice of self-coronation among medieval kings, using a long-term approach. From a political point of view, self-coronations are proofs of the activation of individual agency rather than the stability of established structures in the Middle Ages. This ritual demystifies certain anthropological tendencies to constrain the rites to the boundaries of their particular context or to fix them in an essentialist symbolic meaning. From a social perspective, medieval self-coronations pushed for collective innovation and dynamism. These rituals were in a perpetual state of flux, confirming anthropologists’ belief that ritual symbols are not static, absolute objectifications, but social and cultural systems, gathering meaning over time and altering in form. This contextualised approach to the seminal concept of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ requires us to revise a vision of the past altered by the lens of the modern nation-state and modern rationalism. Some of its qualities may be projected onto the present. The king’s skill in avoiding ecclesiastical mediation may help to explain the frontiers and limits between the temporal and spiritual, between politics and religion, which is essential for the stability of modern societies. In the end, the analysis and interpretation of self-coronations lead us to debunk the myth or grand narrative of the process of secularisation.