Alternate Generations among the Lele of the Kasai, South-West Congo

Africa ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Social Condition ◽  
South West ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Kinship Terminology ◽  
As If

Opening ParagraphIn the last fifty years certain instances of a special privileged relation between grandparents and grandchildren have been quoted so frequently as to have become almost classic cases. The three most important are those reported for the Dieri tribe of SE. Australia (Howitt 1904), the Pentecost Islanders of Melanesia (Rivers 1914), and the Oraons of Chota Nagpur (Sarat Chandra Roy 1915). In all three cases the system of kinship terms treats grandchildren as if they were in the same generation as their grandparents, but in each report slightly different aspects of the relation between grandparents and grandchildren are emphasized. Among the Oraons it is the bantering mode of conversation between a man and his granddaughter or greatniece ‘in which the two parties habitually act the part of man and wife’ to which attention is drawn, leading to the conjecture that there was formerly a system of marriage between grandparents and grandchildren. In Pentecost Island the classing of alternate generations together in kinship terminology is ‘connected with an ancient social condition in which it was the normal occurrence for a man to marry the granddaughter of his brother’. Among the Dieri tribe the custom of marriage with a daughter's daughter of the man's own brother was reported as actually in practice.

Kinetic Communism

2020 ◽  
pp. 198-214
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Metabolic Process ◽  
Social Condition ◽  
Social Form ◽  
Material Production ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference ◽  
As If

This chapter argues that since the fetish of value is something produced kinetically, its alternative, communism, must also be something understood kinetically, that is, having its own form of motion. In particular, the previous chapters have aimed to show that what is fundamentally at stake in the difference between material production and fetishism is the transparency and direction of the form of motion. Only when the social form of motion is left fully uncovered by coats, mirrors, and fogs can it be collectively organized without devalorization, appropriation, and mystical domination. Communism is the material social condition in which production is treated not as if it were coming from what is produced but as a threefold metabolic process itself. The thesis of this chapter then is that previous social forms of motion have always relied on a certain degree of fetishism of this motion.

The Abduction of Helen: A Reappraisal

Ramus ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 136-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Paschalis
Keyword(s):  
Married Women ◽  
The Other ◽  
Narrative Coherence ◽  
Annotated Edition ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
As If

‘Bad poetry is written daily, and married women seduced; but it is seldom that a seduction becomes as famous as Helen's, or that a poem as bad as Colluthus’ survives for fourteen centuries to be re-edited with all the apparatus of scholarship and equipped with commentary at the rate of a page for every two lines of verse. γᾷ δ' ἐπισκήπτων πιϕαύσκω: Colluthus is one of the very worst ancient poets to have come down to us. His only notion of the art is to arrange in hexameters phrases borrowed from his predecessors, with little sense of their appropriateness or of narrative coherence. It is as if a parrot had learnt to fit his pseudo-speech to the metre of Shakespeare. Colluthus can give delight, but only to a connoisseur of the ludicrous.’ The opening paragraph of Martin West's review of Enrico Livrea's annotated edition of Colluthus may be the most devastating appreciation of The Abduction of Helen ever written. At the other end stands Giuseppe Giangrande's review of the same edition: ‘Colluthus was a poète savant, who delighted in skillfully borrowing, often with felicitous “humour” and “malice”, from his epic models, and who dexterously applied oppositio in imitando within the framework of arte allusiva.’

Sheep and Sheep-Herders in South Africa

Africa ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. Willcox
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Hair Sheep ◽  
South West ◽  
South West Africa ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphIn a recent paper Mr. C. K. Cooke, F.S.A., discusses the questions of the introduction of sheep into Africa and their arrival in southern Africa (Cooke, 1965).Mr Cooke quotes Zeuner's conclusion (Zeuner, 1963) ‘that the first sheep in Africa were screw-horned hair sheep from Turkestan or Persia which reached lower Egypt about 5000 B.C. and Khartoum by 3300 B.C. This breed disappeared with the Middle Kingdom when it was replaced by a wool sheep and the fat-tailed sheep reached Africa only from the Roman period.’ Zeuner further asserts thatOne breed of sheep descended from the Egyptian hair-sheep had reached South-West Africa before the arrival of the Europeans. In these animals the profile is convex, the eyes are placed high on the skull and close to the drooping ears. The rams carry thick horns and a long ruff on the throat.

Moča, a Tone Language of the Kafa Group in South-Western Ethiopia

Africa ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-147
Author(s):  
Wolf Leslau
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Tone Language ◽  
The North ◽  
South West ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Western Ethiopia

Opening ParagraphMoča is a dialect of the Kafa cluster, in the south-west of Ethiopia. It is spoken in the province of Ilubabor, to the west of Kafa, extending north across the river Baro. The language is called Šäkka by the Moča themselves; the term Moča is used by the Galla and by the Europeans.The dialects of the Kafa cluster are: Kafa spoken in the province of Kafa, between the rivers Omo and Goǧeb to the north and the Gimira tribes to the south; Boša (or Garo) spoken to the north of the river Goǧeb, and west of Omo; and Moča.

The Letter-order of the Semitic Alphabets in Africa and the Near East

Africa ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Honeyman
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Near East ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The South ◽  
South West ◽  
Determining Factors ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphThe Ethiopic syllabary employed for writing the classical Ge'ez and also, with certain modifications, the contemporary South Semitic vernaculars of East Africa, was formed by super-imposing a system of auxiliary vowel-marks upon a basic consonantal alphabet; this alphabet occurs, alongside of the syllabic script, in the Old Ethiopic inscriptions of the Axumite Kingdom in the fourth century of our era, and is a derivative of the Sabaeo-Minaean or Old South Arabic script found in the monuments of the south-west Arabian kingdoms. But although the Ethiopic syllabary is thus genetically connected with the other main branches of the Semitic alphabet, the traditional order of the signs, in which the consonantal component and the accompanying vowel are the primary and secondary determining factors respectively, does not agree with that of any Semitic alphabet hitherto known. There is no old or reliable native tradition as to the reason underlying the order of the signs; no help is to be had from numerical signs, which elsewhere, as will shortly appear, afford valuable testimony to the order of the letters; for Ethiopic borrowed Greek alphabetic signs for this purpose, while the South Arabian inscriptions used single strokes for the units, and for higher denominations the initial letters of the native words for five, ten, hundred, &c. The mnemonic word-groups reconstructed by Bauer and others are open to objection on grounds of language and sense. Other external criteria yield only tentative and inconclusive results, and the subject has accordingly remained one of speculation and controversy.

N!ow

Africa ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 232-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna Marshall
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Kalahari Desert ◽  
South West ◽  
Run Off ◽  
South West Africa ◽  
Edible Roots ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Covering Vegetation

Opening ParagraphN!ow is a belief concerning rain and cold which is held by the !Kung Bushmen in the region around Nyae Nyae in South West Africa.About ten inches of rain falls in an average year in this part of the Kalahari Desert and sinks into the deep sands. There is no run-off in streams and there are few water holes. The rain is sufficient to support a covering vegetation of grass, shrubs, and scrubby trees. The vegetation includes numerous edible roots, tubers, leaves, fruits, and nuts, for which the Afrikaans language provides the convenient word veldkos.

The Structure of Titled Offices among the Abutia Ewe

Africa ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Verdon
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Group ◽  
The Political ◽  
The North ◽  
Northern Areas ◽  
Southern Half ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Volta Region ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
North And South ◽  
As If

Opening ParagraphThe Abutia Ewe form one of what the British colonial administrators dubbed the ‘traditional areas’, over one hundred of which are said to compose the Ewe people or Eweland. These Ewe traditional areas lie in the southern half of the Volta Region (in Ghana) and in southern Togo. Although much has been written about the Ewe, little is known about the political organisation of the inland areas, north of the coastal savanna. In fact, most authors have treated the Ewe as if they were thoroughly homogeneous and could be analysed as one ethnic group or one society, only acknowledging variations between the north and south, not considered significant enough to make them completely different groups (Spieth 1906; 1911; Westermann 1935; Ward 1949; Manoukian 1952; Nukunya 1969; Friedländer 1962; Asamoa 1971 amongst many others). And yet I contend that the northern areas are as distinct from the southern ones as they are from the Akan populations. As a result, none of the present available literature is particularly useful as a paradigmatic model of the northern areas' political organisation.

Vernacular Text-Books in South African Native Schools

Africa ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clement M. Doke
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
West Africa ◽  
East Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
South West ◽  
Northern Sotho ◽  
South West Africa ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphIn this survey of vernacular text-books I am confining my attention to the Union of South Africa and the three High Commission Territories of Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland. In this area we have five important literary language forms in use, viz. Xhosa and Zulu (belonging to the Nguni cluster of Bantu), and Southern Sotho, Tšwana, and Northern Sotho (belonging to the Sotho cluster). Reference will be made to two other languages spoken in the northern and eastern Transvaal, Venda and Tonga (commonly written as Thonga, and belonging to the cluster of languages spoken in Portuguese East Africa from Delagoa Bay northwards). I do not intend to deal with the languages spoken in the Mandated Territory of South-west Africa, nor with such intrusions as that of Kalanga into the Bechuanaland Protectorate.

Caste in Africa?

Africa ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 398-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. M. Todd
Keyword(s):  
Hierarchical Systems ◽  
South West ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
South West Ethiopia

Opening ParagraphEminent Indologists have stated that it is inappropriate to use the word ‘caste’ in non-Hindu contexts. Despite such warnings numerous Africanists have used the term, with varying degrees of imprecision. In this paper I first outline different emphases which have appeared in the literature concerning caste in India; then discuss several examples of hierarchical systems in Africa which have been described as ‘caste’. Finally, I focus upon my own fieldwork data concerning the Dime of South-West Ethiopia, amongst whom there operates a system which can, I believe, be unequivocally labelled caste.

!Kung Bushman Religious Beliefs

Africa ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna Marshall
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
South West ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
South West Africa ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Medicine Men

Opening ParagraphMy purpose in this paper is to describe some of the religious beliefs held currently by the !Kung Bushmen of the interior bands of the Nyae Nyae region of South West Africa. I shall limit the paper to a description of their concepts of the gods, the problem of evil, supplication, the spirits of the dead, and the ceremonial curing dance, but leave for another paper a more detailed account of medicine men, how they become medicine men, and more about their practices and beliefs. We gathered the information which I present principally on our expeditions of 1952–3 and 1955.

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