Can a Blind Man Really know an Elephant? Lessons on the Limitations of Oral Tradition from Paul Irwin's Liptako Speaks

1982 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 303-323
Author(s):  
Donald R. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Area Of Interest ◽  
Remarkable Degree ◽  
Social Customs ◽  
Degree Of Similarity ◽  
Upper Volta ◽  
The Way

It was six men of IndostanTo learning much inclinedWho went to see the Elephant(Though all of them were blind),That each by observationMight satisfy his mind.Over a thousand miles separate the Fulbe emirate of Liptako in Upper Volta from the region of the lower Gambia River, where several Mandinka states long held political authority. Fundamental differences between the areas are easy to notice. Besides speaking its own language and following its own set of social customs, Liptako's Fulbe population practiced a mixed pastoral and agrarian mode of subsistence on land where rainfall was only marginally sufficient. The Mandinka were more strictly farmers in an area that receives on average about twice as much rainfall as Liptako. Liptako existed as a unified Fulbe state only since the first decade of the nineteenth century, whereas many of the Mandinka states of the lower Gambia date to at least three centuries earlier. Commerce was important to both regions, but Liptako's commercial focus was toward the Sahara and the desert-side trade, whereas the lower Gambia was a point of contact between savanna merchants and Atlantic shippers. But, despite these obvious differences, there is a remarkable degree of similarity in the way individuals living in the two areas remember their past, and historians find a host of like problems they must confront when attempting to reconstruct the precolonial histories of either region.I had become increasingly aware of some of the difficulties in working with Mandinka oral tradition during fieldwork in the lower Gambia. But only recently have I become familiar with problems another historian encountered as he studied traditions from Liptako, so many miles from my own area of interest. A Fulbe emirate, Liptako rose in the wake of Usuman dan Fodio's jihad early in the nineteenth century.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

A Distinction No Longer of Use: Evolutionary Discourse and the Disappearance of the Trope/Figure Binarism

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley Sharon-Zisser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Common Part ◽  
The Way

Abstract: The concem with progress and utility is shared by nineteenth-century scientists, philosophers, and rhetoricians, leading to significant correspondences among their discourses. This concern is manifest, for example, in the way in which several rhetorical treatises of the nineteenth century regard the distinction between a figure and a trope, which had been a common part of rhetorical theory since the time of Quintilian, as useless and anachronistic. By examining three nineteenth-century articulations of the justifications for erasing the trope/figure distinction from the cultural repertoire, this essay reveals structural and semantic parallels between these rhetorical treatises and the discourses of evolution and utilitarianism. Thus, the essay locates the source of the synonymity which the terms “trope” and “figure” have acquired in contemporary critical metalanguage in Victorian ideologies of progress and of the unprofitability and consequent discardability of the ancient.

The Well-Mannered Auditor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deaville
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
The Way

The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth century prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the domestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the enjoyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led authors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room performances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of attention” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inattentive listening.

Questioning territories and identities in the precolonial (nineteenth-century) Lake Kivu region

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-515
Author(s):  
Gillian Mathys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Lake Kivu ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

AbstractThroughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority functioned in this region, and therefore they affected identity. The presumption that territories could be constructed in which ‘culture’ and ‘political power’ neatly coincided was influenced by European ideas about space and identity, and privileged the perceptions and territorial claims of those ruling the most powerful centres in the nineteenth century. Thus, this article questions assumptions that continue to influence contemporary views of the Lake Kivu region. It shows that local understandings of the relationship between space and identity differed fundamentally from state-centred perspectives, whether in precolonial centralized states or colonial states.

Is God Really in History?

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.

Anna Karenina: The Dialectic of Prophecy

PMLA ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-282
Author(s):  
David H. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Anna Karenina ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Way

One of the most impressive features of Anna Karenina is the way in which Tolstoy draws the reader's imagination beyond the literal level of the narrative into generalizations that seem mythical in a manner difficult to articulate. With Dostoevsky or Melville, one sees immediately a propensity for exploiting the symbolic value of things. With Tolstoy, things try, as it were, to resist conversion: they strive to maintain their “thingness” as empirical entities. A character in Dostoevsky is usually only half man; the other half is Christ or Satan. Moby Dick is obviously only half whale; the other half is Evil or some principle of Nature. But Anna Karenina is emphatically Anna Karenina. Like almost all of Tolstoy's characters, she has a proficiency in the husbandry of identity; she jealously hoards her own unique reality, so that it becomes difficult to say of her that she is a “type” of nineteenth-century Russian lady or a “symbol” of modern woman or an “archetypical” Eve or Lilith.

From Chiromancy to Psychochirology

Aries ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-270
Author(s):  
Alexandra H.M. Nagel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Novel Method ◽  
The Way ◽  
Fortune Telling

Abstract The works of Julius Spier, a pupil of C.G. Jung, provide a perfect case study illustrating the psychologization of chiromancy during the Interbellum. His case also highlights a lack of insight in the way in which hand-reading has evolved in Europe since the nineteenth century. After its appearance in the West, the art of reading hands has generally been referred to as chiromancy (hand divination, i.e. fortune-telling through reading the palm). Thanks to the work of the French captain Casimir S. d’ Arpentigny, published first in 1843, chirognomy (the study of hand forms) has become an important aspect of hand-reading. Afterwards, Adolphe Desbarrolles distinguished a chirognomic and a chiromantic aspect on a hand-analysis, whereupon either chirology (the study of the hand) or chirosophy (wisdom of the hand) became the umbrella terms for the “twin sciences” chiromancy and chirognomy. Spier, however, juxtaposed chirology and chiromancy before branching off with his novel method entitled psychochirology.

Oral Literature and Transculturality: A Study of Contemporary Cameroonian Songs

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-64
Author(s):  
Anne Obono Essomba
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Culture Shock ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Universal Values ◽  
Hybrid Product ◽  
The Way

Globalization led by Europe has spread so-called 'universal' values across the globe, which seems to have cultural intermingling as its backdrop. All human endeavors are based on a culture that has become multidimensional. All the time, in their diversity, cultures try to complement and absorb each other. However, in this meeting of cultural giving and receiving, it takes on a new face, the culture shock.  This encounter causes major changes in our modern societies, giving way to a loss of cultural identity and internal imbalance. This article aims to analyze the way in which contemporary Cameroonian musicians use cultural and linguistic facts for communication purposes and other arguments. The aim of our work is to show how the various songwriters have found, through song, a new mode of resistance so that African traditions escape sedimentation. In this way, they reconcile the elements of oral tradition and the contributions of modernity to create a hybrid product. To illustrate our point, we have chosen oral texts from different regions of Cameroon.  In order to better understand the transcultural reality in the texts, we will highlight the marks of traditional and modern aesthetics, then show that the transcultural is seen as a space of symbiosis between the traditional and the modern.

scholarly journals Women and Orientalism: 19th century Representations of the Harem by European female travellers and Ottoman women

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Thisaranie Herath
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
Private Spaces ◽  
The Way

The inaccessibility of the Ottoman harems to European males helped perpetuate the image of the harem as purely sexual in nature and contributed to imperialistic discourse that positioned the East as inferior to the West. It was only with the emergence of female travellers and artists that Europe was afforded a brief glimpse into the source of their fantasies; however, whether these accounts catered to or challenged the normative imperialist discourse of the day remains controversial. Emerging scholarship also highlights the way in which harem women themselves were able to control the depiction of their private spaces to suit their own needs, serving to highlight how nineteenth century depictions of the harem were a series of cross-cultural exchanges and negotiations between male Orientalists, female European travellers, and shrewd Ottoman women. 

scholarly journals How long was the nineteenth century?

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (spe) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
David LIGHTFOOT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Learning Procedure ◽  
The Way

This paper reviews the problems of the deterministic and predictive view of language change initiated by nineteenth century linguists and shows that such a view is still present in many analyses proposed by twentieth century linguists. As an alternative to such a view, the paper discusses an approach along the lines of Niyogi and Berwick (1997), which takes the explanation for long-term tendencies to be a function of the architecture of UG and the learning procedure and of the way in which populations of speakers behave.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document