Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Nomadic Societies; Oral Cultures

Social Risk-Management Strategies in Pastoral Systems: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis

by Masi Kimiaie

The Incompetent

by Mohamed Eno

the poem is part of my forthcoming petry book: Guilt of Otherness

It is under review with a literary critic. It is under review with a literary critic.

Work notes on the Perugia Cippus

by Mel Copeland

This is a PDF file of work notes relating to the longest extant Etruscan text, the Perugia Cippus. This text includes a history of queens and kings. It is unfortunate that Livy and other Roman historians did not record more names of Etruscan regents, since we now have a rather long list, particularly of Etruscan queens, and it would be helpful if we can reconcile a few of the names and events to other histories. Nevertheless, the many names of queens listed cause one to take another look at the role of women in Etruscan society. We know the Etruscans treated their women with respect, possibly equals, as can be seen on tomb paintings, etc., but this long list of queens, with only a few kings listed, is curious. These Work Notes relate to other Work Notes, such as the Zagreb Mummy and Tavola Cortonensis. These can be helpful in auditing the translations of the other 160 texts (and growing) on the Etruscan Phrases website.

We have converted appropriate documents into PDF files in order to facilitate review of the work. The documents work together with the Etruscan Phrases.a.html which should be opened as an index to the other pages that are covered in the discussion of the these Work Notes.

This work focuses on refining declension and conjugation patterns used throughout the Etruscan Phrases texts. Although most of the words decline following Latin patterns, there are some words that are not Latin but rather like French / Italian. Conjugation patterns tend to follow Latin cases, except for 1st person singular, where the tense tends to be like French and Romanian verbs.

The Etruscans separated words and phrases by means of single or double dots ; i.e., a period and a colon. We respected those punctuation marks from the beginning, as we compiled the words that make up the Etruscan vocabulary. The definition and case / tense of a word has to be consistent wherever it is used in all of the texts, and while words may have several meanings, as in Latin or any other language, we have attempted to be conservative, applying the same meaning across the texts where a word is used.

It is hoped that this work, Etruscan Phrases, will take the discussion on the Etruscan civilization from the darkness of mystery to a measurable landscape, of the Etruscan people describing their own times, hopes, dreams, regents and history. We trust that other scientists will agree and embrace the prospect of rewriting history using factual data based upon a true understanding of the Etruscan writings, to free us from the obtuse speculations of the past. There is a great opportunity, as it was when Jean-François Champollion gave us the ability to read the writings of the Egyptian monuments, their histories and their Book of the Dead.

In a manner of speaking the Zagreb Mummy is of the same nature, as it is what could be called the Etruscan Book of the Dead. It seems to be liturgical in nature but often refers to places in Etruria. The Tavola Cortonensis appears to be a message among army generals and the Perugia Cippus is a history, the first written history extant written by the Etruscans. While stele were used as boundary markers, this stone appears to be a commemorative stone placed, perhaps, at the dedication of a school (Etr. SKVL).

This document includes like phrases and words from other major texts, such as the Tavola Cortonensis, Tavola Eugubine, Zaagreb Mummy, Tavola Novilara, the Pyrgi Gold tablets, Lemnos Stele and miscellaneous short inscriptions on pottery.

Australian Aboriginal Geomythology: Eyewitness Accounts of Cosmic Impacts?

by Duane Hamacher

Hamacher, D.W. and Norris, R.P. (2009). Archaeoastronomy: the Journal of Astronomy and Culture, Volume 22, pp. 60-93.

Descriptions of cosmic impacts and meteorite falls are found throughout Australian Aboriginal oral traditions. In some... more Descriptions of cosmic impacts and meteorite falls are found throughout Australian Aboriginal oral traditions. In some cases, these texts describe the impact event in detail, sometimes citing the location, suggesting that the events were witnessed. We explore whether cosmic impacts and meteorite falls may have been witnessed by Aboriginal Australians and incorporated into their oral traditions. We discuss the complications and bias in recording and analysing oral texts but suggest that these texts may be used both to locate new impact structures or meteorites and model observed impact events. We find that, while detailed Aboriginal descriptions of cosmic impacts are abundant in the literature, there is currently no physical evidence connecting these accounts to impact events currently known to Western science.

The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500-1730

by Daniel Woolf

Intellectual and Cultural Renaissance? !8th and 19th Century Fulbe Networks

by Wendy Wilson-Fall

Nomads, Identity and Memory

by Wendy Wilson-Fall

initially presented at the African Studies Association National Meetings, 2004

Nomads, Identity and Memory – ASA Presentation, 2004

This paper presents a discussion of identity among... more Nomads, Identity and Memory – ASA Presentation, 2004

This paper presents a discussion of identity among Fulbe nomads in West Africa as it is lived today. In so doing, it refers to the memories of Fulbe people as dynamic process which embodies ideals which are seminal to nomadic lifestyles and critical to nomadic Fulbe identity as lived by people who are currently nomads as well as those currently dreaming of being nomads. I will start with a story of an encounter which I had in Senegal about 10 years ago.

During a field trip to northern Senegal to a village on the border of the Lac de Guers, my mind was wandering away from the meeting which was the official reason of my visit. The look of the place, and the feel of the place, reminded me of places and times in Niger that I had passed with Wodaabe friends. The Wodaabe are a group of Fulbe who still, for the most part, live a more or less nomadic existence. The smell of the dust, the wide open spaces, and the rounded, low hills we had passed on the way to Lac de Guers had sent me into a reverie of pleasurable, exciting moments I had experienced “en brousse” among the Wodaabe.  I looked up at one point and encountered two young men’s faces on the other side of the meeting space. Swathed in white turbans, they, too, reminded me of the Wodaabe. Emboldened by my feelings of nostalgia, I said to them in Pulaar “I have heard that there are Wodaabe here. But, I suppose it isn’t true.” To my surprise, they re-arranged their turbans in a very Wodaabe way and said to me: “oh, yes there are Wodaabe here. We are Wodaabe.”  In shock, I mumbled something that was the equivalent of “how interesting, you must be kidding?” and returned my attention to the meeting.

At the next site, I met young farmers who were preparing a field for a vegetable crop. Here, I thought, I could safely ask about the Wodaabe from some of their neighbors. I had been shocked because the existence of Wodaabe, as I had known them to be in Niger, was more a rumor to me than a reality. When I posed my question, though, the young farmers were transformed. We are Wodaabe, they said, and this is our land.”

What followed next was an excited discussion as I explained that I had known Wodaabe in Niger and was wondering if there were any relationship between the Wodaabe of Senegal and those of Niger. One young man became very empassioned and invited me to visit his mother and family. Once in the car, his comportment progressively moved from that of a young humble farmer to that of a proud independent nomad. He questioned me about the clan names that I may have encountered in Niger. Satisfied that I had in fact spent some time with the Wodaabe of Niger, he presented a story to me.

Long ago, he said, we lived in the western part of this land just after Waalo. We were pushed further east by the farmers. Then, we were living in another place and more farmers came, and we moved again. We did not always dress like this. Before, we, too, wore our hair long, wore leather chaps, and other clothing like our brothers from Niger. We are not sure, he said, but we think that they are our people who began leaving as we were pushed further and further east. We cut our hair now, and dress differently, because we want to appear civilized. We don’t want trouble with people. But, he said, we are also tired. We will not move again. We are farming now, and we will fight to keep this land. From much further west to here was once our land, and we will not give it up. We have (beep) to fight for this land if we must.”

When I thought of the topic of identity and memory, then, my mind immediately went to this encounter and the story  which the Wodaabe of Senegal shared with me.  Here were some nomads, one could say, in disguise. But once in a less public space, the disguise was let down for a moment. The tone of the language, the vocabulary, and the attitude of the speaker changed. In a spontaneous moment, the speaker gave me a Moorish ring in the same way the nomadic friends in Niger had once given me a gift of a Twareg ring. In front of my eyes, a Tucoleur farmer had become a Wodaabe nomad. I saw that his identity was intimately engaged with a long memory of nomadism.

Mary Nooter Roberts and Al Roberts state in “The Audacity of Memory,” the Introduction to the book on Luba art, that “It is truer to lived experience to consider the past as represented and assigned value according to its purposes for group identity and political legitimacy in the present…The politics of history-making in the present and the intentions of poltical legitimacy underlying historical pursuits require that even oral narratives and related expressive media for history-making…be deconstructed to be understood.” The say, later on in the same text, that “…memory is active, always in the present, and a construction, transation, and negotiation as opposed to a reproduction.” I believe that this is true to the story related to me by my friend Ly in Senegal. I have since returned often to this conversation as I am repeatedly struck by the many ways that people who live a nomadic past are struggling to make –do with a semi-sedentary present, hemmed in by development projects, new farming schemes, and unpredictable weather conditions without the ability to employ traditional strategic options that have served as key elements in the pasture and herd management adaptions.

As it happens, there are now geographers, historians, biologists and economists who agree that mobile herd management is a strategic undertaking, requiring considerable skill and knowledge of plant life, water conditions, and the topography of large areas. Ian Scoones produced a wonderful book with contributions by eminent scholars in the field, such as Jeremy Swift, who describe the rational and even “locally scientific” value of nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyles and economic systems. Alas, governments are not convinced in many cases, and throughout West Africa the nomadic Fulbe are increasingly being faced with forced sedentarization, not directly through policy, but indirectly through the effects of other policies focused on agriculture and urbanization. Perhaps, then, nomads are being convinced that they are like other people, that they will be happier and more financially secure if they settle down??

Hardly. The songs that are sung, the dances that people do at weddings or simply for fun, in the rainy season, the informal ceremony of entering new towns and markets as the professional strangers that nomads are, reflect the encounter of past selves with contemporary presentations of self that respond to social constraints but do not bow down to them. How do the Wodaabe, and other nomadic Fulbe, recall nomadism?

Nomadism, by definition, requires mobility. This is a physical mobility that is mirrored by a mobility of spirit, by a remove from the routine of the farmer’s life, and by a distance that is maintained from non-Fulbe farmers’ ways. Nomadism requires a mobility and agility of personality, the capacity to be friendly with settled peoples without appearing to threaten hosts with becoming an unwieldy neighbor. Such social agility and slight of hand is a learned thing, it is passed down in families through jokes and songs, and friendly insults between adults, between children, and between adults and children.

Cattle are most often seen as the symbol of Fulbe attachment to roaming. They are even blamed for Fulbe peculiar, stand-offish ways, and their resistance to sedentarization. I would argue that there is much more to the distance kept, even by settled Fulbe, then love of cattle, although love of cattle is central. I argue that it is a love of space, of movement, of having social and material options, that returns, like a tide, to the nomadic spirit. This is a love, like all great loves, that is learned. The memory of self-reliance, of wealth and austerity as a way of life, is a key educational factor in the nomadic household. Rather than dying out when a family or individual settles, it seems rather to rise from the context of memory to that of ideal and ideology.

Many Wodaabe from Niger have talked to me about the stresses that they are experiencing as new variables enter what is already an uncertain way of life. There are Wodaabe, now, who have bought cars and have drivers, Wodaabe youth who have gone to school, and even some  Wodaabe who have succumbed to Christian missionaries. Where does it all lead? Do these circumstances symbolize a march towards an un-Wodaabe new Wodaabe? It doesn’t seem so, and in fact the circular movement of people through categories of sedentary, semi-sedentary, semi-nomadic to nomadic appears to prove its worth in these uncertain times. In Senegal, nomads are remembering their relationship to the land in ways not far from Nyerges proposition of a biography of environment. They are living the environment, and transitioning through lifestyles in ways, to them, that are probably not linear.

Anthropologist Paul Stoller, in writing of the Songhay of Niger, talks about two kinds of histories. He states that there are “histories ‘from above’ constituted by historical texts that are read, re-read, interpreted, and re-interpeted. There are, as well, histories ‘from below’ that are embodied in objects, song, movement and the body. These are the histories of the dispossessed”. Later on, in the same book (Sensous Scholarship) Stoller goes on to describe the monochord violin of the Songhay spirit possession ceremonies. He says that according to his teachers, the violin “resonates existential themes: the powerlessness of the human confrontation with nature; the utter contingency of life in the Sahel; the delicate balance between life and death; the unresolved tensions between men and women, old and young, friends and foes. “ (I might add, between herders and farmers!.)  He goes on to say, “These are historical themes of struggle, of perserveance in a hot, drought-plagued land, of resignation – even the nobles bear powerless witness to the ravages of nature in the Sahel. These themes, the substance of counter-memory, are rarely found in historical texts or epics.”

Stoller’s discussion of the violin is apt as a metaphor for the nomad and his or her existential relationship with memories of mobility, movement and freedom. The land, the pastures, the water holes, and the cattle are the violin. 

'Amoozin’ but Confoozin’: Comic Strips as a Voice of Dissent in the 1950s

by James Eric (Jay) Black

Black, James Eric (Jay). "Amoozin but Confoozin': Comic Strips as a Voice of Dissent in the 1950s." ETC: A Review of General Semantics 66.4 (2010): 460-77. Print. Also slated to appear Black, James Eric (Jay). "Amoozin’ but Confoozin’: Comic Strips as a Voice of Dissent in the 1950s." 2009 Semiotics Annual: Specialization, Semoiosis, Semiotics. Ed. John Deely and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 521-537.

Originally presented at the Semiotic Society of America, Cincinnati, Ohio (October 2009).

By using parody and Aesopian strategies of textual resistance, 1950s comic strip writers such as Walt Kelly and Al... more By using parody and Aesopian strategies of textual resistance, 1950s comic strip writers such as Walt Kelly and Al Capp offered hidden transcripts and built-in alibis for the expression of dissent while other intellectuals and policy makers within the public forum could not. Comic strips inherently question authority. At a historical moment when the public forum was rightfully afraid to air arguments, comic strip artists and writers operated in a subterranean area of the public sphere resilient against the apparatus of the state. During a time when First Amendment rights were questioned, comic strips allowed its writers political cover to make arguments against the establishment, giving Americans a unique chance to examine their fears by re-enforcing rather than tearing apart 1950s values, symbolic patterns, and beliefs. The newspaper comics escaped the worst of the comics book investigations because newspaper comic strips had long since observed their own codes which consisted of several layers of censorship. Censorship, even self-censorship, becomes productive if it gives rise to forms of resistance, which develops out of the censorship practices. This is largely due to the pressure of the censor on the author to develop Aesopean coding in her work.

Shifting identities: A comparative study of Basque and Western cultural conceptualizations

by Roslyn Frank

Another paper in the series “Hunting the European Sky Bears”.

Full citation reference:

Frank, Roslyn M. 2005. “Shifting identities: A comparative study of Basque and Western cultural conceptualizations.” Cahiers of the Association for French Language Studies 11 (2): 1-54. Also available online at: http://www.afls.net/cahiers/11.2/frank.pdf

The paper analyzes two contrasting sets of cultural conceptualizations. One centers around the complementary opposition of the colours 'black vs. red' represented by cognitive frames of traditional Basque thought and performance art while the other set is the deeply rooted hierarchical opposition of 'black vs. white', embedded in Western thought.

As is well known, the Western worldview brings into play an extended colour-coded cultural model known as the Great... more As is well known, the Western worldview brings into play an extended colour-coded cultural model known as the Great Chain of Being, grounded in a mutually exclusive, asymmetric opposition between ‘black’ and ‘white’. In contrast, the Basque model introduces complementary colour-coded oppositions consisting of ‘black’ and ‘red’. The Basque dataset model should not be understood as merely some kind of inversion of the Western one, but rather as being composed of a radically different set of cognitive alignments. Nonetheless, there are junctures where the reader may be able to identify a certain overlap between the component parts of the two systems. Moreover, in the case of the Basque model it is clear that these alignments harken back to earlier indigenous pan-European beliefs in the efficacy of the colour black, its intrinsic epistemological grounding in notions of fecundity and wholeness as well as the positive role of black animals in general.

So far our provisional research results argue for the following scenario: that in the case of Europe the powerful life-giving and protecting characteristics associated previously with the colour black have been distorted, although not totally eradicated from the consciousness of Europeans, in part because of the influence of the Catholic Church and the Inquisitional authorities. The task of countering black’s positive polarity was central to the Church’s efforts to win converts. Given that the colour black was a key component in the competing eco-centric cosmology, attempts to assign a different value to it constituted an assault on one of the principle tenets of the indigenous interpretative grid. The fact that the colour black continues to have a highly charged aura about it – the sudden appearance of a black cat still generates a certain level of uneasiness in modern urban dwellers – testifies to the resilient nature of the older eco-centric cosmology: it has not been forgotten.

In contrast to the hierarchical anthropocentric cultural model encountered in and propagated by the ontological metaphors encountered in the Western dataset, we allege that those found in the Basque dataset derive their vitality from this earlier pan-European eco-centric cosmology, grounded in a different myth of origins, namely, in the belief that humans descend from bears. Reflexes of the belief in the sacredness of bears are still encountered in the rich folkloric traditions and practices of Euskal Herria.

Navigating Modernization: Bedouin Pastoralism and Climate Information in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

by Andrew Gardner

Co-authored with Timothy Finan, the MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (Spring): 59-72. 2004.

In the petroleum rich states of the Middle East, pastoral nomads of Bedouin descent have been the indirect... more In the petroleum rich states of the Middle East, pastoral nomads of Bedouin descent have been the indirect beneficiaries of growing national wealth. A series of vast and significant changes—some environmental, some economic—have transformed the traditional nomadic livelihood into a modern version of itself. Bedouin nomads have become less bound by the ecological constraints that forged their livelihood strategies, particularly less dependent upon climate variability and the exchange of climatic information. In hindsight, the process of modernization has increased pressure upon the rangeland, opened the Bedouin to market-based vulnerabilities, and challenged the traditional social template—once inextricably embedded in the environment—of Bedouin life. In 2000, the Bedouin nomads were targeted by a government plan to provide them with a sophisticated climate information system upon which a variety of decisions could be based. We argue that this intervention ignores very efficient local knowledge systems, that it will principally benefit non-Bedouin urban-based investors, and that it will exacerbate the already-difficult conditions of life on the Saudi rangeland.

The New Calculus of Bedouin Pastoralism in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

by Andrew Gardner

Published in Human Organization, Volume 62, Number 3: Pp. 267-276.

Recent debates have challenged the very foundation of political ecology. One important critique, stemming from the... more Recent debates have challenged the very foundation of political ecology. One important critique, stemming from the work of Vayda and his associates, promotes a problem-specific, ecological, and positivistic approach to the analysis of the causes of environmental change. Their focus on the “event,” however, is seemingly at odds with earlier concerns with process. Utilizing a case study of the Bedouin people in Saudi Arabia, I argue that the key ecological events upon which this research focuses, the Kuwaiti oil fires and the ongoing process of desertification, provide poor isolates of the human/environmental relationship. If we accept the Kuwaiti oil fires as an environmental event, or better, as a point of departure for working backwards in time and outwards in space, it becomes evident that these “events” are best comprehended as nodes in a complex web of determination, or nodes in a web of interlinked processes. It is a web that reaches outward to the ebb and flow of the global economy, one that remains inseparable from the nuances of national politics and policy, one that reaches inward to the core cultural values of Bedouin society, and one that reaches backward in time to a series of historic conjunctures and processes.