news
on the Shikanda portal : Wim van Binsbergen's recent
publications and work in progress
1. Intro
This series (established
February 2002; on this page only current topicalities from the
year 2008- are included; click here for the years 2002 and 2003; and here for the years 2004-2005; and here for the years 2006-2007; and here for the years 2008-2009; and here for the years 2012-) is to
alert the visitor of new additions and changes in the Shikanda
portal, and to report on recent and forthcoming developments in
Wim van Binsbergen's professional activities in the fields of
African Studies, Intercultural Philosophy, Long-Range Cultural
Analysis, and Poetry. Hyperlinks give access to the texts in
question, and photographs accompany the entries. The information
appears in tabulated form. The closer to the top of this page,
the more recent an event is. Some events have a page of their
own, accessible via a hyperlink; others are merely summarised
below, and may then have a simple illustration to mark them.
2. Other sites in the Shakanda portal
if you are through with
the topical information below, proceed to
the Shikanda portal in order to access all other
websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural
philosophy, African Studies);
ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black
Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the
Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation;
literary work
3. Internal Search Facility for the
entire Shikanda portal
This search facility provides a complete
electronic index of the present website on ethnicity, and of all
of Wim van Binsbergen's other websites in the present domain, and
moreover enables you to search the entire Internet quickly and
effectively; simply enter the word(s) you require into the blank
search box, and press 'Search'
4. Shikanda Forum and Message Board
This service has been discontinued
5. Topicalities: Wim van Binsbergen's recent
publications and work in progress
NB: the default language
in this webpage is English; however, the site owner lives and
works in the Netherlands, and writes poetry in Dutch; entries
reflecting an entirely national Dutch context will be in Dutch,
and will be marked by an orange
background; major entries will be separated by a light green
beam: ;
abstracts and blurbs appear against a light blue background.
In
thanksgiving for the blessings of the
past year, a home concert / poetry
reading / reception / meal was offered at
the van Binsbergen's home -- as in
previous years. Accompanying herself on
the South Asian tambura stringed
instrument, Patricia van Binsbergen
performed a few hymns from the North
Indian dhrupad repertoire, which
she has been studying for the past few
years under Rotterdam conservatory
lecturer Marianne Svasek (originally the
latter was to take the lead in this
performance along with her pakhavaj(hand
drum)-playing husband, but both had been
incapacitated by flu). Wim van Binsbergen
then read an extensive selection from his
new volume of image poetry, entitled Dendrogram
(click here for the book's text
and images).
These readings were punctuated by four
musical intermezzi of singing (including
overtone singing), improvised by Patricia
whilst accompanying herself on the South
Asian musical instrument called srutibox.
After half a decade of successfully
competing for poetry prizes within
grammar school and municipal contexts,
Hannah van Binsbergen recently drafted
her first full book of poetry, Gevaren
van de voorstad (Dangers of the suburbs),
from which she read four poems during our
gathering. After a musical introduction
on the piano by the pianist, piano
pedagogue and poet, Marijke Kuneman, Wim
van Binsbergen read the central poem 'Loy
Krathong' from last year's volume Vanuit
een nieuw lichaam van verlichting:
Gedichten Thailand 2010 (click here
for the book's text and images: formatted text or text with illustrations). The performing part of the
session was concluded by Patricia's
improvised singing while accompanying
herself on the steel drum.
When playing the
videos below at full screen, you can
return to this page by pressing the
Esc[ape] button on your computer's
keyboard; you can select image quality
between 480, 360 and 240
part of
the audience
Patricia sings (in the
universal language of
improvisation)
The
shrine of Sidi Mhammad al-Kabir
in the highlands of N.W. Tunisia;
this is one of the supernatural
agencies (among several others
from Africa, Asia and Europe) to
which Wim van Binsbergen and his
family make offerings several
times a year -- in the case of
Sidi Mhammad this has happened
ever since his first fieldwork,
1968
This
innovative book is a forward-looking
reflection on mental decolonisation and
the postcolonial turn in Africanist
scholarship. As a whole, it provides five
decennia-long lucid and empathetic
research involvements by seasoned
scholars who came to live, in local
people's own ways, significant daily
events experienced by communities,
professional networks and local experts
in various African contexts.
The book covers materials drawn from
Botswana, Cameroon, the Democratic
Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria,
South Africa and Tanzania. Themes include
the Whelan Research Academy, rap
musicians, political leaders, wise men
and women, healers, Sacred Spirit
churches, diviners, bards and weavers who
are deemed proficient in the classical
African geometrical knowledge. As a
tribute to late Archie Mafeje who showed
real commitment to decolonise social
sciences from western-centred modernist
development theories, commentators of his
work pinpoint how these theories sought
to dismiss the active role played by
African people in their quest for
self-emancipation. One of the central
questions addressed by the book concerns
the role of an anthropologist and this
issue is debated against the background
of the academic lecture delivered by Rene
Devisch when receiving an honorary
doctoral degree at the University of
Kinshasa. The lecture triggered critical
but constructive comments from such
seasoned experts as Valentin Mudimbe and
Wim van Binsbergen. They excoriate
anthropological knowledge on account that
the anthropologist, notwithstanding her
social and cognitive empathy and intense
communication with the host community,
too often fails to also question her own
world and intellectual habitus from the
standpoint of her hosts. Leading
anthropologists carry further into great
depth the bifocal anthropological
endeavour focussing on local people's
re-imagining and re-connecting the local
and global. The book is of interest to a
wide readership in the humanities, social
sciences, philosophy and the history of
the African continent and its relation
with the North.
Rene Devisch is emeritus professor from
the Catholic University of Leuven,
Institute for Anthropological Research in
Africa.
Francis B.Nyamnjoh is former lecturer at
the Universities of Buea and Botswana,
and former Head of publications of
CODESRIA. He is now professor and Head of
the Department of Social Anthropology at
the University of Cape Town.
René
Devisch during his allocution as the recipient
of a honorary doctorate from the University of
Kinshasa, Congo, 2007; much of The Colonial
Turn was triggered by this event (source: http://soc.kuleuven.be/web/images/7/38/Hphd_Rdevisch_1.JPG )
The Great Enclosure of the Great
Zimbabwe complex, one of the most
contested sites in the study of
Africa’s transcontinental
continuities in
pre- and protohistory
INTERNATIONAL
CONFERENCE: Rethinking
Africa’s transcontinental
continuities in pre- and protohistory
(African Studies Centre, Leiden
University, Leiden, the Netherlands,
12-13 April 2012)
organising committee Marieke van Winden,
Gitty Petit & Wim van Binsbergen;
funding: African Studies Centre, Leiden
(ASC), Leiden University Foundation (LUF)
and the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus
University Rotterdam
-- this
conference is to mark Wim van
Binsbergen’s retirement from the
African Studies Centre, Leiden, after 35
years
OBSERVERS. Specialists, interested
non-specialists, and all people
associated with Wim van Binsbergen in the
course of his career are welcome to
attend the first day of the conference
with observer status (attendance fee
EUR25). Considering the expected massive
interest it is important to register
beforehand. Please contact Marieke van
Winden (WINDEN@ascleiden.nl
) for details.
At this conference, Wim van Binsbergen
intends to present a paper entitled:
'Before the Presocratics: Cyclicity,
transformation, and element cosmology as
a likely pre- or protohistoric substrate
in Africa, Eurasia and North America'.
See the following abstract:
ABSTRACT. This argument
seeks to contribute to the study
of the global history of human
thought and philosophy. It calls
in question the popular, common
perception of the Presocratic
philosophers as having initated
Western philosophy, and
particularly of Empedocles as
having initated the system of
four elements as immutable and
irreducible parallel components
of reality. Our point of
departure is the puzzling clan
system of the Nkoya people of
South Central Africa, which turns
out to evoke a cosmology of six
basic dimensions, each of which
consists of a destructor,
something that is being
destroyed, and a third, catalytic
agent. This is strongly
reminiscent of the East Asian
correlative systems as in the yì
jing cosmological system of
changes based on the 64
combinations of the eight
trigrams two taken at a time; and
particularly of the five-element
cosmology of Taoism in general,
in which the basic relations
between elements are defined as
an unending cycle of
transformations by which each
element is either destructive or
productive of the next. Further
explorations into Ancient Egypt,
India, sub-Saharan Africa and
North America suggest, as a
Working Hypothesis, that such a
transformative cycle of elements
may be considered a prehistoric
substrate, possibly as old as
dating from the Upper
Palaeolithic, informing Eurasian,
African and North American
cosmologies; but possibly also
only as recent as the Bronze Age,
and transmitted
transcontinentally in
(proto-)historical times. With
this Working Hypothesis we turn
to the Presocratics and
especially Empedocles, whose
thought is treated in some
detail. Here we find that the
transformative and cyclic aspects
of the putative substrate system
also occasionally surface in
their work and in that of their
commentators (especially
Aristotle and Plato), but only to
be censored out in later, still
dominant, hegemonic and
Eurocentric interpretations. This
then puts us to a tantalising
dilemma: (1) Can we vindicate our
Working Hypothesis and argue that
the Presocratics have build upon,
and transformed (as well as
misunderstood!), a cosmology
(revolving on the cyclical
transformation of elements) that
by their time had already existed
for many centuries? Or (2) must
we altogether reject our Working
Hypothesis, give up the idea of
very great antiquity and
transcontinental distribution of
a transformative element system
as an Upper Palaeolithic
substrate of human thought –
and in fact revert to a
Eurocentric position, where the
attestations of element systems
world-wide are primarily seen as
the result of the recent
transcontinental diffusion of
Greek thought from the Iron Age
onward. Both solutions will be
considered. Typologically, but
with considerable linguistic and
comparative mythological support,
our argument identifies essential
consecutive steps (from
‘range semantics’ to
binary oppositions to cyclical
element transformations and
dialectical triads), in
humankind’s trajectory from
Upper Palaeolithic modes of
thought towards modern forms of
discursive thought. It is here
that the present argument seeks
to make a substantial
contribution to the theory and
method of studying the prehistory
of modes of thought worldwide. On
the one hand we will present
considerable linguistic arguments
for the claim of great antiquity
of the most rudimentary forms of
element cosmology. On the other
hand, we will apply linguistic
methods to identify the origin,
in West Asia in the Neolithic to
Early Bronze Age, not of the
postulated substrate system as a
whole but at least of part of the
nomenclature of the Chinese yì
jing system. The region indicated
constitutes a likely environment
from where the ‘cross
model’ as a mechanism of
‘Pelasgian expansion’
(van Binsbergen 2010 and in
press; van Binsbergen &
Woudhuizen 2011) might allow us
to understand subsequent spread
over much of the Old World and
part of the New World –
including the presence of the
transformative element cycle
among the Nkoya. However, in the
penultimate section of the
argument a strong alternative
case will be presented: that for
direct, recent demic diffusion
from East or South Asia to
sub-Saharan Africa in historical
times.
a contemporary Chinese depiction
of a giraffe presented to the Chinese
emperor in the context of Admiral Zheng He's voyages, early 15th
c. CE
Now published
(in a memorial volume for Gerti Hesseling
(1946-2009):
ABSTRACT. From a naive
transcontinental perspective, the
challenge surrounding human rights
amounts to mediating and vindicating a
North-Atlantic cultural product outside
the North Atlantic in contexts that
initially appear to be alien and
inimical. From this perspective, human
rights in Africa are part of the wider
problematic of the continent's reception
of North-Atlantic constitutional law.
However, intercultural philosophy exposes
this naive view as inherently hegemonic
for attributing to the North-Atlantic
region the monopoly of something that
could, alternatively, be considered an
inalienable achievement of humankind as a
whole. This approach is disqualifying for
persons outside the North Atlantic as it
makes it more difficult for them to adopt
human-rights thinking as potentially
universal and as resonating with their
own local concepts of personhood,
integtity and freedom. The present
argument challenges the hegemonic
approach to human rights. On the basis of
a study of the human-rights thinking in
the traditional legal system of the Nkoya
people of Western Central Zambia, I argue
an endogenous, local historical basis for
many of their human-rights concepts;
moreover, the application of these rights
in Nkoya society is often subtle and
liberating. Finally, the Nkoya people
even boast a few human rights for which
there are no ready equivalents in
standard North-Atlantic human-rights
catalogues.
Gerti Hesseling in 2007
(photo Vincent van Binsbergen)
From late October to mid-December 2011, Wim
van Binsbergen was seriously ill. Apologies are
offered for any inconvenience this may have
caused in regard of his various publication,
supervision and conference projects. By
mid-December he turned out to be fully recovered.
ABSTRACT. During my
recent visit to Zambia (July 2011), where
I have conducted historical and
ethnographic fieldwork among the Nkoya
people since 1972, I obtained a unique
cult statuette that played a role in the
diagnosis and treatment of cults of
affliction – the latter, allegedly
new and alien forms of possession
considered to have entered the Zambian
countryside from an eastern direction
from the late 19th-century onward. In
this paper I describe the artefact in
detail, and seek to define its regional
and long-range connectivity in space and
time. The artefact, and its attending
local exegesis, although apparently
isolated in terms of style and technique,
turns out to represent a cosmology and
cosmogony which, far from being totally
alien, appear to underlie much of social
and ritual life in this part of South
Central Africa before this worldview came
to be almost completely eclipsed, first
by the ascendance of the ancestral and
royal cults in precolonial times, then by
the advent of the colonial state,
capitalism, and Christianity. This
insight leads to a revision of my earlier
approach to cults of affliction
particularly my book Religious change
in Zambia (1981).
A modern depiction
of Mami Wata, an aquatic goddess with a wide
distribution in West and Central Africa, and (as
this paper argues)
continuous with aquatic deities in Southern
Africa, the Mediterranean
and throughout Eurasia
In May 2009, Wim van
Binsbergen presented the following paper:
‘Giving birth to Fire: Evidence for a
widespread cosmology revolving on an elemental
transformative cycle, in Japan, throughout the
Old World, and in the New World’, at the
Third Annual Meeting of the International
Association for Comparative Mythology, Kokugakuin
Shinto University, Tokyo, Japan, 23-24 May 2009;
meanwhile this complex argument has been
rewritten, so as to separate the specific
analysis of Japanese mythology from the
ambitious, transcontinental argument concerning a
widespread postulated protohistorical substrate
cosmology of a transformative cycle of elements.
In anticipation of publication as a journal
article, the Japanological argument now appears
here in pre-publication preview:
transcontinental
connections of selected African stories as
discussed in van Binsbergen's 2011 paper on
Malawian stories
Now published
To a special issue in memory of Mathijs
[ Matthew ] Schoffeleers by the leading scholarly
journal of Malawi, The Society of Malawi
Journal, Wim van Binsbergen is contributing
not only an extensive obituary, but also an
article on Schoffeleers' approach to Malawian
folk tales:
Wim van Binsbergen's
obituary of Matthew Schoffeleers is also
being published in the Journal of
Religion in Africa and on the website of
the African Studies Centre, Leiden
left: wooden
statuette of Mwandanjangula, collected in
Angola 1998 -- note the female breast,
although the unilateral being Mwendanjangula,
with only one side to his body, is usually
considered male in modern discourse;
Mendanjangula plays a considerable
role in the mythology of South Central Africa
(including Malawi) and in the present paper
In de
maanden oktober-november 2011 schreef Wim van
Binsbergen te Charakopio (Messanie, Griekenland),
Antwerpen en Haarlem de dichtbundel Dendrogram,
een samenhangende verzameling beeldgedichten (114
pp. inclusief foto's en aantekeningen), die
binnenkort in druk zal verschijnen. Onderstaande
flaptekst kenschetst de inhoud. Klik hier voor de
digitale versie:
(N.B. gedicht en bijbehorende
foto verschijnen naast elkaar op
tegenoverliggende pagina's. Het laden kan een
minuutje duren. Om de bestandsgrootte op internet
laag te houden, is de kwaliteit van tekst en
foto's veel minder dan in de gedrukte versie)
DENDROGRAM.
De beelden in deze bundel zijn overwegend
ontleend aan projectie van voor mij
actuele of vanzelfsprekende inhouden op
de aanschouwing van grillig gevormde
olijfbomen in Zuid-Griekenland. Daarbij
is de belangrijkste mededeling er een
betreffende de ‘Textuur van het
Zijnde’ – een onderwerp dat,
ondanks zijn gruwelijke woordkeus (die
echter normaal filosofisch taalgebruik
weerspiegelt), niet tot de ene sectie van
die naam beperkt blijft. Dit regardeert
mijn inspanning, als dichter, Afrikaans
waarzegger, en intercultureel filosoof,
om een wereldbeeld te formuleren waarin
plaats is voor de kennis van zowel het
moderne Noordatlantisch gebied met zijn
wetenschap en technologie, als van het
oude Afrika met zijn – naar ik
ontdekt heb, naast anderen –
waarheidsgetrouwe waarzegmethoden en
effectieve magie. Oppervlaktestructuren,
spanningsvelden, plastieke torsies,
onverzoenlijke maar tijdelijk ontveinsde
tegenstellingen, als kenschetsing van de
werkelijkheid, vormen het hoofdthema
van deze bundel. Zij zijn geconcretiseerd
in een vijftal secties: Dendrogram;
Textuur van het Zijnde; Mythische
voortijd; Eigentijds; en Autobiografisch.
Ik stel mij op het standpunt dat een
tekst grotendeels zelfstandig is en door
elke lezer op eigen wijze
geïnterpreteerd mag worden ongeacht de
oorspronkelijke bedoelingen van de
schrijver. Niettemin zijn de voor mijzelf
actuele en vanzelfsprekende inhouden voor
de meeste lezers onbekend en duister,
zodat zij uitnodigen tot korte
toelichtingen – waarmee deze bundel,
evenals mijn vorige, mijn eigen paden in
leven en werk documenteert, en de
verbindingen daartussen laat zien.
Wim
van Binsbergen in front of the Artemis temple at
Brauron,
eastern Attica, 2011; here 'Pelasgian' female
puberty rites were
conducted somewhat reminiscent of those of
Niger-Congo speaking sub-Saharan Africa
'Pelasgian'
wall fragment from Zagani Hill, Attica, 3000-2500
BCE
(now at the Athenian international airport
museum) -- reminiscent
of masonry of Southern African Iron Age sites;
similar masonry
may also be found at Ancient Olympia, NW
Peloponnesus, Greece
September 2011
15 September 2011: deadline
for the submission of titles and abstracts for
Wim van Binsbergen's valedictory conference
'Rethinking Africa’s transcontinental
continuities in pre- and protohistory' (Leiden,
The Netherlands, c. 12-13 April 2012); click for Call for Papers
and for Addition to Call for Papers; title and abstract to be sent to Mrs
Marieke van Winden MA at: WINDEN@ascleiden.nl
Muhammad Seifikar;
photo: Mels van der Mede
Wim van Binsbergen acts as
external examiner of the PhD thesis written by
Muhammad Seifikar on 'Universals in Ethics and
Politics', Department of Philosophy, Gendt
University, Belgium, 2 September 2011
August 2011
Wim van Binsbergen (left) and Fred
Woudhuizen; photo Mels van der Mede
Now
published
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
& Woudhuizen, Fred, C., 2011, Ethnicity
in Mediterranean Protohistory, British
Archaeological Reports (BAR) International
Series No. 2256, Oxford: Archaeopress, 519
pp., 84 figures, 46 tables, cumulative
bibliography, index of proper names, authors
index, ISBN 978-1-4073-0823-4, £70.
In addition to the
Preliminaries, the book consists of the following
five parts:
PART I. ETHNICITY IN
MEDITERRANEAN PROTO-HISTORY: EXPLORATIONS
IN THEORY AND METHOD: With extensive
discussions of the Homeric catalogue of
ships, the Biblical Table of Nations, and
the Sea Peoples of the Late Bronze Age,
against the background of a long-range
comparative framework,
BY WIM M.J. VAN BINSBERGEN, p. 17
PART II. THE ETHNICITY OF
THE SEA PEOPLES: AN HISTORICAL,
ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC STUDY,
BY FRED C. WOUDHUIZEN, p. 191
PART III. THE ETHNICITY OF
THE SEA PEOPLES: A SECOND OPINION,
BY WIM M.J. VAN BINSBERGEN, p. 331
PART IV. THE ETHNICITY OF
THE SEA PEOPLES: TOWARDS A SYNTHESIS, AND
IN ANTICIPATION OF CRITICISM,
BY WIM VAN BINSBERGEN & FRED C.
WOUDHUIZEN, p. 395
PART V. REFERENCE
MATERIAL: CUMULATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY AND
INDEXES, p. 419
The book's principal focus
is on the Mediterranean Bronze Age and the
massive political, linguistic and ethnic
changes marking that period's end; meanwhile,
this chapter particularly dwells on this
book's great relevance for, and indebtedness
to, African Studies and Intercultural
Philosophy, whilst presenting an overview of
the main methodological and theoretical tools
to be deployed in the course of its argument
This book
reflects the intellectual encounter, over the
years, between, on the one hand, a group of Dutch
scholars studying the Ancient Mediterranean,
Ancient Egypt and Africa, and, on the other hand,
Martin Gardiner Bernal (photo: front cover) as
one of the most challenging and innovative, but
also controversial and criticised, scholars of
recent decades. From the 1980s on, Bernal has
claimed that the roots of Western civilisation
were to be sought not in Ancient Greece but
outside Europe, in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia,
and ultimately in sub-Saharan Africa. Bernal has
wrought havoc in Western identity, addressing hot
issues such as racism, exclusion, cultural
domination, White and North Atlantic hegemony. He
has combined a preference for non-mainstream
theories (including Afro-centrism) with a passion
for ad-hominem arguments derived from his
personal sociology of knowledge. In this way he
has blazed a trail of polemics and conflicts
throughout a considerable number of international
scholarly fields, learned journals, and
conferences.
Deriving from
one such conference, with three original
contributions by Bernal himself, and greatly
expanded and updated, the present collection as a
whole does not (contrary to the 2008
Warwick conference on Bernal) call for
canonisation of the Black Athena thesis as
a main-stream achievement of empirical research.
It does however call for recognition of Martin
Bernal as the courageous and visionary initiator
of an inspiring and timely research programme.
His Black Athena series has greatly
contributed to raising the question of the global
politics of knowledge, from heresy, to becoming
the very boundary condition of scholarly and
institutional integrity. In this sense of
maturation, self-transcendence and limitation, we
may say that Black Athena comes of age.
Molly
Myerowitz Levine, prominent contributor to the Black
Athena debate, called the present collection
when published in the scholarly journal
TALANTA ‘the most interesting,
constructive, and substantive treatment of Black
Athena to date’.
Now
published:
Wim M.J. van Binsbergen,
2011, ed., Black Athena comes of age:
Towards a constructive reassessment, Berlin
- Münster - Wien - Zürich - London: LIT,
numerous figures and tables, extensive
general index, 368 pp., ISBN
978-3-8258-4808-8
(click here for the book's Table of
Contents; and here for the book's general index)
An earlier version was
published as a special issue of the
archaeological journal TALANTA in 1997. This
already contained three seminal texts by Wim van
Binsbergen, now appearing in the present book in
the following form:
For the present book edition,
the original collection was augmented with
Fred Woudhuizen's paper:
'The bee-sign (Evans no. 86): An instance
of Egyptian influence on Cretan
Hieroglyphic' (pp. 283-296), and with
three new texts by Wim van Binsbergen
which bring the collection up to date:
Mediterranean
cameo representing the goddess Athena, dating
from the early Common Era, and found in Meroe, N.
Sudan
Martin Bernal, author of the Black Athena
thesis (from mid-1980s onwards) and initiator of
the ensuing Black Athena debate
June-July 2011
Cranes and Pygmies
(with connotations of the juxtaposition of Heaven
and Earth, but also of Africa and Eurasia)
depicted as fighting, on the Aryballos vase,
Greece, 570 BCE
Please feel free to
circulate this call for papers among your
scholarly network; you will be doing us a great
service
Rethinking
Africa’s transcontinental continuities in
pre- and protohistory
an international conference
marking the retirement of Wim van Binsbergen
(convenor / editor), and one of the activities in
the context of the 65th anniversary of the
African Studies Centre, Leiden (the Netherlands)
Leiden, the Netherlands, ca.
12-13 April 2012 (exact vanue and dates to be
announced)
this conference is open to
Africanists, linguists, geneticists, comparative
mythologists, archaeologists, comparative
anthropologists / ethnologists, historicans,
classicists, Egyptologists, Afrocentrists, and to
any scholar who proposes to make an original and
path-breaking contribution to the topic
Prospective participants are
hereby invited to submit the title and abstract
of their proposed contribution by 15 September
2011 (e-mail to Mrs Marieke van Winden at: WINDEN@ascleiden.nl ). These proposals will be responded to
before 15 October 2011, and accepted papers are
to be submitted by 15 March 2012 to be included
in the prospective conference website. Depending
on available funding (for which additional
applications are still in progress) acceptance is
to provide for a substantial core group of
participants, paid travel to Leiden v.v. and
accommodation there -- and an inevitably somewhat
less generous arrangement for other accepted
participants.
Please feel free to
circulate this call for papers among your
scholarly network; you will be doing us a great
service
The world
distribution of the RH-D genetic marker, one of
the Rhesus markers often interpreted as
indicative of transcontinental continuities among
Anatomically Modern Humans
In the first
three weeks of July, 2011, Wim van Binsbergen
visited Zambia in order to attend, once more, the
annual Kazanga ceremony, on which he has
published at length from the 1990s onwards (1992, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000, 2003 (a), 2003 (b)). The
2011 festival was to take place in Kaoma district
on 2 and 3 July 2011, but was postponed by two
weeks due to national mourning following the
death of former President Chiluba, and pressing
other commitments of the Zambian Vice President
who was determined to attend the ceremony. Wim
van Binsbergen's visit was on the invitation of
the Lusaka-based National Executive of the
Kazanga Cultural Association.
He revisited Nkoya society in
the pursuit of the historical and anthropological
questions that have informed his Zambian research
for decades, but also with the specific new
questions that have emerged in his comparative
research of the last decade, notably the continuities between African and
Eurasian mythologies,
and cultural connections between Africa and Asia
in pre- and protohistory (see below, entry for
April-May 2011).
As a member of the African
Studies Centre, Leiden, Wim van Binsbergen has
also taken this opportunity to look into broader
issues of research co-operation and research
strategy at the regional and national level in
Zambia, in that connection especially reviving
his long-standing intellectual and institutional
contacts with the University of Zambia, where he
was a Lecturer of Sociology in 1971-74, and
subsequently an affiliate of the Institute for
African Studies (formerly Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute, now Institute for Economic and Social
Research -- INESOR). In preparation of this
aspect of his trip, Wim van Binsbergen produced a
short proposal 'Investigating the possibility of
creating an intercontinental research hub
focussing on Zambia' (click).
An extensive analytical report
on this field trip has been prepared:
Meanwhile a 200 pp. draft
report on this field trip has been completed.
Moreover, as a result of this field trip, Wim van
Binsbergen could revise his approach to cults of
affliction / ecstatic cults, their underlying
worldview, and their history, see:
from left to right: Simon Simonse,
Jos van der Klei, Klaas de Jonge and Wim van
Binsbergen, June 2011
Amsterdam
Working Group on Marxist Anthropology, 35 years
later
In the late 1970s,
seven Dutch anthropologists (Reini Raatgever,
Klaas de Jonge, Simon Simonse, Jos van der Klei,
Johan van de Walle, Peter Geschiere and Wim van
Binsbergen) teamed up to form the Amsterdam
Working Group on Marxist Anthropology, seeking to
refine and apply the conceptual and theoretical
apparatus of neo-Marxist anthropology to the
empirical data they derived from their recent or
ongoing fieldwork and reading, mainly but not
exclusively in relation with Africa. Beside the
developments in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, around
SUN Socialistische Uitgeverij Nijmegen (Socialist
Publishing House Nijmegen) and the philosopher /
anthropologists Ton Lemaire, the Amsterdam
initiative proved to be a major, highly
influential step in the reception of neo-Marxism
in the social sciences in the Netherlands. The
group produced a Dutch-language book: van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Geschiere, Peter L.,
1982, red., Oude produktiewijzen en
binnendringend kapitalisme, Amsterdam: Vrije
Universiteit / Free University Press (now available at Google books), of which three years later an
extensively rewritten English version appeared:
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., & Peter L.
Geschiere, 1985, eds, Old Modes of Production
and Capitalist Encroachment: Anthropological
explorations in Africa, London/Boston: Kegan
Paul International (now available at Google books). Even before the publication of the
Dutch book, the group dwindled without manifest
causes, and in the next decades the seven members
each went their way as brothers in a folktale,
without ever totally losing sight of one another.
Half a life later they are trying to revive their
former bond. A first informal meeting took place
in Amsterdam, 9 June 2011, and more are to
follow.
The Amsterdam Working Group on
Marxist Anthropology, c. 1977 (incomplete, from
left to right: Johan van der Walle, Wim van
Binsbergen, Simon Simonse, Klaas de Jonge, Reini
Raatgever with on her lap the infant Geertje van
der Klei, Henk Meilink (guest), Peter Geschiere
-- missing is Jos van der Klei, in whose house
the meeting took place and who took the
photograph
From 10 April to 13 May 2011 Wim van
Binsbergen (accompanied by his wife Patricia, who
among other qualifications holds an MA in African
Studies) conducted extensive fieldwork in Sri
Lanka, as the (pen-)ultimate leg in a series of
Asian explorations from the mid 2000's onwards
towards van Binsbergen's new book on
African-Asian continuities in pre- and
protohistory, working title Out of Africa or
Out of Sundaland (one of the projects lined
up for inclusion in the proposed new subprogramme
'Africa in the World' of the African Studies
Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands). The
circumstantial evidence for such continuities is
considerable, both in the field of comparative
ethnography (van Binsbergen's most relevant field
of expertise in this connection), and in such
fields as genetics, linguistics, archaeology,
comparative mythology, and the history of plant
and animal domestication. Extensive preliminary
sketches have already been made in the form of a
full-size book draft with the working title Out
of Africa or out of Sundaland, along with
detailed, but more provisional and fragmentary
regional sketches already provisionally posted on
this website, on the basis of earlier trips to
Java (2007 and 2010), Bali (2010, with subsequent reflections), Borneo (2010),
Thailand (2010), and the
Cameroonian Western Grassfields (2006) -- while
the world of Asian Buddhism was further explored
during trips to China (2002 and 2006) and
Japan (2005 and 2009), and
comparative reflexions on the Homa fire cult
ranging from Vedic times to present-day Hindu and
Buddhist Asia (see entry on October 2010, below).
This extension of his research activities into
Asia has owed much to his close association with
the Department of Sanskrit and Asian Studies,
Harvard University (Michael Witzel) throughout
the years 2000. The overall critical inspiration
(Stephen Oppenheimer's General and Special Sunda
theories in his book Eden in the East: The
Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia, 1998)
was subjected to a quantitative analysis based on a
global sample of flood myths, published (with the
collaboration of Mark Isaak) in Cosmos. Meanwhile, a lavishly illustrated preliminary
account of the recent findings in Sri Lanka has
now been prepared (click here). As empirical operationalisation of
Asian-African continuities we have concentrated
on topics that, over the decades, have played a
major role in van Binsbergen's comparative
research: kingship; cults of affliction / trance
and possession cults; herbalism; divination;
board games; representational art; music and
dance; maritime transport technology; tree cults;
megalithic cults. During the field trip to Sri
Lanka, an overwhelming amount of promising
empirical clues was collected, documented in
thousands of photographs and many hours of video
recordings. Extensive reflection on Thailand (2010)
highlighted Buddhism as a possible context for
the transmission of Asian themes to sub-Saharan
Africa in the course of the last one or two
millennia -- especially in the form of kingship
and ecstatic cults. There was further
corroboration of the hypothetical existence, at
least from the Early Mediterranean Bronze Age
onward (third millennium BCE), of a
transcontinental maritime network of trade and
cultural transmission, stretching from West
Africa and the Mediterranean, to China. However,
while the Buddhist context would make us stress
Africa-bound transfers and put Africa on the
passive, receiving side of Asian-African
continuities (and the same suggestion emanates
from van Binsbergen's studies of transcontinental
continuities in the fields of divination,
boardgames, and cults of affliction), the present
trip -- while drawing attention to the Early
Modern, Kaffir African influence on South Asia --
inspired considerable rethinking on this point of
pre- and proto-history, and highlighted -- rather
in line with Afrocentrist thinking, e.g. by the
USA educationalist and linguist Clyde Winters --
the existence of a Asia-bound complex of
transmission from Africa especially in the last
three millennia BCE. In a recent article, van Binsbergen
reviewed a number of major analytical models for these long-range historical
relationships, including Frobenius' South
Erythraean model, Oppenheimer's Sunda model and
his own Pelasgian model; the latter model is
illuminating in that it defines a substrate
informing both (West, South, South East, and
East) Asian cultures, and sub-Saharan cultures,
in the last two millennia BCE, and therefore
helps to explain part of any transcontinental
continuities that may be established, by
reference to a common West Asian source in
Neolithic times or earlier. Yet perhaps the most
important result of this trip has been a growing
awareness of the methodological and typological
requirements and presuppositions of this type of
research, in the light of which also the already
available parts of the proposed book will be
revised.
A priestess in her shrine
dedicated to the god Kataragama / Skanda, and
engaged in trance divination, near Polonnaruwa
No fieldwork on religion is
possible without exploring the material,
productive side of social life at the same time;
here Patricia van Binsbergen is dragged through
calf-deep mud in order to participate in rice
planting, near Polonnaruwa
While Wim van Binsbergen was
away on fieldwork in Sri Lanka, two of
his principal teachers of anthropology
passed away: Douwe Jongmans (1922-2011) who initiated Wim van
Binsbergen to the complex intercultural
practice of ethnographic and
ethnohistorical fieldwork and to North
African ethnography; and Matthew Schoffeleers
(1928-2011),
specialist on Malawi and on African
religion, who worked closely together
with Wim van Binsbergen in the (pre- and
proto-)historical study of African
religion, and who conferred a doctorate
upon him from the Free University,
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1979, with
Bonno Thoden van Velzen as external
examiner, and Terence Ranger on the
committee. Not having been able to
personally pay his respects at the
graveside due to fieldwork absence, Wim
van Binsbergen here honours these eminent
teachers and friends with obituaries
(click on the respective names).
The
contradictions of van Binsbergen's career
are brought out by these two recent
deaths,
rendering Douwe Jongmans and Matthew
Schoffeleers all the dearer, and all the
more sorely missed. It is striking that
these two deaths should have occurred
when Wim van Binsbergen, for the first
time in his long Africanist career and
half a year before retirement, had
formally obtained institutional funds for
the specific purpose of doing fieldwork
far outside Africa, applying the
Jongmansian techniques and communicative
stances in Sri Lanka, in a bid to bring
to light what van Binsbergen thinks are
the transcontinental, cross-Indian Ocean
strands in African religion -- in whose
study Matthew Schoffeleers was, after
all, his closest ally.
Wim van Binsbergen's
obituary of Matthew Schoffeleers has
meanwhile appeared on the website of the African Studies Centre, Leiden,
the Netherlands (where
Schoffeleers served as a Deputy Chairman
in the early 1980s), and has been
accepted to appear in the Journal on
Religion in Africa; it is likewise
to appear in a special issue on Matthew
Schoffeleers of the main Malawian
academic journal, along with a revised
version of Wim van Binsbergen's comments
on Schoffeleers' analysis of Malawian
fairy-tales featuring superhuman suitors,
apparently in a context of long-distance
trade (click here for an older version
of Wim van Binsbergen's paper).
Op 7 april
zal Wim van Binsbergen de vierde en afsluitende
lezing verzorgen van een serie over 'Mythen en
mythologieën' georganiseerd door het
Albertinumgenootschap te Nijmegen. De andere
sprekers in deze serie zijn de hoogleraren Mineke
Schipper en Bart Vervaeck, en Dr Hugo Koning
March 2011
Completed at
long last (and scheduled for publication August
2011, see there, above)
One
of the fruits of the sabattical period which Wim
van Binsbergen has enjoyed during the first three
months of 2011, has been the final completion
(camera-ready MS) of the very extensive book (98
figures, 45 tables, over 2 million chrs, spaces
not counted):
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
& Woudhuizen, Fred, C., 2011, Ethnicity
in Mediterranean Protohistory, British
Archaeological Reports International Series,
Oxford: Archaeopress, 519 pp., numerous
figures and tables, cumulative bibliography,
index of proper names, authors index.
This book, on which both
authors have worked for nearly a decade, has now
been accepted by the publishers (Archaeopress,
Oxford), and is scheduled to appear in the
British Archaeological Reports International
Series August-September 2011 (see there, above).
10 February 2011: The public
defence of Stephanus Djunatan's PhD thesis The
principle of affirmation is to take place in
the Senate Hall of the Erasmus University
Rotterdam, 11:30 hrs; supervisors: Professors Wim
van Binsbergen and Bambang Sugiharto
the image shows (full circle)
the prospective young doctor, and (broken circle)
one of his supervisors, during fieldwork
(syncretistic Sufi pilgrimage at the devotional
shrine of Nagara Padang, West Bandung, Java,
Indonesia, 2010).
On the basis of my
Aggregative Diachronic Model of Global
Mythology theory, and further inspired by
other prehistoric attestations of
crosshatching and by my own ethnographic
fieldwork into female puberty rites among
the Nkoya people of present-day Zambia
(1972-1995), I will propose a very
specific meteorological reading of the
Blombos pattern – as a
representation of the Rainbow ( -
Serpent), probably in an initiatory
ritual context.
Of course, crosshatching is ubiquitous,
one of the most obvious ways of
graphically treating a surface, and my
argument does not in the least pretend
that all crosshatching, in prehistory or
later, is to be understood in this
manner. Various alternatives from a
number of continents will be considered
in my argument; some of these (in terms
of the Lightning Bird / Rain, and of the
Milky Way) will turn out to be remarkably
related to the Rainbow Serpent pattern
– as systematic counterparts, or as
systematic transformations, still with a
meteorological or cosmic reference.
More important than the apparent, and no
doubt ephemeral, result in terms of such
specific interpretations, my argument
aims to contribute to the development of
methodology in the highly problematic but
rapidly expanding field of symbolic
archaeology.
The scientific interpretation of
apparently meaningful patterns without a
local and contemporary, ‘emic’
explanatory metatext at our disposal
constitutes a well-known problem in
anthropology. We encounter this
hermeneutical problem all the time when
making knowledge claims about ulterior
implied meanings (not explicitly stated
by the local actors, and perhaps even not
consciously known to them) in cultural
patterns not our own. The positivistic
position, popular in anthropology in the
middle of the 20th century CE, was to
reject all such scientific claims if they
were not emically supported, i.e. by the
local actors’ explicit conscious
verbal statements; however, this position
has now been recognised as too narrow
– thanks to the influence of
structuralism, psychoanalysis and more
recently, cognitive science.
The Blombos red ochre incised block, South
Africa, 70,000 Before Present
Rainbow Serpent, Australian rock art, undated
current year: 2011 (begins above this line; the closer to
the top of the page, the nearer to 2012)
November - December 2010
An Africanist
exploring South East Asia: learning to play the
gamelan at Rawabogo desa, Ciwidey, West Java;
musical ensembles in South Central Africa (e.g.
royal orchestras), and even West Africa, appear
to owe (as claimed by A.M. Jones 1964) a
considerable debt to gamelan and xylophone
musical traditions of South East Asia -- or is
the historical connection the other way around?
Main
findings of Wim van Binsbergen’s
research in 2010 compressed into 150
words (for detailed discussion and
substantiation see the specific entries
for 2010, below)
1. The othering of Africa has dominated
North Atlantic scholarship, yet there has
been much African-Eurasian
socio-cultural, religio-mythological,
linguistic and genetic continuity –
attributable, not primarily to the
of-Africa Exodus of Anatomically Modern
Humans (c. 60,000 Before Present), but
especially to the Back-into-Africa
migration (from 15.000 BP).
2. The impact of Islam and Christianity
on sub-Saharan Africa is recognised, but
also Hinduism / Buddhism must be
acknowledged as major, though submerged,
influences on East, Southern and West
Africa – an aspect of South East,
South and East Asian influence on Africa
in pre- and protohistory.
3. African societies have excelled in the
social technology of reconciliation
locally and regionally – however,
the weak nature of Africa’s formal
organisations; particularist
divisiveness; failing idioms of
universalism; and the dislocated and
alienated African subjecthood; have
largely prevented the national and
international application of this asset.
4. African wisdom potentially addresses
major ills of post-modern global society.
5. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena thesis
sees Ancient Greek, subsequently West
European, ultimately global, civilisation
as exclusively a product of Ancient Egypt
and ultimately of sub-Saharan Africa;
this Afrocentrist view must be largely
rejected on empirical grounds, but should
be applauded for focussing on the global
politics of knowledge.
an Africanist
exploring South East Asia: at the end of an
arduous journey through the jungle of Thailand
present-day popular Islamic ritual
(but note the Hinduist / Buddhist hand gesture)
on the apparent remnants of a megalithic corridor
grave at the site of Nagara Padang
Abstract.
The devotional shrine of Nagara Padang,
village of Rawabogo, Ciwidey, West
Bandung, Indonesia, plays a central role
in the research of the author’s PhD
candidate Mr Stephanus Djunatan, a
lecturer of philosophy at the Parahyangan
Catholic University (UNPAR), Bandung, who
is scheduled to publicly defend his PhD
thesis before the Erasmus University
Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in February
2011. The author himself returned to the
shrine in 2010, three years after his
first visit, and this time in the context
of a massive student research training
project supervised by c. 10 UNPAR
lecturers including Mr Djunatan. Leaning
heavily on the latter’s work, the
author’s argument briefly describes
the main features of the shrine and of a
large collective pilgrimage there
starting from the village of Rawabogo. In
a more original vein, the argument
highlights the syncretistic signature of
the shrine’s cult (apparently a
mixture of Islamic, Hinduist, Buddhist
and animistic elements, going back to the
first half of the second millennium CE).
Parallels are drawn not only with the
Borobudur devotional shrine of Central
Java, but also with North Africa (where
the author has studied, since 1967,
shrine cults in the context of popular
Islam) and with sub-Saharan Africa (where
in at least three places, as widely apart
as Malawi, Cameroon and Uganda, somewhat
similar, symbolically and cultically
charged rock formations may be found,
especially associated with the idea of
the emergence of the first people from
the earth or their descent from heaven).
The possibility of an extreme antiquity
for the Nagara Padang site as a cult
centre is further suggested by its
reminiscences of Upper Palaeolithic
initiatory rituals of spiritual
(re-)birth, with the novice having to
press oneself through a narrow rock
crevice. The presence of at least one
menhir and of numerous cupmarks on the
top of the site suggests continuity with
the widespread Indonesian megalithic
complex, with contested affinities
throughout South East and East Asia, and
the rest of the Old World – and
Bronze Age dating. These discussions are
supported by numerous illustrations.
Against the background of a selection of
the scholarly literature the
anthropological theory of shrine cults
(also called regional cults) is presented
in a nutshell – with emphasis on
Victor Turner’s concept of
communitas. This finally allows the
author to comment, as requested by the
organisers, on the considerable merits of
the student research training project.
The relevance of this study in
the context of Wim van Binsbergen's current
research projects (particularly his book in
preparation Out of Africa or out of
Sundaland? ) is that it constitutes a useful
reminder of the fact that apparent continuities
between South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa
need not be attributed to specific cultural
transmission between either region, but may also
derive from a common prehistoric substrate.
This paper has now been
slightly reworked and polished up and is
currently in the press as a contribution to the
Indonesia-based journal Sundalana, which
specialises in studies on the Sunda culture of
Western Java
major and minor
cupmarks as tell-tale signs of megalithic and in
general prehistoric dimensions of the shrine of
Nagara Padang
(Background: In the autumn of
2007, Wim van Binsbergen delivered the key note
address at the International Symposium
"Expressions of Traditional Wisdom"
(Brussels, 28 September 2007). His complete
address was later rewritten as a Memoire of the
Academie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-mer, in
the form of a little book (see yellow cover
illustration to the right) entitled:
For the conference proceedings
proper the key note address had to be trimmed to
standard article length, and the argument had to
be greatly pruned. These conference proceedings
have now been published in the Bulletin des
Séances de l’Académie Royale des Sciences
d’Outre-Mer (blue cover illustration to
the left), including the shortened version of the
rewritten key note address:
KEYWORDS. —
Epistemology; Tradition; Phronesis;
Africa; Intercultural.
SUMMARY. — Wisdom is initially
defined (cf. Aristotle) as creative
practical knowledge that allows one to
negotiate the contradictions of human
life (especially in less rule-governed
domains manifesting uncertainty and
incompatible multiple truths), thus
accepting that human life is social and
finite. The argument begins with noting
(1) the resilience of wisdom as a topic
in modern thought and science. Next we
deal (2) with the dilemma of expression
of wisdom: while scholarship thrives on
specialist explicit language use, wisdom
is often secret and risks being destroyed
by expression and translation. Section
(3) offsets expressions of traditional
wisdom against four modes of 'tacit
modern unwisdom' (in such fields as
corporality, conflict regulation, the
concept of mind, and myth). The four
modes of tacit modern unwisdom are then
contrasted (4) with African perspectives,
where the human body is the recognized
focus of wisdom; where conflict
management stresses (at least at the
local level) practical wisdom over
impersonal and divisive rules; where the
human mind is considered to be porous
hence accessible through extrasensory
means; and where, in the deep history of
Anatomically Modern Humans, up to 60,000
years ago the foundations were laid for
all the myth we all live by today, while
also later mythological developments were
to be percolated all over the world
including Africa
Nieuwe
dichtbundel gepubliceerd
Als een van de resultaten van de reis
naar Thailand, november 2010, schreef Wim van
Binsbergen een nieuwe dichtbundel, die inmiddels
gepubliceerd is:
FLAPTEKST: VANUIT
EEN NIEUW LICHAAM VAN VERLICHTING:
Gedichten Thailand 2010 werd geschreven
te Koh Lanta, Zuid-West-Thailand, en
Haarlem, in november / december 2010. Het
boek schetst in zeven nauw samenhangende
lange gedichten de activiteiten,
waarnemingen en bewustzijnsprocessen
tijdens een reis die de dichter en zijn
vrouw ondernamen naar Thailand. De
confrontatie met dit door Boeddhisme en
koningscultus beheerste land (met als
contrast het strandtoerisme van zijn
Islamitische Zuiden) voert van
aanvankelijke bevreemding tot
bewondering, verdieping en ontroering
– die ook reflecteert op de
liefdesrelatie tussen de beide reizigers.
Zoals ook in de bundel Vloed: Een
gedicht (2007) vertoont het
dichterschap van Wim van Binsbergen ook
in dit boek een nauwe band (door
aantekeningen ondersteund) met diens
wetenschappelijk werk, de laatste jaren
gedomineerd door de comparatieve
mythologie als een van de sleutels tot
het oudste verleden van de mensheid, en
tot de prehistorische verhouding tussen
Zuid-Oost-Azië en Afrika.
Wim van Binsbergen
(Amsterdam, 1947) publiceerde de
dichtbundels Klopsignalen, Leeftocht,
Vrijgeleide, Herstzondag, Eurydice,
Herfstgroei, Vloed en Braambos;
de verhalenbundel Zusters, dochters,
en de roman Een buik openen.
Samen met Ad van Rijsewijk vertaalde hij
Okot p’Biteks Lied van Lawino /
Lied van Ocol. Hij heeft voorts een
wetenschappelijk oeuvre op zijn naam
staan als antropoloog, historicus,
filosoof en comparatief mytholoog. Veel
van zijn werk is niet alleen in druk
beschikbaar maar ook op
http://www.shikanda.net.
oplaten
van Thaise luchtballonen tijdens het Loy
Krathongfeest -- onderwerp van een van de
gedichten in Wim van Binsbergens nieuwe bundel Vanuit
een nieuw lichaam van verlichting
Wim van Binsbergen at the Wat Pho temple,
Bangkok, Thailand, 2010
Now published:
Tagou, Célestin, 2010, ed., The
Dynamics of Conflict, Peace and Development in
African Societies: From local to international,
Yaounde: Presses des Universités Protestantes d'
Afrique; click here for details including order
information
This book is based on the 2009
Yaounde conference organised by the book's
editor: International Colloquium on The
Problematic of Peace and Development in Africa:
Balance Sheet and New Stakes in the 3rd
Millennium, Faculty of Social Sciences and
International Relations, Protestant University of
Central Africa (UPAC), Yaounde, Republic of
Cameroon, 6-9 April 2009. The book's appearance
marks the 80th birthday of Professor Johan
Galtung, inspiring force and patron of UPAC's
Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies. As a
member of the Scientific Board of this Centre,
Wim van Binsbergen made the following
contributions to this new book:
ABSTRACT. The
argument consists of two parts. In
the first part, I address the
question as to the nature of
reconciliation – reconciliation
being a ‘social technology’
i.e. a set of established and viable
strategies of problem-solving,
consisting however not in the
manipulation of the natural,
non-human aspects of the world but in
the articulation and transformative
management of human individuals and
groups. Such social technologies of
reconciliation i.e. of social and
political conflict resolution, I will
examine especially in the African
context, and I will conclude that,
among the societies of the world,
African societies have, since times
immemorial, particularly excelled in
the social technology of
reconciliation as applied at the
local and regional level. This leads
on to the second part, in which I
contrast Africa’s excellent
record in local and regional
reconciliation, with the excessive
rate of destructive and genocidal
conflict that has characterised the
African continent in the past few
decades. The argument’s central
question then becomes: How can we
explain that Africa’s social
technologies of reconciliation have
proven so utterly ineffective, and
have so little been applied, at the
national and the international level?
After highlighting the crisis of
legitimacy of modern and traditional
elites as part of the explanation, a
fuller explanation is derived from an
examination of the political
sociology of modern Africa, along
such lines as the weak nature of
Africa’s formal organisations;
the pitfall of particularist
divisiveness; failing idioms of
universalism; and the dislocated and
alienated African subject. This leads
us to consider Christianity and
ubuntu (‘the art of being
human’) in South African
reconciliation, and to recognise
transcendentalism and universalism as
harbingers of peace – but at a
considerable cultural cost for
Africa. Greater attention to the
time-honoured African social
technology of reconciliation may help
to reduce that cost.
Ayutthaya, Thailand
senior Buddhist monk dispensing
blessing and beaded bracelet, Bangkok, Thailand
medieval Thai ceramics
In the context of Wim van
Binsbergen’s work in progress on pre- and
protohistorical connections between South East
Asia and Africa (he has worked for some years now
on a draft MS provisionally entitled Out of
Africa or out of Sundaland), he and his wife
Patricia made another self-sponsored trip to
South East Asia, this time to Thailand, during
most of November 2010. Upon his return, he wrote
an extensive report in which the lessons are
drawn which Thailand turned put to have for his
Sunda project :
ABSTRACT. On the
basis of a consideration of selected
aspects of Thai culture and history
(especially the kingship, musical
instruments, and ceramics), against the
background of the results (here briefly
summarised in Section 2) of the
author’s earlier results into
transcontinental continuities between
Asia and Africa in the field of
divination and ecstatic cults, this
argument seeks to demonstrate that the
study of such continuities now (with the
new attention for neo-diffusionist
studies in the context of globalisation
research) opens up as a promising field
of enquiry. After posing preliminary
methodological questions, the leading
framework that emerges is that of a
multidirectional global transcontinental
network, such as has gradually developed
since the Bronze Age. Having argued the
possibility of Hinduist and Buddhist
influences in addition to the
well-acknowledged Islamic ones, the next
question discussed is: what kind of
attestations of possibly transcontinental
continuities might we expect to find in
sub-Saharan Africa. From a long list, and
leaving out divination which has already
been the subject of the author’s
related research, three themes are
highlighted out as particularly
important: ecstatic cults, kingship, and
boat cults. The discussion advances
evidence for the Hinduist / Buddhist
nature of the state complex centring on
Great Zimbabwe, East Central Zimbabwe, as
a likely epicentre for the transmission
of South-East-Asian-inspired forms of
kingship and ecstatic cults. A
provisional attempt is made at
periodisation of the proposed Hinduist /
Buddhist element in sub-Saharan Africa,
and the limitations of transcontinental
borrowing in protohistorical and
historical times is argued by reference
to an extensive, originally Neolithic,
cultural substratum from which both South
East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are
claimed to have drawn. On the basis of
future research advocated here, new
insights in transcontinental continuities
are to be expected, that throw new light
on the extent to which Africa has always
been part of global cultural history, and
should not be imprisoned in a paradigm
that (out of a sympathetic but mistaken
loyalty to African identity and
originality) seeks to explain things
African exclusively by reference to
Africa.
Great
Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe
Ayutthaya,
Thailand
wooden
food bowls from Zambia
chariot
on mural, Royal Palace, Bangkok.
Thailand
Vodun priest, Togo
Royal Palace and temple complex,
Bangkok, Thailand
Kings, West Africa
Bij
uitgeverij Lannoo | Atlas, Tielt / Amsterdam,
2010, verscheen de bloemlezing van Koen Stassijns
en Ivo van Strijtem, De mooiste gedichten van
de hele wereld: De moderne wereldpoezie in 333
gedichten, waarin opgenomen (pp. 232-233)
van Okot p'Bitek, 'Er is geen vaste tijd voor
borstvoeding', in de vertaling van Wim van
Binsbergen & Ad van Rijsewijk
village shrine with honey
container; in the background drums, at sunrise
during a name-inheritance rite among the Nkoya
people of Zambia, 1977
October 2010
Gerti
S.C.M. Hesseling (1946-2009) was a Dutch
Africanist legal scholar, and for eight
years (1996-2004) the Director of the
African Studies Centre, Leiden. She was
also Wim van Binsbergen's first PhD
student, supervised jointly with the
constitutionalist Leo Prakke (public
defence 1982). Working closely together
throughout the 1980s in the context of
the Centre's Department of Political and
Historical Studies, Gerti Hesseling and
Wim van Binsbergen organised conferences
on the African state and published books
and papers on African constitutions and
on the African state in general. For a
commemorative collective volume of this
stimulating colleague and life-long
friend, Wim van Binsbergen is now
contributing a paper entitled:
van Binsbergen, Wim
M.J., in press, 'Human rights in the
traditional legal system of the Nkoya
people of Zambia: An exploration in
legal anthropology'. Click here for the abstract.
(also see Topicalities
for November 2006); for the full version, see
above, Topicalities for March 2011.
Gerti
Hesseling (right) in conversation with
Julie Ndaya (who was to receive a PhD
under Wim van Binsbergen's supervision in
2008), and Prof. René Devisch, at the
Leiden African Studies Centre, April 2004
In the first two
weeks of October, Wim van Binsbergen participated
in three conferences at Harvard University,
Cambridge MA, USA
1.
Variations of Homa: From Vedic to Hindu
and Buddhist, Department of Sanskrit
and Asian Studies, Harvard University
Note on South and East
Asian fire ritual, and the Southern
African sangoma cult
by Wim van
Binsbergen
Wim van Binsbergen's
keen interest in this topic was prompted
by his extensive recent work on the
transcontinental mythology and ritual of
fire and of the transformative cycle of
elements, pursued in a book draft on the
Greek fire god Hephaestus and his alleged
Egyptian counterpart Ptah (forthcoming), on the Birth of Fire in Japanese
mythology, and
on the widespread (including African)
distribution of the transformative cycle
of elements as an unsuspected, but
crucial, background of the Ionian
Pre-Socratic philosophers, whose claim to
fame as the founding fathers of (Western)
philosophy therefore is to be
reconsidered (forthcoming). Moreover, the
relevance of this study in the context of
Wim van Binsbergen's current research
projects (particularly his book in
preparation Out of Africa or out of
Sundaland? ) is as a test case of
the extent to which apparent continuities
between South or South East Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa may be attributed to
specific cultural transmission between
either region, or alternatively derive
from a common prehistoric substrate.
The term homa
is not used in these papers, yet many
details confirm the closeness of homa
to the Southern African cult:
the meticulous
collecting, and piling up in five
courses, of specific, rare and
precious types of fire wood as
the central part of the sangoma
shrine especially upon
initiation;
In urban
Botswana, much cooking and
heating is on the basis of
firewood (although paraffin, gas
and electrical stoves are
increasingly important). Most
urbanites have no direct access
to firewood (the town is
surrounded by the extensive and
unaccommodating domains of the,
originally colonial, Tati
Company) and therefore urbanites
rely on firewood deliveries by
enterprising youngsters using
donkey-carts. This firewood
however is certainly not what the
sangomas use for their
rituals. On the eve of every
major sangoma ritual,
special types of firewood have to
be collected, discretely and
often under cover of night, from
fellow sangomas and
other ritual specialists, and
intricate rules govern the use of
these bundles, indicating a
significance far exceeding that
of ordinary firewood.
Incidentally, a similar pattern
governs the (un)availability of
sacrificial goats in town --
although goats are indispensible
in sangoma sacrifice
(the vegetable emphasis of South
Asian homa offerings is
completely absent here), the
acquisition of each goat requires
an arduous, time-consuming and
often inconclusive journey deep
into the countryside, beyond the
Tati lands. It is an indication
of the transregional, non-local
nature of sangoma that
its sacrifices and paraphernalia
(beads, cloth, divination
tablets) usually come from the
market, and are not drawn from
the sacrificer's own local
produce.
A
comparative perspective on the
basis of Wim van Binsbergen's
work (for details and
references search the present
website): The striking role of
firewood in South and East Asian homa
seems to be related to the
Indo-European cult of the bundle
of twigs as an epiphany of the
sacred (the Ancient Iranian barsamen;
perhaps also the Italic --
Praeneste -- and Germanic -- cf.
Tacitus -- wooden
cleromantic apparatus) and of the
social order (the Italic fasces).
By the same token, a cultic
complex centring on fire extends
from West Asia (Iranian/
Zoroastrian fire cult) both West
(the fire cults of Hephaestus,
Hestia/Vesta) and East (India,
Mongolia, Japan) -- possibly with
fire handling and fire walking as
a widespread and possibly very
old layer surfacing ubiquitously
from sub-Saharan Africa and North
Africa to Bali, etc. Of course,
fire belongs, with lithic tool
making, to humans' oldest
technology dating back over a
million years, but presumably
much of the older symbolism and
ritual has been transformed and
rechanneled into cults associated
with metallurgy as a much more
recent invention (Hephaestus is a
case in point). On the other hand
there is, in homa, an
unmistakable reference to the
place of wood and fire in a
cosmology based on a
transformative cycle of elements,
widespread, since at least the
Bronze Age, from Ancient Graeca
Magna to the Indian Ocean, Japan
and even South Central Africa
(where that cosmology appears to
inform local and regional clan
terminology). These connections
were attributed, a decade ago, to
a very old African substrate
extending into Asia; later it was
proposed that this distribution
across three continents may be
attributed to a Neolithic or
Bronze Age cultural substrate,
originating in West Central Asia
and provisionally termed
'Pelasgian'. However, it is also
conceivable (see below) that the
African ramifications of such a
cosmology derive (or were added
to) from South and East Asian
cultural and ritual intrusions
into Africa in more recent times
(1st to 2nd century of the Common
Era).
the drinking of
blood from the neck of
sacrificial animals in their
death pangs -- where the sangoma
takes over the action which e.g.
in Nepali royal homa-based ritual
was attributed to the goddess
Kali;
the sangomas'
dressing in black cloaks and
calling their god
Mwali, of indetermined gender;
the regulations
for the kind of sacrificial
animal / animal skin belonging to
each segment (caste) of society
(Southern African society does
not recognisably have castes but
kings and warriors obviously --
as is brought out by van
Binsbergen's ethnography: in the sangoma
context, the status of warrior
was repeatedly imposed upon him
-- count as equivalents of Kshatriya),
being a literal application of a
South Asian ritual prescription
for the initiation of Brahmin,
Kshatriya etc. as is already
quoted in one of the above
papers;
the application of
the Heart sutra;
the general
structure and social organisation
of the sangoma lodge as an ashram
all this leaves little
doubt now as to the homa
affinities of sangomahood as studied by
Wim van Binsbergen in Francistown,
Botswana -- although we seem to have here
a piecemeal mixture rather than a very
specific and systematic borrowing from
one concrete and unequivocally
identifiable source.
Meanwhile, even though
the contemporary forms of sangoma
are demonstrably alien to the logic of
Kalanga and Tswana culture in Botswana,
and are popularly recognised to be so
(although they are considered as local,
and identified with, among the Southern
African Nguni cultures i.e. Zulu,
Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi of South Africa,
Swaziland and Zimbabwe -- from one
hundred to over a thousand kms removed
from Francistown), we must not overlook
the very extensive localisation which the
(presumably) South Asian material has
apparently undergone on African soil.
Here it has unmistakably adopted the
format, recognisably widespread
throughout Bantu-speaking South Central
and Southern Africa, of ngoma,
i.e. a cult of affliction (a healing cult
where the standard route to healing for
one suffering is to join the cult and
thus to assist in the recruitment of
still others) whose rituals are
predicated on the dramaturgy of music,
dance, and often possession trance. (Ngoma
means 'drum, collective musical session,
dance' in Bantu languages; could there be
a connection with South and East Asian homa?
Often San ('Bushmen') healing rites in
Southern Africa are considered the
prototype of Bantu-speaking ngoma).
While there are thus many indications of sangoma
having selectively adopted elements of
South Asian Buddhist and Hindu homa,
sangoma has shown the same
capability of selective incorporation vis-à-vis
other cultic and ritual elements
circulating in the Indian Ocean region.
Thus, although sangoma is an
ecstatic cult venerating ancestors
through possession trance and healing in
their name, it has massively adopted the
royal (ancestral) cults of South Central
and Southern Africa (in which, in its
turn, several South Asian elements of
royal cults especially royal
intronisation, royal orchestras, royal
capitals and royal magic have
demonstrably been incorporated). Whereas
trance divination attributed to ancestral
intercession would typically be the sangomas'
principal divination technique, in fact
in the course of the past century the
stark competition over the lucrative
therapeutic market in Southern Africa has
brought sangomas to adopt forms
of cleromantic divination (i.e. with
the use of material tokens, lots) that
have for centuries belonged to the
standard divinatory repertoire of non-Nguni
groups in this part of the world (first
documented attestation second half of the
16th century CE; oldest archaeological
attestation a century later). Nor does
this exhaust the extent of
transcontinental connections in Southern
African divination: outside the domain of
sangoma proper, the divination
bowls of the Venda of Transvaal and
Zimbabwe are highly reminiscent, not only
of West African Ifa divination bowls, but
also of 1st millennium CE Chinese
divination bowls adorned at the rim with
36 zodiacal symbols, largely animal. A
South African, Bantu-speaking diviner
without any conscious knowledge of
Chinese culture even turned out to be
aware of the Taoist Lo Shu
number symbolism associated with the
tortoise's carapace; whereas in general
the Southern African herbalist's
pharmacopaea shows considerable
affinities with the traditional Chinese
one. Painstaking transcontinental
research has brought to light that the
Southern African forms of cleromantic
divination and divining bowls are not
only strikingly similar (in terminology,
astrological affinities, and basic
structuring on the basis of 2n
different and named divinatory
configurations) to divinatory forms in
Madagascar, the Comoro Islands, and West
Africa -- but that they also go back to a
common literate prototype in late
1st-millennium CE Islamic, Abasid Iraq, cilm
al-raml ('Sand Science') or khatt
al-raml ('Sand Calligraphy'), which
in turn display great similarities with
the well-known Chinese wisdom oracle of yìjing
(‘I Ching’), and which
(as Geomantia, Astrologia terrestris or
Ars punctatoria) has also
greatly informed West European scholarly
and popular magic ever since the Middle
Ages).
As a loosely organised healing cult in
a competitive therapeutic market which
has undergone tremendous changes over the
past century, sangoma is almost
by definition innovative and
idiosyncratic, with each individual
practitioner adding his or own personal
touches to a widespread common pattern.
The sangoma scene in Francistown around
1990 was dominated by three lodges each
run by a middle-aged leader: one male
from Ndebele/Zimbabwe background, two
female (and each other's first cousins
i.e. classificatory sisters) from local,
Kalanga/Ndebele background; the male
leader made his women adepts impersonate
royal Nguni ancestors but in divination
besides trance and cleromancy he also
used a crystal ball which his father,
also a sangoma, had received as
a gift from a satisfied White client --
the two female leaders boasted common
descent from a White grandfather,
allegedly from Durban, a South African
city which has had a large concentration
of Indians since the late 19th century
CE, where Gandhi worked as a lawyer for
more than twenty years, and where a
constant stream of visiting pandits
from India must have assured that homa
rituals were performed regularly. While
this opens the possibility that the homa
affinities in sangoma are less than a
century old and are only tied to the
specific biographies of individual
leaders, the close association of sangoma
with the widespread Southern African
Mwali (/Kali?) cult, the manifestation of
homa affinities not only in
Francistown but throughout the Southern
African sangoma complex, and sangoma's
apparent continuity with the Zulu isanuzi
court diviners, suggest a time scale of
at least a few centuries for the South
Asian influences on sangoma.
In such a transcontinental cultural
environment as sangoma clearly
is (well-documented
by Wim van Binsbergen's research over the
past two decades) one would not be
surprised to find elements of South Asian
fire ritual, but one would expect the
South Asian elements to appear in
fragmentary state, and transformed almost
beyond recognition -- as is in fact the
case.
On the occasion
of the Homa conference, on the
morning of 2nd October 2010, a
three-hour fire ritual was staged
on Harvard Yard, with a senior
Nepalese priest (cum American
professor) as officiant: Prof. Naresh
Bajracarya
In the
Nepalese Buddhist homa
ritual as performed at Harvard
Yard. on the lawn in front of the
Harvard Sciences Building, the
central shrine is a simple
mandala temporarily constructed
out of industrial concrete
bricks, bound together with rope,
the crevisses smeared over with
cement, and the ensemble adorned
with red and yellow powdered
lines and little flags. The
priest sits East of this
structure, in front of a small
burner, whose flame will
ultimately be transferred to the
mandala. Left and right of the
priest and one or two metres West
of the mandala (where an altar
has been erected covered with red
cloth) large amounts of offerings
are piled up, to be committed to
the flames by the priest at
strictly prescribed moments in
the ritual. The standard exegesis
is that the fire god Agni, by
consuming the offerings, conveys
these offerings from the humans
to specific gods addressed in the
ritual (cf. Ancient Greek knisê,
Arabic/Islamic baraka);
however, in view of the later
subjugation of all earlier gods
to the Buddha hence Agni's
demotion to subaltern status, it
cannot be ruled out that in much
earlier, pre-Buddhist phases of
the fire cult, the fire god
himself was considered the
principal object of the
offerings. Continuous recitation
of strictly prescribed texts is
another of the priest's duties
throughout the ritual. The priest
(dressed in a white garment with
red and yellow shoulder cape, and
a golden headdress at the height
of the ritual) is assisted by an
acolyte in traditional Nepali
dress.
Early
stages of the ritual
part of the collection of
firewood, and other paraphernalia
Chinese characters are woven into
the officiant's garment
More or less traditionally
dressed people with Nepali
connections form the ritual
audience, seated North of the
mandala in the first phases of
the ritual, and South in the
final phase, when they are
holding a sacred thread that
links them, finally to step forth
one by one in order to present
their financial offering (in the
order of 5 to 10 US$ each) and
receive the priest's blessing,
made visible by a sacrificial red
dot in their face the size of the
priest's fingertip, and by a
sacrificial flower to be stuck
behind the ear. Behind this inner
circle, an outer ring of
onlookers was formed, consisting
of conference participants and
passers-by -- some of whom also
partook of the final blessing.
Towards the middle of the ritual,
the original brick mandala is
built up with additional loose
bricks and assorted prescribed
types of firewood, to be kindled
from the priest's small burner.
It is here that the sacrifices
are to be committed to the fire.
Two ritual participants lift a
heavy piece of firewood onto the
burning mandala; note the modern
Harvard architecture and sun
panels in the background
Ritual participants and acolyte
near the end of the ritual; note
the sacred thread
Towards the end of the ritual,
the acolyte touches all ritual
participants with the fire thongs
Kneeling for the priest's
blessing towards the end of the
ritual
At the end of the ritual, all
firewood has been duly consumed;
note the small burner protected
from the wind by upright bricks,
just in front of the priest
After the ritual, the officiant
Prof. Naresh Bajracarya assumes
the role of modern scholar and
explains the ritual's details
during the homa conference
below:
compare the homa
priest's headdess (with five
petal-like or flamelike segments,
each of which carries the image
of a major Vedic/Hindu/Buddhist
god), with the headdress of the
senior sangoma
Mmashakayile in Francistown,
1989; click here for a
photo essay on Francistown sangoma
headdress
worn during the height of
the homa ritual at
Harvard Yard, 2010
Mmashakayile
posing in state (1989)
the
male ancestors' shrine at
the sangoma
lodge in the outlying
village of
Matshelegabedi, 20 km
from Francistown,
Botswana, 1991. The
construction is
rationalised as a
platform on which to
present sacrificial meat,
and has few if any
counterparts in
sub-Saharan Africa
2. Radcliffe
Exploratory Seminar on Historical
Comparative Mythology, Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard
University
a welcome
re-assessment of current specialist views
of long-range connections in mythology,
genetics and linguistics
click here for a selective and
critical reflection of this conference:
Michael
Witzel, one of the world's
leading Sankritists, President of
the International Association for
Comparative Mythology, and
convenor of the three Harvard
conferences (among others) in
October 2010
3. The 4th Annual Meeting of
the International Association for
Comparative Mythology (IACM),
location: GCIS South, Harvard University,
Cambridge (Mass.), USA. Wim van
Binsbergen (one of IACM's directors) will
present a paper entitled:
On this occasion, Eric
Venbrux and Wim van Binsbergen will
launch their volume New Perspectives on Myth (the proceedings of the 2nd
Annual Meeting IACM, 2008), which was
published a few weeks earlier (see below).
flood hero (according to other
specialists the water god Ea) on a
Ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seal
September 2010
While
the paper highlights especially the bee part of
the reed-and-bee complex of the Ancient Egyptian
royal titulature as (at least, that is what my
argument claims) echoed in modern South Central
Africa, this photograph shows King Kahare Kabambi
of the Mashasha Nkoya, Kaoma district, Zambia,
1977, holding a reed-mat as emphatic
sign of historical identity. His explicit
reference was that when the expanding Luyi ousted
the Mashasha (the name has no conscious reed-mat
connotations but refers to sour beer) from the
Zambezi flood-plain, they carried their reed-mats
with them -- an enigmatic action, for reed for
new mats can be found everywhere in Western
Zambia; however, my hypothesis is that these mats
were mobile coffins, containing the bodies of
royal ancestors.
A second, truncated instalment
of Wim van Binsbergen's views on links between
Ancient Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa is to be
published in i-Medjat 5:
BLURB:
The Second Annual Conference of the
International Association for Comparative
Mythology (IACM) was held at the former
convent of Soeterbeeck near the small
medieval town of Ravenstein in the
Netherlands on 19-21 August 2008. This
volume contains the proceedings of that
conference. The 19 chapters are divided
over five parts: an Introduction offering
a report of the conference, a section on
The Mythology of Death and Dying, another
on Mythological Continuities between
Africa and Other Continents, a section on
Theoretical and Methodological Advances,
and a final one on Work-in-Progress. This
volume demonstrates that the field of
comparative mythology is rapidly and
convincingly shedding its sometime
connotations of over-specialised
antiquarian scholarship, to become (in
close col-laboration with a wide range of
auxiliary fields – from genetics to
linguistics, ethnography, archaeology,
statistics, and classics) an exciting,
rapidly expanding domain of theoretical
and methodological reflection, and an
ever widening window on humankind’s
remoter cultural history. While the field
increasingly becomes transcontinental not
only in subject matter but also in
scholarly participation, new growth
points can be discerned around death as a
mythical domain, and around the
understanding of Africa’s place in
the wider cultural history of humankind
as a whole.
The editors. WIM
VAN BINSBERGEN is Senior Researcher at
the African Studies Centre, Leiden, and
Professor of Intercultural Philosophy,
Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University
Rotterdam, the Netherlands. ERIC VENBRUX
is Professor of Religious Anthropology in
the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and
Religious Studies, Radboud University
Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Both are
founding members of the International
Association for Comparative Mythology
for the last paper the
following abstract is available:
Abstract.
This paper looks at mythological
continuities between sub-Saharan Africa
and the rest of the Old World – not
so much North Africa, but Eurasia. This
is a remarkably unusual perspective in
the field of comparative mythology: the
othering and exclusion of Africa and
Africans have been an inveterate though
obsolescent feature of North Atlantic
scholarship. The approach in this paper
is greatly inspired by Michael
Witzel’s recent work in comparative
mythology, but takes exception at his
Laurasian / Gondwana distinction, which
is predicated on absolute Eurasian /
African discontinuity. Instead, the
present argument seeks to include
sub-Saharan Africa in the standard
comparative mythology as applied to the
rest of the world. For this purpose a
two-stage argument is deployed. Since the
article is essentially a review of
several decades of the author’s
research, it risks to be unusually
auto-referential, for which apologies are
hereby offered. First, twentieth-century
interpretative schemas are discussed that
stipulate mythological continuity instead
of separation between Eurasia and
sub-Saharan Africa: Frobenius’ South
Erythraean model; cultural diffusion from
Egypt; combined cultural and demic
diffusion from sub-Saharan Africa shaping
Egyptian and subsequently Greek mythology
(Afrocentrism, Bernal’s Black
Athena thesis). Then, as background
for the latest generation of models,
indications for transcontinental
continuities are discussed from the
fields of long-range linguistics
(concentrating on Starostin’s
*Borean hypothesis, and adducing new
material concerning the place of
Niger-Congo > Bantu in the *Borean
schema), and molecular genetics: the
Out-of-Africa hypothesis, and the
Back-into-Africa hypothesis. This sets
the scene for a discussion of the
author’s Aggregative Diachronic
Model of World Mythology, suggesting that
‘Pandora’s Box’ (the
cultural heritage with which Anatomically
Modern Humans left Africa from 80 ka BP
on) contained a few identifiable basic
mythological motifs, which were
subsequently developed, transformed and
innovated in Asia, after which the
results where fed back into Africa in the
Back-into-Africa movement – the
entire process resulting in considerable
African-Eurasian continuity. After a
discussion, in regard of the last few
millennia, of the author’s Pelasgian
Model (proposing cultural including
mythological transmission from Western
Asia / the Mediterranean by the
‘cross-model’ mechanism, i.e.
in all four directions – Western
Europe; Northern Europe; the Eurasian
Steppe to South, East and South Asia; and
sub-Saharan Africa – from the Late
Bronze Age onward), the transition to the
second stage of the argument is formed by
an examination of the mythology of the
Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central
Africa, in the light of the
Aarne-Thompson classification; this again
yields results suggestive of considerable
African-Eurasian continuity. This means
that the author’s1992 analysis of
Nkoya mythology (in his book Tears of
Rain) in terms of local
protohistory, may no longer be tenable.
Contamination by recent Islamic and
Christian proselytisation is discussed
and ruled out as a major factor in
African-Eurasian mythological
continuities. To clinch the argument in
favour of massive African-Eurasian
mythological continuities, 26 Nkoya
mythemes are considered in detail against
the fully referenced background of their
global correspondences. A high degree of
African-Eurasian mythological continuity
is the argument’s main,
theoretically and empirically grounded,
conclusion. While this highlights overall
African-Eurasian cultural connections, it
particularly lends support to the
Pelasgian hypothesis, and throws in
relief unsuspected but close and
multiplex affinities between a South
Central African kingship, and the
Eurasian Steppe.
July 2010
In addition to his
membership of the Advisory Editorial Board of the
Caribbean Journal of Philosophy, Wim van
Binsbergen now joins the Editorial Board of Culture
and Dialogue, a peer reviewed semi-annual
journal to be launched in Winter 2010;
contracting publisher: Airiti Press Inc., Taipei,
Editor-in-Chief: Gerald Cipriani; click here for the circular introducing
that new journal
In
this period, the following book went to
the press:
Wim
M.J. van Binsbergen, 2011, ed., Black
Athena comes of age: Towards a
constructive reassessment, Berlin -
Münster - Wien - Zürich-London: LIT,
368 pp.
for details, see above
under August 2011, when the book was
published
Mediterranean cameo representing
the goddess
Athena, dating from the early Common Era,
and
found in Meroe, N. Sudan
June 2010
Wim M.J. van
Binsbergen & Eric Venbrux's
collective volume: New Perspectives
on Myth: Proceedings of the Second Annual
Conference of the International
Association for Comparative Mythology,
Ravenstein (the Netherlands), 19-21
August, 2008
was
one of the first two volumes to be
published in the new series recently
established by Wim van Binsbergen in
association with Quest: An African
Journal of Philosophy / Revue de
Philosophie Africaine, and the
Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University
Rotterdam
pre-dynastic Egyptian fresco arguably showing a
spiked-wheel trap
Wim van
Binsbergen recently formulated the 'Pelasgian
hypothesis' as a useful tool to account for
transcontinental continuities throughout the Old
World from the mid-Holocene onward. A major
inspiration in this has been his re-analysis of
the global distribution of the so-called
spiked-wheel trap, a humble hunting device found
in Central Asia, the Mediterranean, and all over
Africa. The article he drafted on this topic in
2008-2009 is now ready to go to the press. A
preprint is offered here:
ABSTRACT. Reading geographical
distribution patterns and turning them
into models of historical reconstruction
of diffusion, is not only a work of
science, but also a fine art, in which
the experience gathered in the previous
analysis of similar or complementary
distributions contributes considerably to
our perception and interpretation. In the
present argument, the global distribution
of one particular item of material
culture will serve as an example of such
strategies in distributional analysis:
the spiked wheel trap, a common hunting
device in Africa and parts of Eurasia,
but apparently not attested anywhere else
in the world. Africa and Africans are
commonly depicted as totally different
from the rest of the Old World. Much of
the author’s work over the past two
decades has been aimed at combating this
misconception. The distribution pattern
of the spiked 1928 / 1935)
is so pertinent to this question, that
this implement may serve as an ‘the
e‘hypothesis localised origin in the
Neolithic Extendnd of the present argument.
The far greater incidence on African
soil, linked with the Afrocentrist wheel
trap (first analysed by Lindblom in index
fossil’ in African prehistory,
bringing out the merits of the Pelasgian
’ which the present author has
recently advanced, and which is
summarised by hypothesis according to
which major model: origin, would tempt us
to consider the spiked wheel
(a) a rathered Fertile Crescent (by which
is meant the extended region stretching
from the developments in global
cultural history have an African trap as
an African invention which gradually
trickled into Eurasia. However, this
paper argues the opposite
then still fertile Sahara to China),
probably in Central Asia;
(b) followed by spread, in the wake of
the general diffusion of pastoral and
agricultural technologies but
particularly intensified with the rise of
horse-riding and chariot technologies
– both being technological
innovations emerging in Central Asia c. 6
ka BP and 4 ka BP, respectively;
(c) not only were these pastoral
technologies responsible for cultural
spread and proto-globalising
homogenisation of the Eurasian Steppe
Belt from Anatolia to the Pacific –
from the Late Bronze Age onward they also
succeeded in making inroads into
sub-Saharan Africa, both along the Nile
valley and along Sahara dessert routes
(where rock art representations of
chariots abound from the Late Bronze Age
on).
Sparsely inhabited by hunter-gatherers
that lacked both these specific formal
cultural systems and the military
technology that privileged their owners,
the whole of sub-Saharan Africa was
available for expansion of these new
items. Hence their preponderance there in
historical times, which however is to be
interpreted in terms, not of origin, but
of the occupation of an empty niche of
cultural ecology. In the last two to
three millennia, African cultures in
sub-Saharan Africa consolidated
themselves as a result of the interaction
between Palaeo-African populations and
their cultural traits, on the one hand,
and, on the other hand, inputs from
outside Africa, including those from the
Pelasgian realm of West Asia and the
Mediterranean. The spiked wheel trap,
however insignificant in itself, is an
index fossil of the Pelasgian side of
this process. The spiked wheel trap
shares this position with a few other
formal cultural systems, such as mankala,
geomantic divination, and the belief in a
unilateral mythical being, whose similar
distributions we examine as a
stepping-stone towards a summary
presentation of the Pelasgian hypothesis.
key words: Pelasgian hypothesis; Hamitic
hypothesis; Borean hypothesis; Out of
Africa hypothesis; Back-into-Africa
hypothesis; spiked wheel trap;
distributional analysis; genetic,
linguistic and cultural continuity
Africa-Eurasia; mankala; geomantic
divination; unilateral mythical being
A spiked-wheel trap from the Amur region, S.E.
Siberia
global distribution and proposed diffusion of the
spiked-wheel trap
as argued in the paper -- revealing the Primary
Pelasgian realm and the Secondary Pelasgian realm
spiked-wheel trap from Libya
May 2010
Stephanus
Djunatan (left) conducting an interview with
shrine guardians in the prayer hall of their most
senior exponent, at the village of Rawabogo,
Ciwidey, West Java (2007)
Wim van Binsbergen (left),
Stephanus Djunatan (right) and a colleague during
a slamatan (sacrificial collective meal)
that forms part of pilgrimage at the shrine of
Nagara Padang (2010) -- note the pilgrim's
uniform; click here for full report
From 28 April to 12 May 2010
Wim van Binsbergen visited Bandung, Indonesia, in
order to finalise the supervision (jointly with
Prof. Bambang Sugiharto of the Department of
Philosophy, Catholic University Bandung (UNPAR),
and Prof. Robert Wessing of The Hague,
Netherlands) of Stephanus Djunatan's PhD thesis
in philosophy. This thesis consists of the
elaboration of The Principle of Affirmation
dealing -- on the spur of an African
methodological and theoretical inspiration,
notably the work of the lamented Odera Oruka --
with a West Javanese mountaineous pilgrimage
complex and its associated worldview, Taoism,
modern Japanese philosophy, Deleuze and Ricoeur;
the thesis is to be defended before Erasmus
University, Rotterdam, which also sponsors this
trip
Abstract. The
devotional shrine of Nagara Padang,
village of Rawabogo, Ciwidey, West
Bandung, Indonesia, plays a central role
in the research of the author’s PhD
candidate Mr Stephanus Djunatan, a
lecturer of philosophy at the Parahyangan
Catholic University (UNPAR), Bandung, who
is scheduled to publicly defend his PhD
thesis before the Erasmus University
Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in February
2011. The author himself returned to the
shrine in 2010, three years after his
first visit, and this time in the context
of a massive student research training
project supervised by c. 10 UNPAR
lecturers including Mr Djunatan. Leaning
heavily on the latter’s work, the
author’s argument briefly describes
the main features of the shrine and of a
large collective pilgrimage there
starting from the village of Rawabogo. In
a more original vein, the argument
highlights the syncretistic signature of
the shrine’s cult (apparently a
mixture of Islamic, Hinduist, Buddhist
and animistic elements, going back to the
first half of the second millennium CE).
Parallels are drawn not only with the
Borobudur devotional shrine of Central
Java, but also with North Africa (where
the author has studied, since 1967,
shrine cults in the context of popular
Islam) and with sub-Saharan Africa (where
in at least three places, as widely apart
as Malawi, Cameroon and Uganda, somewhat
similar, symbolically and cultically
charged rock formations may be found,
especially associated with the idea of
the emergence of the first people from
the earth or their descent from heaven).
The possibility of an extreme antiquity
for the Nagara Padang site as a cult
centre is further suggested by its
reminiscences of Upper Paleolithic
initiatory rituals of spiritual
(re-)birth, with the novice having to
press oneself through a narrow rock
crevice. The presence of at least one
menhir and of numerous cupmarks on the
top of the site suggests continuity with
the widespread Indonesian megalithic
complex, with contested affinities
throughout South East and East Asia, and
the rest of the Old World – and
Bronze Age dating. These discussions are
supported by numerous illustrations.
Against the background of a selection of
the scholarly literature the
anthropological theory of shrine cults
(also called regional cults) is presented
in a nutshell – with emphasis on
Victor Turner’s concept of communitas.
This finaly allows the author to comment,
as requested by the organisers, on the
considerable merits of the student
research training project.
As a guest of the Parahyangan
Catholic University, Bandung, Wim van Binsbergen
presented the following seminar:
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
2010, 'The crisis of meaning under conditions
of globalisation, urbanisation and
commoditification, and the reconsideration of
traditional wisdom approaches as a possible
way out -- with special attention to Africa
and Indonesia today', the Department of
Philosophy, Parahyangan Catholic University
Bandung, Monday 10 May 2010, 16.00-17.00 hrs
while being orally adapted to
the specific Bandung situation at hand, this
seminar largely formed a truncated version of:
ABSTRACT
Wisdom is initially defined (cf.
Aristotle) as creative practical
knowledge that allows one to negotiate
the contradictions of human life
(especially in less rulegoverned domains
manifesting uncertainty and incompatible
multiple truths), thus accepting that
human life is social and finite. After
indicating (1) the resilience of wisdom
as a topic in modern thought and science,
an overview follows on wisdom in various
periods and regions of the world (2). (3)
The dilemma of expression of wisdom:
while scholarship thrives on specialist
explicit language use, wisdom is often
secret and risks being destroyed by
expression and translation. Section (4)
offsets expressions of traditional wisdom
against four modes of 'tacit modern
unwisdom' (in such fields as corporality,
conflict regulation, the concept of mind,
and myth). (5) Can wisdom be transmitted
interculturally, within and outside an
academic context, and by what mechanism
of situational oppositional framing is
traditional wisdom both an alterized
object of study and a site of
identification and encounter? (6)
Defining the specific difference between
scientific and wisdom modes of knowing,
in the former's reliance on standard,
repetitive, intersubjective procedures of
knowledge formation embedded in limiting
conditions. (7) The four modes of tacit
modern unwisdom (cf. 4) are then
contrasted with African perspectives. (8)
Finally, intercultural philosophy is
argued to spring from a situation
(today's globalization) where Western
mainstream philosophy has to give way to
a wisdom perspective as defined above.
Doornbos, Martin
R., & van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., (in
press), Researching power and
identity in African state formation,
(500 pp.) -- this co-authored book
was accepted for publication by UNISA
[ University of South Africa ] Press,
Pretoria, South Africa, and is to
appear in 2011
Professors
Matsumura, Berezhkin, van Binsbergen and
others at the 2nd Annual Meeting of the
IACM, Ravenstein, the Netherlands, 2008
While the 2009 (XXIII)
and 2010 (XXIV) volumes of Quest: An
African Journal of Philosophy / Revue
Africaine de Philosophie are now
being prepared for the press so as to
come out before Summer 2010, intensive
preparations are being made for volume
2011 (XXV). Among the various options
open we can mention the following: a
volume entirely devoted to the seminal
work of the Cameroonian philosopher
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga -- which if it
could be realised would be one of the
three major publications to come out of
the Eboussi project which has been
running for the last few years, with
extensive participation of Cameroonian
scholars, and further involvement of such
prominent specialists as Prof. Procesi
(Roma), Prof. Kasereka and Prof. Mudimbe
(USA) -- , the latter a member of the Quest
Advisory Editorial Board. The
participants in this project are all of
them professionals, most of them
philosophers. This work possibly
envisaged in the Quest context would
distinguish itself from two other recent
publications on Eboussi. The first one
published in Paris, 2009, was a volume of
Mélanges in his honour, under
the editorship of Ambroise Kom; the
second, intended to be published by Presence
Africaine (in principle), will
include the proceedings of the 'Journées
Eboussi' which were organized at the
University of Yaounde, Cameroon, in the
summer of 2009. These various hommages
celebrate Eboussi as one of the most
original and influential minds of modern
Africa.
Fabien
Eboussi Boulaga
The Belgian city
of Genk has a jumelage with the Botswana city of
Francistown. As a specialist on Francistown, Wim
van Binsbergen has been invited to advise the
Municipality of Genk on socio-cultural historical
background of this Botswana boom town, and to
participate in a medical panel meeting to be held
in Genk, Belgium, 19-20 April, 2010
to the left, click the
operating triangle to watch a superb
short movie bringing out, against the
homely theme of an ordinary mature woman
killing and preparing a cock for dinner,
many of the contradictions of modern
Francistown life, between (youthfully
revived) dust-coloured tradition -- and
glossy, gaudy globalisation: "Ready",
a 2004 (2008 re-edit) video by Eva
Heldmann, intercutting a ballroom dancing
competition in Francistown, Botswana, the
Mogwana Dancers in Gaborone, Botswana,
and more. The quality of the film allows
full-screen playing, by activating the
square of four arrows bottom right in the
video screen. Although the traditional
dancers, like the ballroom ones, clearly
dress up for the occasion and (as cynical
culture critics would be quick to point
out) present some sort of performative
maskerade, yet the young girl's dance
solo at the end has all the vigour and
the redemptive beauty of historic African
culture through the ages -- as I am
qualified to say, as a certified Botswana
sangoma, i.e. traditional
therapeutic and divinatory dancer, myself
After the movie Ready, take the
opportunity of sampling a few more videos
of Botswana life, by clicking on the
upward arrow extreme right at the bottom
of the video screen
In April 2010 bezocht
Wim van Binsbergen de stad Genk
op uitnodiging van de gemeente
Genk, en hield daar een tweetal
voordrachten:
(sommige
illustraties nemen nogal veel
tijd om te laden, maar de links
zijn in orde -- geduld dus)
Francistown:
modern formal structures in the 'dustbowl full of
sand' (a colonial stereotype for Botswana)
heraldic sign of the city of
Genk
March 2010
In March 2010, Wim van
Binsbergen and his wife Patricia went on an
extensive journey through South East Asia
(Sarawak and Sabah as parts of Malaysian Borneo;
and Bali and the Gili Islands, Lombok,
Indonesia). This resulted in a preliminary report
highlighting selected aspects of the trip:
(notes concerning genetic and
cultural relations between South East Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa, the rival Sunda and Pelasgian
hypotheses, details of the Niah Cave
archaeological site and its significance,
glimpses of Iban and Chinese components of
Malaysian Borneo society and its colonial
background, reflections on Balinese culture in
the face of globalisation, Balinese New Year
(Nyepi), initial fieldwork on Balinese religion,
as well as further reflections on the global
distribution and interconnectedness of ecstatic
cults, shrine cults, fire cults, and of mankala
boardgames).
Subsequently, my report was
rewritten with exclusive emphasis on the Sunda
hypothesis, and -- after re-assessing the genetic
evidence -- totally different, and this time
affirmative, conclusions concerning the
Oppenheimer / Tauchmann hypotheses of extensive
South and South East Asian demographic impact on
sub-Saharan Africa in protohistoric times:
International
Colloquium on The Problematic of
Peace and Development in Africa:
Balance Sheet and New Stakes in
the 3rd
Millennium (convenor Jr. Prof.
Célestin Tagou), Faculty of
Social Sciences and International
Relations, Protestant University
of Central Africa, Yaounde,
Republic of Cameroon, 6-9 April
2009
After the successful
completion of this International
Colloquium in May 2009, the convenor, Jr
Prof. Celestin Tagou, managed to have all
the papers revised and submitted within
half a year, and the conference book is
now ready to go to the printer's. Wim van
Binsbergen has been honoured to advise on
the editorial process, and to contribute
a Foreword to this splendid and timely
collection
Jr Prof. Celestin Tagou,
UPAC
Archaic
cosmology: Rain and its Adversary, the Rainbow
The five-tiered
ethico-linguistic system of
the Bronze-Age Mediterranean, arguably
including a proto-Bantu / Khoisan substrate
Stealing the
moon by building Kapesh kamunungampanda,
'The Kapesh tower from forked branches', in a
major Nkoya
myth of kingship, Zambia
In February 2010,
Wim van Binsbergen will be 63 years old. It is
time to begin to wind up the research projects in
which -- with the constant support of the African
Studies Centre, Leiden, and with great
inspiration from the Netherlands Institute for
Advances Studies, the Philosophical Faculty
Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the Harvard
Round Table on Comparative Mythology -- he has
engaged for the past twenty years: ever since his
unsettling transcultural experiences during
anthropological fieldwork inFrancistown,
Botswana, brought him to radically reconsider
standard forms of North-South knowledge
construction in anthropology and oral history,
and to engage in transcontinental explorations
aimed at ascertaining the pre- and
proto-historical continuities between Africa and
other continents -- ultimately in a bid to
establish the empirical foundations for the
thesis of the fundamental unity of humankind.
Around the turn of 2010 Wim van Binsbergen has
been working on the finalisation of a number of
books and articles that are scheduled for
publication in the course of that year, notably:
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
‘The continued relevance of Martin
Bernal’s Black Athena thesis:
Yes and No’
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
‘Before the Pre-Socratics: The evidence
of a common elemental transformational cycle
underlying Asian, African and European
cosmologies since Neolithic times’
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
‘The continuity of African and Eurasian
mythologies: As seen from the perspective of
the Nkoya people of Zambia, South Central
Africa’, in: van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
& Venbrux, Eric, eds., New
Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the
Second Annual Conference of the International
Association for Comparative Mythology
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Cluster
analysis assessing the relation between the
Eurasian, American, African and Oceanian
linguistic macro-phyla: On the basis of the
distribution of the proposed *Borean
derivates in their respective lexicons: With
a lemma exploring *Borean reflexes in
Guthrie’s Proto-Bantu
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Towards
the Pelasgian hypothesis: An integrative
perspective on long-range ethnic, cultural,
linguistic and genetic affinities
encompassing Africa, Europe, and Asia
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Out
of Africa or out of Sundaland: Mythical
discourse in global perspective
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., Joseph
Karst: Pioneering long-range approaches to
Mediterranean Bronze Age ethnicity
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
'Reconsidering spiked wheel traps: An
exercise in global cultural distribution
analysis'
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
'Towards the prehistory of African
divination'
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
‘Building with skulls, and stealing the
moon: Aspects of the continuity of African
and Eurasian mythologies: As seen from the
perspective of the Nkoya people of Zambia,
South Central Africa’, in: Venbrux,
Eric, & van Binsbergen, Wim M.J., eds., Studies
in Comparative Mythology
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
& Venbrux, Eric, eds., New
Perspectives on Myth: Proceedings of the
Second Annual Conference of the International
Association for Comparative Mythology
Venbrux, Eric, & van
Binsbergen, Wim M.J., eds., Studies in
Comparative Mythology
van Binsbergen, Wim M.J.,
& Woudhuizen, Fred, Ethnicity in
Mediterranean proto-history
draft versions of
many of these texts have already been made
available from this website; specific hyperlinks
to these earlier versions will soon be provided,
while their imminent publication is pending
Dendrogram
of the proposed relationships between
linguistic macrophyla under Starostin's *Borean
hypothesis, including the likely place of Bantu
and Khoisan, with various alternative time scales
A schematic transformative
cycle of elements,
such as arguably underlies the Taoist
cosmology, the Nkoya clan system in South
Central Africa, and the pre-Socratic /
Aristotelian four-element system
In Wim van Binsbergen's most
recent work, a central role is played by his Pelasgian
Hypothesis as the culmination of his
transcontinental research, over the past 20
years, into geomantic divination, mankala
games, leopard-skin symbolism, comparative
mythology, language macrophyla, the spiked wheel
trap, and other formal systems demonstrably
linking Africa and the other two continents of
the Old World -- against the background of the
increasingly detailed and convincing long-range
insights molecular genetics, comparative and
historical linguistics, and comparative
mythology, are offering into the past of
Anatomically Modern Humans, especially from the
Upper Palaeolithic onwards. Wim van Binsbergen's
imminent publications scheduled for 2010 are
intended to present most of this work in
progress. Here the Pelasgian Hypothesis will
appear as a viable alternative, not only for
Stephen Oppenheimer's intriguing and perceptive
Sunda thesis, but especially for Martin Bernal's Black
Athena thesis. The Pelasgian Hypotheis lacks
the reductionist (albeit refreshingly
antihegemonic and anti-Eurocentric)
Egyptocentrism or Afrocentrism of Bernal's work,
and instead highlights the exceptional continuity
and creativity of the Mediterranean-centred
Pelasgian Realm -- as a major seedbed even of
African languages and cultures; in the process,
much new light is cast upon one of the most
formative periods of global proto-history: the
Sea Peoples Episode at the end of the Bronze Age.
current year: 2010 (begins above this line; the closer to
the top of the page, the nearer to 2011); clickhere for the years 2008-2009
proceed
to the Shikanda portal in order to access all other
websites by Wim van Binsbergen: general (intercultural
philosophy, African Studies);
ethnicity-identity-politics; Afrocentricity and the Black
Athena debate; Ancient Models of Thought in Africa, the
Ancient Near East, and prehistory; sangoma consultation;
literary work
;
abstracts and blurbs appear against a light blue background. 
Zheng He's voyages, early 15th
c. CE 
number symbolism associated with the
tortoise's carapace; whereas in general
the Southern African herbalist's
pharmacopaea shows considerable
affinities with the traditional Chinese
one. Painstaking transcontinental
research has brought to light that the
Southern African forms of cleromantic
divination and divining bowls are not
only strikingly similar (in terminology,
astrological affinities, and basic
structuring on the basis of 2n
different and named divinatory
configurations) to divinatory forms in
Madagascar, the Comoro Islands, and West
Africa -- but that they also go back to a
common literate prototype in late
1st-millennium CE Islamic, Abasid Iraq, 
cilm
al-raml ('Sand Science') or 
khatt
al-raml ('Sand Calligraphy'), which
in turn display great similarities with
the well-known Chinese wisdom oracle of 
yì jing
(‘I Ching’), and which
(as Geomantia, Astrologia terrestris or
Ars punctatoria) has also
greatly informed West European scholarly
and popular magic ever since the Middle
Ages). 
