History and the Testimony of Language PDF Download

Author: Christopher Ehret
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520262042
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book is about history and the practical power of language to reveal historical change. Christopher Ehret offers a methodological guide to applying language evidence in historical studies. He demonstrates how these methods allow us not only to recover the histories of time periods and places poorly served by written documentation, but also to enrich our understanding of well-documented regions and eras. A leading historian as well as historical linguist of Africa, Ehret provides in-depth examples from the language phyla of Africa, arguing that his comprehensive treatment can be applied by linguistically trained historians and historical linguists working with any language and in any area of the world.

Author: Beatriz Caiuby Labate
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199341214
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar offer an in-depth exploration of how Amerindian epistemology and ontology concerning indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon have spread to Western societies, and of how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures have engaged with and transformed these forest traditions. The volume focuses on the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink essential in many indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon. Ayahuasca use has spread to countries far beyond its Amazonian origin, spurring a wide variety of legal and cultural responses. The essays in this volume look at how these responses have influenced ritual design and performance in traditional and non-traditional contexts, how displaced indigenous people and rubber tappers are engaged in the creative reinvention of rituals, and how these rituals help build ethnic alliances and cultural and political strategies. These essays explore important classic and contemporary issues in anthropology, including the relationship between the expansion of ecotourism and ethnic tourism and recent indigenous cultural revival and the emergence of new ethnic identities. The volume also examines trends in the commodification of indigenous cultures in post-colonial contexts, the combination of shamanism with a network of health and spiritually related services, and identity hybridization in global societies. The rich ethnographies and extensive analysis of these essays will allow deeper understanding of the role of ritual in mediating the encounter between indigenous traditions and modern societies.

Author: Bill Bravman
Publisher: James Currey
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
This history of the Taita people during the 20th century focuses on their gradual adoption of a novel ethnic identity. The author shows how ethnicity became a language through which prior struggles were reframed and continued.

Author: Wilbur Smith
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1499861117
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 756

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Book Description
The fourth book in the epic Egyptian series The fourth book in the epic Egyptian series 'She is omnivorous. No matter age or appearance, physical frailty or imperfection. It is not their flesh that feeds her appetites, but their souls. she devours the young and old, men and women. She leaves only a desiccated husk.' An unspeakable evil. An impossible gift. Renowned magus Taita is now over a hundred years old, and has ascended to a new level of wisdom and understanding about his world. But he must prepare himself for the greatest threat Egypt has ever faced: the great plagues and the fair of the Nile, brought about by the fire witch Eos, an ancient force of sheer evil. Taita must risk his soul to battle against Eos, or his homeland and everything he has ever loved will be lost forever. But there are other reasons for Taita to fight -- since success could also mean rewards he could never have thought possible...

Author: D. Freeman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137017252
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Development was founded on the belief that religion was not important to development processes. The contributors call this assumption into question and explore the practical impacts of religion by looking at the developmental consequences of Pentecostal Christianity in Africa, and by contrasting Pentecostal and secular models of change.

Author: James Howard Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226764591
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
These days, development inspires scant trust in the West. For critics who condemn centralized efforts to plan African societies as latter day imperialism, such plans too closely reflect their roots in colonial rule and neoliberal economics. But proponents of this pessimistic view often ignore how significant this concept has become for Africans themselves. In Bewitching Development, James Howard Smith presents a close ethnographic account of how people in the Taita Hills of Kenya have appropriated and made sense of development thought and practice, focusing on the complex ways that development connects with changing understandings of witchcraft. Similar to magic, development’s promise of a better world elicits both hope and suspicion from Wataita. Smith shows that the unforeseen changes wrought by development—greater wealth for some, dashed hopes for many more—foster moral debates that Taita people express in occult terms. By carefully chronicling the beliefs and actions of this diverse community—from frustrated youths to nostalgic seniors, duplicitous preachers to thought-provoking witch doctors—BewitchingDevelopment vividly depicts the social life of formerly foreign ideas and practices in postcolonial Africa.

Author: Nancy Lutkehaus
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136657428
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This volume draws together ethnographies of female initiation rites in Melanesia which require anthropologists to rethink their analysis of initiations and their perceptions of gender. The contributors argue that female initiation rites express more than cultural notions of femininity, narrow definitions of reproduction, or coming of age rituals - instead they play an important role in other life cycle rituals and in the political and economic organization of society.

Author: Alhena Caicedo Fernández
Publisher: Universidad de los Andes
ISBN: 9587980875
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The Radical Otherness That Heals proposes an interesting theoretical advance in various schools of local and regional, and national and transnational analysis. It is based on a multilocal ethnography and a detailed sociological and political reading of the interactions between institutions and social and cultural representations of otherness. The original theoretical proposal consists of reading the reconfiguration of shamanisms stemming from processes of ethnicization and patrimonialization, and skillfully reconstructing the national ideological space and the most recent effects of multiculturalism through representations of otherness Anne-Marie Losonczy, Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris "The concept of the yagecero field serves as the axis of this innovative research that intertwines a multi-sited ethnography with a biographical approach to the actors. An extensive review of the literature on indigenous shamanisms, their networks, national politics, inter-ethnic relations and representations of the radical alterity that heals makes it possible for the reader to draw near, based on the close proximity of neo-shamanic practices, to perceive the national and transnational influences that are an integral part of the ongoing dynamics of this phenomenon. The analysis of neo-shamanism and the practices of the taita yageceros in Colombia contributes to deepening current debates on contemporary shamanisms and the broader issue of new religiosities, the transformations of indigenous groups and their politics of identify. This book provides a valuable input to the characterization of New Age spirituality from its understanding as a localized practice. It opens a space to compare the aforementioned manifestations in Colombia with similar ones in different countries." Esther Jean Langdon, Professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 960

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Book Description
The official records of the proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, the House of Representatives of the Government of Kenya and the National Assembly of the Republic of Kenya.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 960

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Book Description
The official records of the proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, the House of Representatives of the Government of Kenya and the National Assembly of the Republic of Kenya.