The Nilotes of the Sudan and Uganda

The Nilotes of the Sudan and Uganda
Author: Audrey Butt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-02-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315313790

Routledge is proud to be re-issuing this landmark series in association with the International African Institute. The series, originally published between 1950 and 1977, collected ethnographic information on the peoples of Africa, using all available sources: archives, memoirs and reports as well as anthropological research which, in 1945, had only just begun. Concise, critical and (for its time) accurate, the Ethnographic Survey contains sections as follows: Physical Environment Linguistic Data Demography History & Traditions of Origin Nomenclature Grouping Cultural Features: Religion, Witchcraft, Birth, Initiation, Burial Social & Political Organization: Kinship, Marriage, Inheritance, Slavery, Land Tenure, Warfare & Justice Economy & Trade Domestic Architecture Each of the 50 volumes will be available to buy individually, and these are organized into regional sub-groups: East Central Africa, North-Eastern Africa, Southern Africa, West Central Africa, Western Africa, and Central Africa Belgian Congo. The volumes are supplemented with maps, available to view on routledge.com or available as a pdf from the publishers.

Beneath the Volcano

Beneath the Volcano
Author: Gregory L. Forth
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2021-08-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004434844

Beneath the Volcano is the first major account of the Nage, who inhabit the central part of Flores in eastern Indonesia. The book focuses on Nage ideas concerning a variety of spiritual beings and how these influence both ritual practices and ideas about human beings. In exploring these subjects, the author sets out to uncover a classification of spirits. While quite different from taxonomies of natural beings, Nage ways of linking named categories of spirits nevertheless reveal a regular conceptual order. In describing this order, use is made of a version of Dumont's notion of 'encompassment'. Common ideas informing relations between Nage humans and several categories of spirits are further interpreted as instances of a pervasive principle of 'symmetric inversion', according to which human beings are spirits for the spirits.

The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555

The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402-1555
Author: Matteo Salvadore
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2016-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317045459

From the 14th century onward, political and religious motives led Ethiopian travelers to Mediterranean Europe. For two centuries, their ancient Christian heritage and the myth of a fabled eastern king named Prester John allowed the Ethiopians to engage the continent's secular and religious elites as peers. Meanwhile, back home the Ethiopian nobility came to welcome European visitors and at times even co-opted them by arranging mixed marriages and bestowing land rights. The protagonists of this encounter sought and discovered each other in royal palaces, monasteries, and markets throughout the Mediterranean basin, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean littoral, from Lisbon to Jerusalem and from Venice to Goa. Matteo Salvadore's narrative takes the reader on a voyage of reciprocal discovery that climaxed with the Portuguese intervention on the side of the Christian monarchy in the Ethiopian-Adali War. Thereafter, the arrival of the Jesuits at the Horn of Africa turned the mutually beneficial Ethiopian-European encounter into a bitter confrontation over the souls of Ethiopian Christians.

Christianity in Indonesia

Christianity in Indonesia
Author: Susanne Schröter
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 3643107986

Indonesia is a multicultural and multireligious nation whose heterogeneity is codified in the state doctrine, the Pancasila. Yet the relations between the various social, ethnic, and religious groups have been problematic down to the present day. In several respects, Christians have a precarious role in the struggle for shaping the nation. In the aftermath of the former president Suharto's resignation and in the course of the ensuing political changes Christians have been involved both as victims and perpetrators in violent regional clashes with Muslims that claimed thousands of lives. Since the beginning of the new millennium the violent conflicts have lessened, yet the pressure exerted on Christians by Islamic fundamentalists still continues undiminished in the Muslim-majority regions. The future of the Christians in Indonesia remains uncertain, and pluralist society is still on trial. For this reason the situation of Christians in Indonesia is an important issue that goes far beyond research on a minority, touching on general issues relating to the formation of the nation-state.

Kings of Disaster

Kings of Disaster
Author: Simon Simonse
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2023-11-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004618023

This study of the rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan means a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from Rene Girard's theory of consensual scapegoating the author shows that the long standing distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victimary role of the king as compared with that of enemy victims. Kings of Disaster so proposes an uninvolved solution to the vexed problem of regicide. Recent cases occurring during the great drought of the mid-1980's are discribed and analyzed. Making simultaneous use of first-hand field data and archival sources, the book offers the first presentation of five Nilotic communities on the East Bank of the Nile. This study offers a new perspective on the role of violence in the structuring of society.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy
Author: Knut Mikjel Rio
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781845454937

On the basis of diverse ethnographic contexts in Oceania, Asia, and the Middle East, the author's challenge current conceptions of hierarchical formations and reassess former debates, both with regard to new theoretical issues and the new world situation of post-colonial and neocolonial agendas.

The Vatican Collections

The Vatican Collections
Author: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 262
Release: 1982
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0870993216

Nearly three hundred illustrations and a text reveal the entire range of the Vatican's artistic holdings, replete with priceless masterworks from all periods.

A History of African Linguistics

A History of African Linguistics
Author: H. Ekkehard Wolff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2019-06-13
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1108417973

The first global history of African linguistics as an emerging autonomous academic discipline, covering Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

A Grammar of Luwo

A Grammar of Luwo
Author: Anne Storch
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027269378

This book is a description of Luwo, a Western Nilotic language of South Sudan. Luwo is used by multilingual, dynamic communities of practice as one language among others that form individual and flexible repertoires. It is a language that serves as a means of expressing the Self, as a medium of art and self-actualization, and sometimes as a medium of writing. It is spoken in the home and in public spaces, by fairly large numbers of people who identify themselves as Luwo and as members of all kinds of other groups. In order to provide insights into these dynamic and diverse realities of Luwo, this book contains both a concise description and analysis of the linguistic features and structures of Luwo, and an approach to the anthropological linguistics of this language. The latter is presented in the form of separate chapters on possession, number, experiencer constructions, spatial orientation, perception and cognition. In all sections of this study, sociolinguistic information is provided wherever this is useful and possible, detailed information on the semantics of grammatical features and constructions is given, and discussions of theory-oriented approaches to various linguistic features of Luwo are presented.