Embodiology

2019 ◽  
pp. 762-784
Author(s):  
S. Ama Wray
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
West African ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Training Methodology ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
African Perspective ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aesthetic Values

Dance-drumming performance practices in West Africa reveal multiple modes of communication that take place between performers and informed audiences, in an ongoing exchange of novelty. In the Ewe case, the critical nature of the relationship between movement, music, and language lies within their explicit drum syntax producing Ewephone comprehension, which is processed through the body’s varying porous kinaesonic surfaces. This principle process is conceptualized as Dynamic Rhythm, the metacomponent of Embodiology, which is both a training methodology and a theoretical framework that makes inherent improvisation discernable to the nonpractitioner. In addition, as a result of this understanding, interlocking aesthetic values within West African performance practices are identifiable within the African Diaspora. This articulation of improvisation from a West African perspective creates a gateway for both the scholarly and artistic fields of dance to develop a way to understand these autopoietic phenomena that were, until now, largely hidden.

Divine Revelation in West Africa and Central Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 419-435
Author(s):  
Josiah Ulysses Young
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Doctrine Of God ◽  
Traditional Religions ◽  
African Independent Churches ◽  
Independent Churches ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African Traditional Religions

This chapter examines divine revelation in West Africa and Central Africa, with a historical focus on the relation of biblical beliefs to African traditional religions. It discusses the African independent churches, specifically the Église de Jésus-Christ sur la Terre par le Prophète Simon Kimbangu; Vincent Mulago’s essay in Des prêtres noirs s’interrogent (1956); specific essays from the book Biblical Revelation and African Beliefs (1969); and Engelbert Mveng’s book L’Art d’Afrique noire: liturgie cosmique et langage religieux (1964). The chapter also examines the recent scholarship of the Ghanaian theologian Mercy Oduyoye and the Congolese scholars Oscar Bimwenyi-Kweshi and Kä Mana. Regarding the relationship between divine revelation and African traditional religions, it discusses J. B. Danquah’s book The Akan Doctrine of God (1944), the arguments of the Congolese Egyptologist Mubabinge Bilolo, and the West African scholar Ntumba Museka.

Drought and Dependence in the Sahel

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Ball
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Development Strategy ◽  
Safety Margin ◽  
West African ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Ecological Stability ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between human activity and environmental degradation has been documented in numerous studies. With regard to West Africa, E. P. Stebbing was already warning of ecological degradation due to overcultivation and overgrazing in the 1930s. Less well documented are the reasons why people who understand many of the requirements of ecologically sound farming and herding nonetheless mismanage natural resources to the point of disaster. An examination of the 1968–1973 drought in the Sahel zone of West Africa (formerly French West Africa) suggests that the lack of economic autonomy for Sahelian countries is a major cause not only of their economic stagnation and underdevelopment but equally of the degradation of their ecosystems. Specific policies, initiated during the colonial period and continued by independent governments, can be identified as reducing the ability of West African farmers and herders to exploit their environment with an adequate safety margin. Largely as a result of the 1968–1973 drought, there has been an upsurge of interest in the Sahel on the part of international and national aid agencies. However, it is very possible that the programs devised by these groups will promote neither economic autonomy nor ecological stability for the countries in that region. A development strategy based largely on self-reliance, on the other hand, could be more successful in protecting both the populations and the ecology of the Sahel.

The Slave Trade and Coastal West Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth G. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Archaeological Work

The Atlantic slave trade has been the focus of archaeological work in a number of West African countries. Much of the work has emphasized the impressive trade castles of the Ghana coast, where extensive European constructions demonstrate the importance of the slave trade in the regions’ history. Work has also been conducted on other settings, including in Bénin, where African agency manifested itself differently than on the Gold Coast of modern Ghana; Sierra Leone and Gambia, where European trading establishments were typically smaller; and Guinea, where the ‘illegal’ slave trade of the nineteenth century blossomed. Many of these sites of enslavement have become important parts of local heritage, as well as a global heritage of African-descended people and the heritage tourism associated with the African Diaspora.

From Paternalism to the Chambas Formula for Mediation: Conceptualizing Cooperation between the UN and Regional Organizations in Mediating Conflicts

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Thomas Kwasi Tieku ◽  
Megan Payler
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
Soft Skills ◽  
West African ◽  
Regional Organizations ◽  
Elite Networks ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Consistent Application

Abstract This article explores the working relationship between the United Nations (UN), African Union (AU), and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in mediating conflicts in West Africa and the Sahel regions. We argue that through the United Nations Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS), the UN, ECOWAS and the AU are working on mediation efforts to transcend traditional conceptualizations of the relationship between the world body and regional organizations. We show that the partnership is grounded on the logic of subsidiarity, informality, elite networks, technical competence, soft skills, and robust social trust. For heuristic purposes, we call the six principles the Chambas Formula, with reference to the centrality of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for West Africa and the Sahel, Mohamed Ibn Chambas, and the emergence and consistent application of the principles in the mediation setting in West Africa and the Sahel regions.

In Hip Hop Time

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Appert
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aesthetic Values

In Hip Hop Time goes beyond popular narratives of hip hop resistance to address Senegalese hip hop—Rap Galsen—as a musical movement deeply tied to indigenous performance practices and changing social norms in a modernizing Africa. This is a story of globalization, of diasporic movement and memory, of an imagined African past and contemporary African realities, of urbanization and socioeconomic struggle, and of the relationship between popular music and social change. The book takes readers from Senegalese hip hop’s beginnings among cosmopolitan youth in Dakar’s affluent neighborhoods in the 1980s, to its spread throughout the city’s ghettoized working-class neighborhoods in the mid- to late-1990s, and up to the present day, where political activism and hip hop musicality vie for position in local and global arenas. It connects these classed and generational shifts to postcolonial political, social, and religious structures, as well as to globally circulating narratives of Afrocentricity and Blackness. It shows how, through social networks constructed through and around a shared system of aesthetic values called hip hop, Senegalese youth negotiate gender, class, and family in the context of underdevelopment. An ethnography of the inextricability of musical and social meaning in hip hop practice, In Hip Hop Time charts new intellectual territory in a growing, interdisciplinary body of scholarship on hip hop in Africa and around the world.

The Coin of the African Realm

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Herbst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Regional Economies ◽  
African Countries ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter examines the politics of the currency in West Africa from the beginning of the twentieth century. A public series of debates over the nature of the currency occurred in West Africa during both the colonial and independence periods. Since 1983, West African countries have been pioneers in Africa in developing new strategies to combat overvaluation of the currency and reduce the control of government over the currency supply. The chapter charts the evolution of West African currencies as boundaries and explores their relationship to state consolidation. It shows that leaders in African capitals managed to make the units they ruled increasingly distinct from the international and regional economies, but the greater salience of the currency did not end up promoting state consolidation. Rather, winning the ability to determine the value of the currency led to a series of disastrous decisions that severely weakened the states themselves.

The Subject Matter of Intellectual Property

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Final Stage ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Trade Mark ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The Relationship

This book offers a study of the subject matter protected by each of the main intellectual property (IP) regimes. With a focus on European and UK law particularly, it considers the meaning of the terms used to denote the objects to which IP rights attach, such as ‘invention’, ‘authorial work’, ‘trade mark’, and ‘design’, with reference to the practice of legal officials and the nature of those objects specifically. To that end it proceeds in three stages. At the first stage, in Chapter 2, the nature, aims, and values of IP rights and systems are considered. As historically and currently conceived, IP rights are limited (and generally transferable) exclusionary rights that attach to certain intellectual creations, broadly conceived, and that serve a range of instrumentalist and deontological ends. At the second stage, in Chapter 3, a theoretical framework for thinking about IP subject matter is proposed with the assistance of certain devices from philosophy. That framework supports a paradigmatic conception of the objects protected by IP rights as artifact types distinguished by their properties and categorized accordingly. From this framework, four questions are derived concerning: the nature of the (categories of) subject matter denoted by the terms ‘invention’, ‘authorial work’, ‘trade mark’, ‘design’ etc, including their essential properties; the means by which each subject matter is individuated within the relevant IP regime; the relationship between each subject matter and its concrete instances; and the manner in which the existence of a subject matter and its concrete instances is known. That leaves the book’s final stage, in Chapters 3 to 7. Here legal officials’ use of the terms above, and understanding of the objects that they denote, are studied, and the results presented as answers to the four questions identified previously.

THOUGHTS ON THE WESTERN SAVANNAH AND SAHEL

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-326
Author(s):  
Michael A. Gomez
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Spatial Frame ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractA recent revival of interest in the empires of the medieval western Savannah and Sahel has generated new insights into slavery, ethnicity, race, and gender in precolonial West Africa. New histories of medieval West Africa also expand the spatial frame through which the relationship between the region's polities and the broader world can be understood. This essay offers a survey of that literature.

scholarly journals Exploring the relationship between corporate social responsibility actions and employee retention: A human resource management perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Hajar Boutmaghzoute ◽  
Karim Moustaghfir
Keyword(s):  
Job Satisfaction ◽  
Organizational Identification ◽  
Employee Retention ◽  
Employee Commitment ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Behavioral Factors ◽  
The Relationship

BACKGROUND: This study builds on the little guidance in the existing literature to analyze the relationship between employee-oriented CSR actions and employee retention in a business context, while using Freeman stakeholders’ model as a theoretical research framework. This research also aims to shed light on significant behavioral factors facilitating the relationship between CSR endeavors and turnover rate. OBJECTIVE: This paper builds on the existing research gap in the literature and suggests that behavioral factors, including job satisfaction, organizational identification, and motivation facilitate the relationship between employee-oriented CSR actions and employee retention, which contributes to laying the foundations of a theoretical framework that has the potential to advance both theoretical and practitioner debates and disentangle the complexity of such a relationship, while offering strategically-focused development venues in CSR and HRM fields. METHODS: This research uses a single case study design to ensure an in-depth and detailed analysis of the phenomenon under scrutiny, while relying on a triangulation methodology for data collection, including a questionnaire used as exploratory approach, interviews to generate explanatory data, and archival data to bring confirmatory insights. Data analysis followed the procedures of a deductive approach. RESULTS: The research results show a positive relationship between employee-oriented CSR actions and employee retention, while demonstrating the facilitating role of job satisfaction, organizational identification, and motivation in moderating such a relationship. The findings also stress the importance of framing CSR interventions within the organization’s strategy and goals, while ensuring employee participation in such decision making processes to maximize the effect of CSR interventions on employee commitment and reduce turnover. CONCLUSIONS: This research has the potential to better clarify the nature of the relationship involving CSR interventions, from an employee perspective, retention, and turnover, while laying the foundations of a theoretical framework linking such constructs and other behavioral factors that underpin and support such a relationship. Building on the study’s findings and assumptions, future research is needed to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how HR-related CSR actions affect behavioral performance dimensions, resulting in employee commitment and retention. Future research should also consider multiple case study, multicultural, and ethnographic approaches for the sake of generalizability and theory building.

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