Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 326-330
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Gold Coast ◽  
Considerable Degree ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead

This chapter concludes by returning to where the book started, to the beginning of time, when Odomankoma fashioned something unspeakable: adee, the 'Thing'. The Thing, as recounted by the ntumpane, was death, and its first victim was Odomankoma himself. The chapter recalls how Odomankoma became the first of countless others to mount the proverbial ladder of death, dead yet somehow not dead, leaving humankind to fend for itself in a threatening and mysterious world. It demonstrates that death and the dead stood at the very heart of those cultures and that they materialized in myriad ways as historical action. Ultimately, the chapter examines the identifiable history of death among the diverse peoples of the Gold Coast and the forest and savanna beyond. It analyzes how mortuary cultures in independent Ghana appear to have been characterized by a considerable degree of continuity over the four centuries.

Faces of the Dead

2021 ◽  
pp. 92-106
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead

This chapter reviews the most visible material manifestation of funerary culture on the Gold Coast and in its forest hinterland before the twentieth century: commemorative terracotta sculptures of the dead. The chapter notes that the Akan and their neighbours were parsimonious when it came to artistic engagement with the dead. Unlike in many societies, from ancient Egypt to medieval Christian Europe and on to modern Mexico, death in Ghana has not left a powerful visual residue. Even within West Africa, the Akan region is notable for the absence of art that served to mediate with ancestors and the spirit world: in contrast to cultural zones to the west, north and east, it had, for example, no masking tradition. The chapter looks at the role of the terracottas within the wider Akan funerary complex. It focuses on the evocative sculptures, but the aim, in the spirit of Sir Thomas Browne's reflections on ancient British burial urns, is that they illuminate something of that broader history of death.

From House Burial to Cemeteries

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-209
Author(s):  
John Parker
Keyword(s):  
Gold Coast ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Legislative Council ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Fundamental Shift

This chapter discusses the Legislative Council of the Gold Coast Colony's enactment of a law designed to replace the practice of burying the dead within their houses with that of burying them in modern, Western-style cemeteries. It explains the advantages of cemetery burial, which was a landmark in the bureaucratization of death on the Gold Coast and the beginning of a fundamental shift in the dominion of the dead. The outlawing of intramural burial and the establishment of regulated public cemeteries can be seen to represent the same transition that scholars have identified in the history of death in the West: the moment when the dead's long-established cohabitation with the living in the space of human culture was ended by their forcible relocation to the edge of town. The chapter considers how this development played out on the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast with respect to a crucial element in Philippe Ariès's notion of 'modern' death and Thomas W. Laqueur's of a 'new regime' of the dead: the legally enforced disposal of mortal remains in ordered, purpose-built and communal cemeteries.

The History of the Judahite Bench Tomb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Suriano
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Mortuary Practices ◽  
Iron Age Ii ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Insight Into

The history of the Judahite bench tomb provides important insight into the meaning of mortuary practices, and by extension, death in the Hebrew Bible. The bench tomb appeared in Judah during Iron Age II. Although it included certain burial features that appear earlier in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, such as burial benches, and the use of caves for extramural burials, the Judahite bench tomb uniquely incorporated these features into a specific plan that emulated domestic structures and facilitated multigenerational burials. During the seventh century, and continuing into the sixth, the bench tombs become popular in Jerusalem. The history of this type of burial shows a gradual development of cultural practices that were meant to control death and contain the dead. It is possible to observe within these cultural practices the tomb as a means of constructing identity for both the dead and the living.

Love Letters to the Dead: Resurrecting an Epistolary Art

2009 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy A. Lander ◽  
John R. Graham-Pole
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
End Of Life Care ◽  
Therapeutic Potential ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Life Care ◽  
University Teachers ◽  
Reflective Dialogue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead

This article explores the art of letter-writing, specifically to our beloved dead, as a form of autoethnographic research, pedagogy, and care work. As university teachers and qualitative researchers in palliative and end-of-life care, we review the literature and history of epistolary communications with the deceased, as a prelude to writing our own letters. John writes to his long-dead mother and Dorothy to her recently deceased spouse Patrick, each letter followed by a reflective dialogue between us. Through this dialogue, we highlight the potential application of this art, or handcraft, to formal and informal palliative care, and the implications for practice, pedagogy, policy, and research. We propose that such direct, non-mediated, communications can offer a valuable form of healing for bereaved people. The therapeutic potential of letter writing and the abundance of literary and popular culture exemplars of responses from the dead are also largely unexplored in death education and research.

The Royal African Company of England's West African Correspondence, 1681-1699

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 173-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Cape Coast ◽  
General Terms ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of

This paper draws attention to an ambitious project in the publication of source material for the precolonial history of West Africa, which has recently been approved for inclusion in the Fontes Historiae Africanae series of the British Academy. In addition to self-promotion, however, I wish also to take the opportunity to air some of the problems of editorial strategy and choice which arise with regard to the editing and presentation of this material, in the hope of provoking some helpful feedback on these issues.The material to be published consists of correspondence of the Royal African Company of England relating to the West African coast in the late seventeenth century. The history of the Royal African Company (hereafter RAC) is in general terms well known, especially through the pioneering (and still not superseded) study by K.G. Davies (1957). The Company was chartered in 1672 with a legal monopoly of English trade with Africa. Its headquarters in West Africa was at Cape Coast (or, in the original form of the name, Cabo Corso) Castle on the Gold Coast, and it maintained forts or factories not only on the Gold Coast itself, but also at the Gambia, in Sierra Leone, and at Offra and Whydah on the Slave Coast. It lost its monopoly of the African trade in 1698, and thereafter went into decline, effectively ceasing to operate as a trading concern in the 1720s, although it continued to manage the English possessions on the coast of West Africa until it was replaced by a regulated company (i.e., one open to all traders), the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, in 1750.

Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Berger
Keyword(s):  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Good Standing ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Jewish Resistance ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Second Coming

The focus of this book is the messianic trend in Lubavitch hasidism. It demonstrates how hasidim who affirm the dead Rebbe's messiahship have abandoned one of Judaism's core beliefs in favour of adherence to the doctrine of a second coming. At the same time, it decries the equanimity with which the standard-bearers of Orthodoxy have granted legitimacy to this development by continuing to recognize such believers as Orthodox Jews in good standing. This abandonment of the age-old Jewish resistance to a quintessentially Christian belief is a development of striking importance for the history of religions and an earthquake in the history of Judaism. The book chronicles the unfolding of this development. It argues that a large number, almost certainly a substantial majority, of Lubavitch hasidim believe in the Rebbe's messiahship; a significant segment, including educators in the central institutions of the movement, maintain a theology that goes beyond posthumous messianism to the affirmation that the Rebbe is pure divinity. While many Jews see Lubavitch as a marginal phenomenon, its influence is in fact growing at a remarkable rate. The book analyses the boundaries of Judaism's messianic faith and its conception of God. It assesses the threat posed by the messianists of Lubavitch and points to the consequences, ranging from undermining a fundamental argument against the Christian mission to calling into question the kosher status of many foods and ritual objects prepared under Lubavitch supervision. Finally, it proposes a strategy to protect authentic Judaism from this assault.

African American Journalists in World War II West Africa: The NNPA Commission Tour of 1944–1945

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110549
Author(s):  
Oliver Coates
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
West Africa ◽  
American West ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic

The National Negro Publishers Association (NNPA) Commission to West Africa in 1944–1945 represents a major episode in the history of World War II Africa, as well as in American–West Africa relations. Three African American reporters toured the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Congo between November 1944 and February 1945, before returning to Washington, DC to report to President Roosevelt. They documented their tour in the pages of the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Their Americans’ visit had a significant impact in wartime West Africa and was widely documented in the African press. This article examines the NNPA tour geographically, before analyzing American reporters’ interactions with West Africans, and assessing African responses to the tour. Drawing on both African American and West African newspapers, it situates the NNPA tour within the history of World War II West Africa, and in terms of African print culture. It argues that the NNPA tour became the focus of West African hopes for future political, economic, and intellectual relations with African Americans, while revealing how the NNPA reporters engaged African audiences during their tour.

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