scholarly journals Waar is Abraham dan?

2001 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-340
Author(s):  
J.H. Ie Roux
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
Written Sources

This article deals with some aspects of the historical Abraham. Reference is made to an Afrikaans author, Karel Schoeman, and his novel, uVerliesfontein". In this work Schoeman attempts to enter the history of a town and its people. This, however, is not possible and he therefore says that history is another country. A country which is totally inaccessable. It is, however, also true of Abraham. Since the nineteenth century it has been emphasized that we can never determine the historical Abraham. There are no reliable written sources about him (Wellhausen). Even if one tries to get behind the sources and determine the oral tradition (like Gunkel), Abraham still evades one. Through markers in the text and ancient near eastern parallels some scholars even sought to date and describe the era of Abraham. These attempts also failed. It is argued that we should rather refrain from dating Abraham. This, however, is not the end of the story. We can still try to determine how Abraham was interpreted in faith through the ages. In this regard Von Rad's usage of Usage" can be of great assistance. In a next article this topic is discussed futher.

Indigenous Written Sources for the History of Bonny

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 185-196
Author(s):  
Susan M. Hargreaves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Court Records ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Similar Character ◽  
Written Sources

It is well known that indigenous contemporary written documentation exists for the precolonial and early colonial history of some of the coastal societies of South-Eastern Nigeria. The best known example is Old Calabar, for which there exists most notably the diary of Antera Duke, covering the years 1785-88, a document brought from Old Calabar to Britain already during the nineteenth century. More recently John Latham has discovered additional material of a similar character still preserved locally in Old Calabar, principally the Black Davis House Book (containing material dating from the 1830s onwards), the papers of Coco Bassey (including diaries covering the years 1878-89), and the papers of E. O. Offiong (comprising trade ledgers, court records, and letter books relating to the period 1885-1907). In the Niger Delta S. J. S. Cookey, for his biography of King Jaja of Opobo, was able to use contemporary documents in Jaja's own papers, including correspondence from the late 1860s onwards. In the case of the neighboring community of Bonny (from which Jaja seceded to found Opobo after a civil war in 1869), while earlier historians have alluded to the existence of indigenous written documentation, they have done so only in very general terms and without any indication of the quantity or nature of this material.

scholarly journals The Representation of Status in Mande: Did the Mali Empire Still Exist in the Nineteenth Century?

1996 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 87-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Organizational Structure ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Methodological Errors ◽  
Widespread Acceptance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Of Information

For the reconstruction of the history of the aftermath of the Mali empire, that is, the period 1500-1800, oral traditions are the only source of information. The history of this period has been reconstructed by Person and Niane. Their work has gained widespread acceptance. In this paper I will argue that these scholars made significant methodological errors—in particular, in interpreting chronology in genealogies, and their reading of stories about invasions and the seizure of power by younger brothers.My reading of the oral tradition raises questions about the nature of both sixteenth- and nineteenth-century Mande (that is the triangle Bamako-Kita-Kankan (see map), the region where the ‘Malinke’ live), and the medieval Mali empire, because I think that Mande royal genealogies have wrongly been considered to represent claims to the imperial throne of the Mali empire. In contrast, my reading of oral tradition suggests in retrospect that the organizational structure of the Mali empire may have been segmentary, and not centralized, ranking between segments under discussion, each group thereby creating a hierarchical image.The conventional wisdom seems to be that the Mali empire collapsed/disintegrated in the period from 1500 and 1800. As Person put it:Dans le triangle malinké, on ne trouvera plus au XIX siècle que des kafu, ces petites unités étatiques qui forment les cellules politiques fondamentales du monde mandingue. Certains d'entre eux savaient faire reconnaître leur hégémonie à leurs voisins, mais aucune structure politique permante n'existait à un niveau supérieur. Beaucoup d'entre eux, dont les plus puissants et les plus peuplés, seront alors commandées par des lignées Kééta qui se réclament avec quelque vraisemblance des empereurs du Mali médiéval.

Place Names as an Historical Source: An Introduction with Examples from Southern Senegambia and Germany

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 45-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Bühnen
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Research Experience ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Egg Shells ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Written Sources

Written sources for the history of sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of East Africa) only begin to appear with the inception of Arabic records from the ninth century onwards, and these are restricted to the Sahel and the northern part of the savanna belt. European sources begin in the mid-fifteenth century, first for Senegambia. They, in turn, confine themselves to the coast and its immediate hinterland, as well as the navigable courses of rivers, with few, and often vague, references to the interior. For the time before the early written sources and for those extensive areas which only much later entered the horizon of writing witnesses, other sources illuminating the past have to be traced and tapped. Among such non-written sources are the findings of anthropology and archeology, of research in oral tradition and place names. Because of their interdependence, working with different source types contributes to the reliability of results.So far little systematic use has been made of place names as a source for African history. Houis' 1958 dictum, “la toponymie ouest-africaine n'est pas encore sortie de l'oeuf,” has not yet been proven obsolete. In this paper I hope to stimulate the process of shedding the egg shells. It is intended as a short introduction to the potential historical treasures place names may yield, into their characteristics, and into some principles guiding their interpretation. With the aim at illustrating my arguments, I add examples of place names. These I have chosen from two areas which, at first sight, seem to have been selected rather randomly; southern Senegambia and Germany. In fact both areas share few features, both geographically and historically. Two reasons have led me to select them. First, they simply are the regions I know best. Secondly, the recourse to German place names is instructive, as research on place names has been undertaken there for more than a century, leading to a wide range of data and to the accumulation of rich research experience.

The Pivotal Characterization: Ancient Law as Non-Statutory Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua A. Berman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Statutory Law ◽  
Ancient Law ◽  
History Of

Scholars of biblical law have long seen the inconsistencies among the law corpora of the Pentateuch as signs of schools and communities in conflict. This chapter offers an introductory foundation for the following five chapters on biblical and ancient Near Eastern law. It demonstrates that the dominant approach to the critical study of biblical law—that is, as statutory law—is based on anachronistic, nineteenth-century notions of how law works and how legal texts are formulated. The chapter traces the history of legal thought in that century, and how it shaped (a better term might be distorted) how we view the ancient legal texts of the Bible and the Near East, and recovers premodern understandings of how law works and how legal texts are to be read in accordance with common-law jurisprudence.

Stories About the Destruction of a Shrine in the Context of a Cycle: Observing a Particular Pattern

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-114
Author(s):  
Антонина Петровна Липатова
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Official History ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sacred Object ◽  
Text Formation ◽  
Official Recognition ◽  
Written Sources

В статье осуществлена попытка рассмотреть цикл рассказов, группирующихся вокруг святыни, как живую, «самонастраивающуюся» систему. Структуру цикла образуют нарративы, описывающие этиологическое и историческое прошлое святыни и ее чудесное настоящее. В случае рутинизации устной традиции структура цикла нередко подвергается изменениям. Предмет нашего рассмотрения - корпус текстов о сакральном объекте в условиях широкого официального признания, сопровождающегося рутинизаций устной традиции. Происходит своего рода «перераспределение» ролей в рамках цикла. Сюжет этиологической легенды, зафиксированный во множестве письменных источников, становится «официальной историей» края. Рассказчики теряют интерес к ней, в традиции осуществляется пересказ, а не рассказывание по законам фольклорного текстообразования. Примета легендарного - актуальность информации. Трансформантный тип вариативности, характерный для этиологической легенды, становится приметой рассказов о поругании святыни. Традиционно рассказы о разрушении сакрального объекта рассматриваются как «дочерние» образования. Однако при широком официальном признании статуса объекта рассказы о его разрушении начинают восприниматься как «ядро представления», именно с их помощью объясняется сакральность. Таким образом, говорить о деградации устной традиции даже при широком официальном признании не приходится. This article attempts to consider a cycle of stories grouped around the image of a shrine as a living, “self-adjusting” system. The cycle is formed of narratives that describe the shrine’s etiology, its history, and miraculous present, but the cycle often changes as the oral tradition becomes routinized. The article analyzes a corpus of texts about shrines that have wide official acceptance and are subject to the routinization of the oral tradition. In this case a kind of redistribution of roles takes place within the cycle. Many written sources record an etiological legend that serves as the official “history” of the region. Thereupon, narrators lose interest in it, which results in a paraphrase rather than a storytelling according to the usual laws of folklore text formation. A mark of legends is the topicality of their content. The variations characteristic of etiological legends (of the transformative type) become a marker of tales concerning desecration of the shrine. Traditionally, stories about the destruction of a sacred object are considered “daughter” (subsidiary) formations. But with widespread official recognition of the status of a shrine, stories about its destruction often begin to be perceived as the “core of representation,” since it is with their help that the shrine’s sacred character is explained. Thus, one cannot speak of the degradation of the oral tradition even given its widespread official recognition.

The Pate Chronicles Revisited: Nineteenth-Century History and Historiography

1996 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 301-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall L. Pouwels
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

A few years ago I offered an assessment of the Pate “Chronicles” as a tradition-based source for the history of the East African coast. That paper drew on recensions and versions that were readily available at that time to researchers interested in their historiography. Reasons of length and scope, cited at the end of the paper, restricted discussion to Sultan Fumo Madi b. Abu Bakr and his predecessors (Sultan nos. 1-24), that is to say, up to the time of the Battle of Shela,ca. 1807-13. To reiterate, in that paper I established the following points:(1) All recorded versions appear to have been based on an oral tradition that was extant in the mid- to late nineteenth century among Nabahani family members. The existence of a “Book of the Kings of Pate,” mentioned by Werner and Prins, is problematic (see 3 below).(2) Despite the number of versions of the Pate “Chronicles,” they appear to have actually come from only two informants, Bwana Kitini and Mshamu bin Kombo, who was a relative or possibly, as Tolmacheva claims, Bw. Kitini's brother.(3) Except for minor, though discernible, differences between the lists of the sultans given by both informants, most versions are consistent to a surprising degree. This seems attributable to the fact that there wereonlytwo informants, Kitini and Mshamu, who also were related, and who therefore themselves probably shared the same source(s). Given the differences of detail beyond the kinglists, if one of those earlier sources was a written one, such as an actual “Book of the Kings of Pate,” that source seems to have afforded the informants little beyond names and regnal dates.

European and African Tradition on the Rio Real

1963 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-402
Author(s):  
G. I. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
West African ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Natural Tendency ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
Written Sources ◽  
Historical Detail

Those engaged in studying the history of West African coastal communities find themselves confronted with two different classes of material —historical sources, which are mainly written records produced by Europeans who visited or resided for short periods in the area; and anthropological sources, which are mainly local African oral tradition. There is a natural tendency for historians and for anthropologists each to confine themselves mainly to the class of material they understand best and to use the other, if they use it at all, uncritically and without regard to the interdependence of these two sources. The written sources were produced by people who knew little or nothing about the societies they were describing, and they can only become meaningful if seen against the ethnographic background. The African traditions on the other hand, if used alone, are no substitute for historical records. They are not concerned with an absolute time scale and can only be placed in the right historical perspective if they can be correlated with dated historical records. Neither class is capable of standing by itself; they have to be taken together and used to correct, check, and amplify each other. In addition, the written records have other faults of their own, notably the mesmerizing effect which can be achieved by an arresting statement once it has been recorded in print. The more frequently the statement is recorded the more authoritative it becomes. Captain Adams, for example, in his Sketches taken during ten voyages to Africa made a guess at the number of slaves exported annually from the Rio Real, and this figure of 20,000 was accepted uncritically and repeated by almost every subsequent writer on the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra. When it is possible to take them together, however, a great many of the apparent differences between these two classes of material disappear. The African traditions at times provide more accurate historical detail than the written sources, while some of the latter are shown to be more legendary in character than the African and subject to just the same processes of compression and the same dependence on ‘structural time’.

Kings, Titles, and Quarters: A Conjectural History of Ilesha I: The Traditions Reviewed

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 109-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.D.Y. Peel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regional Centers ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
The Town

This is an essay in conjectural history. Its subject is Ilesha, the capital of Ijesha, one of the larger Yoruba kingdoms, founded probably in the early sixteenth century roughly midway between the larger regional centers of Oyo and Benin. Except for some cursory references to Ijesha rescued from slavery in Sierra Leone in the early nineteenth century, there is absolutely no positive contemporary evidence, whether documentary or archeological, until Europeans first visited the town in 1858. Thereafter, since Ilesha was the leading member of the Ekitiparapo alliance which fought Ibadan to a standstill in the 1880s, contemporary documentation becomes fairly abundant. But my concern here is with the evolution of Ilesha's socio-political structure, with what has since come to be considered its “traditional” constitution, over roughly three centuries up to the third quarter of the nineteenth century. For that, virtually all our evidence lies in what people have said and done since the 1880s.African historians have perforce relied greatly on such evidence and since Vansina's Oral Tradition they have been able to use it both more confidently and more critically, especially in the area of Bantu Africa. My fellow sociologists, however, remain more radically sceptical. Despite their admission of the need for history, they have learned too well how dynastic tradition and legends of origin tend to serve as “characters” for contemporary arrangements and need primary interpretation in the light of this -- and have often concretely illustrated the point with devastating and, for those desirous of using oral traditions for historical ends, depressing effect.

George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels and the History of American Fiddling

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Goertzen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
West Virginia ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music Publishing ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Upper South ◽  
Fiddle Tunes

George P. Knauff's Virginia Reels (1839) was the first collection of southern fiddle tunes and the only substantial one published in the nineteenth century. Knauff's activity could not anticipate our modern contest-driven fiddle subcultures. But the fate of the Virginia Reels pointed in that direction, suggesting that southern fiddling, after his time, would happen outside of commercial popular culture even though it would sporadically engage that culture. This book uses this seminal collection as the springboard for a fresh exploration of fiddling in America, past and present. It first discusses the life of the arranger. Then it explains how this collection was meant to fit into the broad stream of early nineteenth-century music publishing. The book describes the character of these fiddle tunes' names (and such titles in general), what we can learn about antebellum oral tradition from this collection, and how fiddling relates to blackface minstrelsy. Throughout, the book connects the evidence concerning both repertoire and practice found in the Virginia Reels with current southern fiddling, encompassing styles ranging from straightforward to fancy—old-time styles of the Upper South, exuberant West Virginia styles, and the melodic improvisations of modern contest fiddling. Twenty-six song sheets assist in this discovery. The book incorporates performance descriptions and music terminology into his accessible, engaging prose. The book presents an extended look at the history of southern fiddling and a close examination of current practices.

Afrika-Archiv: A New Series of the Frobenius Institute for the Purpose of Publishing Source Material

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 437-439
Author(s):  
Beatrix Heintze
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Source Material ◽  
The Other ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
African History ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Written Sources

“[D]as Wirkungsvolle wird gepflegt, die Gewissenhaftigkeit schwindet; an Stelle der Fähigkeit zu bergründen, der Kraft zu überzeugen, tritt die Sicherheìt im Behaupten.”[T]hat what impresses is cultivated, conscientiousness dwindles; the capability to explain, the power to convince are replaced by self-confidence in asserting.There is nothing more absurd—yet also nothing more common—than a scholarly lifetime of publishing based on materials to which no one else has access.The series “Afrika Archiv” (“Africa Archives”) was founded recently with the aim of publishing source material referring to the history and anthropology of Africa. In this connection the term “source material” shall be considered in a very broad sense. Thus, beside the usual library and other written sources, as well as written records of oral traditions, for instance, even editions of ethnographic collections or photographic documentation will be taken into consideration. African scholars will be able to publish material from their own countries to which we Europeans and Americans have only difficult access. Western scholars, on the other hand, could publish sources from public and private European or American archives, museums, or even widely dispersed articles in periodicals and newspapers on African history of the nineteenth century which are available only with great difficulty and expenditure of time. As a reviewer once commented, such source editions will still continue to be valued when contemporary interpretations have already long fallen into oblivion.Endeavors to record systematically varied sources on the history of the continent, the cultural and scientific history of Africa, and to make the essentials generally available to the scientific public still appear inadequate.

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